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Comment by antasvara | Hacker News Reader

That's an unfair analogy. Rent control directly (or undirectly, depending on your views) decreases the supply of rentable units. Your seatbelt analogy implies that anybody, at any time, can obtain rent control. That's simply not the case. I can't "get" a rent-controlled apartment as easily as I can put on a seatbelt, because the "seatbelt" of rent control isn't available to everyone in the city.

A better analogy would be a city bus. If I take 10% of the seats and allow people to reserve them for personal use indefinitely, that makes the rest of the bus more crowded. The act of renting those seats out limits the supply of other seats, making the rest of the bus more crowded. It doesn't "cause" damage to the riders in the 90% of the bus, but pretending this policy hasn't made things more crowded would make no sense.

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> Rent control directly (or undirectly, depending on your views) decreases the supply of rentable units

But it doesn't. Rent control never takes away any supply. Even if rent control were fully abolished, that same person would still need the same amount of housing (presumably even in the same unit). From a "supply" perspective, it's literally a 1 to 1 -- no change in unit counts, up or down, in any way.

Rent control has no influence over "supply" (unless you are secretly hoping to force a lot of humans into homelessness or something). Rent control only determines how much a person is forced to pay to keep their own housing (housing already built, and that they already occupy) consistent.

> Your seatbelt analogy implies that anybody, at any time, can obtain rent control.

Correct, and that's absolutely true. Generally speaking, legislators could pass a law today to give everybody and anybody rent control (at either the municipal / county / state or federal level). It's literally just a pen stroke away.

There was a time when seatbelts weren't law, and it was harder to obtain them. We recognized how unequal of a situation that would make things, and thus mandated through regulations via law that all cars have them. (Just as right now, it's really unequal for some people to have rent control, but others don't).

Generally, every argument against Rent Control, is really an argument about how it sucks that they don't get rent control themselves. The problem is not rent control, the problem is a lack of enough rent control. If rent control was universal (applied to 100% of rental units) then most of the perceived problems with it would vanish overnight.

> If I take 10% of the seats and allow people to reserve them for personal use indefinitely

That's not an better analogy, it's a unfair one. Rent control does not give people the ability to reserve lots of housing units indefinitely, and rent control doesn't actually distribute or redistribute anything. It lets households pay for one (1) unit at real-world rates (which is exactly the same amount of housing they'd still need and use without any rent control, except that household would suddenly have to give a bunch of extra money away for literally no reason).

>Rent control never takes away any supply.

Why would I build a new apartment building if it was going to be rent-controlled? Why would I rent my units if they were going to be rent controlled? There's evidence that the availability of rentable spaces decreases in the presence of rent control. These policies have had an effect on supply.

If I can't afford a down payment, and I also can't get rent control (because of the length of the waitlist), it's much more difficult for me to find an apartment to rent even though the number of buildings is still the same.

>that same person would still need the same amount of housing (presumably even in the same unit).

Rent control can actually cause people to stay in a larger or smaller apartment than they actually need. If I have to give up rent control to move, why would I do that? I'm incentivized to stay in an apartment regardless of whether or not it's the right size. I could have needed that two bedroom flat when I was raising a family, but now that my family has left I don't need the space. However, rent control means that it's actually comparatively cheaper for me to stay in a large space.

>The problem is not rent control, the problem is a lack of enough rent control. If rent control was universal (applied to 100% of rental units) then most of the perceived problems with it would vanish overnight.

Price controls reduce the incentive to produce rentable units. It's the reason that price controls tend to result in shortages; why would I produce a price-controlled unit if I can't make a profit on it? Why would I continue renting a unit if there's a chance it gets rent controlled? Most studies I've seen have indicated that when rent control is implemented, the number of rentable units decreases.

I suppose the argument could be made that renting is itself a bad thing, and that converting all rentable apartments to units that can be purchased is a good thing. I could see that argument.

> Rent control does not give people the ability to reserve lots of housing units indefinitely, and rent control doesn't actually distribute or redistribute anything.

In practice, rent control functions much like my analogy. If I'm in a rent-controlled apartment, I'm unlikely to leave. Why would I, especially when my rent won't change significantly if I stay? I can't get a better deal elsewhere. It also means that the landlord is unlikely to want to rent that apartment again when I leave, because they're uninterested in getting rent-controlled.

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