Comment by beckman466 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beckman466 | Hacker News Reader

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> San Francisco does not have the highest average incomes in the world.

Are you joking? I seriously can't tell.

Focusing just on worker's wages, when there are billionaire property owners (specifically owners of IP) living around the corner from you, is just ignorant and disingenuous if this really is your argument.

Steve Jobs famously paid himself $1 a year, remember? I mean, that's probably why he wore those hippy sandals right? He just couldn't afford more because of his measly wage? A few tech CEO's will pull down the average if they all pull off this wonderful tax trick.

Honestly I don't understand why you use these arguments and sources, they seem to me to be completely incompatible with reality.

> I recommend you read the article I provided on rent control.

You keep mentioning rent-control, but I have never said that it's the measure I am for. You do realize rent-control is not the only policy that a city or government can use and enforce right?

I think this 2019 documentary called Push (by Fredrik Gertten) does a great job of showing what is happening to the working classes and their lack of options for affordable housing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWSVG9nsRa4

>>Focusing just on worker's wages, when there are billionaire property owners (specifically owners of IP) living around the corner from you, is just ignorant and disingenuous if this really is your argument.

Average incomes within the city are the overwhelming determinant of the demand side of housing supply and demand.

A dozen billionaires are not going to materially affect the availability of housing, even if they all buy huge estates. Average income determines what the vast majority of the city's renters are able to afford to pay for rent.

In any case, San Francisco is not even in the top 10 for number of billionaires among cities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_number_of_bi...

>>Honestly I don't understand why you use these arguments and sources, they seem to me to be completely incompatible with reality.

I suggest you actually read the article I linked to. It describes what economists at large think of rent control, and what studies on the effects of rent control have found.

>>You keep mentioning rent-control, but I have never said that it's the measure I am for. You do realize rent-control is not the only policy that a city or government can use and enforce right?

I brought up rent control because you wrote the following, which implies cities with rent control have had a positive experience with it:

>>I’d expect the opposite, as you see in countries that have rent and ownership controls.

"Economists at large" being a hand picked few and US-centered. Rent control can take many forms: rental caps, incentives/benefits, zoning and housing policies, etc. The view that it's solely a supply-demand equation is way too simplistic. Rent prices are currently falling as much as 10% in Amsterdam despite an extremely strained housing market with a 50k+ deficit on units available vs demand.

Again, I recommend you read the article, as it specifically mentions polls done involving broad cross-sections of economists, and non-American economists.

Instead of assuming the article has no valuable insights, I recommend you read it.

>>Rent control can take many forms: rental caps, incentives/benefits, zoning and housing policies, etc.

Rent control only takes the form of caps on rent, or caps on rent increases. The other policies you mention are not defined as rent control.

Do you think I decided the article is US-centered just by looking at the URL?

So you read it, and didn't notice the article provided statistics on the views of economists at large - as opposed to those of a handpicked few - on rent control, or the many mentions of non-American political leaders' and economists' views on rent control?

Can you at least admit that the economics field at large opposes rent control?

> Can you at least admit that the economics field at large opposes rent control?

It's pretty pointless to talk about rent control if one hasn't established what the desired outcome is. An "efficient" market? Affordable housing for the common man?

Rent control keeps on providing affordable housing in Europe. Abolishing it would cause the rents to rise (both economists and the people promoting it admits to that) and thus give billions to land lords and property owners. But I guess that's a feature, not a bug?

Rent control makes housing less affordable for the common man. This is the near-unanimous conclusion of economists, who have studied this issue for upwards of a century.

Rent control makes housing less affordable than it would otherwise be in Europe too.

This is simply false. Maybe economists models of an optimal market somehow shows that. But on the ground facts refute it without a shadow of a doubt. One cause of this is usually that government involvement in the production of housing is assumed to be out of the question by those economists.

People are not stupid. Why do you think there's so much resistance in Europe towards market based rents if they think it will actually lower their rents? Should people be thrown out of their apartment they've lived in their whole life just because the property owner can find someone wealthier that's willing to pay more? How is that a desired outcome for the common man? People would rather want that the housing is created by the state than have that crazily class based stratification of our cities.

You're saying that a belief that has near total consensus among the experts is "simply false". You clearly haven't examined the evidence on rent control, and are simply making assumptions to avoid having to contend with the possibility that your preconceived notion is wrong.

>>Why do you think there's so much resistance in Europe towards market based rents if they think it will actually lower their rents?

1. Because economics is a difficult subject to understand, made all the more difficult by the multitude of special interests who need to discredit economics in order to rationalize the anti-free-market impositions that provide them with rent-seeking opportunities like subsidies and artificially suppressed rent.

2. Because people who already have rent-controlled units in high-demand cities don't want to give up their privilege for the benefit of the people of the nation at large, who, by virtue of rent control starving the housing sector of the capital to build more units in those cities, miss out on the opportunity to find a unit in the high-demand cities.

>>Should people be thrown out of their apartment they've lived in their whole life just because the property owner can find someone wealthier that's willing to pay more?

YES! They're renters. If they want the stability of not having to ever worry about housing costs increasing, they need to buy their own units. They can't rent, and then expect the stability of being an owner.

We need to be giving housing in the highest-in-demand localities to the people who can make the best use of it economically, which would be those who are willing and able to pay the most for it.

We also need to be giving investors the incentive to invest in new housing in these highest-in-demand localities so that more people can live in them, and that requires allowing rental rates to reflect the supply/demand dynamics. This is basic economics.

> You're saying that a belief that has near total consensus among the experts is "simply false"

Yes, or at least aren't approaching the problem as others are, namely, what the actual effect of their theories would be in practice. We've seen multiple times how much higher rents get with market rents, and how the common man will be kicked out of their homes. Not sure why you keep denying it when the facts are there.

> Because economics is a difficult subject to understand

So yes, you really think people are too stupid to understand that they will actually benefit. Shameless.

> YES! They're renters.

That's putting profits over people and just plainly unethical and is precisely the kind of outcome that justifies rent controls.

> We also need to be giving investors the incentive to invest in new housing

No, we don't. The state can build housing according to need, like other infrastructure. That way, we don't need to kick out the poor folks from their homes. It's already been done in the past, and is being done in for example Wien, Austria.

> This is basic economics.

It's basic and shallow alright. The world isn't some sandbox for trying naive free market models. It's more complicated than that.

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