Ok, sounds like we're closer in thinking than I thought then. I think you're underselling socialized housing somewhat - it's definitely less efficient at a smaller scale, but if you need a lot of housing in bulk then that central planning becomes a benefit. I think some combination of both (such as in Austria) could work, but no fully market-based solution is going to cover everyone.

I guess the thing is, I know price controls can make the supply situation worse. I think the impact is overblown - there's still going to be developers who can turn a profit if the controls aren't too onerous, but there is a negative impact. In my opinion though, it's a worthwhile sacrifice in the short term to avoid evictions and displacement.

There's got to be some sort of compromise here, IMO - like, that's why I mentioned 10% (very arbitrarily), it's still above inflation usually, still allows for developer profit, but doesn't allow for insane price hikes all in one go. With enough supply, that kind of rent control would be de facto pointless anyway. The places where rent control failed are usually because they never bothered to actually fix the supply constraints. Maybe artificially lowering the price a little didn't help the supply, but single family zoning and long arbitrary approval processes for multi family housing are a much more significant artificial limit to supply. I don't think it's all or nothing - there's a certain amount of rent control you can get away with if you remove enough supply restrictions, there's got to be some sort of balancing act possible here.

I guess what I'm saying is, the whole concept of rent control shouldn't be written off just because people expect it to "solve housing". It's an often misused tool with some drawbacks, and there are better ways of providing housing stability (such as social housing), but when done properly it can be a net positive. Or put more succinctly, rent control of a private market is probably the worst way to reduce evictions and sudden rent hikes, but it is a way of doing that. And apparently that's the best we can expect from our politicians :/

Why not build more asap

fwiw all this bill would do is repeal the prohibition on enabling the option for rent control at the local level

The perfect is the enemy of the good. You got more housing.

Fall River has knocked down a bunch of old churches. Instead of building multi unit houses, we got single family homes.

Appeal it!! I just went through the same issue a month ago. The initial denial was overturned.

It affected the whole city….every neighborhood, by law, was desegregated. Rent control on the other hand was limited in scope once the federal government implemented Section 8 housing.

Rent control was applied to certain properties. So, no matter your income if you were in a rent controlled apartment your rent didn’t increase. Many people got WEALTHY while living in rent controlled apartments, which was the real reason they got rid of it. People making really good money were in those properties and the people who were the targeted beneficiaries of the program got the shaft and ended up in public housing.

And that has nothing to do with what I said. I have spoken about the concept of rent control, not specific policy.

But you should be able to figure out my opinion.

Which is not what the proposed bill would do. The bill would give cities and towns the ability to impose rent controls. Not temporary emergency rent controls while they also increased supply. Just rent controls. Now, are you for or against the proposed bill? Because I'm against it.

It's proper usage is a short-term solution while long solutions are implemented or during economic emergencies.

Implementing rent control while increase unit construction would reduce housing costs in the short term while ensuring increased supply in the long term to counteract the supply affects of rent control.

I'm not arguing for the status quo, or for no government intervention. I think that we should use government policy to subsidize construction. What you seem to be advocating for is socialized housing, which tends to be inefficient. It's hard for central planners to know where to build the right amounts of the right types of housing. Markets allocate these resources much more efficiently. That's why even social democracies in Western Europe still have private housing markets.

I'm trying to get you to understand that imposing price controls exacerbates the problem in the long run by making the supply problem worse. No one wants to supply the demand for rent controlled apartments, so new rent controlled apartments don't get built and existing rent controlled apartments get converted into condos which further decreases supply and makes the problem worse.

Your heart is in the right place, but the solution you're advocating for doesn't work. We see this both in economic theory (if you artificially decrease the price of a good you will artificially decrease the quantity supplied, basic econ 101), and in empirical evidence when we examine places where rent control has been tried.

It exacerbates the problem in the long term which makes it a poor policy choice. We should subsidize housing construction rather than imposing rent controls. Learn to draw conclusions based on what you've read.

I mean, I thought I was pretty clear above that insufficient supply is the much larger problem, but if you want to claim I'm "misunderstanding" then go ahead I guess.

The thing is, high prices may not be "the problem", but they are very much a huge problem in and of themselves. I would go as far as to say that yes, these prices combined with a lack of supply are in fact an emergency. High prices for housing are highly correlated with homelessness, and a free market will never find a profitable way to supply decent housing to the homeless. Even if sufficient construction brings prices down for most people, they're still getting left behind.

Like, it's great that you went into that whole explanation about how markets work, but you're totally missing the bigger picture here. The problem is that a fundamental human need like housing should not be subject to the whims of the market. Housing is not, and can never be, a truly free market, for several reasons:

• Housing values incentivize NIMBYism: supply shortages increase prices, which encourage people to put in market controls that further restrict supply and increase value
• The cost of moving is significant, and gives landlords leverage that tenants will never have. It's not just financial impacts, moving can also disrupt children's education, and generally disrupt the feeling of stability and "home".
• You can't just not buy housing. There are plenty of goods that you can just not buy if they're too expensive. Housing is not one of them.
• The net result is landlords have so much more power than tenants, which hardly makes it a balanced market to begin with.

I think that markets are a very useful tool that can actually build a lot of housing if we get rid of some of the blockers. But they're not some sort of fundamental law of the universe that cannot be interfered with. And if they're so fragile that even some sort of barely adequate 10% rent increase cap, for instance, will "utterly destroy" them, then maybe there's a bigger problem here.

As a progressive - fuck these clowns.

Build more housing and tell the suburban nimbys to shut the hell up. Ease up on suburban zoning that requires an acre and 120’ of frontage for a SINGLE home dwelling. Allow more dense multifamily constructing.

Rent control really doesn’t do shit to help folks overall.

It locks people into current living situation. It makes the housing market less liquid and doesn’t create any new beds for all the folks who want housing.

I disagree. I don't think "fair market return" is something that should be allowed when we have a homeless epidemic

The increase isn't tied to any fair market return, their monthly mortgage is the same every month. The increase in rent is always way more than the increase in the costs of property taxes, maintenance, and insurance.

As I have stated, this reduces rent volatility for current residents but leads to increased rents in the future for new tenants.

New housing units reduces housing costs.

Learn how to read a paper.

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My Dude, please take your own advice:

"We find that landlords actively respond to the imposition of rent control by converting their properties to condos and TICs or by redeveloping the building in such as a way as to exempt it from the regulations. In sum, we find that impacted landlords reduced the supply of available rental housing by 15 percent. Further, we find that there was a 25 percent decline in the number of renters living in units protected by rent control, as many buildings were converted to new construction or condos that are exempt from rent control.

"This reduction in rental supply likely increased rents in the long run, leading to a transfer between future San Francisco renters and renters living in San Francisco in 1994. In addition, the conversion of existing rental properties to higher-end, owner-occupied condominium housing ultimately led to a housing stock increasingly directed toward higher income individuals. In this way, rent control contributed to the gentrification of San Francisco, contrary to the stated policy goal. Rent control appears to have increased income inequality in the city by both limiting displacement of minorities and attracting higher income residents."

Yes it clearly does. Even in the abstract, which is evidently the only thing you read when doing research.

That's not what the paper you cited says.

Or you're just misunderstanding the nature of the problem. High prices aren't the problem. High prices are a symptom of insufficient supply, which is the real problem. If you want to leverage government policy to fix the problem, attack the insufficient supply instead of attacking the high price. If you create subsidies or tax breaks for people building the type of housing you want to see built (in Boston that would be high density, small and medium sized apartments), this will alleviate the problem of high prices.

If there is an emergency (such as a 50-100% surge in rents due to a global pandemic), then price controls can be used as an emergency measure, so long as they are explicitly stated as emergency measures and capped by an appropriate time limit. If you don't do that you risk spooking builders and exacerbating the supply problem.

Price controls aren't a minor piece of basic decency, price controls are drastic market interventions. The whole point of a market is price discovery. What is the proper price for a 1 bedroom apartment in Boston? You don't know the answer to that. Neither do I. Neither does anyone in this thread or in the government or in the whole wide world. The only way to arrive at the correct answer to that question is to establish a free and fair market and let the market discover the price. That is the essential function of every market for every good, and we judge how well a market is functioning by how efficiently it arrives at that equilibrium price. A price control destroys this utterly. So that's why a price control would break the market, because that's what price controls do. It is not somehow the market's fault.

No, the purpose of rent control is to stop rents from shooting up for current residents. Says so right in the same. Fortunate, it works very we.

I mean you're not wrong - if rent control/stabilization only applies to some rentals, and you don't adequately expand housing alongside it, you're just shifting the impact. I think it mostly makes sense as an emergency measure - stop people from getting kicked out first, then actually fix things.

Really though, what this boils down to is that a basic human need (shelter) is tied up in a market - a market which is never going to cover everyone's needs if left to its own devices. At the very least, rent control is a blunt instrument to help protect some of the most vulnerable (IMO), but it's a bandaid on a broken system to begin with. Rent control creates perverse incentives because the whole housing market is already full of perverse incentives. But ultimately, I don't think anyone should be allowed to jack up rents to such an extent that it puts people on the streets. And if putting such a minor piece of basic decency into law breaks the housing market, then we have way bigger problems.