Because you benefited at the cost of others. For everyone that has your success story, rent control causes a number of others to have even less access to affordable housing.

And that’s JUST because of rent control

Not wage stagnation or cost of living increases, or AirBNB (oh wait)

Just rent control

So let’s screw the people relying on it because in some narrow context about screwing others (that never happens otherwise in the economy!) rent control is bad

There are hacks and patches all over “the system”. That’s called free market making agreements as needed when needed, IMO

Just because when quantified some story is told that seems off to external players doesn’t mean it’s anyone’s concern but the parties directly involced

> benefited at the cost of others

The cost disproportionately affects the wealthy. Due to the marginal utility of money (your first $10,000 a year has a lot more utility than your 100th), that means even a zero-sum benefit was likely a huge net positive measured in utility.

Mmhmm. Tax money goes to helping the poor and homeless too. That's more money that you could spend on housing.

> How can you, with a straight face, tell me that bullshit?

That breaks the site guidelines and you can't do it here, regardless of how wrong someone is. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Sorry. There's a better way that I could have phrased that, but I pretty clearly did not criticize the person or call them names but rather their argument. I know you're a busy guy but maybe could you correct my misunderstanding here?

This is absolutely language that I would use face to face with someone.

It's pretty simple. First, that sentence combined personal language with aggressive language. That crosses into personal attack almost by definition. Second, it adds no information.

The fix is simple too: edit it out. Signal/noise ratio goes up and the comment gets better.

The alternative to rent control is subsidized housing. Is that a bad thing?

Or people only living where they can afford to. Lots of people might like to live in New York, London, or Sydney (just a few examples). The big problem with housing subsidies is, who gets them? You cant just give them to everyone, or the price of housing will quickly correct to balance supply with the artificially increased demand.

Because to the kind of people who leap to the defense of businesses like Airbnb and slag off rent control, this is just an abstraction. They don’t know or care about the poor people who these policies helped, and think they’ll find some measure of safety by aligning themselves with the Capital class.

They won’t in the long run, but that’s where we are now.

It's a really good rhetorical trick they pull. "The Market" is making things more expensive because you pulled something off the market! Supply and demand buddy! Of course, if pulling some units off the market is good, why not pulling all of them off? The insane speculation has to stop, it literally destroyed the economy in 2008.