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Comment by qwertyuiop_ | Hacker News Reader

My rent went up 29%. I have no choice because my kid is acclimated to the school.

I'm always surprised people are against rent control when instances like this are possible, while they turn around and pay their fixed rate mortgage that is the same price for 30 years straight. Rent control would have capped this increase to like 4% if that.

Rent control would just create another class of citizens who would hold onto units for longer than necessary.

The real solution is to build more housing.

Many people don’t advocate for rent control because rent control placates the masses and doesn’t increase housing affordability in the long run. What we need is reasonable housing policies that increases the amount of higher density housing with good public transit availability.

But no one wants to do it because they are gatekeeping.

We need both more supply and rent control. There has to be some mechanism to keep local rents from running away from local wages and that mechanism is rent control. If you don't have rent control, rents fall into an average point. This doesn't help because oftentimes the distributions of income in an area is bimodal or multimodal; you can have a renter making minimum wage and you can have a renter making substantially more and when rents hit the average between these two incomes, the minimum wage worker ends up rent burdened and the high income worker can comfortably absorb huge rent spikes. Rent control makes little sense to remove, but if you are also not building enough supply it makes even less sense to remove, as without it the rising rents are just crushing your working class who are essential in your local economy and also don't see wage increases along with cost of living like the high income earners do.

Rent control basically benefits only the renters in place when rent control is instituted, which will almost always excludes new projects since...no one would invest in new buildings if it didn't. Even for older buildings, new units rarely become vacant because renters do everything possible to keep their "much lower than everyone else" rents, including subletting to friends and families if they really move on. How hard to you think it is to get a rent controlled apartment in NYC?

> as without it the rising rents are just crushing your working class who are essential in your local economy and also don't see wage increases along with cost of living like the high income earners do.

Again, rent control simply creating a new class of winners who were in place when the rent control was instituted, at the expensive of everyone else. It doesn't actually solve any problems like say, public housing, would.

Being forced to make new friends builds social skills and character.

You're right, they're not happy enough about being forced out of their home, and care too much about the well-being of their kids. This is actually a blessing, and probably a boon to their community.

You must have never had to!

I had to twice, and both times it was traumatizing in the short-term but helped me gain strength and drive when I look back.

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