Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

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It's not, rent caps are a great idea in principle but in reality it just massively constrains the supply which means that yeah, if you find a place to rent you will pay a "reasonable" rate, but there's 200 people willing to rent any place so when landlords aren't allowed to compete on price they compete on everything else. It leads to insanities like landlords requiring 6+ months of rent upfront, very long contracts, very strict(boardering on abusive) rental terms.......since the demand FAR outstrips the supply as a landlord you can get away with pretty much anything because there are always more people willing to rent.

For those downvoting - look at literally any city that has implemented rent caps and tell me that they are a good idea. Where the standard became asking for 6 months upfront and signing a 3-year-no-exit-clause contracts because the demand is so huge it allows landlords to do that. Is that really a net benefit to people renting?

It all depends on how it's implemented. The usual method of controlling rent is to cap only a subset of properties in an area - for example, leaving new builds or new tenancies exempt. Which tends to create a two-tier system that benefits one set of tenants at the expense of the other, while discouraging reallocation for downsizing and suchlike. And as you allude to, without further restrictions on tenancy contract terms, the private landlords will attempt to extract their pound of flesh in other ways.

On the other hand, if rent controls are used as part of a wider strategy to gradually convert private rental stock over to social housing - that is, as a stick to encourage private landlords to sell up to the public sector - along with other measures including more state investment in building such housing, large fines for private landlords leaving their rental properties unoccupied, and so on, then this can be a long-term positive on the overall housing situation.

The end goal should be to remove this wholly unnecessary parasitic landlord class from the housing provision entirely, rather than tinkering around the edges of the problem, as this Berlin measure was doing.

In some US cities like Portland the construction costs for public housing are typically double costs for comparable private housing. The government has little motivation or expertise to reduce the cost since the bill is footed by the public. Seems much more parasitic in my opinion

That's a separate issue, assuming it really is an issue, and not just an indication that those private housing developments in Portland are being constructed with a cheaper, lower build quality so that their investors can generate more profit.

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