Rent Control: Classic or Dud?

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).