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Comment by cft | Hacker News Reader

If there was no rent control, prices would drop even more. Firstly landlords are afraid to permanently lock down at a lower price, offering free months of rent instead. Secondly rent controlled tenants are afraid to lose their apartments, that are still below the market rates.

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Rent control has a miniscule impact on housing prices according to the latest economic research (1). You won't hear that from people still reading 60 year old neoconservative economic theory, though.

https://dornsife.usc.edu/pere/rent-matters

If there were no landlords prices would drop further still!

If there were no landlords there would be no price because there would be no rentals.

Who would do the maintenance?

That makes no sense. Rent controls don't specify a minimum rent, all your reasons apply equally to rent controlled and uncontrolled rentals.

Rent controls do sometimes specify how much rent can be raised year over year. Drop it too low one year, be stuck with relatively low prices in the short term.

They regulate rent increases in Oakland at least. Of course our landlord took the maximum allowed rent increase each time, as if it were the required increase rather than the maximum.

I don't live in the bay area and pay half the rent for three times the space in Boston... not exactly a small town... the Bay Area was already unattractive for me financially and I have an advanced degree in an engineering field.

I, like many of my peers, moved out of Oakland this year over the summer. For a while, I was considering staying around and trying to lock in a lower rent on a larger space, but rents really didn't budge.

Your effective rent _did_ drop, but landlords did it by offering 2-3 months of free rent on a one-year lease (with old rates applying.) It doesn't take Nostradamus to see what happens in 12 months: maximum allowed rent increase and no more sweetheart deals, meaning an effective increase of like 35% (or move again to try and get another deal somewhere else.)

It wasn't worth it to me, so now I'm paying less than half my previous rent for around 2x as much space in SLC.

I don't recall non rent-controlled apartments dropping rents all that much in the Bay... ever.

Rent control means that renting at a low price this year means you're also renting it at a low price next year. Without rent control you could give a discount this year and then jack the rate back up to normal next year.

Also not all property management is about renting out. Sometimes it is just about parking wealth and extra rent is gravy. So if you are just parking, moving to the max rent possible can be a desirable effect. As you may price people out and you do not have to have someone to 'manage' that property as intensively (broke AC, leaky sink fix, etc). Which would be an annoyance on a passive property.

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