Why shouldn't low income earners pay lower rent? From a humanitarian perspective, it doesn't make sense to have a landlord greedily siphoning off the vast majority of a person's income, just so that person can have fulfilled the basic human right of not being homeless. It's parasitic.
Obviously not the best solution for the landlords, but, really, so what? Removing a class of parasites from the housing system would be a feature, not a bug.
Don't you think that would just drive up the market price ? (by restricting supply i.e. making landlordship less desirable)
yeah, that didn't turn out so well for higher education and healthcare. so no to that.
housing markets are distorted in a thousand ways. a solution like that might be appealing for its simplicity, but what we need to do is the hard work of rationalizing a death by a thousand cuts. start by aggressively repealing every zoning/building regulation that's not tied to solid safety concerns (and not nebulous and nefarious ones). eventually you'd be in a position to repeal (in CA) both prop 13 and rent control (but not saying that'll happen), which are complementary distortions, but only when the market is functioning well enough not to need (for sociopolitical purposes, not economic ones) them.
Why should the landlord fit the bill because Jonhy does want to live in a high sought place?
The 'humanitarian' causes are a way to disguise totalitarian acts.
We have laws, property and trade so we don't have to go back to primitive ways.
It's just one of the very few risks a person of wealth might have to accept, should they decide to use their elevated position in society to inflict landlordism upon people.
I agree that everyone should be guaranteed food, water, and shelter (at minimum), but I don't think anyone is entitled to live on the most desirable pieces of land in the world.
The nice thing about using markets to set prices and deal with scarcity is that they're self-adjusting.
my personal take is that the root cause of this is the culture and policy surrounding home ownership, particularly for the middle class. we encourage people to take out a mortgage to acquire a home as soon as possible, and we tell them it's not financially irresponsible for a single physical asset to make up most of their net worth. in fact, we tell them it's the best investment they could possibly make. we grant tax breaks and lower the required down payments to extend this opportunity to even more people. so we end up with a bunch of people who are either highly leveraged on their mortgage, or have paid it off but have minimal other assets. this makes it very important that house values keep going up, so we deliberately distort the housing market so they do.
something I'd like to underscore is that the housing market is very much not a free market. there are tons of restrictions on what type of things can be build, how they can be built, what they can look like, what they can be used for, etc. even if you think free markets are effective pricing mechanisms (and I mostly do), that doesn't really have much to do with the prevailing rent in most areas.
without getting too far into the weeds, and because housing is a durable and necessary good that's proportional to both population and productive capacity, in a free and fair market you'd expect housing prices to track with inflation. that's the reasonable expectation. over time, we've seen housing prices detach from that baseline for a variety of reasons unrelated to its core responsibility of sheltering people. see, for instance, the case-shiller index.
those detachments are distortions to the idealization of a free and fair market to ensure house prices continually rise for political and personal gain, despite the lack of sound economic principles underlying that distended rise.
If they want to pay lower rent, they can do so, but usually in a lower quality neighborhood.
But, of course, the political incentives are aligned to encourage homes becoming ever more expensive at the behest of homeowners.
What would be the point of striving for a raise if your costs increased proportionately to income? The possibility of a higher quality of life gets people to work hard and benefit us all.
> The oppressors are not always landlords - they are [...] other tenants who sit on their rent controlled housing until they die.