Interfering with the market almost always produces poor global outcomes, even if interventions can provide an illusion of success in small localized cases. Sure, you can protect your neighborhood from gentrification or whatever, but at the cost of impoverishing an entire city. How is that fair or just?
I believe in caring about people, not abstractions like neighborhoods, and so support greatly loosening zoning laws and allowing builders to build the market-rate housing that people demand.
People who want to live in SF and have $10m to spend are going to live here. If you won’t let developers build luxury condos for them they’ll just buy a Victorian, Ellis-Act the tenants out, and remodel it back into a single-family home. There is literally nothing you can do to stop it.
Yeah, fuck 'em. For that matter, let's not care about cities or states, either. As long as the national mean rent goes down, everything is dandy, right? After all, we all know that real estate is global. Let the poor move to North Dakota. /s
When you have two affordable neighborhoods in a city, and you gentrify both, the fact that rents are a few bucks cheaper city-wide is thin gruel for the people who got evicted. Nor does it "impoverish" the rest of the city to not gentrify those neighborhoods -- they're out some small number of dollars a month.
"I believe in caring about people, not abstractions like neighborhoods"
That's obviously untrue. You believe in the long-term effects of markets, even if they screw actual poor people in the short term. That's fine, but don't pretend you're doing social work in the near-term.
All you can really say about markets is that the only thing they "care" about is the most profitable allocation of capital.
Part of renting is accepting that your tenure in a particular location might last only as long as your lease. If we had it your way and gave renters a de-facto property right to stay in their apartments as long as they liked, we would slow the development of cities and put pressure on the remaining housing stock. The renters benefit and the rest of society loses. That's unfair.
So, yes, "fuck 'em". Fuck people who want to be selfish and profit at society's expense. Selfishness is exactly what schemes like rent control, prop 13, Oregon's weird tax cap, and so on all enable.
You must have posted this to the wrong thread, because it has nothing to do with anything I've written. There are legitimate, open questions about development policy. That doesn't mean anyone is giving renters a "de-facto property right" to live in their homes forever. How about we start with simply building affordable housing, for a change?
In any case, regardless of your Randian philosophies about what poor folks "should" do to remain in their homes, cities don't function when the people who cook your food and fix your sewers can't live near the city anymore. So these things actually do matter, and the only people currently getting screwed are the poor. We can deal with fairness for rich people once it's an observable problem.
(That said, I'll admit I tremendously enjoy how you jump from complaining about renters screwing society, to complaining about prop 13 in what...50 characters? You're Angry because you're getting screwed by pretty much everyone, it seems.)
There never was. There are actual, valid debates around construction policy, however. Among them:
The article is explicit that the answer to #1 is probably "yes", and it's pretty clear that if you care about the affordability individual neighborhoods, the answers to 2 and 3 are "no" and "yes", respectively, because real estate is obviously not a commodity product. Lowering the mean rent figure for a city does not guarantee that low-income neighborhoods/people benefit from the trade.