Both nimbyism and rent-control are problems.
https://www.cato.org/publications/research-briefs-economic-p...
Pretty much the only study I’m aware of that took the issue head-on, from the Cato institute.
They found that rent control greatly benefits recipients, that rents increase diffusely citywide (about 5%), and that the overall positive and negative impacts were roughly equally balanced (~$3Bn over 17 years). The net is slightly positive, in fact.
In other words, rent control pretty much does what’s printed on the tin: helps certain renters a lot, hurts others a tiny amount, averages out to zero net impact. Here’s the TL;DR:
”On net, incumbent San Francisco residents appear to come out ahead, but this is at the great expense of welfare losses from future inhabitants.”
You can certainly debate the desirability of that outcome, but it’s exactly as advertised.
I'm seeing phrases like (gross cherrypicking, also doesn't represent the full picture article, I know, I know) '15 percent decline in the number of renters living in these buildings' and 'led to a higher level of income inequality in the city overall'. This and conclusions like a 5% increase in rents city-wide suggest that the policy is not improving the housing affordability situation.
Indeed, it looks like rent control is great if you can get it but is making any housing shortage worse.
As I said, you can certainly dispute the goal of favoring incumbents over new residents. There are also issues with landlords in rich neighborhoods wiggling out of the controls, which lead to the rich/poor inequities you note.
But on net, it does what people want it to do: protects existing residents, with a minimal net impact to the housing economy.
If I didn't mind the financial outcome (because I didn't have the money in the first place) I'd have hung on for dear life.. instead I took the settlement and found another living situation.
Rent control does not prevent developers from building new construction, in fact it may promote new developments. Rent control reduces the cost of housing for a select few people who haven't moved in a while, which artificially raises the prices for newer tenants that just moved into a neighborhood. Higher prices for new tenants make developing new housing more attractive, not less.
I think you have switched cause and effect. Developers have to charge higher prices because they have to subsidize rent controlled units. Without rent control you may get away with charging $1000 per month to cover your costs and then slowly increasing prices as inflation picks up over the years.
If you expect 3% inflation but rent control only allows a 1% increase then only charging $1000 will result in a net loss over time so you will have to adjust the rent upward. Assuming a tenant in a rent controlled unit stays for 20 years then the land lord has to charge the tenant $1400 from day one.
> Developers have to charge higher prices because they have to subsidize rent controlled units.
I don't think these two points are contradictory. Yes, rent control increases housing prices on newer units. However, higher prices on newer units provides incentive for developers to build new construction rather than squeezing everything they can from existing ones.
You should read the article before you assert that your opinions rebut its contents.
> "The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded as the Charles Koch Foundation in 1974 by Ed Crane, Murray Rothbard, and Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the conglomerate Koch Industries."
I also have a hard time supporting it just in principal - it restricts mobility, disincentivises renting out property at all, and puts young people and immigrants and anyone else who didn’t happen to get here first at a disadvantage. Then the only housing those folks can get is market rate housing, which we now just call luxury housing as a shorthand even though it’s the only possible housing, and now we can write them off as rich assholes and pretend there’s not a housing problem.
Obviously the causality of these issues is complex, and it’s not all the fault of rent control, but it does seem to be a major pillar of this whole crazy mess we’ve created here.
One last point — think about how big of a deal that 5% increase really is. The median rent is around $3500 for a 1 bedroom apartment, that’s $175 a month the average person in the city could save. That’s significant.
Mods, if you can’t control the ideologues, it’s time to get rid of graying of downvoted comments. People are just using it to censor speech.