OK but we have more empty houses than homeless people. We don’t need more houses. We need to stop wasting resources for the sake of capitalism and stop letting people die for it as well. There is going to be a point where people start setting fire to vacant houses in protest. It is amazing what millions of desperate people will do when their screams of frustration go unheard long enough.
This is the chaos that our leaders secretly want. Otherwise they would have to be abysmally stupid. There is no excuse for ignorance in the information age.
we have more empty houses than homeless people
This is true, but very few of those houses exist where homelessness is a major problem. Location plays a huge role in someone’s life and we can’t just ship everyone that’s homeless or struggling to a dying small town in the US.
The lowest non-condemned house in my city is currently listed at over half a million dollars. There is a three story office building in my block that has been empty since March 2020.
800 billion on the military could probably be enough to fix up all those houses.
There are very few things almost every academic economist agrees on. One of the things that almost everyone agrees on is that rent control does not work.
Economists work for banks not for us. Their models have no connection to the real world. They support bailouts but not student loan debt reduction. Says all you really need to know about them.
Meanwhile areas in North America that didn’t have rent control also show skyrocketing rents. Rent control is starting to look pretty good. I would rather get decades of lower rent than not.
Using SF and NYC as the main examples kinda distorts things as these are both some of the most expensive, developed, and dense parts of the country where development costs are staggeringly high. Something not working there doesn’t mean it doesn’t work anywhere else. The rate of increase in property/rental costs is unsustainable.
Are you an economist?
Or did you just see a supply and demand curve and think that’s all there is to it?
If you studied economics beyond the 101 level, you’d know the supply and demand curve is a theoretical concept that doesn’t actually exist in the real world because the requirements for it are impossible. Supply and demand most definitely exist, but it’s more of a fuzzy force kind of thing not clean lines on a graph. Realistically, it’s more like fuzzy splotches on the graph instead of clean lines.
And there are multiple levels to it as well. Cities have to compete with other cities to attract businesses and businesses would prefer to be in a city where they don’t have to pay someone $100K per year to sweep the floors. Which might happen if that’s the pay level required to live in a city. You could get into a yo-yo situation where a city becomes unaffordable, people and businesses leave, causing the rent prices to drop, attracting people an businesses back, causing it to by unaffordable again, etc, etc. This instability comes at an economic cost that’s greater than the inefficiencies caused by rent control.
You see an economy isn’t just one simple supply and demand curve. You might want to consider that economists might be aware of some factors you aren’t aware of.
an economy isn’t just one simple supply and demand curve.
Aggregate supply and aggregate demand.
Boom. Roasted.
This instability comes at an economic cost that’s greater than the inefficiencies caused by rent control.
It’s extremely difficult to get someone who only understands Econ 101 to grasp the idea of competing economic inefficiencies. Conservative think tanks have been on a rather successful crusade to ensure that de-regulation is only good. So, it’s difficult to convince someone that higher taxes on “job creators” leads to a better, less expensive life for everybody else.
Except climate change is backed up by data studied and gathered by real scientists the vast majority of which are under no pressure to prove it.
Rent control attacks are generated by economists. A pseudoscience employed by the banks to create propaganda.
They are not the same.
The point is to provide relief for those who can’t afford rent.
Please show me actual economic modelling using real world data of the negative impacts of rent control. You know, something that isn’t just theoretical extrapolations based on the non-existent supply and demand curve done by someone who spent too much time reading propaganda on mises.org
