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Landlords Are Pushing the Supreme Court to End Rent Control

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Re: Landlords Are Pushing the Supreme Court to End Rent Control

#71

Post by orwin »

endisneigh wrote: post #17
sudosysgen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't we get rid of NIMBYism and make sure that actually solves the issue without banning sensible implementations of rent control?

Rent control is a bad policy no matter how you slice it. In general most price controls are counterproductive

Non-market housing is basically rent controlled and very productive. I'd say it's the most productive rent control as if you get enough of it (30-40%), the market almost align to non-market housing and landlords have to compete on housing quality.

Just have sf associations build non-market housing. En masse.

Re: Landlords Are Pushing the Supreme Court to End Rent Control

#72

Post by [deleted] »

endisneigh wrote: post #4

Rent control is dumb policy anyways. Now how can we get rid of nimby rule? Local governments have way too much influence on development, for better or worse. Perhaps sufficiently large development proposals must be entertained by the entire city or town rather than being unilaterally decided by a board - that seems like a sufficient compromise (at the expense of speed, but development is slow anyway given the appeals…

[deleted]

Re: Landlords Are Pushing the Supreme Court to End Rent Control

#73

Post by throw0101b »

endisneigh wrote: post #19
FloatArtifact wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know why the local government is the best government? It's the government I can fire through voting. If the state had more power my votes would also have more power to change my community. I don't mean to imply abolishing the federal government in favor of local government. Just a redistribution of power that favors the local government more than the current status quo.

I’m not sure what your point is.

Things should ideally be done by the lowest level of government that can do the job:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

Re: Landlords Are Pushing the Supreme Court to End Rent Control

#74

Post by tharmas »

karaterobot wrote: post #24

Good. People think rent control helps poor and middle class people find a good place to live, and punishes those evil, evil landlords. What it does in practice is discourage building new housing, and encourages evil, evil landlords to convert existing housing into condos they can sell. It drives people out of the city.

Rent control is a two-edged sword. Does some good, does some bad.

Not much is said, but globalism, facilitated by the internet, is a factor driving up house prices. In Vancouver, Canada, they built a lot of condos but the majority of the stock was bought up by overseas residents. In many cases the condos weren't even advertised for sale in Vancouver for locals to buy.

The internet has made it easier for investors to obtain information about potential "investment" properties.

If you are going to build more homes you need to make them available to locals only. I'm sure present (globalist) trade treaties forbid such things.

Another possible solution is for the government to build rent to own housing at an affordable price. That's effectively public housing which has its problems too. Also, I suspect there are trade treaties that prevent that from happening too.

Re: Landlords Are Pushing the Supreme Court to End Rent Control

#75

Post by wskinner »

sudosysgen wrote: post #65
endisneigh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent control is a bad policy no matter how you slice it. In general most price controls are counterproductive

That's really not true. Rent control has been shown multiple times to actually work in reducing prices, and when quantitative welfare analysis in whether the drop in mobility is worth the drop in prices are done, it's often found to be worth it. There are of course ways to do rent control that are better or worse, some of which may indeed be generally counterproductive, and everyone agrees that it can't solve the pro…

Rent control works for some people (e.g. those already living in rent controlled apartments). It also tends to suppress long term supply and improvement of existing supply, and that hurts other people in less visible ways (e.g. people who would have moved into new housing which was never built due to supply suppression, or residents of rent-controlled buildings which gradually fall into disrepair).

In general, we should be skeptical of any policy where those helped are obvious and those harmed are non-obvious or distributed through time and space.

Re: Landlords Are Pushing the Supreme Court to End Rent Control

#76

Post by wwweston »

karaterobot wrote: post #24

Good. People think rent control helps poor and middle class people find a good place to live, and punishes those evil, evil landlords. What it does in practice is discourage building new housing, and encourages evil, evil landlords to convert existing housing into condos they can sell. It drives people out of the city.

In a lot of cases rent control doesn’t even apply to new housing, and even where it might it’s effectively a declaration that profit is allowed on volume more than margins, so it’s pro-density.

You can ruin that with zoning, of course. But rent control isn’t the anti-supply force in that scenario.

Re: Landlords Are Pushing the Supreme Court to End Rent Control

#77

Post by wwweston »

endisneigh wrote: post #4

Rent control is dumb policy anyways. Now how can we get rid of nimby rule? Local governments have way too much influence on development, for better or worse. Perhaps sufficiently large development proposals must be entertained by the entire city or town rather than being unilaterally decided by a board - that seems like a sufficient compromise (at the expense of speed, but development is slow anyway given the appeals…

Rent control is a limit on margins. That makes it a declaration that builders can only scale up profits on volume, which is what is necessary anyway in regions that are largely built out but still massively short of supply. Which means that it’s aligned with the goals and even predicted dynamics to the point where it’s little more than a formalized constraint.

Complaining about it is basically an admission that either other more important factors are keeping supply from happening or that the purported market benefits if/when it does might not be real.

Quite possibly both. As far as I can tell even when there are no obstacles the market isn’t interested in adding supply to the point of diminishing marginal returns, and unit prices do not fall on supply movement, only demand drops.

Re: Landlords Are Pushing the Supreme Court to End Rent Control

#78

Post by themagician »

dffdsa432 wrote: post #53
themagician wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if you want to address the issue. Whether you should is another question. That is what the higher levels of government do. When the majority of citizens need something, you essentially use threat of violence to take it by force. You will never fix the "nimby problem" any other way.

Communist governments used the threat of violence to take by farmland by force. How did that turn out?

Worked out well in areas like Hawaii and many of the US territories we took by force.

Re: Landlords Are Pushing the Supreme Court to End Rent Control

#79

Post by sudosysgen »

wskinner wrote: post #75
sudosysgen wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really not true. Rent control has been shown multiple times to actually work in reducing prices, and when quantitative welfare analysis in whether the drop in mobility is worth the drop in prices are done, it's often found to be worth it. There are of course ways to do rent control that are better or worse, some of which may indeed be generally counterproductive, and everyone agrees that it can't solve the pro…

Rent control works for some people (e.g. those already living in rent controlled apartments). It also tends to suppress long term supply and improvement of existing supply, and that hurts other people in less visible ways (e.g. people who would have moved into new housing which was never built due to supply suppression, or residents of rent-controlled buildings which gradually fall into disrepair). In general, we sho…

See, that's what I mean about sensible applications of rent control. Having a small class of rent controlled appartements is silly and it's not something you ever want to do, it's only ever a terrible compromise between politicians and landlords that everyone knows is a bad idea.

It doesn't suppress supply when building is already wildly profitable and is just being slowed down by permitting either.

The negative impacts of rent control have been the subject of literally hundreds of empirical studies. It's a known quantity at this point and, when you quantify the impact, it's generally worth it, especially in our current zoning hell. It also helps with price stickiness once supply does increase : as you know, developpers only like to build upmarket appartements, which typically take a decade or more to trickle down to the average person.

The main thing is not to do silly things like only apply rent control to a small portion of appartements, we know it doesn't work, and to allow rent to increase with any reasonably incurred costs. This way you actually incentivize landlords to repair their apartments, you reduce the mobility risk, etc...

Re: Landlords Are Pushing the Supreme Court to End Rent Control

#80

Post by BizarroLand »

kjksf wrote: post #41
tomohelix wrote: post #9

This is the natural consequence of Citizen United (such a dishonest name). When those with money is allowed to leverage their wealth to disproportionately affect legal proceedings and lawmaking, it is just a step towards dystopia.

Citizen United is bad but this has nothing to do with it. It's just a lawsuit against NY that the plaintiffs hope to get in front of Supreme Court and win there. The article insinuates there's lobbying involved but it's mum on the details i.e. what exactly they are spending money on given that it'll be decided by 9 judges. Furthermore, I believe Citizen United is specifically about spending money on political candida…

My question is, how can the case be at the Supreme court level already? What about New Yorks's Supreme courts. What were the results of trying it locally? And why would the Supreme Court of the United States pass any ruling other than, "states can decide for themselves whether they want to use rent control or not", since that was the same argument they used for Abortion?
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