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Comment by styren | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure, I live in a rent controller apartment and it certainly is great for the many people in my apartment who work in the city but could never pay the rents.

Thankfully me and my girlfriend can afford and we're therefore planning to buy and lose our contract, but to be honest it probably going to go to someone who needs it. Because owning your own place, being able to modify it to your liking and having people that live there take care for it just makes it much better to own instead (in my opinion).

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> I'm not sure, I live in a rent controller apartment and it certainly is great for the many people in my apartment who work in the city but could never pay the rents.

That's kind of like saying "What's so bad about zoning restrictions? I own a house and it's not affecting me at all!". Of course it's great for you and other people who have a rent controlled unit. The OP explicitly acknowledges this. The issue is for everyone else who doesn't have a rent controlled unit.

By the same token, op claimed rent control “never” works. But some places implement a sort of rent control that applies to all rental housing not just some. For instance, in B.C. rents are only allowed to be raised each year by a fixed percentage (calculated annually based on inflation I believe).

It’s not perfect by any stretch but all renters across the province do benefit equally.

That's the problem, the renters benefit against everyone else who wants to become a renter, or anyone else that wants to increase supply.

If everyone was a renter and there were no barriers to getting a new lease in a new city - rent control would be absolutely fine - because it wouldnt do anything at all.

If somethings only beneficial if is benign, it sounds more like cancer than welfare.

If there were no rent control, all the units would go to the wealthy and everyone else would be driven out of the city.

Why is that? You've got to ask yourself this question, why would this happen? Because if you don't address the cause, you've got a "law of conservation of problems" and you just shift your problems from one place to another. Rent control doesn't solve problems, it moves problems to another part of the system, in this case, a housing system.

So what is the core problem? The core problem is that there aren't enough dwellings in the city for everybody that needs to be there. If there were they wouldn't be so expensive. So figure out what you need to do to build more dwellings.

Building more is clearly the main solution, but failing that, abolishing rent control would only make the existing problem even more dire.

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