> In a food shortage, for example, regulating the price of bread only trades one expression of scarcity (high prices) for another (empty shelves).
This is the key statement to refute if you want to argue for rent control.
This is the key statement to refute if you want to argue for rent control.
Here are some arguments to refute if you want to oppose rent control, particularly the first one (copied and pasted directly from investopedia):
“Rental prices in many U.S. cities are rising far faster than wages for moderate-income jobs. [edit: note here that most of the US has banned rent control, and this is happening regardless]
“Rent control enables moderate-income families and elderly people on fixed incomes to live decently and without fear of a personally catastrophic rent hike.
“Neighborhoods are safer and more stable with a base of long-term residents in rent-controlled apartments.”
Edit: Not sure why I looked so far away, Paris is at 21,000. Like virtually every housing story, this is an example of the people who live in a place deciding they don't want anyone else to live there, and putting up economic walls that only the rich can surmount.
By whom? Ricchie McRich?
Every working class Hong Konger I talked to (even highly skilled ones) said living there is cramped and brutally expensive and would like to emigrate.
These numbers aren't comparable: The municipality of Paris is just the small urban core of a much larger metropolitan region. Berlin has about 3.7 million inhabitants on 890 square kilometers, Paris 2.2 million on 105 square kilometers.
A fairer comparison is with the Petite Couronne consisting of Paris + the innermost ring of its neighbors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%8Ele-de-France#Petite_Cour...), which has 6.7 million people on 760 square kilometers. Still denser than Berlin! But the ratio is far less extreme than you made it look. For an alternative approach, take Berlin's densest districts: Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Mitte, and Neukölln add up to about 100 square kilometers (like Paris) and a bit over a million people. So about 2x less dense than Paris rather than 5x.
Where do you get that idea? It is false. New York? San Francisco? California has statewide rent control as of January 1 of last year. Many of the places where people want to move still do have rent control. Rent control is not a live issue in, e.g., Tulsa, OK or Amarillo, TX, whether it is legal or not.
> “Neighborhoods are safer and more stable with a base of long-term residents in rent-controlled apartments.”
If you have good evidence for this claim, I would like to see it. Moreover: "safer" and "more stable" relative to what? I guess your claim would be "safer and more stable than the counterfactual w/out rent control and with more housing." If you have good empirical evidence for that claim, I would love to see it.
From Wikipedia
"As of 2019, five states (California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Oregon) and the District of Columbia have localities in which some form of residential rent control is in effect (for normal structures, excluding mobile homes). Thirty-seven states either prohibit or preempt rent control, while eight states allow their cities to enact rent control, but have no cities that have implemented it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control_in_the_United_Sta...
German construction industry used to be chronically overbooked, though. IDK how does the situation look now.
German bureaucracy probably does not help. When it comes to red tape, Germany is one of the most onerous countries to do anything new.
You mean... scarcity? That the argument specifically mentions as the thing that price controls doesn't fix? Are you _sure_ it doesn't address it?
People are going to starve either way, why not skip the whole "make the bakers filthy rich" part?
Also, this doesn't really apply to housing.
> Also, this doesn't really apply to housing. Correct, it's more complex there and some of the reasons are mentioned in the article.
If the bakers gets filthy rich, kudos on them !
Even if you don't fully agree with this quote, claiming that only arguments by analogy can ever be valid arguments for rent control is... surprising.
Given the unmeasurable social costs of people starving and dying when there isn't enough food (you can say similarily for people not having houses and freezing to death when there's a blizzard, but also read the sidenote at the end), the capitalists involved in selling and distributing food should not be compensated equally in monetary terms (by selling at higher prices) when there is a shortage of food, since they are the ones at fault of not having reserve resources and prepare their production line from various disasters such as storms and droughts. Even people from the ancient times built and used granaries to store food for years and opened it up to their fellow villagers when storms/droughts happen (even without any profit motives, there wasn't even a notion of "profit" at all!) Capitalists in the current era should prepare far better than them, as our knowledge of biology, climate, and logistics are much more sophisticated than before; a shortage of food should be outright unimaginable given the advanced technology we have. Once there are empty food shelves, the disaster's already happened (at least in the short term you can't materialize food anymore by doing smart "economics"), and really at that dire point capitalists don't deserve the right to receive profit in the same way as normal times.
If the moral argument for this doesn't convince you - then there is a much more convincable political argument (of "dialectical materialism"), which basically goes as: once basic things like food and shelter aren't a given, and then capitalists gouge prices up creating an even bigger moral catastrophe among the poor, enough people would be fucking mad at them and band together wreck shit up, and some people would eventually have their heads cut off (as happened in many points in society, for example the French revolution). It's only that the current structures of power (the state & capital) are much more powerful than the past that this is more unlikely to happen, but if I were really in power I wouldn't dare try to steer closer to this event, as bloodshed doesn't really feel that good to participate. And that's the most uncontroversial center-wing take I can create.
Sidenote: I think your analogy of bread isn't really comparable to the housing problem though, since housing acts less of an ideal commodity than food in economic terms. Housing is far more troublesome if you approach it in a free-market lense, since it's far easier to create a natural monopoly on land than anything else, and thus it is hard for free markets to create a "fair" price that matches with the actual use-value. That's why even some libertarians in support of free markets also think economic rent from land is unfair business practice and should be controlled by heavy taxes (such as the economic ideology of Georgism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism)