Flutterby™! : Effects of Rent Control

Effects of Rent Control

2019-06-15 07:25:09.143549+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

Fantastic Twitter thread on The Effects Of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco, Rebecca Diamond, Timothy McQuade, Franklin Qian (2017).

Reduction in rental inventory, reduced mobility for established renters, all the usual problems.

[ related topics: Bay Area California Culture ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: Effects of Rent Control made: 2019-06-15 14:06:36.540686+00 by: TheSHAD0W

> reduced mobility

This is kind of key, and brings up all sorts of interconnected problems.

Humans weren't meant to live in hives. While groups larger than nuclear families used to be common, there was a family connection between its members, and conflicts could be worked out by the group's leaders. With unrelated and largely unaccountable people stacked up next to each other conflict can go unanswered and can escalate.

That makes apartments less suitable for permanent homes than separate houses, but with mobility that's less important; and modern society is pushing a need for more mobility as job requirements change and positions become obsolete or new positions are developed. But humans prefer permanent homes, and rent control is largely there to make apartments more reasonable as permenent homes.

#Comment Re: Effects of Rent Control made: 2019-06-17 15:11:02.268263+00 by: Dan Lyke

The issue with density is actually unclear to me: Economic value has always come from humans living relatively denser, there's a rough inverse correlation between suicide and density (albeit with a lot of confounding factors, like the poverty that comes from rural living), and a lot of the crime disparity that we used to chalk up to density seems to be more caused by lead in the environment.

What is clear is that we've created huge subsidies for the sprawl and less dense living.

But, yeah, totally with you on how lack of mobility impacts economic prospects. I think we've posted several papers here which suggest that the US policies supporting home ownership cost a reasonable amount of economic growth vs countries which are less focused on giving everyone a mortgage.

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