As Housing Costs Soar, San Francisco Seeks Ballot Solution | Hacker News Reader

As Housing Costs Soar, San Francisco Seeks Ballot Solution

nytimes.com

12 pointstestrun4 comments

It seems like all this would do is push rental prices higher, as investors push the burden of the tax onto the purchaser of the unit, who pushes the burden onto individual renters. As an investor or owner, I don't really care about increased taxes as long as I can float the difference and demand is high enough that I can make it up in the sale price/rent.

This makes zero sense. If the supposed problem is that people are being kicked out of their homes due to broken rent control laws, let's fix rent control laws. This tax is likely to punish more than just professional flippers, and even still, won't affect those businesses all that much.

How do you figure a 24% tax won't affect flippers much? It raises the price of kicking tenants out then TIC-ing a building by the 24% tax, or 4.5 years of property taxes (probably at the remodeled price), or becoming a landlord.

“You can’t legislate your way out of a red-hot housing market, but the Board of Supervisors is trying to mitigate the damage,” Ms. Wolf said. “This is a big problem. If you don’t care about poor people, you should care about tourism, which is our No. 1 industry. You have to have a service class, and they have to have somewhere to live. If we’re all white yuppies, we’re not so interesting.

The arguments against rent control aren't premised on not caring about poor people - they are based on not privileging those poor people who happen to live in San Francisco. Being poor has a whole range of potential negative consequences, and that's why we have things like welfare, progressive taxes, and EITC.

Also, rent control benefits a lot of people who aren't poor, for no obvious welfare reason.

Regarding the need for service workers, the market can deal with that: wages will increase if enough workers leave due to rent prices. The outcome will involve higher prices for those services, but according to the second welfare theorem, it will still be an efficient outcome (please look up the second welfare theorem if you are busy typing "efficient for who?").

On the cultural side, I can see the potential benefits from having a mix of different incomes in a city. But statements like if we’re all white yuppies, we’re not so interesting betrays a certain animus towards Whites.

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