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Comment by firic | Hacker News Reader

Price control for a scarce resource (eg. land) will lower the price for people who are better connected (friends of the seller, same religion as the seller, etc) but will make the cost impossible for others. The solution to the housing problem is to build more houses.

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In my handful of years in the bay area I've seen rent controlled 4 bedroom apartments pass through chains of friends (usually alumni of the same university) several years in a row. Most of these tenants have been well compensated tech workers. I think price control without regulating who can access lower controls can increase inequality. Something I have observed anecdotally to work is fixing a percentage of units to be reserved for low income people. It's a nice way to let us tech workers subsidize the less fortunate and still allow landlords to make money.

Land is available in the US under 10,000$ an acre. It’s the stuff like ocean views and public services that make land valuable not the limited total supply. Basic incomes would cause people to migrate to less expensive areas, but that’s unlikely to change prices much as we have vast amounts of land that’s barely used for anything.

"Good" land is scarce. If you were to propose price control only in unwanted land then that law wouldn't do anything because the price there is already low. I was referring to wanted land, ie. land where price control would do something

I would note that a basic income directly increases the amount of land "sufficiently close to sufficient income".

I suspect people that are on basic income for longer periods might have a different view of what “good” land is. But, more to the point we already do what your talking about via affordable housing. It’s a large waste of resources, but hardly casusing the kind of inflation spiral your talking about due to how it’s implemented.

>The solution to the housing problem is to build more houses.

There's way too much latent demand for housing in booming cities to just build your way out. Without rent control, there will be people not benefiting from the boom that are just bled dry by rising costs.

What is "latent demand"? There are empty apartments in SF right now and if you have the money you can rent them.

But that amount of money is astronomical. People are buying the apartments and leaving them vacant as an investment, rather than using them as intended, as a residence for a person living in the city.

The difference between current demand, and the increased demand that would exist at a lower price.

I just mean, there are lots of people that would move to SF if they could afford it. This mass of potential immigrants will counter an attempt to just build your way out.

Unless you mean a real substantive change to the city e.g. building 30,000 apartments/year.

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