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To address the last point - if your neighbour can't afford to move because the rent is too high elsewhere then under a non-rent controlled system would the landlord not have raised her rent to a point she would be unable to pay it and would thus be forced to move elsewhere?

(I don't know enough to actually have an answer to this.)

Which would you choose:

1) move away from rising costs, in literally any direction (pick just about any other place in the world), settle into a home you can afford and move again later if you want/need.

2) Live in a rent controlled apartment, become trapped for the rest of your life in a neighborhood where you can no longer afford groceries, healthcare or a haircut because of the rising cost of living.

I live in a city with rent control and it's great. New York's rent control model is broken no doubt but look no further than Montreal for a better example.

The difference is that all rent prices are subject to a maximum increase of roughly 1% per year, even if tenants change, the lease is locked to within 1% of the previous tenant's lease.

It works great :) Older rental stock remains cheap, and new properties are reasonably priced too.

Montreal isn’t exactly a city experiencing a massive influx of high paid workers.

Easy to solve the problem when their isn’t one.

Renting is much cheaper in Montreal than similar sized Canadian and American cities. Obviously you cannot compare to cities like NYC or SF directly.

> This article feels like a strawman to me. Infrastructure improvements are not the cause of SF rents. You just need to walk down any block, or sit on BART (if it's working!) and step in a pile of excrement to prove that.

Huh? No, it's the other way around. SF rents are the cause of lack of infrastructure improvements, according to the article.

Do you think it's more likely that without rent control she would have been forced to move earlier, or that her income would be higher than it is now? Something about this situation seems circular, but your argument doesn't admit to there being a feedback loop involved, which makes me suspicious.

I think the implication is that her having been forced to move at the due economic point would have been less coercive than now being trapped into a single location by economic forces -- leaving her freer to seek happiness in other ways, eg, job mobility. Further, that if all the people of a certain class were forced to move, eg baristas could no longer afford to be in the area, it places a strong economic incentive on fixing the actual political problem, which is semi-masked by her current arrangement.

I'm not sure I agree, but I think there's an argument to be had that she'd have more freedom to leave a job if she were living somewhere that she were also free to relocate, and that at scale, this economic distortion leads to high friction.

It doesn't seem too circular to me. Rent control keeps your rent low despite rising rents around you. So in the case of the OP's friend, her rent is now vastly below market. In a non rent-controlled world she would absolutely have been forced to move earlier due to rising rents.

If she can't afford to move anywhere today, wouldn't that make her homeless without rent control?

Some rent control schemes keep all rents low. In Montreal, the government limits all rent increases to 1% per year. Even between tenants.

> Rent control doesn't improve housing choice in that sense.

I don't think it's supposed to. It's just a price control meant to keep large swaths of income brackets from being priced out of the city entirely.

I think the parent means rent control as in "control of the rent in a particular area everywhere at once", rather than "rent-controlled contract for this particular property"