I really don't see how making more apartments expensive to live in helps anyone but landlords.

1. It incentivizes owners to convert rental stock to housing stock.

2. It disincentivizes developers from building new rental stock.

3. It concentrates demand and removes supply driving up the price of non-rent controlled apartments.*

* Every rent controlled place that is lived in my a person who can't afford market rent displaces an individual who can afford market rent who then competes for the remaining rental stock driving up the prices of the non-rent controlled apartments.

It's been interesting seeing how the "if you can't afford to live there, you don't deserve to" attitude can be played both ways.

But my empathy will fall on the elder living on SS.

This is a good thing for creating new housing. New apartments will not be under rent control and can command higher rent, so developers are incentivized to build new apartments.

Rent control, in effect, converts tenants into pseudo-landowners with less fungible rights.

If locations are valuable, and by extension the rents, that is good. But to whom does the rent belong?

If rents are unaffordable, it is because wages are too low and the rent is not shared... which comes back to bargaining power and the overall health of the economy.

Taxing production, for instance, harms economic health.

But allowing speculators to hold the land for ransom creates stagnation, sprawl, and harms the bargaining power of labor... by worsening everyone's best available options for living and working.

Property owners paid all the development costs, directly and indirectly,as well as all the maintenance and bureaucratic work.

If you rent an appartment, you're not paying for a percentage of the lot. You're paying for the fraction of a whole system (structural, electrical, sanitary, etc) which exists only because those who invested their hard-earned cash puting everything together.

More importantly, that little lot is only worth something because other investors spent their hard-earned cash investing in that area, either in urban development projects or in commercial and/or industrial activities.

So quite obviously that sort of exploitation angle makes no sense as it is based on a very weak strawman (i.e., there is only value in occupying a specific region in space) that had no bearing in reality.

Let's put it this way: what would happen to San Francisco's housing costs if magically the entire tech industry raised their figuratice anchor and moved elsewhere?

Only land is to be taxed. Not capital. Not labor.

The issue at hand will always be that there isn't enough housing for newcomers, if we mandated housing construction to grow in a parallel way with office construction and job growth we wouldn't have nearly the sorts of problems we have today.

My belief for that issue is that zoning powers need to be removed from towns and done at a state level as travel technology has made it too easy for towns to push off their negative externalities to other towns. Towns have no incentive to add new housing stock as that leads to more people needing to be serviced and new voters who might push to change the way of life that the current citizens enjoy. Businesses on the other hand, don't get to vote and usually pay much more in taxes than they cost in services. Every city appears to have towns that have realized this an effectively become polluters by letting new business come in but making it other towns problems to pay for. If the state controls zoning, and likely the burden of providing services, then that kind of fucking over of your neighbor won't occur at the level of cities other than ones on interstate borders like NYC and the two Kansas Cities.

Just as how parking requirements make it much easier to find parking in high density and otherwise crowded areas, housing requirements will do the same for housing. A lot of folks on the public housing side of the debate want to decomodify housing through public ownership, but it would be far more effective if we just mandated housing be a part of every commercial development project nation wide.

This would be good for so many reasons ranging from better land use to much more abundant housing.

Additionally, zoning codes should be a state or federal system, as this would make it much easier to build economies of scale around housing development. But the placement of those zones/codes should still remain in the hands of local muncipalities, as no municipality should be able to protect their right to certain types of euclidian zoning.

Require that new offices build an equal square footage of housing on top of themselves, and you've immediately build enough housing for at least the initial stage of population growth that comes with that new office.

Housing people on the same ground area than the offices would probably prove to be a huge technical challenge since it would effectively need probably 8 to 10 times the square footage, not to mention I'm not quite sure people really all want to have their colleagues as neighbours.

I'm also not saying that the office needs to match the housing supply of it's office workers in full, as a lot of new office development is hiring from people locally as well. But say, if you looked at the Seattle area, where Microsoft and Amazon have built over 10 million square feet of office space in recent years, an extra 10,000 apartments would go a long way in relieving the pressure on housing prices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_mortgage_interest_deducti...

"Economists have demonstrated that high-cost high-income areas receive most of the tax benefit. For example, San Francisco, California receives $26,385 per home while El Paso, Texas receives $2,153 per home, a 1,225% difference.[28] The five highest income metros receive 87% of tax inflows, with over half going into California alone.[29]"

If there are people out there "sheltering" themselves from taxes by paying more in mortgage interest, those people are idiots. Any savings you gained on taxes were already wiped out by the fact that you effectively threw away money on your home (i.e. your money did not go into equity; to you, the money just went into a black hole).

I understand that they pay less in taxes as a result of mortgage interest, but if you have an actual choice between (1) spending $1 on mortgage interest and getting a tax deduction or (2) spending $1 on principal and not getting a tax deduction, the choice that leaves you wealthier is #2. Obviously this is not how mortgage payments work and ignores choice (3) of putting money in some other asset, and the time value of money should be considered, but for each equivalent dollar, I would rather get more equity in my home than a tax deduction. The tax deduction is nominally smaller than the equity you would gain on an equivalent amount of money going to principal rather than interest.

This isn't even considering the extra costs of homeownsership, especially property tax and maintenance (and the latter is tax deductible to a much smaller extent than mortgage interest).

> The tax deduction is nominally smaller than the equity you would gain on an equivalent amount of money going to principal rather than interest.

True, but you can't ignore the "choice (3)" that you mention. I'm not in the market for a house right now, but if I were, I would absolutely get a mortgage even though I could pay cash for the whole thing. It's a non-zero risk, but I feel it's a reasonable bet to believe I can make enough in the markets to more than offset the mortgage interest, especially with the MID in play reducing my overall tax.

That doesn't really address the point the parent was making about buying a house being a good tax shelter (I agree with your premise if you restrict thinking to just that), but I don't think it's safe to ignore it in the bigger picture, either.

Henry George would say so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

You could defray those negative effects by building lots of public housing and/or heavily subsidizing new construction.

To the extent that you actually do that, you will naturally lower the market rent to the level that you wanted, making rent control pointless (except that it removes the signal that would warn you when you need to build more housing).

You kind of answered your first clause with your second. Demand can rise very rapidly, but supply can only grow slowly. If you want to keep housing prices stabile for people so they're not being thrown out of their homes or displaced, public housing doesn't address that because you don't get the signal that it's a problem until after the displacement has happened.

It kind of is because housing isn't the only component of housing value. Access to transit, safety, and public amenities like parks and schools are a huge component of what makes housing valuable. All of those things are public goods built by the government. Expecting private builders to build is just allowing public expenditure to line the pockets of a landowner who did nothing to add value to it.

Do you think that people would choose to ignore housing that isn't close to certain public services, if it existed? No, they would choose to live there because it'd still be closer to their workplace than neighboring cities and what not.

Don't forget that if the private sector isn't spending money to create value for the rest of us where we need it, then the alternative is spending people's money through government efforts. And as with any government effort, it is still less efficient because of its much bigger bureaucratic overhead.

Yes. People with money would choose to ignore them and they would wind up being peripheral slums and shanty towns because there aren't public services being built out to support the capacity.

> it is still less efficient because of its much bigger bureaucratic overhead.

Have you never interacted with a telecom provider or health insurance company? Heavily regulated industries and monopoly industries tend to approach messy bureaucracies as well. The messiness of bureaucracy comes from having to suit everyone's needs rather than just ignoring segments of the population that aren't profitable to serve.

This article of faith that government is inherently more bureaucratic or less efficient than the private sector is just not borne out by anything but religious devotion. The assumptions of perfectly fungible goods in a perfectly competitive market, which provides the theoretical basis for the idea of market efficiency, doesn't even hold in real estate.

Government programmes aren’t always less efficient than their private equivalents, e.g. the NHS in the UK is more efficient than many private healthcare systems (source: https://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d5143)

Choosing a subclass of people to scapegoat doesn't solve a structural problem.

It's also useful to think about who is doing things to make things better or worse. Moving in makes things worse, moving away makes things better. Building more housing helps, removing housing makes things worse.

So far that seems to make sense, but here's the counterintuitive part: in any given year, choosing not to move away is as bad as moving in. You're taking up space someone else could use.

(But normally we don't beat ourselves up too much for taking up space.)

But no place does that. They actively encourage new growth, just not new housing, which has the effect of systematically displacing lower income people, and eventually the middle class too. Long term it ends up hurting the original people it was supposed to benefit - ie. all the Californians crying about how their kids can’t stay in state when it’s the discriminatory policies they supported that created that situation.

> If you don’t want anyone to move to an area raise taxes and stop allowing new business etc. - ie, actually discourage new growth.

Personal responsibility is still a thing. If someone can't afford to live in some area, or they don't like what they're getting out of it in terms of wages or expenses, they shouldn't move there.

> They actively encourage new growth, just not new housing

If people continue to move there, they are signaling they are OK with low wages or high expenses or any other drawbacks associated with that choice. If they are not OK with those things, they shouldn't move there.

I, for one, would like to raise the bar a bit and give more people actually good options.

Anyone who suggests that a "best option" that involves commuting 3 hours every day is actually a good option is not someone I want in charge of public policy.

I have seen a lot of people in my area assert that my political will should be subordinate to theirs because I came from somewhere else. Last place I lived, the notion that a particular demographic I fall into should be kept out of the general housing market when possible due to pricing others out was not just a fringe idea but part of several (ultimately successful) city council candidates' platforms. Perhaps people in your area are less nutty about outsiders.

If someone can't afford to live in some area…

Yes, those who can't afford the rent can live elsewhere, so rent control is not needed.

https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/peter...

This is an opinion and not fact - it's how it looks from your perspective. The line between what is a smart investment and unfair feudalism is pretty gray, and I am betting people decide how to frame the situation based on how it personally affects them. That is, I am betting everyone is acting in a self-serving manner.

> Not what's good for the SF boomer wanting to sell his shack for 2M and retire in Florida.

This statement comes off as ageist. Why is it wrong for the SF boomer to want to make a gain off their investment and retire elsewhere? This is a core mechanism of every modern society.

> A couple of billionaires in Atherton should have no say on Caltrain improvements that could benefit millions of working people at the expense of a couple of trees in their backyards.

You are cherry-picking. It isn't just a "couple of billionaires in Atherton". But even if it were, why can't they choose to defend their quality of life? Why does everyone have to live in the bay area? This all comes off as people feeling entitled to live in a highly-desirable region, but on terms that suit them.

It's not just people moving into an area, it's moving within an area.

Rent control creates an market where existing renters are inhibited from moving even into the building next to their current residence. It prevents free movement in/out and within the market.

This also makes it so landlords want to evict/churn renters as much as possible, so they are incentivized to become slum lords. Landords invest as little as possible into the property because as soon as a renter moves in, that renter is never going to leave and the landlord sees diminishing returns over time.

But let me note that this must be done only for long-term residents (that is, those who have been there for years). For example, if someone moved to SF within the last 5 years, they should have known what the price of living there is. This is one of the most desirable cities, and it makes sense that it would be expensive and that not everyone would get to live there. Those moving there in recent years therefore, simply made an irresponsible personal choice and must yield to the consequences, rather than being subsidized at others' expense.

It's not super unreasonable for a city to try to protect its current residents but when an entire country of cities are all protecting their own residents that country is much worse off.

Just to be clear, "move to an area" includes "move out of their parents' house and live on their own".

> because it serves existing constituents above new ones

Because the "new ones" are the kids of the "existing ones", in many cases, if not most. As in, they are also existing constituents.

Do you have a source for this? Personally I don't buy it.

But just for a second, let's assume that's the case. Would you be OK with limiting rent subsidies to just those who either have provably been residents for multiple years (let's say 5+ years) or have long-time roots (e.g. family)? I don't think any city owes expansion and housing supply and a re-architecture to accommodate just anyone who wants to move there.

Non-anecdotal? Not at the moment, sorry. I'd have to go dig. But anecdotally, most of the people I hear complaining about rents (not in SV, various places on the East Coast) are complaining about it being impossible to stay near aging relatives.

> Would you be OK with limiting rent subsidies to just those who either have provably been residents for multiple years (let's say 5+ years) or have long-time roots (e.g. family)?

I personally? It really depends on the form the "rent subsidies" take and how they're financed. I do think that thinking of "build more housing if there's more demand" as a "rent subsidy" is a bit odd, if that's the sort of thing we're talking about here.

> I don't think any city owes expansion and housing supply and a re-architecture to accommodate just anyone who wants to move there.

Now we're talking about the moral and ethical dimension of things, right? Opinions on this differ widely; I personally do not have strong opinions that would apply in a blanket way, and would prefer to analyze specific cases (i.e. specific cities) on a case-by-case basis.

Because walling off cities has awful consequences for national GDP

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/opinion/housing-regulatio...

But it's also a bit hypocritical to encourage and incentivize building tons of new office space, and then be surprised when the people who are to fill that office space would like to live within a reasonable commute distance of that office, and then deny them that opportunity, because "it will change the character of the neighborhood", or, "it will reduce my home value".

Whilst unlimited population growth is impossible, stagnant communities and regions tend to slide into decline. Those regions most amenable to and rewarding of new activity tend to grow.

California occupied this position, globally, for much of the period from ~1930 - 2000, and particularly from ~1950-1975 or so. It does so far less now, with housing costs being a major factor.

Also consider existing renters who need to move, or people who become renting-age.

I will need to move out of the city if I lose my place. I'm paying $1000 below market value.

Here's a better alternative to rent control. Instead of rent control on a per-unit basis, cities could provide subsidies to long-term low-income residents that reduce their personal expenditure on rent. The subsidies would be paid for through taxes, thus amortizing the subsidy across the local tax base instead of impacting an individual landlord or unit.

But let me note that this must be done only for long-term residents (that is, those who have been there for years). For example, if someone moved to SF within the last 5 years, they should have known what the price of living there is. This is one of the most desirable cities, and it makes sense that it would be expensive and that not everyone would get to live there. Those moving there in recent years therefore, simply made an irresponsible personal choice and must yield to the consequences, rather than being subsidized at others' expense.

Yes, and they would still be available. If wages/living conditions are not good enough for them and they move away, there would be an under-supply of their labor which would cause their wages to rise, which would self-correct the problem.

Right now, those same people are willing to work for less. This is a personal choice they are making. And I don't think it obligates lower residents to provide lower-cost housing or greater housing supply.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/los-angeles-hidden-homeless-pri...

They're going to move there anyway. Making it more difficult and expensive won't stop them, as the example of SF shows. Accomodating them, then, is about mitigating the negative effects of immigration on residents and welcoming your new neighbors.

I don't think this is going to be true in the longer-term, and clearly SF has an exodus underway (https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/Bay-A...). People will (are?) realize that the benefits of SF are not worth the tradeoffs (if their circumstances are such that they can't make it there), and move elsewhere. They might (should?) make their way to many of the inexpensive cities away from the coasts that are more affordable, and the new residents moving into those cities will help make them vibrant cities.

At some point, the incumbent residents of SF or other communities may change their policies if what they desire is different. Or not.

But I don't think there is any lack of housing supply or jobs in the middle of the US. What is lacking is the exact housing people want, at the exact price point people desire, at the exact locations they want to live in, in the line of work they want to be in. Demanding such an exceptional situation is highly unreasonable. Making tradeoffs/compromises is a part of life, and no one is entitled to have the best on every dimension by default - that has to be earned.

You're right! SF has an exodus underway among certain groups. It may be possible that this might be distinct from an overall exodus and resulting shrinking population, however.

Is it possible that your perspective, while completely valid in every possible way, may not be as widely shared as you could hope for?

But I guess they just don't care. "I got mine; fuck you" seems to be an attitude prevalent around here.

With rent control, whoever lives there pays lower rent. Without rent control, whoever lives there pays higher rent.

There is no net change in the number of people living there either way.

So why (other to benefit landlords) would we want whoever lives in a given apartment to pay higher rent?

"it will tend to weaken coalitions in favor of reducing housing prices for new home buyers/renters and will tend throw currently homeless people under the bus"

Landlords are not going to voluntarily lower rent prices if they can get away with charging more (else rent control would not even be necessary), and homeless people are not going to be able to afford the higher prices that non-rent controlled apartments cost.

Precisely the opposite is true. Uncontroversially the immediate effect of abolishing rent control will be to create more homeless.

Rent control does not apply to new construction in many cities such as SF, so it does not affect the incentive to build. The mechanism by which abolishing rent control might lower prices somewhat for wealthier people moving into the city is by clearing out the less fortunate who have built lives here, adding their units to the market. Those that have nowhere else to go will become homeless.

If you believe that then it might be worth pondering why New York's highest rate of homebuilding occurred when it had its strictest rent controls though.

In reality all rent control really does is redistribute some the spoils of rising land values from certain owners to certain renters.

This makes some property owners extremely angry but as far as renters and potential renters are concerned it's potentially good or potentially neutral.

If you really want to incentivize home building you need to disincentivize land hoarding. That means repealing prop 13 or implementing LVT.

Have you ever considered how much more housing might have been built if it weren’t for rent control?

It's still an extremely inconvenient fact for anybody advancing the hypothesis that rent control impedes housing development.

It might very well be that the effect is real but is so weak that it is completely overwhelmed by other factors.

It might also be that bringing down property values (which rent control will do) lowers the bar to housing development, spurring more of it.

No, rent control also redistributes the burden of rising rental costs from people who have rent control to people who don't, and tends to make that burden larger than it would be otherwise.

> If you really want to incentivize home building you need to disincentivize land hoarding. That means repealing prop 13 or implementing LVT.

On this, we agree. And we can't just simply throw rent control in the trash overnight and expect everything to work out. It needs to happen in concert with other initiatives that increase the housing stock, and be phased out over time, with targeted help to more vulnerable people.

But I don't expect any of this to happen, at least not until things get to people-are-rioting-in-the-streets levels.

Supply of apartments and demand for apartments doesn't suddenly change under rent control so no, there's no market pressure making non rent controlled apartments more expensive hence there is no redistribution between renters.

Lucky renters get below market rate and unlucky renters get market rate.

There is only re-redistribution from rentiers (landlords) back to renters. 1% -> 99%.

I don't think rent control is the best solution for the housing crisis (100% LVT ftw) but it's intellectually dishonest to pretend that it hurts renters. It never has and it never will.

Yes it absolutely does. Demand doesn't change, but supply is artificially reduced because people with rent control are less likely to want to (or be able to) move out.

Unless you're talking about the people forced on to the street or out of the city entirely by rising rents...?

I don't see the problem. "Wanna move to the area" is a choice. "I am forced out of my house because of higher rent" is not.

Would you extend this idea to property? After all everything you've inherited is like that too (an accident of birth). How about parents? Perhaps children should be assigned to random families at birth, to keep it fair? How about citizenship? Would you give up your citizenship because you being an X citizen is just an "accident of birth" (and as such not really entitled to it)?

People don't have "accidents of birth". People are born in a place because their parents moved there. And the important part comes after the birth: people grew up there, played there as kids, connected with the place, etc. A place is part of a person's life history. It's not just a consumer good up for grabs by the highest bidder.

1. Local political culture limits natural housing supply growth.

2. Increasing percentages of people can't afford rent due to housing supply not meeting demand.

3. Rent control is enacted for political wins.

4. Property values fall due to decreased utility in ownership.

5. New housing creation falls due to new lack of incentive.

6. End-stage dysfunction; negative feedback loop established.

6A. Lack of inflation-tracking minimum wage exacerbates.

The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go -- and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable.

...

None of this says that ending rent control is an easy decision. Still, surely it is worth knowing that the pathologies of San Francisco's housing market are right out of the textbook, that they are exactly what supply-and-demand analysis predicts.

But people literally don't want to know. A few months ago, when a San Francisco official proposed a study of the city's housing crisis, there was a firestorm of opposition from tenant-advocacy groups. They argued that even to study the situation was a step on the road to ending rent control -- and they may well have been right, because studying the issue might lead to a recognition of the obvious.

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent...

These privileged "progressives" need to be put in their place politically.

So rent control tends to show up in areas where rents are growing significantly faster than inflation already, meaning the rent control is at best a band-aid over the existing problem. And then the problem gets worse and economists blame rent controls.

This leads to people being stuck forever wherever they managed to land on their first try. Got a new job offer across town that pays better? Ready to upgrade from your straight outta school studio apt? Too bad. Moving out of your established rent control would cost you so much you’d be moving for an effective loss. Just stay immobile and keep that unit off market for decades.

If the landlord suddenly demands double the rent and you don't have rent control, and everywhere else in town demands double the rent, you are homeless. If you have rent control, your landlord cannot double your rent, but it still goes up at a fixed % a year, and you aren't gonna go homeless.

Housing prices have rose faster than wages can keep up, either you offer some limits at how much you can gouge from a tenant or you accept the consequences of low income workers forced to live far from their low wage job (increased vehicle usage due to being far from convenient transit, more congestion on the roads, more pollution in the city), as there's just not enough jobs in these far flung areas.

The great irony is that all of these debates and issues and perilous environmental and economic situations could all be avoided if we simply built dense supply to match demand. This is the U.S., we do nothing better than create heaps of supply to exceed demand. Distal suburbs hastily constructed in wildfire lands aren't the answer; you have to build housing where you've built the jobs. That means building UP so people don't have to travel for hours and hours sideways to find something they can live in with their wages.

No. Just because a landlord is saddled with low rent units does not mean they can charge more for vacant units. They can only charge what the market will allow. They can't magically find renters willing to pay 50% above market just because they have some units being rented for 50% below market.

Untaxed land -> higher property values -> NIMBYs start getting agitated about proposed housing developments taking chunks out of their home equity by increasing supply

It's the classic problem of tyranny of the majority, which is best solved through hyper-locality (i.e. HOAs).

I also don't understand why you are framing government as inherently bureaucratic as part of this argument. If that's the case and it justifies not having policy-making left to public governments, why not apply the same logic wholesale and say that we don't need city- or state-level governments at all?

How would you propose to do this? Houston is an incredibly large and diverse city, and different places have different needs. It's much easier for people from the actual place to come to a resolution than bureaucrats in a council chamber, many of whom have essentially zero specific knowledge of the area or problem at hand.

> why not apply the same logic wholesale

I think we should. The more sovereignty we can reserve to individuals, the better. That which must be given up should be given first to as hyper-local an organization as possible, growing in scope/scale only as needed.

> why not... say that we don't need city- or state-level governments at all?

Because obviously some things (like, say, some city issues) can't be handled well by a government smaller than a city. This doesn't mean that everything needs to go to them. You're deliberately misunderstanding my arguments to try to discredit them.

via - ignoring NIMBYs or at least reducing their influence, rezoning for density, deregulating to allow smaller/denser/cheaper constructions...

Make towns growth into cities. A lot of heartland available. A lot of people wants to own their house. Good Mortgages. Good construction credits. Industries can have tax benefits to be there.

They might be a reasonable very short-term emergency measure for a few, but long-term, this exacerbates the problem.

See: https://web.archive.org/web/20190115035057/https://plus.goog...

You've got to break that logjam, and LVT is one of the most effective ways to do that.

Remember: they're not making any more land. You can build out (sprawl, congestion) or up (density). Low land taxes or high improvements taxes both discourage density and encourage sprawl. You cannot change land-use by adjusting demand parameters, long-term and large-scale, only supply and holding costs.

Land value tax.

Also, you've ignored that renters are still encouraged to increase housing supply with rental subsidies. If they have enough votes to enact rent control, they have enough votes to increase housing supply for the long term solution.

Your second remains economically invalid for the reasons already stated.

Plus; the probem is *regional8. It's the Bay Area as a whole which is chronically short new housing. SF alone cannot absorb all new demand. Similar dynamics affect most constrained markets.

Again; your economic understanding is flawed, as is your grasp of historical facts.

Minimal zoning, minimal taxes, minimal codes. Just boil it down to the raw essentials and give a legal guarantee that every building permit application will be processed in 6 weeks and furthermore legally guarantee that for new buildings all of these new rules are immutable or 10 to 20 years.

Rent control also has the positive effect that if renters put in effort to improve the economic value of their community and neighborhood, that they wouldn't be displaced in the process. I'd also point out that rent control doesn't always have to happen as a result of low supply, nor does rent control necessarily reduce housing construction should zoning be relaxed in the process (in the era with the highest levels of rent control in Manhattan, was also the era of the highest amount of construction).

If that is the case, wouldn't we all just choose Aspen (or La Jolla or Zurich, depending on tastes) ?

It's not obvious to me how recognizing an inherent right to live in any place would be operable ...

We as a society should incentivize people improving their neighborhoods, as right now we're doing the exact opposite in areas with large numbers of renters.

This isn't about outsiders who move to a neighborhood with the goal of having a place to live, this is about investors walking into a neighborhood and viewing it as a financial opportunity.

Landlordism and rent seeking is an inherently immoral thing that we allow to exist in our society, and we need land value taxes alongside reasonable rent controls (like the ones Oregon just passed) to stop these behaviors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

Before reading that Wikipedia page I never batted an eye at golf courses in city centers, dilapidated shacks with huge yards bordering Google's HQ, or empty lots worth millions sitting undeveloped in the middle of a housing shortage.

So there are other dynamics at play, some cultural like being expected to be physically present when your work could be done either at home or from a local desk-space or something to that effect. I'm sure there are other possible answers to this, but quite a straightforward one to me seems that paying your employees for their commuting time would probably be right in terms of incentivising employers to allow more remote work or even set up satellite locations (possibly as a part of a desk sharing arrangement) in areas typically considered commuter belts.

It gets to the point where some landlords do truly despicable things to drive out tenants who they cannot otherwise legally ask to leave. It also leads to things like tenants refusing necessary repairs because they fear the landlord will use that as a pretense to raise the rent or evict.

Basically, trust just breaks down on both sides.

Plenty of people commute from an inner suburb on one side of the city to a job on the far side of the center. If they could move to the corresponding inner suburb on the other side, and pay the same rent, that would be a substantial saving for them, at no cost to anyone else.

> I'm sure there are other possible answers to this, but quite a straightforward one to me seems that paying your employees for their commuting time would probably be right in terms of incentivising employers to allow more remote work or even set up satellite locations (possibly as a part of a desk sharing arrangement) in areas typically considered commuter belts.

That's not workable; employees can just pick a long commute and pocket the money. And what about those who aren't traditionally employed, or the small companies who'd be bankrupted by this?

Employers don't put their offices in the center of the city out of malice. They do it because it's better for productivity, and/or a better work environment that lets them attract more talented employees. That's real value that you destroy when you make it expensive for two people to swap houses and live nearer where they work; even if you force the bill onto the employer it's still a loss to society.

Why do you assume they would want to? I don't want to move every time I switch to a job in a different part of town.

Because commuting is unpleasant.

> I don't want to move every time I switch to a job in a different part of town.

Then don't! It should be a free choice. You shouldn't get special tax treatment for moving, you shouldn't get special tax treatment for staying still.

That's... extremely common in areas with functional, non-distorted housing markets. There's some financial friction involved in buying and selling a home, plus the obvious emotional attachment, but I nonetheless still regularly hear of people moving across town for a shorter commute or a more desirable neighborhood. It's not a huge deal unless home sales are heavily taxed or the local property tax regime favors long-term owners (the homeowner's equivalent of rent control).

In fact his best option was to let the block decay and become uninhabitable so he could pull it down, put up something better, and rent out at market rates to new tenants. A few years back I drove down the street and guess what: the buildings on that street had clearly been built since I graduated.

We already have a property tax, and the only difference between a land value tax and property tax is that it favors one type of landlord (the ones who develop their land) over another.