Ask anyone actually living in Stockholm, and you'll hear how the system really works. Last I heard there was a 20 year wait to get an apartment the legal way.
But it's always supply and demand that gets the upper hand in the end. If there's a shortage of supply, and you put in more market rules & regulations, costs will shift elsewhere (like the broker in the article) or the black market will simply grow to clear the market.
If landlords determined rent, why isn't rent infinite?
There is some force that pushes rent down from the infinite amount of dollars that landlords would love to have. That force is competition from other landlords.
Supply and demand.
The only reason health insurance/college/rent costs near infinite dollars rather than actual infinite dollars is because price hikes work best when they are hiked slowly every year instead of all at once. Health insurers/bloated college admins/landlords would (rationally) love to have infinite dollars, as they have a stranglehold on a necessary resource, except that’s probably a quick path to the guillotines coming out.
This myth has been reviewed by economists over and over. You can always economize and it naturally occurs on both the demand and supply side. I'm not saying these outcomes are good, but people WILL do them.
Housing demand: live in a smaller place, live with more people, live further away than you want to, live in a van
Housing supply: rent out your extra room, try to build a rental (collect sweet premium)
College demand: community college + transfer, alternative education, maximize credits/minimize time
College supply: offer online degrees, price discriminate (financial aid) ,make cheaper offerings (undergrad only universities, etc).
Health Demand: don't go to the doctor, follow insurance incentives (urgent care vs ER), seek alternative treatment (chiropractors, neighbors, etc).
Health supply: maximize services can be performed by less trained workers (nurse practitioner vs MD, Offer lower end services (Telehealth, etc).
> "unavoidable"
When you see how many choices you have this starts to sound like "I have become accustomed to my quality of life, and I am unwilling to accept economic reality and consider alternatives." This is a natural response to declining standards of living.
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...
With housing it's more flexible: you can commute longer each day. You can just not move to a city where you know the "salary/cost of living" is not working in your favor. You can also time these decisions: go to NYC when you are in your 20s, live with some roommates to get some savings and then when you get older you can move to a more spacious city. You can be flexible about the space you need too: from 1 bedroom in a shared apartment, to a 3 beds detached house in a quiet suburb in another city, there is a lot of flexibility.
In a city there is a constraint on how much you can build, and everybody wants to be there. You can let the free market set the price, or you can try to distort the market with rent controls and then you end up with black markets, illegal payments, people holding on to their apartment for way longer they would normally do etc. Why would a 1 person ever move out of a large apartment if they have a low rent? They don't care that the same apartment would be a god-send for a family of 4...
You _really_ think people aren’t already doing that, huh. Rents are too damn high AFTER all these options have been exhausted, and not because (as Fox News will happily tell you) people are lazy and entitled.
The market for housing in a metropolitan area cannot be organized. Everyone is a landlord. If rent spikes to 100k a year, I'm going to throw away shit so I can rent my 2nd bedroom for 50k, and the cycle continues down.
Same applies for landlord who could either undercut the competition or join the “app” (aka collusion ring) to make higher profit.
> collusion ring
Once again, markets for such a commonly desired good are not 5-10 or even 100 participants. They are unstructured webs of opportunities and favors.
It's hard to increase transportation infrastructure in a built-up area. And when you do, everybody says it didn't work because traffic is still bad or trains are still overfull. But they never notice that population increased during construction. If you could stop growth, then your transportation needs stabilize.
Doesn't really feel fair to me though, because it's so hard to move into the closed city.
Personally, I'm a fan of limiting rent increases to a max of something like 5-10% per year. Not so much that it's a total hardship to deal with a max increase; not so little that landlords have to do max increases every year or get way off market; also not so little that a landlord can't catch up later if they purposefully lag on increases to keep a preferred tenant.
I don't think this meets the criteria most would consider “working”.
Rent control tries to make housing more affordable by reducing the cost, which immediately reduces the supply. At that point, rent control ends up increasing housing costs.
Theory and real-world case studies mean that this is so obvious, that I just assume anyone that's passed economics 101 and is advocating for rent control is either grossly incompetent, currently very drunk, or is disingenuous and actually wants to use the power of the government to make sure other people cannot obtain secure and stable housing.
Or they are one of the lucky few living in a rent controlled apartment.
Remove market economy and the Party will distribute housing as it sees fit, and you have affordable housing, like in the Soviet Union.
Otherwise, inevitably housing will cease to be accessible once a bit more than 50% of population is happy with their housing conditions - then they will vote for people who will help them build value of their house by locking out the underhoused minority.
I can't see a fix to this that won't undermine either democracy (by somehow making people's political choices matter less or not at all, openly or covertly, aka "Putin elections"), or market economy. Both of which sounds worse than just putting up with unaffordable housing.