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Comment by tropo | Hacker News Reader

This is due to rent control.

Renters become more like homeowners when there is rent control. They essentially have an investment to protect. Their immediate financial situation (rent being due, much like a mortgage payment or property tax) is unaffected by neighborhood changes. The enjoyment of their neighborhood is affected though, and they seek to maximize this.

The difference between the controlled rent and the market rent is in some sense an income that the renter receives from the landlord. The higher the market rate rent, the greater this income will be.

Long leases may have a similar effect; this is voluntary rent control.

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Nope not due to rent control. It's due to things like it it taking me 45 minutes today to drive from my apartment to the bay bridge.

What I find annoying is the same people that are against rent control and zoning are also utterly against government providing basic public services such as buses, subways, and mass transit.

So developers build more office space, businesses add jobs, people get packed in tighter with no increase in transportation services to match. You don't need to be a renter or owner for that to rankle. And at least as a owner in theory the value of you asset is going up. As a renter there is no upside at all.

Why would a renter in the city care about your commute?

The renter's upside to NIMBY behavior is that the neighborhood is more appealing. This is obviously an upside for the renter, as long as there is no way for the landlord to take advantage of the increased value.

The owner only gains if they sell the property or find some way to cause a rent control reset.

>What I find annoying is the same people that are against rent control and zoning are also utterly against government providing basic public services such as buses, subways, and mass transit.

Nice straw man, but this is not a commonly held stance aside from the extreme Libertarian crowd.

> What I find annoying is the same people that are against rent control and zoning are also utterly against government providing basic public services such as buses, subways, and mass transit.

I guess I must be the exception then. I am very much in favor of government spending on public transit (which is a reliably good investment in our economy) and generally against rent control (which is known to suppress the creation of new rental stock) except as a temporary measure.

You do see some libertarians who want to get rid of zoning because it's government, but YIMBYism and New Urbanism are generally pushing towards a city that moves by elevator and train. Support for large apartment buildings and support for reallocating road lanes from cars and parking to transit and bikes generally come from the same people.

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