Comment by shit_parade | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shit_parade | Hacker News Reader

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"Rent is too high, I know let me pass a law to make high rent illegal".

Rent control is causing a shortage of suitable living areas and property owners are ignoring maintenance costs.

"Well then, let's pass another law!"

Property owners are passing rent controlled properties to their friends and family, or influencing local government regulations to do complicated rezoning laws or even straight up bribing inspectors

"hmmm, well let's just pass more laws then!"

How many times are you willing to try a solution that continues to fail before you give up? It would be funny except in the mean time your belief that a couple "smart people(TM)" passing laws is ruining the lives of the very people you profess to want to help.

EDIT: The fact you believe it is perfectly reasonable for landlords to be held hostage and forced to do 'buy outs' of tenants who refuse to leave an apartment that isn't theirs is all I need to know about your thug mentality.

There's no particular reason to think rent control is causing a shortage in SF. New construction is not under rent control, so it does not harm incentives to create new housing. And given the prices even rent-controlled buildings are selling for, it's clear that people are lining up to be landlords in SF.

Don't forget that new construction in SF totally stopped for a few years after Lehman, and rents actually fell a little.

If rent control were actually causing a shortage, we'd expect that rents would have continued to rise during that time. Instead, the far more likely conclusion, given the data, is that rents are being driven mostly by increases in demand.

It is difficult for the armchair libertarian economists of HN to accept that, while rent control probably puts some upward pressure on rents (in theory, anyway), that effect is likely totally swamped by the demand-side imbalance.

I'm not sure how strong that is - after Lehman the housing market collapsed, wouldn't it follow that 2008 crash had a greater effect on lowering rents as well?

I don't live in SF so I can't speak to that, but in the Boston area it caused rents to go up. No one wants to buy a house when home prices are falling month-over-month. A lot of people looked around and decided they didn't want to get locked in and risk being underwater. A lot no longer qualified for standard mortgages. Many people simply lost their jobs, so home ownership was out of the question. Plus the glut of foreclosures. But people still need a place to live, so the demand for rental units shot up even as home prices and mortgage rates were falling.

Uh, you realize you are being an "armchair economist" right here, too, right?

So sad; poor landlord forced to share market gains with a tenant. It almost like kissing an untouchable.

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