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Comment by lambdaphage | Hacker News Reader

What criterion do you suggest to determine who lives in SF, besides "let people come to mutually beneficial arrangements among themselves"? Keep in mind that the most common alternative policy, rent control, is widely acknowledged (http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-...) to turn rental markets into basket cases.

There are currently a host of policies that keep people from doing what they would otherwise very much like to do, which is building new higher-density housing and living in it. That would result in net gains, whereas arguing about who gets to live in SF is pretty much zero-sum. Yet people really seem to like to argue over the latter, and are weirdly quiet about the former.

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I don't have time to do this largr discussion justice, but if you can't tell I think value associated with stable, and preferably cheap, housing is important enough to protect. Regardless if it's preventing a housing market crash, having rent control or forcing increased development.

Sure, and the question is how you achieve those aims. If you can read an op-ed by one of the most highly respected progressive economists in the world, whose message is:

> Rent control in SF has had perverse consequences for tenants. Don't go in for rent control.

and your conclusion is

> Maybe we should go in for rent control.

I'm not sure what else to say.

Rent control is one of the tools, I've never said anything about it in relation to SF. I'd like to see anyone argue that rent control doesn't work as a price ceiling for the rent controlled units.

Well, that really depends on what you consider a price: if a law prevents a landlord from renting to the tenant offering them the most money, they have to decide on the basis of some other criterion. In SF, you apparently had people showing up to open houses offering to pay the (legally stipulated) rent a year in advance. (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary NB: the author is apparently sympathetic to rent control) Moving a year's worth of future rent up to the present costs money in the form of interest rates, and is a cost. Landlords in rent-controlled units are notorious for dragging their feet on repairs, since the tenant is unlikely to look elsewhere and even if so, another occupant will always be ready to take over the lease. Just searching for a place in a rent-controlled district takes more time. All of these are costs, arising from the fundamental fact that if you make it illegal to allocate a resource on the basis of price, you still have to allocate it some other way.

You shouldn't be worried about rent control failing to function as a price ceiling-- you should be worried about it functioning exactly as a price ceiling.

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