Rent Control: Classic or Dud?

"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.

I was born into Mitchell lama housing. I still sometimes resent my parents for leaving it behind.

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.)

property developers somehow manage to build housing in every town, suburb and city in america that isn't new york or san francisco without being framed as uniquely greedy and malicious elements in our economy. which is not to say that they're saints, but they're certainly not the root cause for why crappy san francisco apartments rent at 3k these days. but they're great scapegoats as they're concrete while most of the rest of this situation is abstract. in the queens neighborhood I lived in until recently, the locals made sure to fight every new housing development in the name of 'stopping the greedy developers'.

every new development in my queens neighborhood is massively more expensive than the existing housing stock

^^^

my point isn't that developers are "greedy," it's that if you accept "the market" in laissez-faire mode as the sole generator of housing supply, then you're in trouble because the developer's job is to make maximum profit and that is not going to be by providing affordable housing. government needs to constrain and regulate the developers, and to provide housing of its own, because a general condition in which people can obtain housing affordably is a public good. that's all. this doesn't obtain in the same ways in smaller towns and suburbs because land is cheaper (or: has been made cheap) but it's absolutely a real thing. the last few times i've visited athens, GA, population 100,000, i've heard from a lot of people about all the gross, awful, development downtown oriented towards high-end apartments for the college-aged kids of rich parents, and "gameday" hotels and condos for said rich parents and alumni, versus other ways that "growth" might be pursued which could be (a) less rapidly gentrification-oriented and (b) more equitable given a minority population that's largely been left out of any putative economic benefits of all this. people connect the dots between the luxury apartments downtown and the very dramatic rise in rents everywhere else.

this all goes beyond a "rent control" thread of course but that was my point - you asserted that rent control doesn't address the underlying supply constraint and i agreed that a comprehensive housing policy would need to do something about that supply. that means we have to talk about developers, right?

(or at the very least, tweaking things to expand the pool of developers, making it easier for e.g. unions, housing non-profits, and neighborhood orgs to develop housing)

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.

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.

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.

One of the problems we have here in the Bay Area, is that developers are often given the choice of including affordable units in their building(s) or paying into a fund for affordable housing development, so those units are built elsewhere. But the affordable units don't end up getting built ... or at least the delays are absurd.

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.

Well, it can be a bit complicated, in that sometimes the profit requirement is a condition of getting loans from banks, etc. to finance the construction. Maybe you know a shit-ton about real estate/construction finance and I'm putting my foot in my mouth here, idk

"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'm trying to convert my falling-down useless garage in my backyard (which cannot house a car due to where it's placed) into a small studio in Berkeley and the amount of fucking paperwork and nonsense I've had to go through so far is ridiculous. Can't remove a 'parking space' from the property without sufficient replacement parking. Ok, I have a driveway. oh driveways in the front don't count. Why? Then someone else says they do. Then someone says they don't. Driveway on the side can. Oh it doesn't because it's not wide enough. you'd have to drive down it to get to this mythical garage parking in my back yard! Fuck off.

Building codes are good.

I mean parking requirements are antediluvian and should be abolished but I'm in favor of ppl like yourself having to get thoroughly permitted when you are putting up structures that people will be occupying

Ok, I have a driveway. oh driveways in the front don't count. Why? Then someone else says they do. Then someone says they don't. Driveway on the side can. Oh it doesn't because it's not wide enough. you'd have to drive down it to get to this mythical garage parking in my back yard! Fuck off.

imagine this level of bureaucracy and back and forth but in terms of converting industrial buildings to live/work housing and arts spaces, and that is my world (or at least part of it).

silby - have you ever had to deal with building codes, or building anything, or a city building and permitting department, personally?

No but it sounds fun, I love paperwork.

Anyway I rent.

No but it sounds fun, I love paperwork.

I thought this too ... in practice, it is not fun

As such I like the assurance that the people who own the properties I rent are subject to building codes and must meet thorough contemporary standards for safety and accessibility.

in London developers just pay a bribe "contribution" to the local council to avoid having to build the required amount of affordable housing, or they say they'll build x number of affordable units to get the planning permission, then suddenly this becomes "unviable" and there is a legal loophole that means they can weasel out of it. So yeah I'm pretty comfortable calling developers greedy and basically they are vermin that should be exterminated

xp - that's another theoretical thing that in reality is often not the case.

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

I’m not running for mayor though.

it is a motherfucking nightmare. add to that: city office randomly closed due to 'furloughs' on days; understaffed when they are open; the people working there telling you to your face that the rules are 'stupid'; and you have to take a day off work to go in and deal with this shit because when they are open they are only open until like 4pm.

newest rule: bathroom lights and fans must have an auto-shut off. this is required by city law.

one of our mayoral candidates has policy goals that are fairly similar to yours -- I will probably vote for them, but they will likely not win

the people working there telling you to your face that the rules are 'stupid';

Yep!

and you have to take a day off work to go in and deal with this shit because when they are open they are only open until like 4pm.

Yep!

newest rule: bathroom lights and fans must have an auto-shut off. this is required by city law.

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

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"

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).