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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

I experienced exactly this in the early 1980's. In Berkeley, CA. Apartments were scarce because of rent control. I had a coworker that lived in his apartment from late 70's until late 90's. He paid less than $300/mo. It was great for him. He saved a ton of money and bought a house in Berkeley in the late 90's. But, as a student I had to live in Oakland and was never able to find an apartment. Every time I went to look at one there were another 99 people there. It was so frustrating.

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Around 1994/5 I wanted to move to Berkeley. I had a very hard time finding a place. I looked at so many attics turned into bedrooms and other crappy places. Eventually, I found an ideal (relatively) place and there was a good 50+ people looking at the same apartment during a showing...

I walked up to the landlord (who was a lawyer in his day job) and said... "I know you can't pick favorites, but I have a good salary and I'm not a student." ... he ended up making his top picks write an essay on why we wanted the apartment. I got the place and stayed there for 10 years.

Interestingly, during the last few years I was there, rent control ended and the landlord really wanted me out because he knew that he could make 2-3x more. He turned into a slumlord and refused to make any improvements and the ones he made were all half assed. The storage locker in the carport under the building got broken into as well.

Eventually, I left for SF and sublet the place to some friends illegally because they needed an inexpensive place. He eventually found out about that and I had to let the place go.

I guess my point is that I've seen first hand rent control and no rent control go through both phases. I really don't think there is a good solution. Someone always gets the short end of the stick.

If there was no rent control, why didn't he just raise the price up to market value when your lease came up for renewal?

I live in a city without rent control, and your experience is entirely foreign to me. Heck, my current landlord has offered to pay for things that I don't think are even really his responsibility. He's just happy to have good tenants paying market rate.

Switching tenants will probably cost a few thousand dollars in lost rent, and it won't earn him any more income, so he treats us well.

I don’t know CA, but in NYC, rent controlled apartments can only become market rate apartments in a specific, legally prescribed way. Even if you are in a market rate apartment, the landlord is only allowed to raise your rent by a certain percentage each year; this percentage is higher for market rate and lower for rent-controlled, and there is also a third category called “rent stabilized” which is between market rate and rent controlled.

(Just as note about rent control in NYC—rent controlled apartments account for something like 1% of total apartments. The number is slowly going down, it was about 3% twenty years ago.)

"grandfather clause"

The removal of rent control only applied to new tenants. He was limited to a city controlled yearly mandated increase, the entire time I was there. He also couldn't kick me out unless he moved into the apartment himself for some period of time.

He also had to put my deposit into an interest bearing account and was required to pay me that interest. The rental increase and payment was a ritual I went through yearly with him and he always delayed giving me the interest as long as he could by law.

2-3x+ more rent is enough reason for a landlord to want to push someone out in a competitive market like Berkeley. There is always a stream of new tenants because it is a college town and limited rental housing is available.

In other words, it was still rent controlled.

Yes, but only until the current tenant leaves. Which gave that landlord all the incentives to make the current tenant leave, as evident by the half-assed repairs and other slumlord-like behaviors that the parent comment mentioned.

Yeah, so it actively incentivizes neglecting maintenance duties and driving out the current tenants rather than offering them to renew their lease at the market rate. Sounds like a terrible law.

That's the downside of rent control. Rent ends up being stable and predictable for tenants, but it reduces the landlord's incentive to fix thing when they break and to make improvements (though many rent control laws, including SF's, still allow landlords to pass some of the cost of capital improvements to renters).

Even when rent control continues to be active, landlords have an incentive to want to get their tenants out, because (at least in SF), a new tenant can be charged market rate when they move in (and then that rate is locked in with limited yearly increases until they leave).

When rent control in Berkeley ended, but existing tenants grandfathered in, the landlords were incentivized even more than usual to do things to make a tenant want to leave, since then they'd have a completely non-rent-controlled unit again.

It's not only bad behavior on the landlords' side. Tenants are incentivized to hold onto the unit as long as possible, even if they want or need to move out for a while. They'll often illegally sublet the place and hope the landlord doesn't come by to check on them until after they move back in. But they're also in some ways trapped: they may want to move, but know that they'll face a huge rent increase in their new place, so they stay put.

Honestly I can't really blame landlords or tenants for their bad behavior under rent control; the rules around it only tend to provide one good outcome: rent stable and increases are predictable. Other outcomes are usually negative, and that's an inherent property of the system. But that one good outcome is often good enough to justify keeping rent control around.

That that has anything to do with rent control is an absolute myth. Two counter examples are Sydney and Melbourne, both don't have rent control, Australia has big incentives for investing in housing (tax reductions if you don't live in the house). Both cities have seen an explosion of rents (10% year on year is not uncommon) and a building boom of cheap apartments that are only rented out via Airbnb. I can tell from experience that landlords do the absolute minimum they are legally required (mostly even less) and tenants are afraid to complain because they need the references when moving.

You get what you pay for. If the tenant here wanted to live with slum like pricing, tenant should get slum like conditions.

When I moved in, the pricing was fair, if not a bit high.

Over the years, cost of living increases for whatever reasons and now the rent I'm paying seems low.

Maybe the solution is to allow landlords to have larger increases that match changes in COL, but that is effectively the same as getting rid of rent control.

Right. The whole point is you said they got rid of it, but they didn't. It was still in effect and causing problems in your situation.

Your proposed solution is now to get rid of rent control, which is what they had supposedly already done. But I agree. Seems like (actually) getting rid of rent control would have been a good move.

Frequently, even on places that don't have "rent control", there's still limits on how fast landlords can jack up the price on a tenant in the place, but that doesn't apply to new tenants. So if you can only raise the rent by $100/mo once a year, but the market rent for the place is $1000/mo higher than current, you've got 10 years before you actually reach market rate.

Because of something called vacancy control. You can't raise rents on people in a unit. You could raise the rent of an empty unit to market rate (in Berkeley, in the 90's after rent control was changed).

EDIT: changed word "defeated" to "changed"

To add more context, only a few cities (Berkeley, Santa Monica) had strong rent control with vacancy control in the 1980s and 1990s. Other cities, such as San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles, had rent control but have always allowed the rent to reset to market rate when the unit is vacant.

The California Law called Costa-Hawkins phased out vacancy control in all cities from 1995 to 1999. After 1999, landlords have the right to set the initial rent, overriding local vacancy controls. (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...)

In Nov 2018, California voters rejected Proposition 10 41%-59%, which would have repealed Costa-Hawkins and allowed vacancy controls again (https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_10,_Local_Ren...). Berkeley, Richmond, and Santa Monica would immediately have imposed vacancy controls under their existing laws.

In Nov 2020, California voters again rejected Proposition 21 40%-60%, which would have allowed vacancy controls that limit rent increases to 15% per vacancy (https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_21,_Local_Ren...).

Interesting that it took an essay contest to break the tie. Seattle now has an ordinance that they must rent to the first applicant who qualifies. This is to prevent discrimination against minorities.

Yea, I felt like it was kind of weird at the time, but I was also young and cocky and used my privilege to get the place in a highly competitive market. I don't feel good about that later in life.

In his defense, I don't think he was discriminating against minorities as much as he was just trying to find a good tenant, in a sea of applications, that wouldn't cause him a lot of headache.

One side bit of information is that he had had an accident and had lost part of one arm. He was very apt and that didn't hold him back at all, he was used to challenges.

> Seattle now has an ordinance that they must rent to the first applicant who qualifies. This is to prevent discrimination against minorities.

Isn’t it already illegal to discriminate against minorities in renting housing?

Yes. But it is impossible to prove, so the law never gets enforced.

So Seattle entirely removed the ability of landlords to pick their tenants? Imagine applying that to anything else—must hire the first qualified job applicant, etc.

I don't know, this kind of makes sense. You've presumably rented apartments before. The process is shady as shit. I've been shaken down by several landlords for prepayments, and intrusively interviewed. It must be much worse for Black renters.

And it's how most purchasing works! I go to rent a car, they have to rent me the car if it's available; they can't wait to see if a safer-looking driver is right behind me. Renting an apartment isn't a job interview.

> I go to rent a car, they have to rent me the car if it's available

I don’t think they have to rent you anything if they don’t feel like it. They can wait for safer looking driver just fine. It’s just they don’t, because it doesn’t make sense for them from business perspective, but they very much could do that.

And here I think that if Alamo started turning down drivers with reservations at the rental counter on sight, and those drivers were even slightly disproportionately Black, Alamo would be in a world of hurt.

If they had no reason to turn down drivers other than their race, sure, but that's because it's illegal (on top of being morally repugnant). They can turn down drivers for other reasons just fine, though, even if they are disproportionately black. For example, I'm told that voter ID laws are wrong, because black people are less likely to have ID (presumably driver's license). Alamo is perfectly able to turn down drivers without driver licenses, even if they are disproportionately black.

My point is that the expectation is so strong that, absent something on your driving record to prevent it, you'll get a rental no matter what you look like as long as you have a reservation (which you'll get sight unseen).

That is not true of apartment renting; in fact, I'd argue, it's distinctively untrue of renting. Thus, my rebuttal to Rayiner.

This is much more true of rental companies that work at a scale close to Alamo. If you pass a background check and have a deposit you get a spot.

This is less true of mom and pop rentals. This is probably less true of mom and pop anything.

I think you're right that intuition based decisions make it easier for racism to creep in and are harder to diagnose and fix than process based decisions.

But this problem with renting is probably more true of hiring and firing and more impactful. Should we apply the same rules to hiring and firing?

At first blush, it sounds crazy. I don't know how to make it workable. But in the large, tech industry hiring is super bigoted! The problem you'd be correcting is very real.

I'm not decided on the topic being talked about, but just want to say that my parents in Milwaukee renting out a condominium have gotten burned from a string of 4 tenants. Flat out didn't make payments, didn't respect the rules (i.e. rules of condominium association, which puts the owner in trouble), intentionally ruined the place on last day out, literally, with a sledgehammer, and basically ended up costing money. And my parents are by no means rich... the $800/month for a 3-bedbroom place was their primary means of income.

They're finally having better luck now that this time that they requested credit reports, actually exhaustively followed through on references, etc.

Don't know what the answer is -- maybe the regulations should selectively be applied to those who rent out multiple properties?

I don't think landlords screen tenants out of malice, and I know a bunch of landlords who have related their challenges to me. But environments like this are to unlawful bias what standing water is to mosquitos. It sort of can't help but creep in, and without some objective standard, there's no way to keep it from turning into a plague.

>maybe the regulations should selectively be applied to those who rent out multiple properties

I think they do.

I talked to someone about renting once, I thought we'd agreed to go ahead, the next day they called and said, essentially, they'd decided to rent to someone they preferred better who expressed interest after me. Casually, as though it wasn't a slap in the face.

I concluded that I'm probably stuck renting from an impersonal corporate landlord that runs apartment complexes, but that seems more expensive.

At least in the US, I think people that are renting out part of the building they live in have, legally, a higher degree of latitude in terms of discrimination. It is kind of like a job interview. Or considering someone as a roommate.

I'd be surprised if this had the intended effect. I'd imagine it'd cause most landlords to increase their qualifications, and bar them from making exceptions to those qualifications.

> I really don't think there is a good solution.

There is a good solution - for outsiders like you to go away and not come back. That leaves more housing for long term residents who are the people it's protecting. It sounds nasty but people everywhere can't stand outsiders coming into their place. Xenophobia.

Also, nobody should have children.

Don't Europeans average less than one per person? I had the impression that was true for a very long time now.

My urban planning teacher used to say, as a synthesis, that rent control does more damage to a city than bombing..

Why? Buildings will degrade. Fast forward some years and rents will not justify any building maintenance by landlords. History is full of examples that ideology recurrently ignores.

> He saved a ton of money and bought a house in Berkeley in the late 90's.

That gave him a durable advantage and helped him acquire assets that would further gain in value. Not to mention, as a renter and home owner, he was able to vote against new developments for years, further increasing scarcity and the value of his house.

And then bureaucrats complain about inequalities?

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