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California Approves Statewide Rent Control

nytimes.com

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Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#611

Post by kortilla »

dwaltrip wrote: post #495
dgzl wrote: post #259

I'm a renter in Oregon and I've been outspoken about this long before the laws were passed. From my experience, people who support heavy laws, regulations and taxes don't spend enough time considering potential side effects. They feel like with enough support, they can just force anything they want to happen, while completely disregarding the market. I feel like an amount of the general public just wants Big Daddy go…

The market is simply a tool. It's not infallible. It is a very powerful framework, and enables amazing things. However, left unchecked, it will also create undesirable outcomes or side effects. Negative externalities are a real thing. In this specific case, perhaps you are right, I can't say. But your wide-sweeping declarations and general tone reveal your own harmful ignorance.

We’re talking about rent control, a system designed to attempt to dictate that supply and demand doesn’t exist via a law. A system with no economic foundation that creates worse housing everywhere it’s implemented.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#613

Post by dcgudeman »

anigbrowl wrote: post #605
dgzl wrote: post #259

I'm a renter in Oregon and I've been outspoken about this long before the laws were passed. From my experience, people who support heavy laws, regulations and taxes don't spend enough time considering potential side effects. They feel like with enough support, they can just force anything they want to happen, while completely disregarding the market. I feel like an amount of the general public just wants Big Daddy go…

I'm a renter in Oregon and I've been outspoken about this long before the laws were passed. From my experience, people who support heavy laws, regulations and taxes don't spend enough time considering potential side effects. They feel like with enough support, they can just force anything they want to happen, while completely disregarding the market. You know I was neutral on this stuff, studied economics and some bu…

Why?

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#614

Post by kortilla »

gleenn wrote: post #439
xoa wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember , size of California is fixed Yeah, fixed at ~164 thousand square miles (~400,000 km^2). Are you for real? Los Angeles and New York City proper (not the metropolitan areas) are interestingly nearly identical in official area at around 468 square miles each. But LA has a density of around 8000/mi^2 while NYC is well over 27000/mi^2. If LA merely matched NYC that'd cover another 10 million or so population b…

While your are technically correct, there are significant issues getting water. Just because there is a spare part of land also doesn't mean it's not in the middle of one of our huge deserts or is connected in any meaningful way to roads. Empty land doesn't equal inhabitable land.

Nope, as long as almonds are still being grown in CA, there is plenty of water. Residential water consumption is nothing compared to farming.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#615

Post by KODeKarnage »

raz32dust wrote: post #609

How does this work? Can't the landlord just refuse to renew the lease, and then lease it out to someone else with a higher rent?

Turning over the leaseholder has a cost all by itself. But more importantly, there is also the reputation damage you'd sustain by doing this. Consider, any perspective leaseholder who googles the property could find that out that you're kicking out the tenant to increase the rent. That would drastically reduce the potential demand from people looking for the security of a long-term occupancy. So, yes, it might be possible for a landlord to do that. But if he does it twice, he will earn a reputation and only attract short-term tenants. This means, it is an option only for the most short-sighted and stupid landlords.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#616

Post by WalterSear »

jquery wrote: post #277
phil248 wrote: post #138

I'm shocked at the ideological fervor here and the fact that virtually no one seems to have looked at the details of the actual bill. This is nothing like the rent control ordinance in SF that has caused $3000 units to get stuck at $500 rents. That will never happen under this law. The allowable increases are so much higher than "normal" rent control laws that any given unit will catch up to market rates in a matter…

Are there any provisions for periods of high inflation in the market?

The limit is 5% plus inflation.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#617

Post by Litmus2336 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #226
Litmus2336 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're intentionally misrepresenting the opposing viewpoint. If rent control artificially reduces the price of housing, more people will want to live in CA. Less houses will be built, as less profit is being made. Therefore, prices will be lower for those already housed, yet more people will be unable to purchase a home. Of course the million dollar question is how many less units will be built if they're les…

> If rent control artificially reduces the price of housing, more people will want to live in CA. There were two other comments in this same subthread pointing out that people are in fact moving out of California. (One of them has been deleted.) It's almost as if f(california_net_migration) is multivariate. > Less houses will be built, as less profit is being made. Residential construction in California has been appr…

>And yet, proposition 13 is rarely cited as a significant contributor to California's housing issues, especially by the "this is simple supply and demand" crowd. Personally, while I suspect proposition 13 has contributed, there are lots of other factors, including foreign investment [4].

Really? Because I am vehemently anti prop 13, and I don't think you have to go far to find people that hate it too. So I'm not sure you can use that criticism against me. That's essentially a straw man.

> Less houses will be built, as less profit is being made.

This is more or less a factual statement, that if less profit is to be made by renting houses at least some portion of people will choose to invest in other things. Whether that portion is even noticeable, I don't know

>There were two other comments in this same subthread pointing out that people are in fact moving out of California. (One of them has been deleted.)

>It's almost as if f(california_net_migration) is multivariate.

If you want to have a serious conversation, being snarky isn't going to help. Regardless of net migration statistic, California is still growing in population. SF is still growing, and the state overall sees positive growth.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#618

Post by kortilla »

manfredo wrote: post #428
cabaalis wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this argument before. Why shouldn't it be an investment? 1. Land is a limited resource. 2. Property improvements last for a very long time, and are incrementally improved. 3. The buy-in price is relatively high, so only very interested parties get involved. 4. It's a home for goodness sake, why would you not call it an investment?

Housing cannot be both affordable and and a good investment. The definition of a good investment is a piece of property that has a price that increases over time. The nature of exponential growth means that eventually housing will become unaffordable if it is perpetually a good investment. Society's expectation that housing is a good investment results in people taking on significant debt to buy increasingly expensiv…

You’re conflating “an investment” with “an exponentially growing investment”.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#619

Post by Litmus2336 »

phil248 wrote: post #179
Litmus2336 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/... I believe you might be thinking of month-to-month, which is not a traditional lease. On all fixed term leases over a month rent cannot be changed during the term of the lease.

Which is an oddly elaborate way of saying that rent increases in California can happen annually.

Technically, you can have a lease of any length. I've seen 3 and 6 month leases. I'm sure it's possible to have a 24+ month lease.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#620

Post by kortilla »

cryptoz wrote: post #72
pitaj wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason the market is not working is because of onerous regulation by the government in the first place.

Not all regulations are equal. Merely because some past law was bad does not mean all future laws will be bad. Saying that rent control is bad because past zoning (or other law) was bad doesn't make sense.

Rent control has never been good anywhere. Yet places keep trying it expecting something different.

Supply and demand is one of the simplest concepts in economics and yet rent control does nothing to increase supply. In fact, it decreases supply by not shifting prices higher to induce more production.

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