If the implementation of a good idea always falls apart for any reason then it's a bad idea.
Then your civilization never progresses. Seems like a bad rule of thumb to me.
That's what Vienna does and it's famous for its low-cost, high quality housing.
The city of Vienna is Europe's biggest landlord. It's also the most livable city in the world for something like a decade in a row now.
There are others too, but that'd the most glaring...
The owning class (Both single home owners that live in the house they own AND people who rent out units) already fight against the building of additional supply.
I mean of course, but both are true, it limits supply in just the straightforward way that it means more people can compete in high desirability areas. (maybe it increases demand, not limits supply?) either way it drives prices up.
> https://ichthyoid.writeas.com/price-controls-basic-economics...
The goals and outcomes that this chapter describes far exceeds the goals I have described (maybe oversimplified). To clarify, the outcome desired is prolonging an established balance between fixed income (subsidy) and rent (market force) by artificial control for the specific case of the elderly indigent, which is necessarily capped by senescence.
Ironically, throughout the chapter, politics are mentioned in a myriad of contexts and even highlighted.
> since luxury housing is often exempt from rent control.
Because why? Politics.
Maybe you're asking why or how it doesn't work? It doesn't work because money is in some sense not what's really going on. Sowell's main point in the whole book is that in a free market economy, money is how we allocate scarce resources that have alternate uses. But the real action is the allocation of resources, not the money.
So if you institute rent control, you have not created any more housing. You have not increased the incentive for creating more housing. All you've done is allocate the existing housing a different way. (You've also created a disincentive to pay for proper maintenance on rent-controlled apartments.) You've moved the problem, helping those who are in the right position when rent control is enacted, at the expense of others. (Of course, those who are in the right position become major advocates of rent control, but that doesn't make it a good policy. It just makes it politically popular with the beneficiaries.)
[Edit: I don't have time to plow through the link you provided in your edit/update. But I think that for the specific issue you're trying to address, a pure subsidy might work better than rent control.]
I agree with this. It could work better if only legislation could keep up with inflation, which it doesn't. Hence fixed income is best subsidized by fixed rents.
If you don't trust the legislature, though, you might not trust them to write the rent control legislation in a way where the cure isn't worse than the disease. But you could argue that they only have to get that right once, whereas the subsidy they have to keep getting right. (Though they could plausibly write an inflation escalator clause into the subsidy legislation...)
I still don't think that I agree with you. But you've made a case that made me think, which is about the highest praise I can give to an HN comment.
That was my initial assertion.
> It's always the implementation that falls apart (because politicians).
> But you've made a case that made me think
I appreciate the earnest engagement.
how can politicians be directly to blame for everything bad. Surely majority people are electing this person to do what he/she/they are doing.
I didn't say this, ofc. I think you meant to say, how can they be to blame for the implementation. I think "the why" is obvious in that context. They craft the legislation and vote on it.
> Surely majority people are electing this person to do what he/she/they are doing.
Surely not. Elections are not physical handcuffs, where everything that an elected official is elected for is performed or all expectations are met. Voters largely have to make compromises based on all kinds of circumstantial conditions, like the range of candidates and their records and their sentiments on related issues. You probably know all this, but the phrasing makes me think you don't understand the way democracy works in a practical sense.
Rent control is a niche issue for most people. The result of a rent-control policy is usually nothing a voter can directly notice or measure over a relatively long time, say multiple election cycles. That's why most analyses of rent control are sampled over a years and large populations.
Truly good ideas usually succeed on their own merits despite opposition.
If you have a fixed income _and_ already have a lease somewhere you like and don't foresee any reason to move in the future then (and only then) rent control works in your favor, at the expense of anyone else who is looking to move into or within the area.