Comment by mindcandy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcandy | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe my feed is biased. But, I’ve been seeing good arguments lately that “The rent is too damned high!” is largely a problem created by voters. And, I don’t know how we’re going to fix that.

Ex: https://youtu.be/yoT76zITRx8 TLDR: 60% of both left and right wing voters like rent control. 98% of economists oppose it. Even liberal lefty economists. Even though they support price controls elsewhere like utility monopolies. Rent control feels good in the short term, but is detrimental to the vast majority in the long term in a large variety of ways.

The actual solution, to the surprise of no one, is to increase supply.

Unfortunately, there was a paper I don’t have a link to showing that not just old NIMBY homeowners, but largely everyone consistently vote against measures that increase supply. It’s part of a larger effect where people measurably bias their voting against policies that sound like they will benefit rich people. Very similar policies in similar areas will get different votes depending on how the wording makes it clear the rich will benefit.

Well guess who almost always benefits immediately from real estate construction? So… we keep voting to prevent construction and then complaining that the rent keeps going up.

Rent control doesn’t “feel good” — it allows for housing stability in a volatile economic environment. Without rent control, I would be de facto evicted from my home with a 50–100% rent increase from the recent AI boom. (This is literally happening to other folks in my neighborhood.) Why on earth would I vote against it? Because some economist said so? (And no, it’s not 98%, you made that figure up.)

Fortunately, you can have rent control and incentivize housing construction. These things are not mutually exclusive.

Economists don't say no one would ever need to move without rent control. They do say the situation is a whole lot worse for all of the other folks in your neighborhood because you have rent control. And, in the long run, rent control is likely to be detrimental even to you in ways that take more than a single sentence to understand.

I didn't make up 98%. I got it from the video who got it from https://kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/rent-control/ Reading more closely, I stated it wrong. 2% agree rent control has helped. 81% explicitly do not, then there are the "other" categories.

OK, but as rental pressure increases, people will vote to protect themselves from arbitrary eviction. Period. No amount of hand-wringing over abstract economic theories will change this.

No renter should have to live with the constant threat of losing their housing due to perturbations of the local economy or the whims of their landlord. As is often the case, economists are asking the wrong question.

Exactly. The problem I don't know how to fix is that voting for rent control is short term thinking that ends up causing rental pressure to become much worse in the long run. There are few things more difficult than convincing large numbers of people to think long term.

So, here we are. Living today in the long-term consequences of decades of voting for more rent control while opposing urban real estate development. And, the solution everyone is calling for is more rent control while opposing urban real estate development.

It is my experience that renters in my cohort (SF yuppie) are very much pro urban development. It’s the homeowners who are the biggest NIMBYs. They want their home values to increase and rent to go up. Reduced housing stock is a benefit to them; it’s not a benefit to renters.

Also: no amount of “thinking long term” will convince a renter to vote for their own eviction in order to make housing (maybe) cheaper for someone else many years down the line. It makes no sense. That is absolutely the wrong way to frame the problem.

There is a path where we expand rent control and incentivize housing development. They are not inherently contradictory policies.

Sure, it's possible. But, rent control is a serious disincentive to housing development. It requires correspondingly serious investment from the politicians to overcome that. In practice, what is done is to disincentivize for short term gain, not invest in long term gain, and complain that it's going terribly in the long term.

Rent control is really about curbing opportunist pricing and gauging, which people do because of course they do.

Realistically, a, say, capped 10% rent growth is MORE than enough to turn a profit on a property. In fact, you wouldn't just be turning a profit, you'd be compounding. Because your mortgage doesn't go up like that.

When we see this insane 100% rent bumps or whatever, that's opportunistic behavior. The landlord knows they can get away with it because of some blip in the current market, some temporary volatility they can leverage. That's bad for everyone involved.

For the landlord, they're trading off security in their investment for "more money now". They might not realize it, but it's a bad choice. Because eventually they will be forced to aggressively cut the rent or be pushed out. If they had just taken a modest hike year over year, they likely would've come out on top.

> It’s part of a larger effect where people measurably bias their voting against policies that sound like they will benefit rich people.

Blaming this on voters gives up the propagandists' game. A statement like "we'll make sure more houses are built to lower housing costs" does not sound like "we'll let business owners do business they otherwise wouldn't be allowed to do", even if they happen to describe the same policy.

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