751
'Renters Are Struggling': Economists Back Tenant-Led Push for Federal Rent Control
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
751 points (96.8% liked)
News
22890 readers
4485 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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. Im shocked they got 30 economists to sign on.
The following is apropos as it even addresses the specific policies of SF and NYC mentioned here. If you need to see a progressive voice go look at Emmanuel Saez as his work is what Sanders and Warren based their tax plans on.
https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/rent-control/
Rent control is a horrific idea. Over the long term is disincentivizes the construction of housing. If you want to bring the costs of housing down then you need to build more housing ideally multi family units not kore luxury housing which is what rent control creates incentives to build.
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.
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.
And the office building won't have the plumbing a residential building needs.
Pity we don't have people whose job it is to do plumbing work. Nope, doesn't exist.
No we have more vacant homes which is not the same thing as available or usable. A house that no one lives in and is being sold is counted as vacant. An unrented apartment listed for rent is vacant
Your premise is based on a flawed concept if what vacant housing means.
800 billion on the military could probably be enough to fix up all those houses.
Not without making a bunch of people in the military or dependent on it homeless.
Make the military fix them. They are always bragging about vocational training. Right now the only training they give is how to not seeing a therapist for PTSD. This would at least teach them how to do some basic carpentry work. And would benefit us a lot more compared to making planes that can't fly in the rain.
Human suffering is power. Kind of crazy imo. I'm imaging a bit of ritual too, like a sacrifice.
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.
It's almost as if there can be multiple causes and rent control has been proven beyond all doubt to not work.
Areas that did not have rent control now = rent going up
Areas that did = rent going up
Except that areas that did still got decades of lower rent.
You talk a lot about proof but I am not seeing any.
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.
They are perfect examples as rent control did NOTHING to impact the costs of housing there.
It did for the folks using it.
Not over the long term
Please explain how.
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.
Aggregate supply and aggregate demand.
Boom. Roasted.
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.
Yeah and aggregate demand is basically impossible to model because people be crazy.
And sure, rent control could cause issues in the long run, but in the long run we're all dead anyway. Other, bigger, problems will likely happen sooner than something like rent control having a significant economic impact.
No, I did not just see asupply curve nor did the dozens of economists polled. The fact is it has failed to make housing more available or decreased the cost of housing when implemented.
Arguing for rent control is the economic equivalent if arguing against climate change. Pretty much everyone is in agreement on the issue.
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
I literally link to the IGM forum.
https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/rent-control/
If you have no idea who that is it is a collection some of the most highly regarded economists in the world. They universally turn their back in the policy. You are arguing with the consensus of the largest group of academic economists we currently have
It is odd that you are accusing me of being an AnCap for representing perhaps the least controversial opinion in academic economics. Perhaps you should look into taking even just 101 which MIT has on line for free to rectify your inexperience and lack of education.
What is that link? So over a decade ago, 40 people that I don't know indicated their opinion about rent control on a website. That's your proof? Of what exactly? What was the methodology in which they were selected? Come on, some basic science please!
At any rate that's not an economic model involving real world data. It's just a poll on website that 40 people responded to.
And I did take Econ 101. And also Econ 201 where they explain the requirements for supply and demand: -Free movement of labour -Infinite number of competing companies -Perfect knowledge -No barriers to entry
In other words, things that are impossible in the real world.
Looking at a supply and demand curve and thinking you know about economics is like reading Act 1 of Romeo and Juliet and thinking you're a PhD in English Literature. Supply and demand is theoretically how things are supposed to work which you learn about in Econ 101. Beyond Econ 101, most of economics is about why it doesn't work like that in the real world what regulations are needed to approximate something vaguely resembling supply and demand. And sometimes a regulation that moves away from supply and demand in one market can get us closer to a reasonable supply and demand approximation in other markets. As I mentioned before, rent control helps the labour market, which is kinda important.
You could click on each name to realize they are all economists or youcould read the sentence where I mention they are all economists.
The poll results you are arguing against is a consensus of experts. If you think you know better I think you need to takea second to ask why a person with no education in economics would know better than a group of people with doctorates.
You took 101 and 201 and you have no idea who the University of Chicago's IGM forum is? You either went to a clown collage, paid no attention in macro, or are completely full of shit. I strongly suspect you are lying about your credentials here as again the view Im giving would have been taught to you.
Ok, so you got nothing but appeal to authority, and the "authority" is a decade old poll that 40 people responded to on a janky website?
Apparently this IGM forum is something paid for by the Chicago Stock Exchange. I don't see any indication of the methodology they used to select these particular people. Given the source of their funding, it makes me a little suspicious. $1.5 million to 40 economists to answer an email once a week? Was the Chicago Stock Exchange paying that money for honest answers or were they paying for the answers they wanted to hear?
And they don't seem to do any macroeconomic analysis. Methinks it's just some bullshit meant to influence public opinion. I guess it worked on you.