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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

I feel like economists (as the Krugman quote above seems to illustrate) don't consider the real world. Price controls aren't necessary when there's abundance. When housing supply meets (or slightly exceeds) demand, landlords don't jack up rents every year and displace tenants. When it doesn't, and can't, what do we do to keep people from losing their homes?

(And don't give me the usual drivel about how people who are renting should be expected to assume they'll be kicked out all the time. Compassion, please. These are humans we're talking about.)

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Isn't the obvious solution to build more houses (apartments, flats, whatever)? Like, isn't it incredibly obvious that there is actually a simple solution to this problem - build more so that there is an abundance of choice? How people come to the conclusion that in a densely populated and highly desirable area, the solution isn't building more capacity but rather to artificially cap prices?

It's like a database server running out of memory and the proposed solution isn't to increase memory, but rather just reject new entries into the DB because it's full.

I mean your analogy makes it very clear that usually if a server is temporarily running OOM you might use temporary means to mitigate. You might use mitigations while you are waiting for new memory to arrive.

But what do you want to do if upgrading memory just isn't really possible quickly? What is point not to apply mitigations?

No, that's the solution 20 years from now.

And also it does not work like this in cities. Housing is worthless to your city if the house is 1 hour outside the city. NYC can't alleviate housing costs by building more homes in Timbuktu.

Mamdami is mayor of NYC, not Timbuktu. He doesn't exactly have much control of where to enact his policy.

>Housing is worthless to your city if the house is 1 hour outside the city

I live in LA suburb so I'm confused by this. The commute sucks downtown but an hour commute these isn't a dealbreaker.

Its also my perception that NYC's transit system isn't completely crap like LA. That should enable you to build farther out from the core city if needed.

Well LA is not really a city, it's, like, 5 cities pretending to be one.

And what I mean is: the solution to not enough housing is to build denser housing, not just more housing. That's why LA is also broken: they didn't do that. They just built further out. Which didn't alleviate housing costs, because if you work in downtown, you have to buy a house in downtown-ish, and the supply there hasn't been fixed, because we built more housing somewhere else. Which is why LA housing costs are also mega fucked.

But NYC has another problem: it's already pretty dense. Building more housing where it matters won't be easy - which is why we see proposals from mamdani to convert some commerical space to housing.

Well I certainly agree LA is too big for its own good. I would have preferred denser housing as well, even if I myself wouldn't want to live downtown.

I don't know how feasible it is, but hearing that Mamdami is willing to convert abandoned post COVID businesses to dense housing is a good idea in my eyes. That would simply be too radical an idea before COVID forced the US to perform a mass WFH experiment.

>Which didn't alleviate housing costs, because if you work in downtown, you have to buy a house in downtown-ish, and the supply there hasn't been fixed, because we built more housing somewhere else. Which is why LA housing costs are also mega fucked.

I'm talking more in idealism, but to first go absurd: if we could teleport to work it wouldn't matter where we build houses.

That's the theory I go off of when I say "I assume NYC doesn't have crap public transit". I can commute downtown in 40 minutes with no traffic, but using buses and railway would take me 2.5 hours, one way. And missing a stop stalls you for an hour. Not even to mention the hours they run. That is unacceptable in an 8 hour workday.

LA's mistake (outside of NIMBY zoning laws) was thinking that you can outfreeway public transit. And I think we can safely say that has failed.the idea of suburbs can work if we had proper, modern railing that ran every 10-20 minutes and get downtown in 20 more. But I don't think anyone in tune with California needs to be reminded of how that project is going.

Housing is an inelastic supply which takes long to catch up to demand. Using price controls to combat market excess shouldn't be controversial. But price controls cannot work if underlying policy issues which prevent supply to increase (zoning, permitting, excessive standards) aren't resolved.

> Compassion, please. These are humans we're talking about.

I think that's the core issue with detractors. Rent control is relief, and those who are not in danger only see the forest and miss the trees burned in the process.

If you only think about humans as a spreadsheet, rent control makes no sense. "You gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelette" kind of deal. Even some otherwise economically progressive people I know seem to miss this, but I suppose being able to comment on the internet carries a bit of security to begin with.

The gold faith interpretation lies in the idea that rent control is political poison. It's unpopular to undo rent control, so it's never undone. And I get that. But

1. I see that as sign of a weak politician. Yeah, sometimes we need higher taxes. No one "likes" taxes but we need them.

2. In some ways, trying to undo rent control means the problem isn't solved yet. There's less resistance against rent control once you see housing prices start to fall naturally.

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