Rent Control: Classic or Dud?

surprised there wasn't a thread on this. Starting partly because broader rent control is up for vote in California (repeal of Costa Hawkins, a law that limited what kind of rent control municipalities could impose). As a renter I certainly appreciated my rent controlled apartments in Berkeley. The argument counter to it (among other things, but the 'friendly argument', I suppose) is that is limits the number of vacancies by disincentivising people from ever moving out.

While I get the arguments against it , at least in the Bay Area rent control would seem to be necessary. Though I'm interested to know who exactly it's impacting the most; it doesn't really help anyone moving into the area, or students. I'd much rather see plentiful housing for all income levels but Berkeley, at least, is also notoriously anti-developer; and, new construction 'affordable' units are still too fucking expensive, IMO, for many to even get into. Anyway, I bought a house about seven years ago and while I pay more in mortgage and taxes than I'd like I'm happy to see that amount is still less than a 1 br apartment in this city these days.

Thoughts on any of this, and on CA prop 10 in particular?

Dud. Rent control discourages property owners from all but the most rudimentary upkeep, eventually creating dilapidated, slum-like rental housing stock. Why should i replace the threadbare carpet, paint the walls, and update to a larger refrigerator if I won't get a dime extra in rent for doing so?

also, this seems like one of those rare political issues that hasn't been completely co-opted by either side. Dems seem to be un-unified on this issue and stances taken by people running on Costa Hawkins have been really...shifty.

Dud. Rent control discourages property owners from all but the most rudimentary upkeep, eventually creating dilapidated, slum-like rental housing stock. Why should i replace the threadbare carpet, paint the walls, and update to a larger refrigerator if I won't get a dime extra in rent for doing so?

― Lee626, Sunday, October 21, 2018 8:55 PM (fifty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What is your argument against just stabilizing rent increases while allowing enough of an increase to afford proper upkeep and still make a profit though?

it occurrs to me that rent control and opinions on it shed some light into demographics within demographics; ie: white, liberal, but coming from rich families; and white, liberal, but coming from poor families. People from rich families, particularly land/property rich families, may well, particularly in California, have very strong liberal beliefs; but they're not going to be receptive to anti-landlord legislation. But they don't like to talk about this. Call it white fragility or whatever; but they have families to whom they can return, etc. They are never truly 'potentially homeless". does this make sense?

taking sides: living in a dilapidated rent-controlled apartment vs. living in your car in a Wal-Mart parking lot

Dud. Rent control discourages property owners from all but the most rudimentary upkeep, eventually creating dilapidated, slum-like rental housing stock. Why should i replace the threadbare carpet, paint the walls, and update to a larger refrigerator if I won't get a dime extra in rent for doing so?

Do landlords actually do this in non-rental controlled properties? In my experience, they do not. In areas with rental properties in high demand, they don't need to do any maintenance, people will move in anyway, paying more and more rent to live in shitholes.

The US/UK divide is going to be off-the-scale here.

im for it

Landlords: Incarcerate or Behead?

once owning more than two properties is illegal, I'm not sure if I'd support rent control or not.

yeah p much

TS: paying £600 a month for a two-bed flat and putting your own carpet in vs paying £2800 a month and maybe, possibly, having a carpet paid for you if the landlord is feeling generous.

Registered fair rents are great - and should be enforced alongside strong quality standards for upkeep and tenancy protection.

I presume Ed's proposed rent controls in '15 were quite weak, and The Sun were trying to portray him as a Maoist at the time!

Didn’t even have to think about this - yes, the things landlords get away with are fucking scandalous. Keeping security deposits, demanding absurd fees for cleaning or wear and tear, and acting like paying over 60% of your take home is a great deal. The audacity!

ive always had good landlords and i dont rly blame em individually for going rates

but fuck market control of accommodation if its at all scarce

property is theft

lock thread

so does the UK have strong rent control across the nation? curious.

none since thatcher afaik

ffs which part of 'lock thread' do the mods not understand

they're still sounding it out

Xp, yes the system of registered fair rents (with independently-assessed increases, rather than landlord-controlled ones) was removed by the Housing Act in 1988, at least for England.

However, anyone who started one prior to the act being introduced, and who hasn’t moved, would still have it. My parents started theirs in 1982 and only ended it in 2016 (when the fair rent, which was about 70% lower than the actual market rent at the time, became too expensive).

why would someone lock thread? I didn't take that as a serious proposition. I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts on this topic.

ShariVari, that's interesting. So the market rate was well below what the fair rent adjustment was? Did their rent then go down after that? And where was this in the UK because I can't imagine market rates in London ever going down.

No, they just moved to a different part of the country.

The fair rent is always going to be below market rate but the escalation in prices meant that even something that was substantially lower than the open market ended up being less viable than simply moving somehwhere cheaper.

The other side benefit is that landlords have such a strong incentive to get people to move, but can’t actually force them to, it’s not unusual for them to pay tenants a lump sum to leave.

taking sides: living in a dilapidated rent-controlled apartment vs. living in your car in a Wal-Mart parking lot

seriously! tenant law varies so much across the US that I am hesitant to say what is legal and what isn't, and under what circumstances the tenant can sue the landlord/withhold rent, etc.

And in terms of the downsides re: disincentivizing people moving out -- I can't keep track of how many people I know live in apartments and houses where the original tenants/master tenant don't actually live there anymore but they keep up the illusion they do in order to maintain the rent control. Also, and this is a somewhat conservative opinion, giving people the incentive to stay put in many ways contributes to a greater sense of community and responsibility re neighborhoods. In terms of community activism, engagement and volunteerism, it is generally people who have lived in the same dwelling for a long time, or plan on it, who contribute most to their communities.

Controp: Rent control is the only way for normal people to live long-term, raise families, retire, experience a full life, in any area that's considered habitable and receives even a minimum of civic services. Without rent control, they will always be displaced or in danger of displacement as soon as their community comes to the attention of anyone with greater resources.

Fight me.

xp yeah that last part is super important.

^^ This too!

I can't keep track of how many people I know live in apartments and houses where the original tenants/master tenant don't actually live there anymore but they keep up the illusion they do in order to maintain the rent control.

Side note: This kind of manipulation is inevitable when the needed resource (affordable housing) becomes scarce. It twists the intention of the law a bit, which isn't ideal, but as long as it still meets a housing need for a community member, the existence of the rent-controlled unit is still doing its job. (Until someone rents it out to some transplant kid whose parents pay her rent, who could arguably find adequate housing elsewhere.)

If an RC unit wasn't such a mythical unicorn to urban residents, it wouldn't be *as* distorted by pressures like scarcity.

The land trust model has this built in. Right now it's on the rise (relatively) here, which I think is great.

my guess is that subletting rent controlled apartments is far more common in NYC than the Bay Area. It depends on your landlord but around here, in my experience, they go out of their way to investigate and then try to evict anyone doing this.

I think rent control is fine if seen as a short-term patch on a broken market, but it's not a good long-term solution since it doesn't address the underlying supply constraint. also shielding a subset of the population from a terrible situation in some ways makes it harder to get widespread support for bigger/better policy solutions, similar to how the existence of medicare makes it harder to pass universal health care. rent control kinda allows the existing lower / middle class to kinda just muddle through, and imo that's probably a bigger issue than the other bad side effects attributed to it.

overall I think housing vouchers are a better mechanism for making sure people have a roof over there head, just like food stamps are a better way to get people food than fixing the price of apples.

Dud. Rent control discourages property owners from all but the most rudimentary upkeep, eventually creating dilapidated, slum-like rental housing stock. Why should i replace the threadbare carpet, paint the walls, and update to a larger refrigerator if I won't get a dime extra in rent for doing so?

― Lee626, Sunday, October 21, 2018 6:55 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wish i had lived as privileged an existence as you to think that this isn't a common thing that happens in non-rent controlled apartments

I think rent control is fine if seen as a short-term patch on a broken market, but it's not a good long-term solution since it doesn't address the underlying supply constraint.

Well, this is an argument for a comprehensive housing policy, of which rent control would take its place alongside other devices that also can't fix the housing market by themselves, like:

* the building and zoning codes, disability laws etc. - pretty normative by now but we should remember these are part of controlling what landlords can do, and were once viciously opposed for that reason
* passing other laws that regulate what landlords are allowed to do, providing legal support to tenants, maintaining housing courts with enough staff to process it all, etc.
* expanding the housing supply through publicly-built and publicly-operated housing of various types for various income levels
* actively stepping in to preserve housing where it exists, for example making it harder to demolish and rezone for more profitable office towers or for smaller numbers of high-end units, etc.
* etc.

as well as non-"housing" policy that directly impacts affordability and scarcity which are after all not eternal givens. so for example the more robust your public transit infrastructure, the more spread-out the upward rent pressures (versus having just a few neighborhoods that are livable AND convenient). and of course, policies that increase median income and cap (or effectively cap) higher income brackets seem like they'd have a positive impact on renting generally.

wish i had lived as privileged an existence as you to think that this isn't a common thing that happens in non-rent controlled apartments

― ( ͡☉ ͜ʖ ͡☉) (jim in vancouver), Monday, October 22, 2018 1:55 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Word. My complex is overinfested with German roaches (they're even in the laundry room), the units usually have no dishwasher, washer or dryer, the on-site pay laundromat has all 8 units broken quite often, staircase steps are broken, water is turned off without warning for hours, there is insufficient parking for tenants because they converted several hundred spaces into reserved spaces that nobody bought, they also emailed everybody about roof repairs like 24 hours before without regard to receipt and towed every car that wasn't moved even if the emails bounced back, and there is trash strewn everywhere in the road near the dumpster which never gets emptied...

All for prices no struggling family could afford.

I am moving tho

that sounds awful. where are you?

Orlando

"Rent control" is illegal in Washington but new multifamily development in Seattle is starting to come with requirements to build X% of units renting at rates affordable to households making ≤Y% of the area median income as "mandatory inclusionary zoning", on top of existing bonuses for optionally doing that. Also we may have built enough units to absorb newly-hired Amazon employees, such that rent growth is finally flat here for the first time in years, value of advertised concessions (free months) is going up, maybe we'll displace a few fewer people the next few years

I wouldn't be living in SF without rent control; my girlfriend's been in her place since the middle of last decade, and I moved up and moved in three years back. Without it, forget it; with it, I can (and do very much) enjoy the fact I can actually walk to work.

anyway landlords are dud as mentioned upthread, all housing should be owned by the state and handed out for free based on how many children and books you have

yes, one extra room per three children, or per three bookcases

can’t see anyone complaining about that

I opted to move into a house that my new landlord is subletting cos I was so sick of shitty apartment/condo complexes

this scenario isn't exactly inherently free of issues but at least if my landlord turns out to be terrible it's one demon rather than several demons in the Apartment complex management, all of their own varying levels of incompetence/dickcheesery.

also said landlord is live-in so they have some kind of motivation to keep up the place

I’m not sure if rent control is good, but decontrol has t shown any evidence of being good in NYC so far. Still waiting for the market to work its magic and create some affordable housing.

oops, turns out the highest profit margin is in luxury housing and class A office space! but maybe if we wait long enough this will suddenly change.

that's where I'm falling. in some perfect world sure, housing would be plentiful and cheap. in our shit world, there are many impediments to development of affordable housing, not the least of which is there's no money in it so who wants to develop things they aren't going to make money on? because of this, it seems like rent control is necessary. i'm voting to roll back Costa Hawkins in CA because I don't have faith in any other solutions.

or we can just wish the rich people away? rich people are either going to live in luxury buildings or they're going to continue to crowd out the rest of the market.

xp

in NYC at least some of the pressure at the top of the market is faraway rich people not living in luxury buildings, but just buying the units as a cash sink. shady money often involved. this of course drives actual in-person rich people to other sites, worsening everything.

but even setting this aside there are plenty of ways to not leave the fate of the city up to 'the market' and how it interfaces with rich people. this requires us to focus not only on landlords but on developers too. tools like zoning and building codes, and the power to approve or not approve rezoning proposals, could be powerfully used to shape the supply of housing. the current very paltry use of tax incentives and withholding-zoning-changes to wheedle a few scraps of "affordable" (not really affordable) units out of developers could be massively expanded. developers will plead poverty - there'll be no way for us to make a profit! but what they really mean is we won't make the maximum profit we can under the current regulatory regime. naturally they're always pushing to undermine and weaken the current regulatory regime, reshaping the conditions that create the market in their favor. (see also, tax cuts for the rich. turns out when you roll them back they don't actually lay people off by the millions like they're always saying they'd be forced to.)

reviving things like mitchell-lama may also be worth a look. for those not familiar this was essentially a program to use urban-renewal eminent-domain powers to assemble sites, and then sell them to developers with affordability-for-the-next-twenty-years-ish strings attached. (the strings are mainly what differentiates this from typical Title I urban renewal but yes in the outlines this is a "public-private partnership" and carries the asterisks of such.) the failure to develop more sites in this way has meant that the stock of mitchell-lama co-ops keeps shrinking, but the ones that remain continue to provide decent and livable accommodations for non-millionaires. there are still good sites that could be developed, they just keep slipping away to splashier and more dubious schemes, most notably the Cornell campus on Roosevelt Island. beyond mitchell-lama we could just be thinking of other ways of funding and facilitating the building of limited-equity co-ops, which from my limited understanding used to have much more extensive federal subsidies available, enticing developers to pursue them. creating a stock of affordable housing is always going to be a political project because a laissez-faire market whose terms are set by the developers will never be interested in it.

silby - are you familiar with land trusts? I think you might like them.

building codes (and the departments that enforce them) are a great tool for getting nothing built, or delaying building, or ratcheting up the costs of building so only deep pocket developers can do so.

i mean - - - what's your point exactly? the housing supply was certainly worse when there was no requirement to have windows, hot water, or means of safe fire egress. agreed with silby, these codes protect me as a renter. to akm, i can't speak to whether this is unfairly burdensome on you as a garage-renovating homeowner (the thread is about rental housing fwiw), but i support your campaign to get your government to fully staff and support its code-enforcement team, that sounds like it would be broadly beneficial.

yes, landlords do illegal things despite the code. according to the DOB website, my ex-landlord is looking at thousands of dollars in fines for illegal basement occupancy in the building i lived in. which is a laugh because that apartment burned up in a fire and all of us tenants were just kind of SOL on that count (i doubt the fire was unrelated to his shoddy building/maintenance practices, but there's no way of proving that. but "some people will break the law" isn't really a good argument against having a law, by itself anyway.

it's a fair point about how larger actors can more easily adapt to code but i'm suggesting thinking of the code as a tool to get the kind of housing you want out of those actors, for example making requirements on the size/layout of legal units, which could steer the market away from lofty luxury studios for yuppie singles. again, this is minor piece of the housing-supply puzzle.

But the affordable units don't end up getting built ... or at least the delays are absurd.

right - hence my calling the current efforts "very paltry."

sometimes the profit requirement is a condition of getting loans from banks, etc. to finance the construction.

i don't know a shit-ton.... but this is where policy and subsidy come in as far as i understand it. the expansion of the limited-equity co-op sphere from the 1930s through circa the 70s was a result of policies that made it easier to get loans to do exactly this kind of thing, much as the explosion of suburban housing was unthinkable without the FHA guaranteeing long-term mortgages and turning them from an absurd risk into easy money. on limited-equity projects, this seems like helpful on the importance of below-market interest rates (BMIR) which were made available by federal policy in the kennedy-johnson era and then curtailed by nixon. as i read it, the basic model was to subsidize limited-equity projects in a roundabout way - - if HUD pre-approved a proposed project as meeting program goals and appearing viable, the developing entity could get below-market interest rates from the bank, and then Fannie Mae would buy the mortgage at market value from the bank, taking the risk off the bank's hands while not having to act as a bank itself. after the federal dollars faded, state and municipal policies in new york served to keep the initiative alive in a mutant form though the dollar amounts were more suited to residents acquiring and refurbishing an existing rental building, often with a ton of elbow-grease sweat equity to fill in the gaps.

"this seems like helpful"... yeesh

Not at all, other than I think as a plot point in a disney channel original movie about a ranch?

If I weren't too busy being completely self-indulgent all the time I'd probably do some housing activism but the one group meeting I attended was for a group that was too inchoate for me to know what to do with. And then they didn't send any follow-up emails; maybe they're on facebook idk.

xp re: land trusts

i mean - - - what's your point exactly?

my point is partly related to what you say here:

it's a fair point about how larger actors can more easily adapt to code but i'm suggesting thinking of the code as a tool to get the kind of housing you want out of those actors, for example making requirements on the size/layout of legal units, which could steer the market away from lofty luxury studios for yuppie singles. again, this is minor piece of the housing-supply puzzle.

except it isn't that minor a piece. Also, you end up dealing with shit straight out of the movie, Brazil, or Kafka ... like, this department says you need to do this, even though it isn't actually their jurisdiction, and then the department that could help you, doesn't, and most of the people you deal with either have no power to actually help you, and so you send emails or schedule meetings with the people who can, and then nothing really comes of that either ... and it isn't uncommon for the people whose jobs are to enforce the code, for those people to actually not know the codes they are there to enforce. So you have to c&p code sections in emails to them. Then they can do things like require lots of plans, that are really just up to their discretion to require, not that they really are required to provide/prove basic safety compliance ... I can go on and on and on

basically for people/groups that aren't these "larger actors" you end up fighting a war of attrition, where their resources are greater than yours, so you end up running out of money or energy or both.

"that sounds fairly inexpensive. Do you have to get a permit to install it though? And an inspection?"

I need the permit to turn this garage into a small working studio space with a bathroom in it and I need to indicate on the plans that this is so. IE: it's a habitable space, but not something we're going to 'rent out' which I think is the crux of the problem with the city. Theyd be happier if I put a full kitchen in there and rented it to someone (which I'm never ever going to do; it's 250 square feet!). I just want somewhere people who visit can sleep in, and somewhere to work on music/writing.

Maybe Oakland and Berkeley just have the shittiest code enforcement departments and everywhere else is great.

xp - get a permit for the auto-shut off for the fan/lights was my question.

all I know about Seattle's current situation is that every permit queue in town is like miserably backlogged because of the boom times but that includes huge projects too.

xxp based on my friend's nightmare getting a local restaurant permitted, I'd say "no" to that hypothesis

akm - what I would do, would be to get a permit for a toilet and work sink, and say something like, "my kid and their friends often play in the garage, and I was thinking it would be convenient to have a toilet there, and a sink so they can wash up, because my wife likes to keep the house clean, and our house only has the one bathroom (that is if yr house only has one bathroom)" -- unless you really want to put a shower/bath in there? Then that would definitely signify "dwelling unit" -- but a toilet and sink in a garage doesn't, to me, set off a red flag re change of use.

At 250 sq ft, you can still theoretically park a car in that garage and have the bathroom meet code -- maybe the sink isn't in the bathroom, but outside, depending on size, layout, location of plumbing pipes, etc?

i see we're really zeroing in on a solution to the urban housing crisis: eliminate all that blasted big-government red tape

some of that red tape is important: the requirements for affordable housing, and anti-discrimination measures that factor in, etc. A lot of basic life safety stuff in building and fire code is super important.

But if you haven't had to actually deal with how these things get implemented and enforced, and the double standards that often come into play ... it's like saying people shouldn't complain about institutional racism because we have laws that prevent this, even though in practice, they often don't.

er... wait, no, it's not like that? unless your analogy is just "it's just like saying something's not a huge deal when for me it poses a substantial hassle." in which case you could just throw institutional racism into any disagreement?

from the POV of a renting urbanite it's the other way around - we're saying there's a serious crisis massively affecting the quality of life of millions and all means available should be brought to bear. i threw in changes to code as one area that could be explored to further constrain the market. and now i'm hearing from homeowners about what a pain in the neck it is to comply with the code. so it feels like you're saying "the problem is not in fact urgent" or i guess maybe "sure it sounds like an urgent problem, but what're you gonna do? regulating the market just leads to me having to fill out forms, it's a kafkaesque nightmare out here." but maybe i missed a post where you framed some alternative solution to the crisis.

one of the problems is that the constraints end up having unintended consequences on affordable housing developers and groups/people wanting to create affordable housing by converting previously "illegal" occupancies into legal ones. Meanwhile, the large developers of market rate buildings absorb the costs of those constraints (and use them to assert that they can't build cheaper housing because it costs so much to build).

The way these agencies (planning, zoning, building, fire, etc), in practice, treat people that want to build affordable housing, is super sketchy and intolerant, and people/organizations that don't have deep political connections have no recourse.

For example, they will do things like say, "oh, you have paperwork showing that this is legal? well, that doesn't match what we have on file. ... oh yeah, and our files are kinda disorganized and we lost a lot of them, but we're the building department, so we're gonna say that this construction/building use isn't legal, and make you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars."

or "we could make this minor exception for you that doesn't really affect life safety for the tenants, but we don't want to, so you need to do this, this, this and that, and that will probably cost you a few hundred thousand dollars and take 2 years"

Again, this isn't about "filling out forms" -- this is about obstructionist tactics, selective enforcement, and a lack of political will to prevent this stuff from happening or at least impose stronger checks and balances on the government agencies that oversee building and housing.

well, okay, on that part i'm agreed - if you're going to implement a policy, implement it for real, don't undermine it completely.

There are other issues in terms of affordable housing and housing in general that are related to somewhat outdated norms for what constitutes a family, personal lifestyles, types of employment, but that's some seriously off-topic nerdy shit

Anyway my long-standing housing policy goal is for the city to seize all single-family homes, bulldoze them, and build free public housing.

^ this is outrageous nonsense

single-family homes between Boren and the lake should be converted to city-run boarding houses, and all families relocated to towers next to the Northgate light rail station

deal; now where do we put the dome

lid I-5 all the way from the convention center to Georgetown, cover it in "tiny houses" for the homeless, bike paths and community gardens.

(exhaust fans to vent in @mayorjenny's backyard.)

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/livable-city/la-oe-rosenthal-rent-control-20181019-story.html?fbclid=IwAR1wVZsarrd-79cikKUv_N3KFAVlUwNnZHkC2aHLTTlh7DoQCQ6ewjH5fPI

on the subject of affordable housing:

https://wamu.org/story/18/10/24/isnt-affordable-housing-d-c-area/?fbclid=IwAR00u-sFeKR7iBQ4XhSfQ1EBBNVsf1ZlSXsbf5-aHYTGvI0YeysfcW6w_r4

So yeah I'm pretty comfortable calling developers greedy and basically they are vermin that should be exterminated

Scum of the earth.

The objections to building codes raised so far all seem to fall under what I would call the "boundary conditions problem". Developers are profit-driven, while building codes are driven by considerations that directly oppose maximizing profits, such as requiring electrical inspections underwritten by permitting fees. Because of these opposing motives, developers will predictably and universally operate as close to the boundary of the regulations as possible, and will regularly try to cross the boundaries in the direction that favors profits.

This endless tug-of-war between developers and the enforcers of building codes and zoning requirements results in the developers constantly seeking definitional loopholes in regulatory language, or political leverage to weaken regulations or capture the regulators by placing their allies in charge, and a mindset among embattled enforcers that views every application with extreme suspicion. It doesn't help the disposition of the enforcers that the developers' view of the system is the only one that is consistently publicized, until some new building-safety disaster happens and there is a political scramble to re-regulate.

This same dynamic happens at every point where profiteers are conflict with government regulation. So, yes, developers can and will always play these games, so long as they are rewarded for them by increased profits. The stereotype of the arrogant, lazy bureaucrat exercising a petty and irrational tyranny over the honest and upright businessman, by entangling him in pointless red tape is more fiction than truth, but you can be sure that whenever it does occur, the developers will squeeze every bit of leverage they can from it.

I don't have the economics chops to fully express this concept, but I think that classical "supply and demand" economics have failed to play out in urban real estate the way they "should" according to the textbook because we don't have a sufficient understanding of what the *thing* is for which there is supply and demand, and how that thing is actually changed, and therefore the demand for *it* is changed, when more of it is produced in certain ways.

In other words, sure, if you take some working class neighborhood with standard workforce housing and then just build more identical workforce housing, assuming no growth in population or slower growth than growth in housing, yes, classical economics tells us that supply rising more than demand should lower prices. But when you build massive mixed use luxury projects in that working class neighborhood that have the potential to completely change the neighborhood, you are also changing the demand side, because changing the dynamics of the neighborhood is also going to impact demand in that neighborhood for the working class housing and the land under it (or undeveloped land there). Maybe there are economists who have models to account for all this, but the YIMBYs don't seem that sophisticated about it.

So by the same token, maybe lifting rent control restrictions on some housing stock should cause rents to sort of reach equilibrium, but what in fact happens is that the now decontrolled buildings attract a different class of investor who expects a different return and is going to go in and renovate some kitchens and redo the building face and market it to NYU students with well-off parents instead of the retail workers and teachers' assistants who live there.

another problem is getting apples-to-apples comparisons between existing and new housing. even if you made exact copies of the older housing, down to the finishes and floorplans, you'd be charging more for it because it hasn't depreciated, and constructing it certainly cost more in labor and materials than it did 50 or 100 years ago. but in practice of course there's not a strong incentive to duplicate existing housing, if your profit is X for that but 2X or 3X for building the luxury units. or the dominant tendency around here: building pseudo-luxury units cheaply as hell, knowing that the intended rental market of yupsters will move in even if everything's leaky and there are no true right angles. so long as it has a W/D in unit or some other perk, and looks vaguely bright and 'contemporary' you can get thousands of dollars a month out of these people. and if they discover the place is falling apart they'll move out and you can rent it to another yupster. so you may be increasing the supply of "housing" but maybe not the housing that we need.

the demand for raw units of whatever kind is so massive that landlords and developers both can get away with murder - that's what makes it a housing crisis, and affordability and exploitation are hand-in-hand manifestations of this. i toured a unit this spring in a POS building built probably in the 90s or 00s with no qualities whatsoever. it was just barely in me and my friend's price range. advertised as three bedrooms, but only one of those rooms had an actual window to the outside. when we left the broker person was like "so, maybe we can find some other apartments for you since you didn't like the bedrooms" and i said "you mean, since the bedrooms in this building are illegal." she just kind of laughed and shrugged awkwardly as if this was some quirky personal preference of mine. someone else will take the unit. someone's kid may someday die in a fire in that unit. the landlords do not care and they must be stopped by any means necessary.

even if you made exact copies of the older housing, down to the finishes and floorplans

you actually couldn't do this and have it be up to code because the codes have changed significantly. The older housing is still legal, however, any new housing has to be built up to stricter codes.

The stereotype of the arrogant, lazy bureaucrat exercising a petty and irrational tyranny over people the honest and upright businessman, by entangling him in pointless red tape is more fiction than truth

I have personally experienced the truth of this, as have many of my friends and colleagues.

tbh if I got into the bureaucracy business it would at least partly be to enjoy being a petty tyrant

being a petty tyrant and the benefits package is pretty much the appeal of those jobs fwiw

Not everyone I've dealt with (or have heard others' stories about) in code compliance/enforcement are petty tyrants. There are some that actually care and are competent, but then there are those that totally live up to the stereotype and then some

I don't think red tape is ultimately a big or even modest factor when it comes to why bay area housing is insane, but I find it weird that people find a kneejerk need to defend it. I mean, this is ilx, everyone here is a good liberal, we all believe in some sort of regulatory state and fire codes, that doesn't mean you have to defend every aspect of east bay bureaucracy or every zoning regulation currently on the books. the american zoning system may have progressive roots but that doesn't mean that every implementation has progressive goals or outcomes. a lot of things that are just taken as a given in this country - 'you shouldn't be able to turn your single-family house into a small apartment building or store' are not inherently progressive. our system is not the only way to make sure we don't die in building fires: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html.

the driving force behind bay area housing prices is 'there isn't enough of it' and the biggest hurdle is the fact that the vast majority of the bay area is reserved for single family housing. moderate zoning upgrades and well-meaning affordable housing projects aren't going to ever put a dent in the market.

In other words, sure, if you take some working class neighborhood with standard workforce housing and then just build more identical workforce housing, assuming no growth in population or slower growth than growth in housing, yes, classical economics tells us that supply rising more than demand should lower prices. But when you build massive mixed use luxury projects in that working class neighborhood that have the potential to completely change the neighborhood, you are also changing the demand side, because changing the dynamics of the neighborhood is also going to impact demand in that neighborhood for the working class housing and the land under it (or undeveloped land there). Maybe there are economists who have models to account for all this, but the YIMBYs don't seem that sophisticated about it.

induced demand exists, but it's not infinite. seattle is a good example of a hot market successfully getting saturated. regardless, no economist's model is gonna be able to reliably predict whether downtown wherever is going to get hip and rich.

Downtown everywhere is either going to get rich and hip or permanently empty in the next twenty or thirty years, you can probably draw a line somewhere in the list of US cities by population or pop density and the cities above the line will intensify and those below the line will collapse.

Downtown Vail, CO will probably prove to be an exception to the population size/density rule, but not the rich and hip rule.

i know i seem like a knee-jerk liberal itt and i do recognize that bureaucracy has problems and can ossify into something really counterproductive etc. dealing with the city can suck! i associate with a lot of people who are working in architecture at some level or other, and i hear about how dealing with the city can suck. a partner of mine is in city government and really really believes in city government as a force for good and even she has days where she's exhausted by how much dealing with the city can suck.

i only became a paperwork defender here because the thread's about rent control, rent control was criticized as not being the be-all-end-all, i suggested it would have to be part of a comprehensive housing policy including A, B, C, D, E, and F, and most of the discussion since has been about all the red tape associated with D with a bit on F. happy to just drop it but if the bureaucracy-haters have some other opinion on rent control, or some alternative solutions to the housing crisis that'd probably be more on-topic than me gradually morphing into a crusader for paperwork and apparatchiks.

lol if you hate the city wait until you try an HOA

I’d have to O an H for that

sure, just saying that government doesn’t have a monopoly on petty tyrants

so this morning my apt complex decided to do near-deafening roofwork at goddamn SEVEN IN THE MORNING. it sounds like elephants walking on the roof.

they told us it'd be this week, but most of us figured, y'know, normal waking hours.

Paris had rent controls for all housing from 2015 but a court ended it earlier this year; shockingly rents have gone up & with municipal elections next spring there's a move to reintroduce it.

By contrast public housing (HLM) is rent-controlled and I live in such a unit. It's obviously classic to pay only 25% of my net income each month on rent & utilities and actually live in the city where I work; the limit in public housing is 30% of your net income.

Last month a new service was introduced whereby you can try to trade your HLM with another person in an HLM in the city, for when your family grows or shrinks, for instance. Once the kids leave we'll look into that.

lol if you hate the city wait until you try an HOA

― the late great, Wednesday, October 24, 2018 7:26 PM (yesterday)

i have heard those horror stories -- everytime I think, oh, that condo isn't that expensive and it's in my neighborhood even, maybe I'll look into buying, I think of all my friends that have shitty HOAs.

happy to just drop it but if the bureaucracy-haters have some other opinion on rent control, or some alternative solutions to the housing crisis that'd probably be more on-topic than me gradually morphing into a crusader for paperwork and apparatchiks.

Uh, I've been pretty solidly defending rent control here AND criticizing the mechanics on the government level that prevent things from being built. I'm just trying to say that the system is fucked from the top almost all the way down. At this point, I feel like the only thing that's going to realistically solve the housing crisis in affluent urban centers is a natural disaster or something else that leads to massive depopulation of those areas

sorry if i've been misreading you, then. i still would like to hope for solutions beyond disasters or something else. there ARE efforts building to restart the conversation around housing but they're in sort of academic/policy circles i think and it'll be a while before those trickle back into the political vocabulary like universal healthcare has. in a way i think government intervention in the housing market (except to subsidize suburban home ownership and other higher-end-of-the-market products) has been more completely banished from discussion than almost any other previously mainstream topic.

where I live it's a bit more active a conversation than just in academy/policy circles -- so the frustration and obstacles are clearer, but we have the national housing crisis + a disaster resulting in mass deaths pushing action forward (at least in theory).