Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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It's straightforward imho. Rent controls help people today, where they rent and live today. Supply cannot grow fast enough, nor forever, to keep prices within an affordable band in some situations. Does this mean newcomers will not get rent control benefits? Yes, but they are not stakeholders today; the people who live there today are. Otherwise, landlords can perpetually raise rents faster than wage growth, or even worse, what those on fixed incomes can afford. Broadly speaking, there is no right to profit, and I'm confident you can find a majority who would support affordable housing as a right in most major urban areas.

With immigration inflows slowing, this should alleviate housing demand in some areas, taking pressure off some markets. It's also helpful that there was regulatory action against algorithm driven price collusion and rent increases such as RealPage.

> I don't know to what extents markets are broken down or that people don't believe in them.

Perhaps enough that both NYC and Seattle have recently elected Democratic Socialists as mayors, and Los Angeles is restricting rent increases. "A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov paints a troubling picture: 62 percent of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism."

Citations:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-17/internati... | https://archive.today/GmuD8

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/how-immigration-affects-u... | https://archive.today/bHGiG

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-19/immigrati... | https://archive.today/b5sI8

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://www.cato.org/blog/81-say-they-cant-afford-pay-higher...

> Supply cannot grow fast enough, nor forever, to keep prices within an affordable band in some situations.

The risk of rent control is that it slows the growth of supply, or even contracts the supply. There is no right to profit, but there's also no obligation to build more housing or to continue renting it (rather than tearing it down for a parking lot with lower risk and better returns for example).

That's why some consider rent controls a bad idea. It stabilizes the current pricing, at the cost of potentially making the problem much worse in the future. Not even just for newcomers, it can disincentivize landlords doing repairs and make moving out impossible for current residents.

It probably also incentivizes anti-patterns like having tenants pay for electricity and refusing to make efficiency upgrades. If the landlord won't recoup the investment for high efficiency windows, just leave the 60 year old ones in there and make electricity costs the tenant's problem.

Governments can issue muni bonds to build housing if private developers will not or cannot, and use eminent domain to acquire rental real estate not being maintained to living standards codified in statue.

I personally think the Vienna model is ideal.

https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/economic-growth/regio...

> Governments can issue muni bonds to build housing if private developers will not or cannot, and use eminent domain to acquire rental real estate not being maintained to living standards codified in statue.

With what money? LA was recently downgraded [1] and adding poor people who need social care harms not helps the city budget.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-04-26/city-of-...

This whole “stakeholders today” mentality also applies to the homeownership ladder. In that sense, it seems somewhat fair for renters to get a little piece of that pie despite being unable to purchase a house, even if neither system makes a whole lot of sense.

Homeowners who bought a house before 2022 are in the exact same boat as a renter blessed with a rent controlled unit. As long as they don’t move again, they’ll enjoy housing costs that are well below current market rates with their 3% fixed mortgage rate and rapidly appreciating values.

I don’t really think rent control is optimal policy and I simultaneously find it interesting that people who are bought in on the 30 year fixed rate mortgage system are against the idea of rent control when they effectively get the exact same benefits, more benefits in fact since they can transfer partial equity and effectively stay on top of housing inflation just by entering the system early.

Regarding communism and socialism, I think these ideas become popular as the working class gets squeezed so hard that it becomes clear that capitalism won’t give them a better outcome than even the worst case scenario of “everyone is poor” soviet style communism. Even the worst communist regimes managed to at least provide and guarantee basic housing.

Capitalists who want to avoid socialism/communism should do more to make sure the working class has good conditions, because one possible alternative is that a government enters power that abolishes the concept of private property.

(I also don’t mean to criticize on well-implemented socialist policies. For example, I think Mamdani’s free bus program makes a lot of logical sense and is backed up by an extremely successful pilot project. I don’t think the rent control policies make quite as much sense and serve as more of a band-aid and a method to attempt to equalize the playing field against people who own single family homes who are given wildly preferential treatment by the US government and its financial systems).

Strongly agree with all points. To your point about 30 year fixed rate mortgages vs rent control, we can already see what happens when stakeholders have fixed housing costs via New England. They stay put, and not enough housing is built for new people to move there (Maine and Vermont especially). We seem to be okay with this though, because they are mortgages and properties owned by individuals, instead of rent control across an urban area constraining landlord profits. We simply accept that new workers cannot move to these areas, and that new affordable housing for new workers will not be built, but rent control is verboten.

Deaths already outnumber births in 21 US states, and this will increase over time due to rapid fertility rate declines. Immigration tolerance as an input is the sticking point imho, as there will always be demand to live in major urban areas, and we're really just arguing who gets to live there. Are we at peak housing demand as China and Japan once were? Probably not yet, but we're likely within spitting distance. The faster the fertility rate declines, the faster we get to peak housing demand.

https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-21-states-where-deaths-no...

https://www.bostonfed.org/news-and-events/news/2024/12/nowhe...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45883901 (additional citations)

> there will always be demand to live in major urban areas

Isn't that the detail where the devil is? There's plenty of land in Maine and Vermont. Check out the house prices in Presque Isle. But Burlington has many amenities and a very pleasant quality of life so it's expensive. Price is the way we resolve who gets to live there. So far, no one has a better way.

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