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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand these kind of articles. There's two harsh truth for me:

* It would be crazy not to rent a rent-controlled place in a market like SF. This is what everybody tries to do here, and honestly I would probably not have moved here if I couldn't have found a place without rent-control. It is just too risky (your rent can pretty much double in a week, forcing you to move out).

* SF's real housing problem is that there's a lack of housing. This has nothing to do with rent control, and focusing the story on rent control is like ignoring the bigger elephant in the room. It's a malicious distraction tactic. Check the numbers, the population of SF has remained extremely stabled since the 90s[1], the reason is that there's no more space for people to live.

Ask yourself this question, who would be the biggest benefactors from removing rent control?

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=sf+population&oq=sf+populati...

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To your points:

1) People not moving to markets like SF because rent is too high and telling employers that is exactly what should happen! This forces employers to either lobby for more housing (a good thing) or open offices in reasonable cost of living locations (also a good thing) instead of continuing the status quo bubble. Rent control is a market distorting force in this case.

2) Rent control directly leads to fewer new housing units because there is a disincentive to create housing that's going to rent for below-market. If you want more housing, you should be opposed to rent control. I say this as someone who benefits greatly from rent control and still wants to see it die.

3) The population of SF has not remained extremely stable since the 90s. Look at [1]. There were 140,000 fewer people in the 90s than there are today (a 20% increase)! Also your reasoning that "there's no more space for people to live" is demonstrably false. Go visit Tokyo and then tell me there's no space for more people in SF. There's no more space because zoning laws and height restrictions in the city are absolutely ridiculous and serve NIMBY interests.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco

Edit: since someone is no doubt going to ask, here's a good summary of the economic literature on the topic. It covers a variety of effects related to rent control: https://econjwatch.org/File+download/238/2009-01-jenkins-rea...

With respect to point (2), the argument doesn’t really work for SF; rent control only applies to units built before 1979. New developments can raise the rent as much as they want.

You could argue the threat of possibly having rent control discourages new building, but it’s a much weaker argument.

Your points in (3) I think are much, much more relevant to the SF housing crisis than rent control.

1) not going to happen. In my case, I wanted a job that only existed here. I can either pass on it, or accept it.

2) this is not true. Rent control does not apply to new buildings (unfortunately)

3) 100k in 20 years is NOTHING. The population of SF is still relatively small. And this is exactly my point, they can build more housing, they just don’t want to.

Exactly. Rent controls simply redistribute the spoils of an inefficient market from rentier to renter. New York's strictest rent controls occurred during the period of fastest house building (post war). Note that they're not presenting data like this because the data is inconvenient to their theory.

If the Economist were serious about encouraging property development (they're not) they'd encourage making land a tax liability rather than an asset, so that inefficiently used land (e.g bungalows in sf) would be voluntarily yielded for more productive use.

The Economist has always taken the side of rentiers though, and probably always will.

Gosh, I can't imagine why limiting the amount one can charge for housing would be in any way related to the lack of housing that you say is the real problem.

it depends if the rent control limits are reasonable to the landlord and if property still makes a good/better investment that other investment sources. If the answer to these questions is still yes then it's not going to make that much of a difference.

The main hurdle to housing in California is the planning, permitting and review process along with often absurd rules that can add years to to the development timeline for a project and add millions of dollars to the costs. These could be massively streamlined (parking minimums removed, height limits relaxed and guidelines that if met would allow for rapid project approval etc.)

If we build a system were development projects were able to be completed for $200k per unit then maybe we might start seeing affordable rents...

Isn't a huge part of the housing shortage in SF due to the zoning policies that prevent builders from building more than 2-3 stories in something like 80% of the city?

I don't get what's so hard to understand. Building housing costs a lot of upfront time and money investment. If the person making that investment can't expect to reasonably make a profit, then there is no incentive to build.

And the argument that luxury housing prices out lower income people from housing is like saying luxury cars price out lower income people from cars.

> And the argument that luxury housing prices out lower income people from housing is like saying luxury cars price out lower income people from cars.

No, it's not, since the resources needed for housing (land) are heavily limited, while the resources needed for cars are not.

Of course the resources needed for cars are limited, that's why they aren't free.

Housing on the other hand actually isn't as constrained by land requirements, since you can just build up (provided you're allowed to do so).

Rent control doesn’t apply to new buildings.

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