You cannot legislate away costs for an in demand product. It can't be done. Put strict rent increase laws in place and all you do is make it so people sit in their apartment for years to lock in that low rent.
The properties people purchase as second and third homes aren't going to make a difference to the people struggling to afford 1 bedroom apartments.
Focusing on second and third homes is just a way to punish people wealthy enough to afford multiple homes. While punitive taxes against other classes are attractive to certain parts of the voter base, it doesn't actually improve the situation for people looking for cheap apartments at all.
They will. As fewer homes are allocated to current homeowners, they will be instead available to renters. With fewer renters on the market, the cost of renting will decrease.
It seems like if you add supply to one area of the housing market like the one above, there is a group of people ready to take advantage of that supply. 3bdroom apartment renters buy a home, then 2bdroom apartment renters get a bigger place that's affordable and meets their needs.
Assuming this works exactly like intended, that 1 family with two or three houses now only owns one and 2 other families get a house, then you're freeing up supply across the whole range of properties.
Not that I disagree with building more housing, or being more creative with rent control, but the fact that people in rent conrolled areas can afford to stay in one location isn't a bug. There may be other bugs, but that ain't one.
That won't fix anything. People with capital compete with people who have housing needs for the available houses. Increasing number of houses doesn't change this dynamics.
The people in need of housing will get priced out of available houses eventually.
What should be done is taxing housing heavily and progressively so that houses become a shitty asset that costs you more the more you have of it.
People with capital will drop it like hot potato and finally people who just want to live will be able to afford it again.
It's done, and in many places around the world. In NY and SF; in Vienna, the government owns a large proportion of the housing and keeps it affordable (iirc).
So yeah, if you were lucky enough to have a grandparent get one of those apartments, yes, it will be affordable.
This is fixable by taxation or by limiting corporate ownership of homes.
It will have consequences. Some of those consequences might be negative.
But some won’t. It’s a policy choice, economists aren’t priests.
Most societies do that sort of thing on the regular, but people pushing back against rent control rarely want open borders and welfare for non-citizens.
Since that’s true you can use policy to decide who gets to keep the inevitable consumer surplus.
I live in a rental building in Vancouver, and without rent control it would be awful for everyone, as the demand has been insane in the past decade. Sure, for people like us who can pay 2x the rent wouldn’t exactly be a problem, but I have friends, and a lot of elderly in my neighbourhood who would have to move out right away. I can’t imagine a possible way for supply to catch up with the actual demand just because how the municipal governments function. And well, construction business isn’t known to be efficient here in North America.