>I’m not sure what you’re trying to suggest about hypothetical rent control in London

I'm stating that the extreme lack of supply ascribed to rent control also exists in similar cities without rent control.

So maybe rent control's effect on supply is vastly overblown as you can see by looking at the large amount of house-building in NYC before 1974 in the graph above, which is when rent control laws started getting really watered down.

>It should be clear that London was geographically exhausted long ago

Thats kind of absurd. It only recently caught up to prewar population levels. Property prices skyrocketed way before that.

>The truth is that being a rent-controlled landlord is easy mode.

If they like it so much why do they try to trick/bully tenants into leaving or offer large sums of money to tenants to leave if that fails?

>And you’re still ignoring all of the people locked out of the system by the ensuing decade-long wait

Give leveraged landlords market rent in restricted supply environments like SF and the FIRST thing they will try to do is to inhibit further development with NIMBYism that might bring down their rents and damage their investment.

Detractors of rent control tend to feign support for new residents but theyre perfectly happy for them to be priced out alongside the long term residents of the city.

More social housing fixes the underlying supply issue. Higher property taxes fixes the underlying supply issue. Wanting to kill rent control before or instead of fixing these things means being concerned with profit, not people.

Rent control is a band aid while that happens to keep long term (especially elderly/vulnerable) renters housed.

And landlords loathe it.

> So maybe rent control's effect on supply is vastly overblown.

Just because rent control negatively affects supply doesn't mean bad supply is only caused by rent control.

I live in London too and I'm baffled by the lack of tall buildings in pretty central parts of the city. The real solution is more supply.

> Rent control is a band aid while that happens to keep long term (especially elderly/vulnerable) renters housed.

At the expense of people who don't currently live in London but could, such as immigrants or people from poorer parts of the country finding a good paying job here.

>At the expense of people who don't currently live in London but could, such as immigrants or people from poorer parts of the country finding a good paying job here.

Kicking grandma out of her rented apartment and on to the street isn't going to suddenly mean that Romanian cleaners won't be living 7 to a house in zone 5.

This housing crisis was deliberately engineered in London as a result of the 1980s war between Thatcher and local government. Council housing was privatized as a result (& some of those gains were capitalized by existing residents through right-to-buy).

Councils were starved of tax funding through the UK's comically low council tax rates. This meant that not only was owning property a much better deal but also that councils lacked the funds to increase the supply of housing. Hence prices taking off like a rocket.

There's your supply issue. Rent control would be a drop in the bucket compared to that.

Not london, but i moved away from cambridge in the 2000s to switzerland of all places, which i thought was hugely expensive.

Well, in cambridge, i got kicked out of 2 flats in6 years because they wanted to raise rents, each time, i had to move further out, get a smaller place and still had to pay more money each time, i wasn’t getting pay rise in line with this and i think that’s still the reality across much of the uk, house prices and rents are rising higher than wages.

I also noted across this time that younger people apparently like staying in more and the selfish gits are spending less money on other things and somehow that’s their failing.

I didn’t have my rent raised in ten years here, in fact, as interest rates went down, i would have been well within my rights to demand a decrease. Also, bars, restaurant and clubs seem much more vibrant here than when i was in the uk, as if younger people had a bit more disposable income that flows in the local economy

I had the fun idea to tie minimum wage to real estate in the area. Take the national average rent for an apartment for a family of x people. If the regional average rent is 10% lower the minimum wage can be 10% lowered as well. If the average rent is 100% higher the minimum wage can be cranked up by 100%.

It would create problems for poor companies that will have to make room for more effective entrepreneurs. At the same time it would create new opportunities in areas normally not considered.

> Kicking grandma out of her rented apartment

If she's retired, she can move somewhere cheaper so someone who actually needs to live there for their job can move in.

The rest of what you've written is completely unsubstantiated.

Ah yes, the classic “you’re useless now grandma, the fuck on outta here” line. I bet you’re a real gem in the family.

A landlord is to housing what a scalper is to tickets (or for the nerds, graphics cards). Only one of them leaves you fucking homeless.

Ah yes, the classic "I got here first so it's mine forever".

Are you advocating for an end to all property rights or full housing nationalization or something? Do you advocate for 100% capital gains taxes, including on housing? I don't understand why you target rent control as the only thing that rewards the people who already have things.

I don't support policies that actively entrench the status quo. I'm for taxation that's as high as possible without causing too much negative impact on investments. We're having a conversation about rent control here though, that's why I only talk about rent control, in a conversation about taxation, I'll talk about taxation.

I'd rather a grandmother be housed than be homeless, even if it means her grandchild has to live in a further flat.

two ways of looking at things. on the one hand, there's the view that society exists to take care of people, including letting grandma stay in her appartment if she wants to. on the other hand is the view that society is a competiton, grandchild against grandparent, and so on. one of these views is insanity.

So should grandma occupy a five bedroom house by herself a 15 min walk from the city for twenty years while her children wait until their mid thirties for a deposit on a studio?

If you can afford to rent a flat in London, you can afford a flat anywhere, it's not about homelessness.

but what of you can only afford it because of rent control? isn't that the actual discussion at hand, elderly people staying where they've lived forever because they can afford to due to rent control?

There's a limited supply of housing in those high demand locations, not everyone who wants to live in London can live in London because there just isn't enough units, with that limited supply, housing should go to the people who need it the most, like the people who have jobs in those locations.

Then rent control will allow the _most_ people who have the _shittier jobs_ to live closer to work. I don't think there is a real care here about anything other than "I want the power to do what I want", which translates pretty closely to "mah freedoms".

Absolutely not, they protect current renters, not people with the lowest wages, people with the shittiest jobs have been priced out already. Rent control protects the millionaires renting in Mayfair as well.

> If she's retired, she can move somewhere cheaper so someone who actually needs to live there for their job can move in.

OTOH that is extremely cruel. Older people, assuming they have lived there most of their life, are the hardest hit by having to change. All their lifelong friends are near, their trusted doctors are nearby, it's all they know.

Why not have the job move to the person instead?

That's the dream isn't it? Take all the high paying silicon valley jobs, and move it to some cheap city like detroit.

That'd be great of course, for a ton of jobs, that's not possible though.

> I live in London too and I'm baffled by the lack of tall buildings in pretty central parts of the city. The real solution is more supply.

I just spent 5 days in London and was shocked at how many tall buildings there were that weren't there 20 years ago, and indeed how many are being constructed - not just in the centre and docklands, but in battersea and vauxhall too

In 20 years, you would hope plenty of buildings were built, if you go to places like Whitechapel though, it's all 3-5 floor buildings.

Supply isn't an issue, there are plenty of empty flats already - that's market failure.

Source on the "plenty" of empty flats in London? The number I found is 29,242 which is hardly something that'll get the prices down.

Indeed, and vacancy numbers are to be expected. Go to any source for rental investments and you'll typically see vacancy rate assumptions of 4% to 8%, because tenants leave and placing a new tenant can take some time. If you plot that on a city home to 10 million people, it's entirely natural to find that a few hundred thousand homes are vacant at any point in time, typically only a few weeks or months. The 'long-term vacant' problem is relatively minor by comparison, and while that must certainly be addressed, it's not at all going to change the order of magnitude of the current housing issue.

London's vacancy rate is actually very low, even during covid when vacancy rates tended to rise.

> More social housing fixes the underlying supply issue.

How could social housing fix the issue? The underlying issue is too many obstructions to building new houses, which restrict supply. If commercially motivated developers cannot build enough houses due to bureaucracy and obstructions by NIMBY groups, then municipality would likely fail too.

My house was build some 30 years ago by students who paid for their education. They added a new badge of construction workers every year (and the oldest badge got their diploma). I have no idea what happened with the concept. They are now back to [the usual] building things next to and inside the school then demolishing it.

I imagine the collective mind could greatly benefit if everyone had to spend a few (education focused) months in construction (and/or say farming etc) Its not boring if its just a short period. In construction you can learn the basics of a discipline (and make yourself useful) in just a few days.

But I agree it is the obstruction that prevents cheap housing. Its probably intentional (to some extend) simply to drive up prices.

> Now you don’t have to worry about installing good appliances or even nice carpet. The air condition doesn’t work well? Too bad, as long as it meets regulations (if any) then that’s good enough. Why would you if your tenants aren’t choosing based on competition? The tenants suffer, too.

I'm totally against rent control, but London's rogue landlords and its very low quality housing are world famous and people coming from all over the world spend the first 6 month adapting to crazy stuff like carpet, old carpet, 10 year old carpet, fucking carpet, windowless toilets, wooden walls, decaying electrical systems, holes in the walls, carpet (I can't get my head around the idea of having carpet in a flat), etc... and carpet (unless they are in the top 5% of the income distribution and can afford to pay 2-3K£ per month in rent). Air conditioning and half-decent insulation are for the top 1%.

Said that, I don't think London's problem is lack of rent control, but rather it is lack of development of the rest of the country and the government artificially inflating the housing market.

You have forgotten carpeted stairs, and worst, carpeted bathrooms.

My skin crawled at the thought.

Carpeted kitchens.

> it should be clear that London was geographically exhausted long ago

It's clear that there are over 30,000 empty homes in London, while most flats built are way out of the range of ordinary families.

Many people are locked out of the system now, we have "affordable housing" that you need to earning about £80k to buy, the current system is utterly failing.

>It's clear that there are over 30,000 empty homes in London

So? According to wikipedia london has anywhere between 10.0 million and 14.3 million people (depending on whether you're counting "urban" or "metro"). 30,000 empty homes translates to 80k people[1]. As egregious as that might sound, is a drop in the bucket relative to the overall population. The 30k number also fails to differentiate between long term emptiness (eg. billionaires hoarding houses) and short term emptiness (eg. units undergoing renovation, units looking for a new tenant). The latter is necessary for a functioning rental market, otherwise it's impossible for people to move into/around the city because all the housing units are locked up.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/295548/average-household...

Why are there over 30k empty homes, if they command so much money from tenants?

Who can afford to keep homes empty at such great expense, and for what purpose?

Sounds like a step is missing...

> Stick it to those evil developers and landlords, amirite?

Seattle so far has not imposed rent control, but they've done everything else they can to create benefits for renters at the expense of landlords.

And so the smaller landlords exit the business, and the larger ones raise rent to cover these new "free" goodies.

One of the freebies is the city will provide a free lawyer to any tenant with a dispute with the landlord, but the landlord gets to pay for his own lawyer.

The landlord would have been paying for their own lawyer regardless.

Yes, but by reducing the lawyer cost for the tenant to $0, the tenant is far more likely to initiate legal action, even for frivolous cases. The tenant can regularly use that as a threat.

I would think that the blame for rising rents in Seattle might be more realistic to put on 600,000 people, many of them earning hundreds of thousands of dollars moving into the metro area over the past decade.

With a firehose of money sloshing around, of course rents are going to rise. You can be damn sure that I'm going to outbid any of the locals for my apartment. Rent is barely a blip on my budget.

I've read in the letters section of the Seattle Times many, many letters from landlords who are exiting the business in Seattle due to the extra uncompensated costs heaped on them by the city.

When a landlord 'exits the business', do they also load the apartment they are letting into a helicopter, and take it out of the city?

The housing inventory doesn't change, regardless of whether landlords are 'exiting'. Like any conscious class, they are just complaining because they, like the rest of us, want more money.

Many own the home, they can sell it to anyone, including people who want to own it as a residence. Underperforming buildings also get razed by developers.

> Many own the home, they can sell it to anyone, including people who want to own it as a residence.

Which, in terms of the rental market, is the exact same thing as that person long-term renting the unit.

> Underperforming buildings also get razed by developers.

... And in this town, when that happens, they get replaced by buildings containing more units. You may have seen a few cranes here and there on the city skyline.