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Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

Rent control isn't the fundamental cause of high housing costs: it's mostly a matter of supply and demand. And, yes, rent control limits supply a bit, but nowhere near as much as complicated, arcane, and expensive building and zoning codes.

Given the trade offs, the only reforms I'd make to rent control is having some kind of gradual income requirements. The higher your income, the less rent control you get, up to the point (say, $100k+) where you aren't protected by it at all. Even that is mostly for optics, though, and wouldn't help housing costs too much.

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Agreed, but my primary bone to pick here is that people seem to be proposing further rent control as a viable solution to the housing problem, rather than fixing existing restrictive building codes.

Hahah. Well, if rent control's high level of support raises your blood pressure, wait till I tell you about San Francisco's popular BMR lottery... ;)

A low-income applicant has a nonzero chance in a BMR lottery, which is better than their 0% chance in a market-rate building. There is a logic to it. Unfortunately the thinking usually stops there, rather than considering how to raise the chances overall.

Further rent control is a viable solution to the problem of existing residents being displaced. It isn’t a solution to the difficulty of moving to desirable areas, but rent control advocates don’t consider that a legitimate problem. Or at least are okay with dampening the upward mobility of already affluent creative-class types to protect marginalized communities.

Notice how the possibility that actually non-affluent people would move somewhere for a better job is not something they think about.

Nope, that's because rent control makes that problem worse, so it's best to ignore it.

According to this article:

> The urban design think tank SPUR estimated in 2014 that San Francisco had “roughly 172,000 units of rent controlled housing” at the time, about 45 percent of the city’s entire housing stock.

https://sf.curbed.com/2017/11/3/16603900/rent-control-san-fr...

It's not reasonable to consider all rent-controlled housing off the market, however. Most don't have tenants pay a rent substantially diverging from market rent. People constantly move, even if they are in a rent controlled apartment.

To wit, I'm "Rent Controlled" in SF, but since I moved apartments last year, my rent is controlled to something north of $3k/month. I've had several other friends move recently from and to other Rent Controlled units. Saying a large swath of the city is rent controlled isn't very informative without actual rent data.

The the extent rent control has an impact, it'll be negative. If rent control with serious teeth was ever passed, it would become a fundamental cause of high housing costs (or other, worse issues, depending on how it's implemented)! And I think in specific markets (San Francisco in particular) it may have more of an impact that you realise.

But you're right that the issue now is zoning and building codes of course.

The real risk there is that it would incentivize landlords to select the highest-income tenants possible (more so than they currently do).

Good point. Existing residents needing rent control, however, would get to maintain their protections. And I see the policy argument for maintaining their protections being much stronger than a generalized right to the same rent.

This is called a means test. Strangely enough rent control schemes virtually never come with a means test.

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