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California Approves Statewide Rent Control

nytimes.com

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Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#561

Post by eagsalazar2 »

jeffdavis wrote: post #452
human20190310 wrote: post #322

There is no functioning market to begin with. Housing prices and rent are through the roof in California, yet supply is not rising to meet demand, largely because existing owners oppose new construction. Turnabout is fair play. If owners organize politically to control supply, tenants can organize politically to control prices.

> Turnabout is fair play. The biggest myth is that this kind of stuff actually helps the less-powerful. In reality, it just means they are hurt twice: government artificially suppressing supply, and government manipulating prices which has bad side effects for mamy even if its good for a few. Also, in reality, the powerful often don't get hurt, and arbitrary market manipulations just introduce new ways for them to ge…

Give me a break. Until suppression of building new units stops (by poor, helpless owners), this is the only recourse. I agree wholeheartedly that the real solution is to build more homes but that doesn't appear to be in the cards. So the idea that rent control doesn't actually help lower income people is _completely_ nuts. I know of many people off the top of my head that no-way would still be living in San Francisco if there weren't rent control (including my elderly aunt and uncle).

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#562

Post by CryptoPunk »

fivre wrote: post #533
khawkins wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pernicious attacks on landlords because of some perceived collusion amongst them is ugly. The landlords aren't any more to blame for the lack of supply than their tenants or the politicians. There's obviously money to be had in leveling a block of houses and increasing the population density by 10-30 times the amount. The market demand is extremely high. Real estate developers would jump at the chance to do so if the…

They may not be some grand cabal, but if biggerpockets.com posts are anything to go by, I have no qualms with any pernicious attacks against them. Ruthless capitalism and fundamental human needs do not mix well.

"Capitalism" doesn't mean profit motivated action. Advocating for government restrictions on private property rights, in order to restrict supply growth and increase profits, is not capitalism. It's cronyism.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#563

Post by TMWNN »

shuckles wrote: post #404
holy_city wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After taxes it's a bit under $6,900 so 40% of that is ~$2,700. Browsing Zillow/Apartments.com/Padmapper shows several thousand listings for studios under $2k and single bedrooms around $2.2-2.7k, depending on area. SF proper seems pretty tiny and the most expensive, is everyone just trying to cram in there? Do people try not to commute?

You are right that most casual analyses overstate the real cost of living in SF. A Bart commute in the Daly City direction, or Oakland, or a drive in from Pacifica all get you much more reasonable cost / commute trade offs for jobs in the city. Certainly in absolute prices remain absurd.

I can confirm that as of December-January it was possible to find a decent 900-1000 sq ft house with two bedrooms in southern SF (Visitacion Valley or Crocker/Amazon, say) or Daly City, near BART, for $3000 a month. Still more expensive than than the comparable in New York, where a two-bedroom apartment in Jersey City with a comparable commute to lower Manhattan was $2300.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#564

Post by dgzl »

yocheckitdawg wrote: post #511
dcolkitt wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but construction may not even be necessary. Shipping containers can now be easily retrofitted into stylish apartments. They can easily be stacked eight stories tall. 95% of the work can be done in overseas factories and is subject to the same globally competitive downward price pressure as every other manufactured good. Build them in Shenzen at a wholesale cost of $30,000 per pod, ship them to San Franciso for…

Who the fuck wants to live in a shipping container?

I know many people who would rather live in a shipping container than where they're currently living.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#565

Post by TFortunato »

dcolkitt wrote: post #487
dgzl wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Construction isn't easy anymore. we've taxed and regulated it into a luxury.

Maybe, but construction may not even be necessary. Shipping containers can now be easily retrofitted into stylish apartments. They can easily be stacked eight stories tall. 95% of the work can be done in overseas factories and is subject to the same globally competitive downward price pressure as every other manufactured good. Build them in Shenzen at a wholesale cost of $30,000 per pod, ship them to San Franciso for…

Prefabricated easily moveable homes are already a thing. You can go on https://factorydirectmobilehomes.com/ right now and buy a home larger than a shipping container for less than $30k.

Modular apartment buildings also exist and can be thrown together quickly and affordably.

Not to be rude, but the problem is likely going to take a bit more to solve than throwing shipping containers at it..

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#567

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

guelo wrote: post #530
dgzl wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California is also one of the most taxed and regulated states. Do you think that is a coincidence?

California has also been creating high paying jobs at a fast pace, could that be a coincidence?

D.C. is probably a better example here. California is 1/6th of the US economy. It's not really creating "good" jobs relative to its size.

And D.C. is only doing that because it's just one city. Cities are the winners in the current economy. They happen to be liberal. Cities in Texas and Tenesee happen to be conservative, and they're doing swimmingly also.

Despite how much people get worked up, policy doesn't have a huge macroeconomic effect.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#568

Post by zamfi »

pacala wrote: post #543
zamfi wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a whole spectrum between single family homes and "Manhattan". It's not a binary! The Bay Area's population has grown by 8.5% in the last 10 years. [0] Please, that's not "Manhattan". That's one person on your block converting their garage into a rentable unit. Those "existing homeowners" are really messing things up for everyone because they don't want Bob to turn his garage into a rental? Somehow I think the…

Full quote: The population of the nine-county region grew by over 600,000 people since 2010 — a nearly 8.5% increase — outpacing the growth rate in any other part of California, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released Thursday. 600k people is about as much as Seattle proper. Which happens to span 83.94 sq mi. In less than 10 years. That's _a lot_ of construction.

Huh? 600,000 people in the Bay Area's 7,000 square miles -- I don't see how the Seattle comparison of "83.94" square miles is related.

No residential neighborhood in the Bay Area needs to turn into "Manhattan" to house 600,000 extra people. If every block added a house we'd have extra housing to spare. Zoning prevents a ton of development, and everyone pretends they're fighting "Manhattan".

At Manhattan densities, the Bay Area would house 468 million people. That's not what's happening, and no one is advocating for that.

We don't need to build Seattle in the Bay to house everyone. We just need cities to stop dragging permits out years and every planning committee to stop saying "no" to any small increases in density.

How much construction it is isn't super relevant -- if it's profitable, it will happen!

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#569

Post by chillacy »

> Economists from both the left and the right have a well-established aversion to rent control, arguing that such policies ignore the message of rising prices, which is to build more housing.

Nonetheless while it doesn't fix the underlying economics, I can see how it could be good to have a damper on the volatility of real estate prices, so that prices swing over the course of many years rather than violently.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#570

Post by CryptoPunk »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #536
amahani wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are absolutely correct: rent control (1) increases upward pressure, and (2) decreases rental supplies (and therefore drives up the price of rent) , and (3) benefits high-income earners when not coupled with income limits. (1) Since rent control laws put limits on increases (and not decreases) every landlord understands that he/she should test the upper boundary at all times to avoid renting severly below market r…

In Montreal we've had universal rent control all my life, and it actually works quite well. The rents are comparatively low. We have a decent tech scene, but it's still an affordable, left-leaning city, where even struggling artists can scrape by if they want to dedicate themselves to artistic work. I'm sure some people would argue that apartments in Montreal are less well-maintained as a result of universal rent con…

Montreal has a large supply of old housing stock. Its population growth has also been much slower than Vancouver and Toronto's over the last few decades:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/how-does-montr...

>>Montreal is not shrinking, but it is growing slower than other big Canadian cities – driving down rental demand in the process. From 2013 to 2014, despite gaining nearly 43,000 immigrants from other parts of the world, Montreal tallied a net loss of 10,000 residents to other provinces.

If either Vancouver or Toronto had had more stringent rent control in place over the last few decades, the housing situation in these cities would be much worse than it is right now.

The effects of rent control have been heavily studied and are well-known:

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html

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