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stratozyck
Deinonychus
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02 Jun 2023, 5:55 pm

Hello, if you've read my rants before you may be familiar, if not - I am a PhD economist that can probably anger everyone in the room. This rant is inspired by many housing discussions I've had with progressive/left wing types over the years. In particular, this one was inspired by someone spotting a bear in my neighborhood.

This was on FB, and on my neighborhood FB someone had posted a picture of a bear that got near our neighborhood. A very left wing neighbor posted a rant about how this is what happens when the county doesn't care about density buildup and starts cutting down trees.

I asked her, "didn't you say a few days ago you wished there was more affordable housing?"

Her: "Yes"

Me: "You know if you start restricting density buildup in a high demand area, it causes rents and home prices to go up, right?"

Her: "N--- I am sad you never mention things that help others."

Me: "I was just pointing out that you are advocating for contradictory policies. You said on one hand you want more affordable housing for low income people but on the other hand you want less density."

Her: "Why can't we have both?"

It just went nowhere. Economics taught me to approach emotional topics logically. Often, you find that what tugs at your emotions leads you to advocate for policies that do the opposite of what you intended.

For example, a recurring policy that progressives advocate for is price controls. Now here's the thing - price controls can actually be called for in specific markets. The classic example of price controls being optimal is in a "natural monopoly" where it makes sense to have one producer and that one producer is treated like a public utility. Sewer systems are an example. It doesn't make sense to have three competitors trying to build sewer systems in an area.

Rent control in housing markets is a horrible idea - it shifts land use away from housing. If you want rents to go down, you want more housing. More density, more land used for housing, etc. Make it legal to turn a closed business into an apartment. Remove or relax restrictions on tenants per bedroom.

Maybe you might be shocked at the idea of 4 people living in a 2 br apartment, but when you set a minimum rent price (which is what you do with restrictions), you end up with homeless tent cities that I find more abhorrent.

So what about giving poorer people money for housing? Well without increasing the supply, you end up in a situation where landlords just raise rent and take the money - housing prices go up for the entire market. Maybe thats what you want, I don't know.

What about public housing? What about the government simply building its own and giving it to poor people? Either way you cut it, the government will have to buy land in the area to build housing. If density restrictions are enforced, the dollar spent won't go as far and you will end up with understandable blowback from taxpayers mad at government waste.

By the way, I favor both - policies to increase the amount of land and density of housing in high demand areas and federal dollars for housing allowance. You get the best of both worlds - when supply is more fluid the subsidy has less impact on housing prices.

----- bonus rant ----

So when I taught I was pretty good at leaving an impression. I used to give this example - I did not come up with the example but its meant to illustrate unintended consequences. This example made a 50 yo woman cry once, I will explain later.

In the 1980s there were politicians calling for the death penalty for drug trafficking. There was one guy calling for the death penalty even for the possession of a joint. During that time period, penalties for drug trafficking did go up, and most notoriously the penalties for possession of crack cocaine got significantly more serious than the penalty for cocaine, even though they are the same drug.

Let's use the death penalty for possession as an extreme example and work backwards from there. Now, imagine you are a heroin smuggler and you are pulled over with 1 kilo of heroin in your trunk. What is now your optimal strategy?

In almost every class I taught this example in, there was always one person who would say it.

"Kill the cop." Yup, now your optimal strategy is to kill the cop. If you do the payoff matrix, you get pulled over and you are dead, and the worst that can happen if you start shooting the cop is you get killed. Best case you get away completely.

Even if the penalty is many decades in prison, many people might see that as worse than death or close enough to it where the optimal strategy remains "kill the cop."

And we saw this, in the 1980s violence against cops skyrocketed. Drug violence in particular was very violent because the prison penalties for possession was on par with many violent crimes. So why not be violent to avoid the drug charge?

None of this means that no penalty for anything shouldn't be death or long term prison - it is just a consequence to be aware of when you ask yourself, "is this prison sentence even worth it?" Someone smuggling a nuclear bomb is worth risking the cops life with a steep life sentence penalty for being caught. But to me, not smuggling heroin. Fentanyl is more deadly so maybe the math is different there.

Unintended consequences apply in other cases. You make the punishment severe enough and it causes people to do anything to avoid being caught. The ~50 year old woman in the class used to be a 911 call responder and was on the phone with a cop who got shot and killed on the line of duty.

I was molested when I was a kid by an adult. When I tried to tell adults years later, everyone covered for him and protected him until he died. From my point of view, I just wanted him to stop molesting kids. Because the penalty is so harsh, it causes a lot of adults to protect child molesters, which cause more children to be molested.

Maybe thats optimal - I don't know - but I can't help but think that strategy leads to more children being molested overall.



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03 Jun 2023, 4:00 am

A good read as ever. Absolutely right on density restrictions, rent control, and overly-harsh punishments for crime.

I think the "magic" housing policy is Land Value Tax - it incentivises getting the most out of land, as opposed to existing property taxes, which incentivise leaving land empty and profiting from the increase in value.



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03 Jun 2023, 6:48 am

If a country has net immigration of 700,000 as in the UK you're never going to keep up with demand hence we have slum landlords getting rich putting 6 in a bedsit intended for one.


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Nades
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03 Jun 2023, 8:41 am

I think low historically low interest rates haven't helped much. Extremely cheap borrowing seems to have made the housing market inflated to levels that are unstainable. The recent interest rates rises have really put a damper on house prices here and a lot of people are still on low interest fixed rates agreed years ago. Once the fixed rates come to an end the reality of higher rates will really bite.

I see a couple of years of slow and steady price reductions. Even people already with a house won't be able to afford a renewal soon.

On the topic of criminal penalties too, I think excessive sentences can and do backfire. Resorting to anything to avoid a sentence is a good example but I dislike the plea bargaining the US courts employ. In the UK you get a increase of 33% if someone is found guilty by a jury, in the US this seems to be up to 200 to 300% increase. This just pressures people into pleading guilty to crimes that never were or wrongly applied to an innocent party.



Last edited by Nades on 03 Jun 2023, 8:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

stratozyck
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03 Jun 2023, 8:56 am

The_Walrus wrote:
A good read as ever. Absolutely right on density restrictions, rent control, and overly-harsh punishments for crime.

I think the "magic" housing policy is Land Value Tax - it incentivises getting the most out of land, as opposed to existing property taxes, which incentivise leaving land empty and profiting from the increase in value.


I have never heard of the land value tax - so it just taxes the land w/o buildings. Yeah that makes sense. I'm now for that! We have different property taxes depending on which state you live in, and they all account for it weird ways.



stratozyck
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03 Jun 2023, 8:57 am

Rossall wrote:
If a country has net immigration of 700,000 as in the UK you're never going to keep up with demand hence we have slum landlords getting rich putting 6 in a bedsit intended for one.


Sure you can, you build higher!

Max capacity would be towering apartment buildings as far as the eye can see! Only a few locations on the planet are at that point and they fit far more people than the UK does in tiny spaces.



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03 Jun 2023, 9:11 am

Rossall wrote:
If a country has net immigration of 700,000 as in the UK you're never going to keep up with demand hence we have slum landlords getting rich putting 6 in a bedsit intended for one.

Point of order - the record high of 2022 was actually more like 606k net migration.

We could certainly build that many homes. In the 1930s were built over 300,000 dwellings a year for several years in a row. That was stopped firstly by the war, and then by the 1948 Town and Country Planning Act. Even so, from the mid-50s to the late-70s we were building over 250,000 a year.

OK, 300,000 is less than 600,000, you cry. Well, few dwellings are designed for one person. We could certainly keep up with demand if we changed our regulatory structure.



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03 Jun 2023, 9:14 am

The_Walrus wrote:
Rossall wrote:
If a country has net immigration of 700,000 as in the UK you're never going to keep up with demand hence we have slum landlords getting rich putting 6 in a bedsit intended for one.

Point of order - the record high of 2022 was actually more like 606k net migration.

We could certainly build that many homes. In the 1930s were built over 300,000 dwellings a year for several years in a row. That was stopped firstly by the war, and then by the 1948 Town and Country Planning Act. Even so, from the mid-50s to the late-70s we were building over 250,000 a year.

OK, 300,000 is less than 600,000, you cry. Well, few dwellings are designed for one person. We could certainly keep up with demand if we changed our regulatory structure.


I think a lot of the skills needed have gradually reduced over time. Not many people want to be brickies anymore.



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03 Jun 2023, 11:37 am

NIMBY’s suck.

Housing was built flat out for many years as fast as we had the capacity to build yet prices still skyrocketed because housing didn’t turn into homes - many units are empty; held by investors from overseas who might come visit for a couple weeks/year if at all.

The only rent controls we have here are the max % per year rents can rise (usually around 2% or something) + restrictions on reasons for eviction, which get abused so people can drastically raise rents with new tenants. Not so convinced that rent controls are a bad thing. Rents have been absolutely skyrocketing way beyond what local incomes can afford. If there were some sort of controls in place, maybe people wouldn’t have bid properties up into the multi millions ?

Long term having enough supply of homes to keep prices & rents affordable makes sense, but in the short term it sure would be nice to have some sort of rent controls vs this s**t show that’s putting ever more people into the street/tents/cars etc. What an absolute clusterf**k.


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03 Jun 2023, 12:01 pm

What compels People to migrate?


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03 Jun 2023, 1:00 pm

mrpieceofwork wrote:
What compels People to migrate?

$ opportunity stability avoiding war etc but coming up: survivable climate.


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04 Jun 2023, 5:50 am

goldfish21 wrote:
Housing was built flat out for many years as fast as we had the capacity to build yet prices still skyrocketed because housing didn’t turn into homes - many units are empty; held by investors from overseas who might come visit for a couple weeks/year if at all.

The only thing there that is true is "prices still skyrocketed".

There is very little vacancy in Vancouver. And it makes no sense whatsoever to imagine investors are leaving large amounts of property empty. The way investors make money is by getting someone to pay them to live there.

goldfish21 wrote:
The only rent controls we have here are the max % per year rents can rise (usually around 2% or something) + restrictions on reasons for eviction, which get abused so people can drastically raise rents with new tenants. Not so convinced that rent controls are a bad thing. Rents have been absolutely skyrocketing way beyond what local incomes can afford. If there were some sort of controls in place, maybe people wouldn’t have bid properties up into the multi millions ?

Long term having enough supply of homes to keep prices & rents affordable makes sense, but in the short term it sure would be nice to have some sort of rent controls vs this s**t show that’s putting ever more people into the street/tents/cars etc. What an absolute clusterf**k.

If you're not convinced rent controls are a bad thing then you don't understand rent control.

It might sound good to you because it lines up with your preconceived ideas about how the world should work, but I'm sure you can think of plenty of ideas of policies people thought should work but actually backfire, like banning certain drugs or subsidising corn production or killing sparrows. The question is not "does this sound good to me?", but "does this actually work?".

Supporting rent control is like believing the world is 6,000 years old. Almost nobody believes it. Rent control has two major negative impacts: firstly, it discourages new construction of cheap housing, and secondly, it discourages people from leaving their artificially cheap housing (and therefore encourages people to remain in housing that is underoccupied). This is great for people lucky enough to already be renting a desirable apartment, but it absolutely sucks for young people or immigrants wanting to find somewhere to live, because the supply of housing is lower.

Ultimately there's no meaningful difference between NIMBYs and supporters of rent control: both want to restrict housing supply and prioritise their own economic interests over the needs of those less fortunate.



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04 Jun 2023, 11:00 am

The_Walrus wrote:
goldfish21 wrote:
Housing was built flat out for many years as fast as we had the capacity to build yet prices still skyrocketed because housing didn’t turn into homes - many units are empty; held by investors from overseas who might come visit for a couple weeks/year if at all.

The only thing there that is true is "prices still skyrocketed".

There is very little vacancy in Vancouver. And it makes no sense whatsoever to imagine investors are leaving large amounts of property empty. The way investors make money is by getting someone to pay them to live there.

goldfish21 wrote:
The only rent controls we have here are the max % per year rents can rise (usually around 2% or something) + restrictions on reasons for eviction, which get abused so people can drastically raise rents with new tenants. Not so convinced that rent controls are a bad thing. Rents have been absolutely skyrocketing way beyond what local incomes can afford. If there were some sort of controls in place, maybe people wouldn’t have bid properties up into the multi millions ?

Long term having enough supply of homes to keep prices & rents affordable makes sense, but in the short term it sure would be nice to have some sort of rent controls vs this s**t show that’s putting ever more people into the street/tents/cars etc. What an absolute clusterf**k.

If you're not convinced rent controls are a bad thing then you don't understand rent control.

It might sound good to you because it lines up with your preconceived ideas about how the world should work, but I'm sure you can think of plenty of ideas of policies people thought should work but actually backfire, like banning certain drugs or subsidising corn production or killing sparrows. The question is not "does this sound good to me?", but "does this actually work?".

Supporting rent control is like believing the world is 6,000 years old. Almost nobody believes it. Rent control has two major negative impacts: firstly, it discourages new construction of cheap housing, and secondly, it discourages people from leaving their artificially cheap housing (and therefore encourages people to remain in housing that is underoccupied). This is great for people lucky enough to already be renting a desirable apartment, but it absolutely sucks for young people or immigrants wanting to find somewhere to live, because the supply of housing is lower.

Ultimately there's no meaningful difference between NIMBYs and supporters of rent control: both want to restrict housing supply and prioritise their own economic interests over the needs of those less fortunate.


In proportion to the actual property prices in cities, the rents only return a few % tops too. I think interest rates have played a bog roll too.

There are too many factors to even mention.



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04 Jun 2023, 12:23 pm

The_Walrus wrote:
goldfish21 wrote:
Housing was built flat out for many years as fast as we had the capacity to build yet prices still skyrocketed because housing didn’t turn into homes - many units are empty; held by investors from overseas who might come visit for a couple weeks/year if at all.

The only thing there that is true is "prices still skyrocketed".

There is very little vacancy in Vancouver. And it makes no sense whatsoever to imagine investors are leaving large amounts of property empty. The way investors make money is by getting someone to pay them to live there.


There is very little vacancy in Vancouver and surrounding areas in part thanks to vacant homes and Airbnb/vrbo etc. I responded to one of your posts about this before. Chinese real estate investment culture values a new never lived in home higher than a used lived in home, so some Chinese investors will buy up several new condos and just leave them empty. They make money on the property appreciation/speculation when they eventually sell. They've also managed to get around China's capital outflow controls and get plenty more than $50k/year out of China and into a safety deposit box in the sky in Vancouver - where even IF the price of real estate drops a bit, or if they forego rental income, they still have their wealth as China hasn't expropriated it from them.

There are entire condo buildings that are mostly dark at night, plenty of large houses and mansions, too. The Coal Harbour neighbourhood of Vancouver is so full of empty condos that the small coffee shops and markets have closed because there are no people there to buy stuff from them - just empty investor units and vacation homes that people may visit for a week or two a year while being able to brag to clients back home that they own a place in Vancouver. Another bit of financial investor value to them - marketing/branding.. bragging to their clients and prospective clients about their success that has allowed them to buy a home in Vancouver - especially those that own houses/mansions. I heard that some places are being sold with 3d model NFT's of the property so that people can show off a virtual tour of their "Vancouver house," to people back home vs. only to those they fly here to entertain.

It's not just IN Vancouver that there are a bunch of empty condos/homes, either. It's in suburb cities as well. The guys that built the latest towers near White Rock beach were talking about how they know those buildings, just like others, are going to have a lot of empty places in them.. sucks to put your hands to work building housing that doesn't turn into homes - especially when we're in a housing crisis.

Yes, there's now an empty homes tax to discourage places being left empty which has resulted in some being rented and some being sold, but there are still way too many empty places considering what's going on here.

The_Walrus wrote:
goldfish21 wrote:
The only rent controls we have here are the max % per year rents can rise (usually around 2% or something) + restrictions on reasons for eviction, which get abused so people can drastically raise rents with new tenants. Not so convinced that rent controls are a bad thing. Rents have been absolutely skyrocketing way beyond what local incomes can afford. If there were some sort of controls in place, maybe people wouldn’t have bid properties up into the multi millions ?

Long term having enough supply of homes to keep prices & rents affordable makes sense, but in the short term it sure would be nice to have some sort of rent controls vs this s**t show that’s putting ever more people into the street/tents/cars etc. What an absolute clusterf**k.

If you're not convinced rent controls are a bad thing then you don't understand rent control.

It might sound good to you because it lines up with your preconceived ideas about how the world should work, but I'm sure you can think of plenty of ideas of policies people thought should work but actually backfire, like banning certain drugs or subsidising corn production or killing sparrows. The question is not "does this sound good to me?", but "does this actually work?".

Supporting rent control is like believing the world is 6,000 years old. Almost nobody believes it. Rent control has two major negative impacts: firstly, it discourages new construction of cheap housing, and secondly, it discourages people from leaving their artificially cheap housing (and therefore encourages people to remain in housing that is underoccupied). This is great for people lucky enough to already be renting a desirable apartment, but it absolutely sucks for young people or immigrants wanting to find somewhere to live, because the supply of housing is lower.

Ultimately there's no meaningful difference between NIMBYs and supporters of rent control: both want to restrict housing supply and prioritise their own economic interests over the needs of those less fortunate.


Ok, cool story. The average HOUSEHOLD income here is $82K Canadian gross before taxes are taken off - and that includes the very high income earning statistical outliers that boost the average. Not a lot of money these days. Rents have pretty much doubled over the last few years. Pretty sure some sort of better controls than the 2% increase & eviction restrictions we have now would be very welcomed by people who would like to be able to afford housing/food/transportation/medicine etc all in the same month, every month.

Even building full tilt as fast as skilled trades could, prices skyrocketed.. despite developers insisting that if they were granted permits to build more and more it would reduce prices. Then as the market cooled, they cancelled projects they weren't likely able to make maximum profit selling to foreigners anymore vs. building housing to sell to locals to live in as homes. Developers left to their free market games aren't going to build & sell what creates affordable housing for people, they're going to build and sell whatever makes them the highest profits. Some of the projects that went on to completion were then turned into rental buildings.. with astronomical rents - which are only that high because developers and marketers, in cahoots with government, played Monopoly games with our real estate market and sold us out to every bit of dirty money they could get flowing into government owned casino accounts. Billions of dollars/year.

So, F all of them. Further regulations that make life affordable for working people are needed. Stricter restrictions on evictions. Changes that make it so that when one roommate who's on a contract moves out, the contract can continue and with another roommate instead of the contract being voided and a new one being required.. an acquaintance posted on Facebook just yesterday that due to this the rent in his 2 bedroom apartment is going from $2040 to $3000/mo so he's looking for a cheaper 2 bedroom in the suburbs. And, possibly some form of rent controls - even if just temporary until more homes can be built and moved into.. which should maybe consist of many social housing units. Provincial government built apartment buildings in the 80's and 90's then stopped and left everything to property developers, which has resulted in this mess and years long wait lists for social housing.

Whatever you say about rent controls not helping is nonsense to the people who's rents are climbing by 50-100%+ when they're forced to move.


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04 Jun 2023, 3:44 pm

goldfish21 wrote:
The_Walrus wrote:
goldfish21 wrote:
Housing was built flat out for many years as fast as we had the capacity to build yet prices still skyrocketed because housing didn’t turn into homes - many units are empty; held by investors from overseas who might come visit for a couple weeks/year if at all.

The only thing there that is true is "prices still skyrocketed".

There is very little vacancy in Vancouver. And it makes no sense whatsoever to imagine investors are leaving large amounts of property empty. The way investors make money is by getting someone to pay them to live there.


There is very little vacancy in Vancouver and surrounding areas in part thanks to vacant homes

There is very little vacancy... due to vacancy?

That's like saying there is very little crime due to all the crime.
Quote:
and Airbnb/vrbo etc.

This might be a legitimate point if construction isn't keeping up with total demand, but it seems unlikely to be having a huge impact in a city like Vancouver.
Quote:
I responded to one of your posts about this before. Chinese real estate investment culture values a new never lived in home higher than a used lived in home, so some Chinese investors will buy up several new condos and just leave them empty. They make money on the property appreciation/speculation when they eventually sell. They've also managed to get around China's capital outflow controls and get plenty more than $50k/year out of China and into a safety deposit box in the sky in Vancouver - where even IF the price of real estate drops a bit, or if they forego rental income, they still have their wealth as China hasn't expropriated it from them.

Yes, sure, nice story... but the vacancy rate is still very low.

You can go on about how some people don't have their lights on at night (shock horror! My neighbours must think I live elsewhere! :lol: ) but that fundamentally doesn't get away from there simply not being very many homes without people living in them.

These Chinese investors aren't stupid. They're mostly not going to pass up on free money by renting a flat out in a city where rentals are in such high demand. Empty property still deteriorates, after all; from an investor's perspective the value can continue to go up due to scarcity, but leave a property empty for years and it is going to have serious problems.
goldfish21 wrote:
Ok, cool story. The average HOUSEHOLD income here is $82K Canadian gross before taxes are taken off - and that includes the very high income earning statistical outliers that boost the average. Not a lot of money these days.

The average income you are quoting there is the median income, not the mean income. A trillionaire moving to Vancouver would have no impact upon that measure. To be clear, it's the right measure to use, but it isn't significantly affected by a super-rich 1%, it's the income of the person in the exact middle.
goldfish21 wrote:
Rents have pretty much doubled over the last few years. Pretty sure some sort of better controls than the 2% increase & eviction restrictions we have now would be very welcomed by people who would like to be able to afford housing/food/transportation/medicine etc all in the same month, every month.

Even building full tilt as fast as skilled trades could, prices skyrocketed.. despite developers insisting that if they were granted permits to build more and more it would reduce prices. Then as the market cooled, they cancelled projects they weren't likely able to make maximum profit selling to foreigners anymore vs. building housing to sell to locals to live in as homes. Developers left to their free market games aren't going to build & sell what creates affordable housing for people, they're going to build and sell whatever makes them the highest profits. Some of the projects that went on to completion were then turned into rental buildings.. with astronomical rents - which are only that high because developers and marketers, in cahoots with government, played Monopoly games with our real estate market and sold us out to every bit of dirty money they could get flowing into government owned casino accounts. Billions of dollars/year.

So, F all of them. Further regulations that make life affordable for working people are needed. Stricter restrictions on evictions. Changes that make it so that when one roommate who's on a contract moves out, the contract can continue and with another roommate instead of the contract being voided and a new one being required.. an acquaintance posted on Facebook just yesterday that due to this the rent in his 2 bedroom apartment is going from $2040 to $3000/mo so he's looking for a cheaper 2 bedroom in the suburbs. And, possibly some form of rent controls - even if just temporary until more homes can be built and moved into.. which should maybe consist of many social housing units. Provincial government built apartment buildings in the 80's and 90's then stopped and left everything to property developers, which has resulted in this mess and years long wait lists for social housing.

Whatever you say about rent controls not helping is nonsense to the people who's rents are climbing by 50-100%+ when they're forced to move.

This is just emotional reasoning.

You live in a city with rent control. In most of the city, for most of the last 20 years, it has been outright illegal to build dense housing. As a result, it isn't profitable to build affordable housing. There isn't enough affordable housing. House prices and rents are going up very quickly. And your solution is... more rent control?

Rent control does. not. work. It makes the problem worse. In Vancouver, in New York, in San Francisco, in Portland, in Washington DC, in Toronto, in Los Angeles, there is rent control. Guess which places have the worst housing crises in North America? Why, that would be Vancouver, New York, San Francisco, Portland, Washington DC, Toronto, and Los Angeles... large cities without rent control, like Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, are not necessarily doing well (although some of them are!) but are not having the same issues. Weird, huh?

This is the single issue where there is most consensus among economists, a famously disagreeable bunch. Everyone from leftists like Paul Krugman to libertarians like Thomas Sowell agrees that they have the opposite of their intended effect.

As well as reducing the supply of housing, rent control creates a disincentive for landlords to properly maintain the property - after all, they cannot get a fair market price for a maintained home, so they may as well get a fair market price for one that's still habitable but in need of some serious TLC.

So please, spare me the "this is how I think it should work", because the evidence shows that it doesn't actually work that way. It being "welcomed" by people is all well and good, it's a bad idea that will make housing less affordable in the long run. You need to encourage affordable housing, not discourage it.



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04 Jun 2023, 4:49 pm

Low vacancy (available to move into) rate due to all of the empty homes. (Unavailable to move into because investors are keeping them empty.)

I’ve explained it to you twice in two different threads now. Many investors do not want renters as it devalues the properties in the eyes of their prospective buyers as well as themselves due to their culture. Simple as that.

It’s not people with their lights off. :roll: There are no people living in this condos/houses/mansions. Fact. Some neighbourhoods are practically ghost towns - especially Coal Harbour.. for the number of condos there there should be a bustling community of residents able to support cafes and markets, but there are very few people there. Other neighbourhoods I kinda wonder how long it might be until (more) homeless people just start squatting in empty mansions tbh.

It’s not illegal to build affordable homes. Developers simply haven’t been interested in building regular homes working people can afford when they can build luxury homes for people with deep pockets and with almost no restrictions on foreign money pouring in, local incomes cannot compete.

They’re entirely conflicting concepts. Maximizing profits and maximizing affordability. That’s why government should get back into housing again as they’ve been out of building social housing here for 30 years. People who work jobs for a living need homes to live in.


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No :heart: for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.