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Comment by manyxcxi | Hacker News Reader

I'm buying a house right now, and while I don't feel it's rigged- it sure is a pain the butt.

You realize rent control isn't just about baby boomers, right? Pretty much all the minority advocacy groups fight for more rent control, or at the very least section 8 housing- and I'd like to see a single study showing a city > 100,000 people with 80% of the market locked up in rental control. I have a hard time believing any market would even get to 30%, after all the people with REAL money (the developers/land owners) want nothing to do with it.

Also agree with you on getting let down by our parents/grandparents on the education issue. I was born in '82 and had it rough, I can only imagine what a kid born in '92 had to deal with.

Edit: I'm moving from Seattle to Portland, so does that mean I'm one of these people they're talking about that has to move out, or one of the assholes moving in? Both?

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Indeed, rent control is usually about preventing people from being priced out of neighborhoods. It seems that a lot of people are happy if people get priced out of areas, as long as it's other people who get priced out of them. And even though it's more socially problematic - it's more of a problem when a family is forced to relocate against their wishes (and dealing with issues like switching schools) than when someone who is already relocating can't find an affordable apartment in the area they prefer.

That's a strawman. People moving in can have children too, or be looking to start families. Likewise people in rent-controlled properties don't all have school-aged children, and they certainly don't all send them to local schools.

I'd argue it's a bigger social problem for talented young people to not be able to move into centres of employment because of people who's children have grown up and left home still living in rent controlled properties. Such people are locked out of living in a perfectly reasonable place against their wishes - because of a rigged system that entitles those who came first to play by an entirely different set of rules.

Why should they get an easy ride, while everyone else, who's working just as hard - or often much harder, to pay their inflated rent - suffers as a consequence?

> People moving in can have children too, or be looking to start families.

Yes, but rent control doesn't force them to relocate or switch schools - the people who are negatively affected by this are people who have already decided to move. In contrast, the people who are negatively affected by removing rent control will be people who don't want to move but are forced to move by rising rent.

At least to me, it seems that people having to leave their neighborhoods because of rising rent is a larger negative impact (both to them personally and to society as a whole) than people who are already moving having to pick a neighborhood that is not their preferred neighborhood.

> the people who are negatively affected by this are people who have already decided to move.

"Decided to move" is not a reasonable description of the reasons for people to move into cities - they want jobs, they want to live among their peers, they want to take their place in the world. They didn't "decide to move", as if somehow they could live in their hometown all their life achieving their dreams.

> the people who are negatively affected by removing rent control will be people who don't want to move but are forced to move by rising rent.

I want a pony. And a boat. But I don't get those things, and I'm certainly not going to demand that I get to buy those things at a price far-below market rate. It might be nice to allow a group of people to not have to move "because they don't want to" rather than because they can't afford to stay - but it's unjustifiable when it comes at the expense of locking an entire generation out of the rental market and locking out younger people from living perfectly reasonable lives.

You can't defend a privilege that seeks to entitle one group to live according to their whims, isolated from the economic realities in which everyone else is forced to live. Rent control is a zero-sum game, it only provides benefits to one group by screwing over another.

> it seems that people having to leave their neighborhoods because of rising rent is a larger negative impact (both to them personally and to society as a whole) than people who are already moving having to pick a neighborhood that is not their preferred neighborhood.

You're trivialiaing the problem. This isn't about satisfying people's whims or preferences. An entire generation is being locked-out of living where they work, with many being shut out of jobs because of that. The person who can't afford to move to SF doesn't live in a less desirable neighbourhood of SF, because they can't afford to live there either, and they don't move to Oakland anymore, because that's expensive too now (guess what, they have rent control too). So is Richmond, and Almeda. So they move where? Concord? The commute alone is going to eliminate them from many potential jobs in SF. Meanwhile you defend single-earner part-time worker older couples living on Nob Hill (and who likely have ample savings) working irrelevant jobs which could be anywhere because they "don't want to move". One person's whim does not outweigh another's necessity.

Never mind the issue that rent control is probably harming the very people it aims to protect by putting so much pressure on the rental market that they can never afford to move, and so much knock-on pressure on the housing market that they can never afford to buy. So even if you're convinced of its social value, it's still non-sensical.

A fair market and a livable minimum wage would seem like an infinitely better solution.

"I want a pony. And a boat. But I don't get those things"

Couldn't we turn that argument on those who want to live in the cities?

"You're trivialiaing the problem."

And you're trivializing the problem of forcing people out.

"This isn't about satisfying people's whims or preferences."

Bullshit. You're making this about satisfying the whims or preferences of those moving in.

"A fair market and a livable minimum wage would seem like an infinitely better solution."

A fair market is one in which one does not get priced out of their home.

>"Decided to move" is not a reasonable description of the reasons for people to move into cities - they want jobs, they want to live among their peers, they want to take their place in the world. They didn't "decide to move", as if somehow they could live in their hometown all their life achieving their dreams.

That's still a very privileged view. The predominant reason people move is for work: they'll be (or continue to be) unemployed if they don't.

What you're missing in your arguments against rent control is that rent control protects socioeconomic diversity. Without rent control, fair market value may force people who are not high earners out, displaced by a more homogeneous population of highly-educated and high-earning people. This is not an unalloyed good.

One of the primary goals of rent control is to ensure a mixed-income population in highly-desirable urban centers, and in many cases it is precisely rich socio-economic diversity that many (not all, but many) people find attractive.

EDIT: readability

"That's a strawman."

No, it's not.

" People moving in can have children too, or be looking to start families."

Maybe. But they haven't already set down those roots. What makes them more deserving that the people who already have?

"Such people are locked out of living in a perfectly reasonable place against their wishes - because of a rigged system that entitles those who came first to play by an entirely different set of rules."

And those who are pushed out? Are they not locked out of living in a perfectly reasonable place against their wishes, because of a rigged system that entitles newer people to come in and change the rules?

"Why should they get an easy ride, while everyone else, who's working just as hard - or often much harder, to pay their inflated rent - suffers as a consequence?"

I have to ask the same thing of those moving in. Why do they get to push other people out?

> I'd like to see a single study showing a city > 100,000 with 80% of the market locked up in rent control.

It's not hard to find. San Francisco is pretty close, with around 72% of the rental market under rent control. (I saw a figure somewhere claiming it was effectively as much as 85%, but I can't find the reference from my iPhone).

https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-San-Francisco-apart...

> Pretty much all the minority advocacy groups fight for more rent control, or at the very least section 8 housing

Rent control and section 8 are totally different things.

Also, in much of New York 80%+ of apartments are rent-controlled: http://www.nakedapartments.com/guides/nyc/renting-in-new-yor....

You mean rent-regulated. From your link: "Less than 2% of NYC apartments are rent-controlled".

San Francisco has just under that– around 73%.

https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-San-Francisco-apart...

And just to clarify, it's 73% of the rental market. If you build new housing and it's all owner occupied, they won't budge that 73% number.

It might not be a huge factor but it's something to keep in mind.

You're forgetting that the price of any new owner-occupied property must also price-in the opportunity cost of not renting out that property. Nobody buys a house when they could get rich by renting out the same house to someone else. Indeed a foreign investor is likely to buy it, because it's a great source of income, and they already have somewhere to live.

If I can rent a property out for thousands of dollars a month, that property is worth a lot of money. So it's really the rental market that is pushing up prices in the owner-occupied market.

In the last housing bubble rents detached from housing prices pretty severely. Back in the 80s, it was generally cheaper to buy than rent - the 20% down saw to that. But things completely flipped with the more recent financial ingenuity.

In a way, I see rising rents in SF as a return to normalcy.

Lots of people buy real estate in can Vancouver and leave it empty instead of renting it out. It is a safe place to park money and the hassle and wear of tenants isn't worth the money they pay when the market has been going up so much.

I've heard there is a city in Australia that also has loads of empty condos bought by investors... Surfers maybe?

Buying a house and not living in it or renting it is definitely a thing

this happens in miami ALL the time. tens of thousands of empty apartments owned by foreigners parking their cash.

The number of units in NYC under 'rent control' is ~30,000.

Yes, it's that low. It's less than 2% of the available housing.

It's also not really true. NYC likes to use other terms such as "rent stabilization" to describe the rent-control-like protections they have in place. Some 45% of NYC rental properties fall under such protections. The combined figure for rent control, rent stabilization and other controls bring just over 60% of the NYC rental market under pricing controls.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control_in_New_York

Nope, nope, you have it right but in the context of this discussion you have it wrong. :-) There is rent control and rent stabilization, two separate items under the rubric of "rent regulated housing". See, those terms have political and legal connotations that don't necessarily perfectly match with the colloquial or intuitive phrase "rent control".

Rent control is specific to a tiny percentage of buildings and units, relevant to the situation where a) the tenant is in a rent-controlled building [ build before 1941 ] and b) the tenant or their descendants have been continuously occupying the unit since 1971. That's your rent control. Rent doesn't ever go up. The stereotypical picture here is of an older woman in her 70's or 80's living in a three bedroom walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village paying $500 a month while other units rent for $6500 or some such.

Rent stabilization is a different matter. About one million units in NYC (out of 2 million, perhaps?) are rent stabilized. That means a lot of things, but in summary it means the rent can't go up by a percentage set yearly by a board of individuals called the Rent Guidelines Board.

Now it gets interesting because in NYC, a rent stabilized unit can be cheap, well below market, depending on how long the tenant's been there, or it can be high. A unit can actually fall out of rent stabilization if the tenant makes above 200,000 a year and the unit hits 2700. It gets more complex: the landlord can make improvements to the building and use that to increase the rent to a degree; rent stabilized units are typically pre-war units/buildings but not exclusively, as a now-expired (this year) program called 421a gave developers tax breaks in exchange for rent stabilizing their units (even if their starting rent was market rate).

As an aside, and back to the original point -- here in NYC we're in the throes of some major class conflict and it centers enormously around 'affordable housing' in this city of 8.5m (up from 8m in 2000). Our mayor was elected on the platform of providing cheaper housing. Gentrification is a huge topic here, subject to daily barrages in rags like the Gothamist (whose comments section has commenters with about 50% the average IQ of the people here, I might add).

So approximately 50% of our housing stock falls under some form of housing regulation.

Source, I'm a NYC resident and landlord; also, this: http://www.nycrgb.org/html/resources/faq/rentcontrol.html#di...

I know the difference between rent control and rent stabilization. I wasn't saying there weren't units under regulation, I was just speaking specifically rent control. Rent stabilized units are mostly a short-term deal as the unit distribution changes within a building and their prices approach market-rate.

Source, I'm a NYC resident and rent controlled tenant.

"That's your rent control. Rent doesn't ever go up."

Huh? Controlled rents go up whenever the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal says they do; right now they're in the process of increasing by as much as 9.6% by 2018 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/01/nyregion/facing-increase-r... and since 1975 they've gone up 707% http://www.nyshcr.org/Rent/PublicHearingInformation/SAFR-Pre...

Fair enough. I stand corrected on that sentence.

A few nuances need to be pointed out, though. While they increase, they increase to levels set by the city based on a calculation that incorporates costs of things like taxes, utilities and whatnot.[1] In addition the owner has to apply for the increase, which is laborious and more than half the time never even is done. But the point is that they started at very low levels, and even if things eventually catch up, rent controlled units are typically quite below even rent stabilized units in rent asks.

If a genie appeared and magically offered you a choice between a stabilized unit and a rent-controlled one, equivalent in every other way, without knowing any other facts you'd most likely pick the rent-controlled one, even if there's been a 7-fold increase since the 70's as you point out, because you'd be more likely to pick the cheaper of the two.

1 - "New York City Local Law 30 of 1970 stipulates that Maximum Base Rents be established for rent controlled apartments according to a formula calculated to reflect real estate taxes, water and sewer charges, operating and maintenance expenses, return on capital value and vacancy and collection loss allowance. The Maximum Base Rent (MBR) is updated every two years by a factor that incorporates changes in these operating costs." (http://www.nyshcr.org/Rent/FactSheets/orafac22.pdf)

Except you can't pick a rent-controlled unit, because you can't get into one unless you were in before 1971. You can be transferred one as immediate-family but it requires 2 years of financial interdependence between you and the tenant -- not easy.

Rent controlled city with population >100K? Try Los Angeles, population 3.8M. From http://la.curbed.com/2016/1/27/10872448/rent-control-rent-st...:

...there are around 118,000 [rent controlled units] in play in LA right now, making up "about 85 percent of the city's rental housing stock"

Well Portland is hotter than Seattle right now so you're a privileged asshole..? I dunno.. Enjoy your move and please help keep Portland weird :)

I actually grew up in Portland, in SW- and having been outbid by 10 and 20% on multiple other houses I got to experience the heat from that housing market.

For us, we're moving back home. So maybe when I moved to Seattle I was the asshole and now I'm just a movie trope small town dude moving back from the big city to raise the kids.

EDIT: I'll add that having grown up there really helped me know what were completely BS/bubble prices on properties. Houses with bids going to $560k where the neighborhood was in the high 200s, low 300s a decade before. Where you know the traffic sucks, the neighborhood isn't anything special, and generally know what the neighborhood is like crime/people wise made it so much easier to just look at a house price and say no without getting caught up in the frenzy.

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