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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

Rent control is dumb policy anyways.

Now how can we get rid of nimby rule? Local governments have way too much influence on development, for better or worse.

Perhaps sufficiently large development proposals must be entertained by the entire city or town rather than being unilaterally decided by a board - that seems like a sufficient compromise (at the expense of speed, but development is slow anyway given the appeals).

Of course that’s not a perfect solution either since there are towns in which home ownership rate is almost 100% and thus they would be most incentivized to not allow any development even if they all voted at the expense of the neighbors shouldering the development burden.

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Rent control is a limit on margins. That makes it a declaration that builders can only scale up profits on volume, which is what is necessary anyway in regions that are largely built out but still massively short of supply. Which means that it’s aligned with the goals and even predicted dynamics to the point where it’s little more than a formalized constraint.

Complaining about it is basically an admission that either other more important factors are keeping supply from happening or that the purported market benefits if/when it does might not be real.

Quite possibly both. As far as I can tell even when there are no obstacles the market isn’t interested in adding supply to the point of diminishing marginal returns, and unit prices do not fall on supply movement, only demand drops.

You know why the local government is the best government? It's the government I can fire through voting. If the state had more power my votes would also have more power to change my community.

I don't mean to imply abolishing the federal government in favor of local government. Just a redistribution of power that favors the local government more than the current status quo.

I’m not sure what your point is.

Typical issue of why you vote at all. Your influence to the result drop significantly from your town meeting, to local to state to federal. Obviously you cannot just have local gov otherwise it is impossible to coordinate some project. But some issues are better local.

The problem is which is which and if conflict how to resolve them. Not sure there is an answer.

If a city votes on what to do with the homeless, they might get a solution.

If the entire nation votes on it, the solution will be “send them all to California”.

I think the point is local government is more accountable to its citizens than state or national governments and therefore removing something inherently local from its purview, like land planning, would be stupid.

Things should ideally be done by the lowest level of government that can do the job:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

Why don't we get rid of NIMBYism and make sure that actually solves the issue without banning sensible implementations of rent control?

Rent control is a bad policy no matter how you slice it. In general most price controls are counterproductive

For many people, price gouging is conceptually palatable when it doesn't apply to them.

A revision would make more sense, but treating it like a black and white issue is disingenuous.

And yet people vote in politicians who back it.

More basic issues clearly need to be addressed before politicians can repeal rent control and still get reelected.

That's really not true. Rent control has been shown multiple times to actually work in reducing prices, and when quantitative welfare analysis in whether the drop in mobility is worth the drop in prices are done, it's often found to be worth it. There are of course ways to do rent control that are better or worse, some of which may indeed be generally counterproductive, and everyone agrees that it can't solve the problem by itself.

Economics is not even close to being sufficiently precise for you to be able to reason through any appreciable problem from first principles.

Rent control works for some people (e.g. those already living in rent controlled apartments). It also tends to suppress long term supply and improvement of existing supply, and that hurts other people in less visible ways (e.g. people who would have moved into new housing which was never built due to supply suppression, or residents of rent-controlled buildings which gradually fall into disrepair).

In general, we should be skeptical of any policy where those helped are obvious and those harmed are non-obvious or distributed through time and space.

See, that's what I mean about sensible applications of rent control. Having a small class of rent controlled appartements is silly and it's not something you ever want to do, it's only ever a terrible compromise between politicians and landlords that everyone knows is a bad idea.

It doesn't suppress supply when building is already wildly profitable and is just being slowed down by permitting either.

The negative impacts of rent control have been the subject of literally hundreds of empirical studies. It's a known quantity at this point and, when you quantify the impact, it's generally worth it, especially in our current zoning hell. It also helps with price stickiness once supply does increase : as you know, developpers only like to build upmarket appartements, which typically take a decade or more to trickle down to the average person.

The main thing is not to do silly things like only apply rent control to a small portion of appartements, we know it doesn't work, and to allow rent to increase with any reasonably incurred costs. This way you actually incentivize landlords to repair their apartments, you reduce the mobility risk, etc...

Non-market housing is basically rent controlled and very productive. I'd say it's the most productive rent control as if you get enough of it (30-40%), the market almost align to non-market housing and landlords have to compete on housing quality.

Just have sf associations build non-market housing. En masse.

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