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Comment by archagon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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