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A comment on If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too. Parent comment

Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by dredmorbius on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @08:00PM (#19507604)
Subsidies encourage more housing as much as any other demand-increase does, which is to say, not at all, where supply is effectively constrained. Existing actors in the landlord, real estate, and finance markets all benefit from constrained supply and price inflation.

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.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by lern_too_spel on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @09:53PM (#19508402)
Land value tax requires a constitutional amendment in California. Once again, with feeling: it does not solve short term problems and is therefore not an alternative to rent control.

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.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by dredmorbius on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:13PM (#19508870)
Your first point is, sadly, very true.

Your second remains economically invalid for the reasons already stated.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by lern_too_spel on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:34PM (#19508987)
Nope. New landlords are incentivized to build housing. The only thing that could stop them is regulations from existing landlords, but in a place with enough votes for rent control or subsidies, existing landlords do not have the votes to stop them.
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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by dredmorbius on Thursday March 28, 2019 @12:23PM (#19513689)
Counterfactual: San Francisco has rent control and subsidies (Title 8). Landlords have the votes to stop construction.

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.

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Re:If You Can’t Afford the Rent, It’s My Problem, Too by lern_too_spel on Sunday March 31, 2019 @12:30AM (#19533877)
It is not a counterfactual. Once you have rent control, existing renters will no longer be in favor of building new housing. You're confusing having the votes at two different times, among other things.
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