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I’m old enough to remember when the government has tried to cap the cost of one thing while ignoring other factors. It never ends the way the government thinks it will.
That’s bullshit. Nyc has rent stabilized apartments and it’s fucking fantastic. Not perfect of course, but really really good. Those apartments are highly sought after. The biggest problem is that there aren’t remotely enough of them
Almost like no one wants to build any because they can’t be invested in and the only people it works for are those who already got one.
I’m only enough to remember when corporations were not people, and when the ultra wealthy paid taxes.
If you’re talking about a government that is ignoring other factors, which is not true in this situation. Go read the article.
But even in general, if you’re trying to argue that the government can’t possibly solve the problem of mega corporations buying up tons of property, making tons of money, and screwing over millions of Americans, then you might be right but I sure hope you’re wrong.
No agency/group/organization can possibly account for all factors. They are going to fail to take something into account.
That something is going to blow up in their face.
I remember when the government tried to tell truckers they couldn’t charge more to ship products. The government failed to take into account a little item called gas, to this day I can’t figure out how they screwed that one up. Guess what the truckers did.
They put the keys on the dash and said f u. Ask truckers who drove during the 70s and 80s and they will tell you about it.
This too will blow up in people’s faces.
Is rent getting out of control? Yes. But if someone says “ oh we’ll just put a cap on how much can be increased and that will fix the problem”. It tells me they are just delusional. How do we fix the problem? I don’t know. But yeah this will end badly.
How do we fix it - make it less profitable to be an investor without pushing up the price of building new houses.
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capital gains tax
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empty property/ land banking tax… and a significant one.
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significant taxes on investment properties when multiple are owned. Controversial take - i think no penalties should apply on your second property, and half on the third.
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minimum standards and registration of rentals.
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and a significant reduction on these if the property was built in the last 10 years.
I think you’ve backed yourself into a corner that’s hard to support. Originally you were saying that they didn’t take into account enough factors, and I pointed out that in fact they had researched the issue extensively. Now you’re claiming that they didn’t take into account all possible factors… I agree with you on this claim, but I don’t agree with your conclusion. Because if the claim is that failure to take into account all possible factors will lead legislation to fail, then we have thousands of examples to the contrary. Many laws have succeeded throughout history across hundreds of countries around the world. And not once had the lawmakers considered all possibilities and all implications of the laws that they were creating.
What is the best approach to fixing housing prices? I don’t know. Will this method succeed? Maybe. But if you’re assuming that it’s going to fail because the issue is complex, then history says your assumption is unwarranted.
Just as long as they also cap property tax and insurance increases at 3%, I’d be fine with that. I had both more than double in price in 3 years.
Nah. Property tax is good. It pays for better community spaces and services. Better roads, local infrastructure, public transit, schools. It probably didn’t go up very much if at all as a percentage of your property value. They likely just reassessed your property value and they’ve doubled since before COVID. It’s completely normal for taxes to go up with property value.
Insurance etc… yeah, a call would be nice
This is first order thinking. What this would cause is much much less building of units that people would rent, so the total supply would slow way down and housing would get worse.
Get rid of renting entirely and watch the quality of communities improve overnight.
Unfortunately, I think you’re right. What is the solution to outrageous rent that doesn’t involve the government providing more rent subsidies that simply funnel public money into the hands of property owners? That solution encourages property owners to raise rent because the government will increase subsidies to cover the difference.
The problem is the government makes it too hard and expensive to build anything. People dont realize this but on average the government adds over $100k per single family house that is built. As a person that is in housing, my number one issue is with the government, and they only make it worse. So the solution is to greatly reduce the amount the government is involved in the creation of new housing.
You mean like safety regulations? I hear this same shit from sales all the time complaining about factory of safety in design. “I told the customer it would only be $X, and now it’s so much more!”
But they still would not be able to keep up with inflation, and this would just be one more stone on a heap of other regulations that make it not worth building housing.
Might be depend on your area but around me we’ve had a cap for a few yesrs and units are still going up (not necessarily affordable ones).
Rent control is literally the textbook case of making a bad situation worse via unintended consequences.
You forgot the other thing they teach.
Never discuss that with anyone who hasn’t studied economics - the same as how we will deliberately reduce GDP to increase the unemployment rate, or sometimes a country is better off by axing a productive market and putting 50k people out of work. They don’t see how and will only take it out on you.
Its just not worth the arguement.
Maybe the point is such a system that only works on numbers is inhumane and should be avoided? Economics people want to argue within economic frameworks which don’t work well if some assumed market conditions don’t exist. I have never seen reality work quite as described when free market breaks down and MNCs control government policymaking
People don’t like applying economic theory because it reminds us of the core part of being human - I only care about myself and will act in a way that benefits me. Even altruistic people act as they do because they want to disadvantage themselves to help others and you can’t force them to change.
Rent caps are one of those that sound good in theory - like telling ticketmaster to lower the price of tickets, or 0% unemployment. But doing so just means other things suffer.
Sure, so Oregon did the same thing in 2019.
“7% plus the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, West Region (All Items), as most recently published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or 10%, whichever is lower.”
https://www.oregon.gov/das/oea/pages/rent-stabilization.aspx
So 10% in 2024, 14.6% in 2023, 9.9% in 2022.
What this does is encourage landlords to increase rent by the maximum allowed, because they don’t know how much they can increase it next year.
Even in years where they might not have had a reason to increase rent, or increase it minimally, they take the maximum.
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/09/13/oregon-maximum-rent-increase-announced/
I guess the argument is that they will raise rent by the maximum, even at excessive risk of losing tenants? Because if the tenants will pay that much, why wouldn’t the landlord charge that anyway?
I learned this in my Econ101 class; if you impose rent control you will disinsintivize investment into building homes exacerbating the problem of housing supply. Some one in my class literally asked why rent control was common in places like NY and my Econ teacher dodged the question. Econ101 in the US is basically neoliberal indoctrination.
The easiest response to the textbook is to point out that the current problem isn’t supply. In the US we have 6 houses for every homeless person. We have plenty of housing stock. The problem monopoly power over housing.
Beyond that I believe that housing investment should be managed cooperatively; rather than by the profit incentive.
Thank you beautiful stranger. Eloquent, succinct, and has the sources to back it up and put fools on blast.
Does the Econ101 class also teach you to assume that humans are rational consumers?
Can you explain the monopoly bit without me watching a youtube video?
Literally every single time anyone has ever (literally ever) linked me a Youtube video to explain something or serve as a source, that video could have been summarized in an article that would take less than 60 seconds to read. The trend should die.
the current problem isn’t supply. In the US we have 6 houses for every homeless person. We have plenty of housing stock.
This ignores a lot of factors, like location. Huge swaths of Detroit, for example, are basically ghost towns. Not many people want to live there because of this, the houses are in poor condition from neglect, and it has one of the worst crime rates in the US.
Not to mention, if you take a homeless person and stick them in a house, that doesn’t fix any issues that might have caused them to become homeless in the first place, like mental health issues or drug addiction. And you’ve probably uprooted them from whatever support system they had.
↑ supply or ↓ demand. As much as it frustrates politicians, these are the only true levers.
Of course, economists have successfully predicted 5 out of the last 3 recessions so who knows. Why don’t you go ask Chat GPT.
