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Supreme Court turns down rent control challenge
(www.latimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Controversial opinion, but shouldn’t capitalism allow the free market to decide rental rates and tenancy durations? Why are rental incomes regulated. I completely understand having regulations for health and safety reasons (maintenance needs to be enforced, apartments need to be liveable) but why control the prices in a capitalist society?
The free market cannot provide affordable housing for everything, including essential service workers
I thought pure capitalism meant that a removal of controls and regulations would lead to natural consequences (like essential services workers being priced out) which would eventually lead to a lack of essential workers, which would eventually lead to the creation of affordable accommodation in the city by some enterprising business looking to capitalise on that opportunity. The free market would eventually take care of the problem. It might be disruptive in the short term, but ultimately that problem would be self resolved by the market. Bringing in regulations and controls starts to smell like socialism?!
In a world with infinite resources maybe. But consider places like NYC where there is no more land to build on and agencies with money gobble up whatever land/buildings become available before an enterprising agency can come in to shake up the market and you’ll start to realize one of the major failings of capitalism.
Capitalism always favors the rich at the expense of the poor. The only way that the poor can prosper is at the good will of the rich, which is something that exists in such small quantities that it may as well not exist at all.
Correct
For clarity, I believe in socialism, and live in Australia, arguably one of the more successful social democracies. I’m trying to highlight how capitalism has some massive gaps when it comes to implementation.
Interestingly, in Australia we have no rental controls, and the market just works. Prices rise and fall based on the demands of the market. At times, renting in Australia becomes unaffordable for many, and it’s all over the news, and people try to address the issue. But I don’t know that I’ve ever heard rental price controls being offered as a solution. The more common proposed solutions are to: build more affordable houses in newly created suburbs further from the city, increase public transport options to the city making outlying suburbs more viable, all of which provide downward pressure on the rental prices in the popular city districts. As construction booms, the rental market softens.
(I copy/pasted this comment from its original location as the person I replied to deleted their comment)
Your minimum wage is $23.23 USD/hour. Ours is $7.25/hour.
You don’t have rent control but you DO have a government that drives wages with regular review and increases determined by the FWC. Our wages have practically stagnated for 30 years. It’s been 15 since we last saw a minimum wage increase.
You really can’t compare Australia’s housing situation to the US’s because of the massive economic differences.
Then NYC needs to manage itself better by purchasing property and knocking shit down to build larger buildings with more tenements in the same footprint. That "flavorful" 2 story with 12 apartments in Manhattan? Bulldoze that clunker and build a new 20 story with 120 apartments in it!
Then you keep doing it. NYC buys property, knocks down whatever tiny thing is there and rebuilds it to 10 or 20 times the previous capacity. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
All that's happening with their current scheme is that the rent controlled apartments are being subsidized by everyone who lives in the market rate apartments so that they don't damage the "character" of certain areas. The only winners are the people in the relatively few available rent controlled apartments and they're only winning because they're literally taking money from other people.
It's not sustainable.
Who are you proposing do this exactly? Certainly not the city, that's government intervention. Maybe an enterprising developer, one that would see the shape of the market and realize that prices go up far faster than square footage does? You can see the same issue happening with single family housing, no developer wants to build small but affordable homes because large and expensive ones cost only two or three times as much to build yet sell for probably ten times that much, and there is always a market for them because there are always corporations and hedge funds willing to pay that much and just sit on it as an investment. With apartments the issue is actually worse because you first need to buy the property and evict all the tenants, then you need to get your plans certified by the bureaucracy (and there are several), then you need to demolish the building, and only then can you start building a new one with all those cheap apartments that definitely aren't worth building just because the people buying or renting them can't afford to make up the difference even with the increased number of them.
This handwave sentence is always what libertarians use to hide the utter destruction of a working society.
"Yes, millions of people in a city suddenly being homeless, leading to crime/violence/mass death/the breakdown of all services and commerce would be disrupted, but at some point after tens of thousand die it would work itself out because...."
Plenty of "libertarian paradises" out there man, only some of them over run by bears. Hows that track record of unfettered capitalism going?
That's a myth, that hypothetical never happens in pratice. Why should I trust you over reality?
For clarity, I believe in socialism, and live in Australia, arguably one of the more successful social democracies. I’m trying to highlight how capitalism has some massive gaps when it comes to implementation.
Interestingly, in Australia we have no rental controls, and the market just works. Prices rise and fall based on the demands of the market. At times, renting in Australia becomes unaffordable for many, and it’s all over the news, and people try to address the issue. But I don’t know that I’ve ever heard rental price controls being offered as a solution. The more common proposed solutions are to: build more affordable houses in newly created suburbs further from the city, increase public transport options to the city making outlying suburbs more viable, all of which provide downward pressure on the rental prices in the popular city districts. As construction booms, the rental market softens.