> The 2020 Rental Law ... mandated three-year lease terms and required rent to be paid in pesos—a currency rapidly losing value due to rampant inflation.
> Faced with inflation and rigid restrictions, landlords were hesitant to sign long-term leases. Many either set excessively high rents to hedge against future inflation or withdrew their properties from the rental market altogether. Others opted to sell in U.S. dollars or list them on short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, where they could charge in foreign currencies.
So basically, the effects are mainly due to deficiencies with the previous law, and probably can't be generalized to rent control in general (though I'm sure many will try).
For instance, I don't think I've ever heard of a rent control law that allowed setting "excessively high rents" to try to preemptively counter it. I think it's a lot more typical to take the current market prices and limit the rate of future increases.
> For instance, I don't think I've ever heard of a rent control law that allowed setting "excessively high rents" to try to preemptively counter it. I think it's a lot more typical to take the current market prices and limit the rate of future increases.
Some rent control laws only apply to leases of individual tenants and don't apply between tenants. In those, as long as someone leaves 'normally', you can charge the next tenant whatever you like; although if everyone sets excessively high rents to counter rent control, exvessively high rents are the market rate.
Other rent control laws do limit rents since the start of the law or sometimes a point in time before the law.
It's not that the law allowed excessively high rents. But makes no mention of price. How would you even enforce a law that prohibits "high" prices.
> How would you even enforce a law that prohibits "high" prices
In the Netherlands there is a points system. Every feature of a house like the number of bathrooms, windows, heating, etc contributes to the score. It's mostly used to define the social housing threshold: houses below a certain number of points are removed from the free market and have the rent fixed as a function of the score.
For houses on the free market, you look at average price per sqm for the area. High rent is off the curve. You can also correlate to the baseline set by the points system, and rent as a proportion of average income to define 'high'.
If you really want to prohibit high prices, you can set a cap on rent per area and enforce with auditing.
More typically, you limit the amount of rent increases for new tenants, and have the original reference for rent be set before the law was brought up, so nobody had time to preemptively raise rent to cover rent control.
In Sweden, new contracts are arbitrary (new stock or people dying/leaving) so the market is at play then but yearly increases are limited in size (with the exception of "standard improving renovations" that are now being mis-used instead to drive out elders).
In general it has had it's benefits for safety but you now also have 70-90 year olds that once had families that now are living alone in 120m2 4-5 room apartments that can't move to anything smaller (thus yielding space to a young family) because the rent in anything smaller would be larger than their current rent, so they stay and the housing usage gets skewed.
This is not correct, new contracts are not arbitrary. They are determined by the "bruksvärdeshyra". (https://www.hyresgastforeningen.se/stod-och-rad/hyra/vad-ar-...)
Bruksvärdeshyra(utility value) is a tool by lawmakers to punt details away from actual laws, in practice rents become location based so central locations cost more (even if not always as much more as buying would cost).
I checked the laws a bit, the utility value is only mentioned for "disagreements" and the comments explicitly mentions raises as the source for disagreements. Thus when signing an initial contract (as i mentioned) the landlord is free to set whatever they feel like since a tenant would have to agree to get the apartment.
In practice (not by law) landlords are supposed to give a portion of their available stock to the common queue systems, those apartments seem to follow the utility value with some adjustment for location.
However a few years back I was in a separation and since living in Stockholm also a bit desperate and looked at the private landlord queues, the prices were far higher and since I would agree to that initial pricing it would supercede the utility value. Needless to say, I quickly pivoted to buying since that's cheaper in the long run.
> bruksvärdeshyra
Google is translating that as "utility value rent," and it appears to be something calculated by a committee based on the "value" from the tenant's point of view.
Yeah, it’s the same in Vancouver. That being said, they removed yearly increase cap in Toronto in all the new builds since 2018, and it’s still about the same price as here. Or in Calgary where they don’t have it at all, and from what I’ve looked up, rent has increased 14% YoY.
I’d be okay if they removed the caps in my city as well, if we didn’t have enormous amount of red tape and barriers to entry to construction. Otherwise the supply goes up slower than the population increase, so percentage of apartments for rent keeps decreasing.
I don't think I've ever heard of a rent control law that allowed setting "excessively high rents" to try to preemptively counter it.
California rent stabilization doesn't have any stipulations about starting rent for new tenants, only increases for existing tenants.
While I haven't seen it explicitly stated anywhere, I assume California landlords take into account the rent increase restrictions when deciding on what to ask for starting rent. They don't want to be caught in a situation with a 20% insurance increase and a max 8% rent increase, such that they are no longer cash flowing. So they'll add some buffer ahead of time.
Im against rent control in general, but agree that there are material differences in implementation.
For context, Argentina has had 50% inflation at the time rent control went into place, and inflation had increased to 250% in 2024. The rent control required 3 year contracts in Argentine currency only.
In my opinion, this was essentially a speed run of the effects of other rent control laws which limit rent increases to rates below inflation.
The idea that you can come up with a perfect law is how centrally planned economies fail.
They had inflation of 100%. The supply already cratered because of the law, if the preemptive counter was removed the supply would have cratered even more.
The rise in price was due to deficiencies.
The lack of supply was completely expected and would have been worse with a stronger law.
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It is always an implementation issue and never a design issue. If a design leads to easy foot-guns then it is a bad design.
> Real Communism hasn’t been tried. Once we do it, it’s going to work.
Come on. You've said nothing of value and had no insight. No one's talking about full-on central planning. You've just uttered a strawman slogan for the unrestrained free market.
But the unrestrained free market would objectively suck, which anyone with two brain cells who is not high on ideology can predict. It's most prefect expression, anarcho-capitalism, is the ununoctium of economic systems (as it would immediately decay into something very different).
> You've said nothing of value and had no insight. No one's talking about full-on central planning. You've just uttered a strawman slogan for the unrestrained free market.
The case in discussion is not a full-on central planning, just core socialist policies that often fail. It is legitimate to regard the excuses as just excuses.
> But the unrestrained free market would objectively suck, which anyone with two brain cells who is not high on ideology can predict.
This is not the case of the article, nor is suggested by the parent. The housing code or other technical regulations regarding housing have not been removed, thus jumping to ideologies and disparaging them is besides the point[1] and a fallacy. What was lifted was a very common policy solution for the housing problem and it happened that things improved in its absence. Wherever people have been victims of these policies it is natural people respond to supporters with these simple slogans.
Those are 2 straw men there :D.
[1] I recently went through the anarchist political movements of the 19th century and some believed the State is immoral because it is a manifestation of violent power. We live in times where people try to excuse the State's violence primacy with laws which are moral, and that is actually the worst. It reliefs them of the burden that is to take something from the other fellow men. Whenever somebody suggests regulating something about private property they should imagine a mobster coming for extortion money. Maybe the mobster is a really really good guy and we kind of can choose the mobster, but he is still a mobster. I find this moral weight important to keep us and the powers that be from being a bad mobster.
The comment was drawing a parallel - the same way people say "real communism hasn't been tried yet" the root comment is saying "real rent control hasn't been tried yet" and the complaints about the first statement apply to the second.
It is not an argument for an unrestrained free market.
Your use of communism here is a strawman to not talk about socialism. Socialist programs is what kept the world from going back to feudalism.
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With rent control, it seems to be it mostly (always?) seems to be implemented in a binary fashion: a geographic area tends to have most (all?) units controlled or not. When it is removed, then folks can be grandfathered in, so anyone who stays put is fine, but once a unit becomes vacant the unit becomes uncontrolled.
I'd be curious to see a 'sliding scale' implementation:
* all newly built units are uncontrolled
* all units that are 5-10 years old have a maximum rental increase of 3xCPI
* all units that are 10-15 years old have a maximum rental increase of 2xCPI
* units >15 years old are rent controlled (~CPI increases)
Is anyone aware of jurisdiction(s) that have done such a thing?
California tends to work this way. Rent control (government chosen pricing) tends to affect only older buildings, not new ones, and is for rent increases not original rent.
Places that implemented it (SF, Santa Monica, West Hollywood) now have the highest rents. People that are grandfathered never move. Reduces available locations by artificially scarcity. Landlords love it. Grandfathered renters love it. People moving in need to afford much more than older residents and hate it.
> now have the highest rents
This is not proof that rent control causes high rents.
It could be that these are highly desirable areas without enough housing to meet demand, and rent control was in response to high rents.
It could be that landlords are evading rent controls.
It could be that rents would be even higher if rent control didn't exist.
It also means that in places like SF those who built the cities character and provide the backbone of all kinds of services can stay. If the market price came to be they’d have to move, and then we’d only have tech workers who have way more elasticity in their budgets than kindergarten teachers.
You have to recognize reality is messy and you need a mix.
That is how functioning markets need to work. If demand goes up, then the market price goes up. If the price goes up and tech workers want their kids to go to school, they need to pay teachers more.
Right now, there are crappy 100 duct tape fixes. Maybe some teachers are in rent controlled places paying 25% market price, and some are paying full market. Some teachers are in City owned housing that only teachers qualify for.
In short, it isnt a functioning market. For it to be a functioning market, you have to let the taxpayers confront the question of if they would rather pay for schools or not have them.
Markets don't account for the human capacity for self-deception. For a market to work, there needs to be sufficient information on both sides to decide whether to buy or walk away. There also needs to be enough logic to make a cold decision and not let emotions, hopes, desires, fantasies, or hallucinations influence your decision in any way.
Market participants count on the human capacity for self-deception, asymmetrical information, and emotion-based decision-making. In the case of teachers, there will always be some unwise rationalization based on the kids they'll be helping, how beautiful San Francisco is, how nice it is to be on the ocean, etc., which will cause them to make a bad decision about taking a job in San Francisco.
Maybe that's a job for AI. Tell it your job offer and how you spend your money, and it will tell you whether or not you can afford to take the job or run away.
Correct. Markets function on the desires humans act on. They dont optimize for how humans "should" act but dont.
I think there is far more moral hazard in having the government overrule the preferences people act on and enforce the solution they think people should select.
Some people make mistakes. People learn and society learns. Markets take time to search for and find equilibrium.
Preventing markets which are out of equilibrium from progressing towards equilibrium often triggers a cascade of secondary problems.
What you’re suggesting, if I understand you correctly, is the market is suggestion it’s irrational for any teacher to go to SF? And thus SF shouldn’t have any teachers because richer people can afford to displace them?
I'm sorry if you got that impression.Im saying the exact opposite.
I'm saying we should let the schools get to the point of teacher shortages, and then teacher salaries will increase until the they can afford to live in the area.
The current solution is stupid. We keep paying them unsustainable salary and work them in garbage conditions, but 1/10 wins the free housing lottery and gets below market housing.
OR supply can change. Increased demand, in the long run, in a well-functioning market can cause market price to fall. Because supply goes up, and production in volume decreases cost.
Anyway we're talking people here (for now; AI will change this and soon). The only way unit price goes down is if their own costs go down e.g. education loans drop or disappear.
I think what I said holds true independent of increasing housing supply, which I also support. A functional market would find a labor price where necessary workers can afford the housing price, or face going without their labor.
I think the current approach is counter productive because it tries to bypass this with policy solutions that mean workers keep making unsustainable wages, but are subsidized in several other ways with poor implementation.
>Anyway we're talking people here.... The only way unit price goes down is if their own costs go down e.g. education loans drop or disappear.
Im not sure what you are saying here.
I dont think the costs to become a teacher are the bottleneck. Cost of living is the financial bottle neck, and the misery of working in a dysfunctional school districts is the emotional bottle neck.
I know several former teachers in SF. You can afford to be a teacher in SF if you have rent control, but not if you dont. Some left for jobs that pay even worse because the conditions were so bad (broken bones from students, incompetent administrators, hostile parents, ect)
So basically the signal that prices provide (more supply is needed) is stifled.
Seems like a great way to make sure supply never adjusts, which is what happens in places like SF.
I don’t understand - are you suggesting rent control keeps doing prices? SF is one of the most expensive housing and rental markets in the US. What’s not clear about the need for more supply?
In the mean time rent control means we haven’t completely killed off normal people who were here before. The city has already suffered a big blow to culture, teachers, etc due to the price increases this far (and with it techies who care about money and job vs desiring the location, and thus take vs give).
location
San Francisco implemented a time cutoff for its rent control, which covers places prior to 1979.
That said, the increase limit is much less than the CPI, about 0.5X, So covered rents grow much slower than inflation.
As such, there is a pretty big secondary market where leaseholders make money subletting rent controlled places.
I know about a dozen people who have moved to other cities and states, but sublet in SF making thousands.
> all newly built units are uncontrolled
Controlling them after few years later they are controlled, just with less harsh terms. The issue is supply, we are not building enough housing. Controlling after few years means the viability of projects goes down, which is meaningful with the absurdly high costs of regulation, land, and construction.
Not a sliding scale, but Washington DC has rent control only for buildings built before 1975.
My experience with rent control in San Jose, CA was that it only applied to lots where there were at least three units, built before 1979.
If it'a a duplex, no rent control. If it's built in 1979 or newer, no rent control.
If the renter leaves, a new renter's rent is not limited based on past rent.
Regular annual increase is capped at 5%, but there's the usual exceptions available.
If you have a law that stops certain kinds of private agreements, and then you repeal this law, it is logical to see those kinds of private agreements increase.
This is the main difference in politics, as far as I can tell: Some people push for things that seem really compassionate and intuitively good and right, but actually make the problem a lot worse. But to argue this is almost always futile because all most people seem able to absorb is that you're disagreeing with their intuitively compassionate position, not that you're trying to posit a solution that actually functions, so in their eyes you're an existential threat to them.
There are ideologues and there are pragmatists. Partisans are, to varying degrees, ideologues who see the world not as it is but how it must be based upon their presuppositions.
Ideologies gave us freedom, democracy, and nearly every genocide. They can be useful, to a degree, but like any model they break down and cause problems when taken to the extreme.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
> not that you're trying to posit a solution that actually functions
Give me an example of a "solution that actually functions," to any problem you know a lot about, during a period of high inflation.
Legalizing floating market exchange rates.
Tariffs on imports.
I saw FIRST HAND that overnight we went from only quoting in China and Taiwan, to quoting and getting deals in USA.
I was writing the quotes, I was approving them. It turned right back around in 2021.
Tariffs are a tax on Americans. The stuff still gets imported -- at a higher cost to cover the tariff.
But it incentivizes making things in the US. This is probably a good thing if the CCP hits hard times.
Thank you for correcting my first-hand experiences. You know what we didn’t do? We didn’t “tax Americans” by continuing to use China, we made what we could in the US.
Great, you're in the minority of companies that did so.
A counterpart at GM was going the same as me. Yea, small company tho.
What I love is that you can’t admit that you could be wrong - when someone on the street is this case is telling you directly.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Just a stubborn ideologue that could never admit Trump was right on this.
> “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock
People dislike actual data so much, in this case they have flagged the item because it goes counter to their narrative.
Actually, I think there's a pretty legitimate reason to flag this.
The actual article is from the quite biased libertarian Reason Magazine: https://reason.com/2024/09/26/rents-fall-and-listings-increa..., but it's being laundered through msn.com, which obscures that.
Your post seems like an example of what GP is talking about. A source being biased doesn't mean it can't make a valid point, nor does it mean that MSN can't do their own vetting.
> Your post seems like an example of what GP is talking about.
No it isn't. The GP accused the flaggers of flagging it for ideological reasons, because it goes "counter to their narrative." I'm saying that it's legitmate to flag because it's been posted using the wrong url, because awareness of the true source and knowledge of its biases is useful for evaluating the content.
>But to argue this is almost always futile because all most people seem able to absorb is that you're disagreeing with their intuitively compassionate position
What's your point, and what does that have to do with the specific url that's used in the post?
At best Rent Control is a mixed bag. See history of NYC. For those lucky enough to "get in on the ground floor" its great. For others, not so much, as the landlords jack the rent to cover their "losses" on the controlled rent.
I would say Rent Control causes more harm than good overall.
If you consider soviet housing blocks as having operated under rent control, they illustrate the problem. There was little maintenance done by the state --often it was up to the occupants to improve the building. Also, the state didn't build enough units and people had to accommodate multiple families in one unit.
It's a failure but people wish it to be otherwise. They wish for things to spring out of the aether by wishing it so.
It always has. With rent control there is no incentive for landlords to rent, repair, or improve. Which actually reduces the amount of available properties, and dissuades building more housing (because what’s the point?) If you can’t make money doing it then you’re probably losing money.
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> actually make the problem a lot worse
You need to get rid of the actual problem: Capitalism
The context of all these good/bad arguments is that they're good/bad solutions under Capitalism.
With what shall we replace it? Communism doesn’t work. It’s so hard to do that it has supposedly never been tried.
I don't have an answer to that.
But Communism was never implemented in it's "described" (or "pure", if you want to frame it that way) form. The Soviet Union was clearly heavily corrupted, among many other issues that diverge from what Communism is "supposed" to be.
Perhaps a system that favors people over corporations?
A system that centralises power over everything into the hands of a single government will ALWAYS end in corruption, surely that’s obvious?
Under capitalism, individuals are allowed to own enterprises. If they’re corrupted, they’ll fail and other enterprises will supersede them. Under socialism and communism, state monopolies deny ownership and accountability to the public. If they’re corrupted, there is nowhere else to turn.
Join the queue for your turnip rations and be happy you’re equal to all the other miserable people stuck under the regime (except the government officials of course - they’re never equal to the plebs)
How anyone can support far-left ideology after the lessons of the 20th century is beyond me.
> A system that centralises power over everything into the hands of a single government will ALWAYS end in corruption, surely that’s obvious?
See: United States government
See: American police/CJS
See: City governments
> Under capitalism, individuals are allowed to own enterprises.
I live under this system, you don't need to explain it. I can see how it has failed for millions of Americans while propping up the very few.
> How anyone can support far-left ideology after the lessons of the 20th century is beyond me.
I never said I supported Communism. But Capitalism is a failure for the proles due to corruption, favoritism, and purchasing of the [American] government.
I’m not sure the scale of corruption in US government really compares to the scale of corruption that existed in Soviet Russia.
> it has failed for millions of Americans while propping up the very few
It only “fails” for people that lack the capacity or the will to contribute to society.
Whereas far-left ideology destroys wealth, freedom and happiness for everyone except the ruling class.
And the “very few” you describe is actually hundreds of millions of people who enjoy a world class high standard of living in America compared to the rest of the world.
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Like many policies on the left, it’s easier to go with the vibes than actually look at the results and see if it’s a good idea. Rent control never works. It has been played out on every continent save Antarctica and it always leads to worse outcomes.
There are many implementations of rent controls. Argentina's were rather badly done. Compare to:
Germany - where landlords can't charge more than 10% above the local average rent.
Spain - where landlords can increase rent only if they improve the property, but the increase can't be more than 20%.
Netherlands - where one in three homes in the Netherlands are rent-controlled, and rental apartments are capped at under €1,000 per month.
France - rent control applies to furnished and unfurnished properties.
Scotland - government introduced emergency legislation to cap rent increases in the private sector at 3% as of 2022.
Sweden - rent controls apply to new and older buildings, with local market conditions setting the regulated rents.
New York City - a Rent Guidelines Board sets rent increases based on inflation, and landlords are required to renew leases.
Rent controls limit the potential of the underlying asset by having Tennants hoard their current rent in ever degrading apartments. Its an artificial limitation on a resource that can be renewed to lower costs but you end up with a massive amount of rent hoarders afraid to shop around for better housing. It is such a disruption to incentives for both renters and home providers.
From my experience, the rent control in Sweden is a total disaster.
People need stable long-term housing, which is a need that free-market economics can’t really fulfill. It is not humane to have to worry about your rent becoming unaffordable year after year.
Rent Control does exactly what it can do. It's a tool a government can use to reduce the pain the people feel while they do other things to address the root cause.
It's a political gift.
"Vote for me! Forget that I have been in office for decades, vote for me and this time I will make those greedy landlords pay. I will give you rent control! Vote for me."
And it works.
No, IF it worked Milei would not have been elected.
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I'd like to point out this is propaganda. The only source is actually a report[1] from January this year, that's where the line, "Buenos Aires saw a doubling of available rental units, and rental prices have stabilized" comes from. It took me a lot of time to find it a month or so ago when the Libertarians on Reddit were running victory laps after it got picked up by AR15.com's forum[2] early August.
[1] https://www.eleconomista.es/economia/noticias/12935188/08/24...
[2] https://www.ar15.com/forums/General/Milei-ends-rent-control-...
Are you attacking the content or the source?
You.
Seems clear rent controls don't work in a hyper inflating economy where land lords can't lockin rent for multiple years because 3 years down the road, tenants are paying price of bread for rent. The core problem is the hyper inflation, not the rent control, which under "normal" performing economic conditions will not trigger same set of behaviors, or at least the costs/benefits are not this obvious.
Freakonomics had an episode on rent control a few years ago that I found interesting.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-rent-control-doesnt-wor...
As someone who signed contract to rent recently, "rent falling" is beyond bullshit. Listing increase is true, doesn't mean they're "good" listings though.
> "While rents are still up in nominal terms, many renters are getting better deals than ever, with a 40% decline in the real price of rental properties when adjusted for inflation since last October," The Wall Street Journal reported.
I would be cautious about using San Francisco about an example where things could be improved by repealing rent control.
The tl;dr of this article is this line - it increased supply:
> But after the repeal, Buenos Aires saw a doubling of available rental units, and rental prices have stabilized.
That would not happen in SF.
One issue is rent control. Another, separate, issue is housing/rental supply.
Getting apartments built in SF is notoriously difficult. It's not realistic to think you can double the supply of available rental units here imho.
That is a political ask that people have been trying to do for ages, and which other people, homeowners, have been successfully blocking for the same amount of time. While there's an ongoing effort to push against that, I would expect the blocking to continue, successfully as it has been until now.
the description of the previous (bad) law as 'rent control' represents malicious disregard for the truth. 'rent control' idiomatically means, in english, limitations on raising rents over the entire period of time a tenant inhabits a property, not over the predetermined term of a lease. the wikipedia article explains:
> The loose term "rent control" covers a spectrum of regulation which can vary from setting the absolute amount of rent that can be charged, with no allowed increases, to placing different limits on the amount that rent can increase; these restrictions may continue between tenancies, or may be applied only within the duration of a tenancy.
argentina has never, to my knowledge, had rent control in any of these senses. when the lease expired, after three years (or previously two) there was no restriction on how much the landlord could demand in rent to sign a new lease. commonly it would be several times the old rent, due to inflation. three years ago the dollar was 184 pesos https://dolarhistorico.com/cotizacion-dolar-blue/mes/septiem... so a 250 dollar rent would have been 46000 pesos. now it's 1230 pesos https://dolarhistorico.com/cotizacion-dolar-blue/mes/agosto-... so those 46000 pesos would be worth 37 dollars without the yearly inflation adjustment
the text of the article sort of admits this by omission, while implying the contrary through its dishonest choice of wording. this is in sharp contrast to the integrity and reliability i normally expect from reason—i often disagree with their values but rarely with their facts
this has misled commenters here such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41659436
This law isn't rent control, because it's not strong enough to be considered rent control. OK, that seems like an acceptable argument.
But, at least according to MSN, it did have effects on real estate concomitant to the arguments against rent control.
Interesting result. Argentina is in the midst of a grand experiment.
yes, i agree
This seems excessively prescriptive. If we're using Wikipedia as the referee today, this is what it says:
> Rent control is part of a system of rent regulation that limits the changes that can be made in the price of renting a house or other real property.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control_(disambiguation)
What you describe, and what Argentina had, is fairly clearly a limit on the changes that can be made in the price of renting. Requiring a certain term of lease, and prohibiting a lease which allows, for example, adjusting the monthly rate to match inflation, are both limitations which fairly belong in this category.
You've accused Reason of dishonesty here, I don't think that's accurate. You might prefer the phrase to be used in some more restrictive or definite sense, but they describe the law in the second paragraph:
> The 2020 Rental Law, enacted under former President Alberto Fernández, aimed to protect tenants. It mandated three-year lease terms and required rent to be paid in pesos—a currency rapidly losing value due to rampant inflation. Rent adjustments were limited to once a year, based on a central bank rate that factored in inflation and wage growth. The law also allowed tenants to dictate the conditions for lease termination.
Is any of this wrong?
yes, that paragraph you quoted from the article is correct, but it omits to mention that there is no limit to how much the landlord can raise the rent when the three years are up
an employee who coaches his kid's soccer team on weekends isn't a 'whistleblower' even though he blows a whistle, a barium getter isn't a 'vacuum cleaner' even though it cleans a vacuum, and things like a three-year lease aren't 'rent control' even though they control the rent
you already know this, since you're a native english speaker, but i'm commenting to keep you from confusing people who might not be
People respond to incentives. If gas was mandated at 25 cents a gallon every station would be empty.
You could still buy it from a guy with a 40 gallon drum on a flatbed though. Cash only of course.
@dang - looks like this article has been flagged tactically for ideological reasons. Can you please restore it to view?
Yes - fixed now. But please send these requests to hn@ycombinator.com because @dang is a no op that I run across only randomly!
Thank you very much. I will email next time.
*
or, you know, it's irrelevant as rent fall because nobody have money and listing increase because everyone is leaving.
Demonstrating that any set of facts can be twisted to appear to support any narrative.
Or that rent control benefits the insiders and hurts everybody else, including the children of said insiders who won’t be able to find housing.
Argentina never had rent control. Rent control keeps rents low for indefinite periods of time. Argentina simply mandated 3 year leases.
We, in the US, have a housing affordability crisis. Therea re a number of causes for this:
1. Cities are reaching the limit they can sprawl while still effectively being the same city. Atlanta springs to mind;
2. People vote for politicians who restrict supply to increase the value of something they see as an asset rather than something simply to provide shelter; Increasing house prices are simply stealing from the next generation. That's all. Minimum lot sizes, SFH only zoning, bans on MDU/ADUs, etc all exist solely to increase house prices;
3. Politicians only ever tackle the problem from the demand side eg mortgage interest tax deductions, first home owner grants. All this does is increase the prices by the induced demand. It's a wealth transfer to the existing homeowners.
4. Landlords. In an ideal world, they wouldn't exist. This almost happened in the UK and it was surprisingly simple [1]. They are quite literally and figuratively rent-seekers.
The YIMBYs will tell you "build! build! build!". This is overly simplistic. It also depends on what you build. Look at Manhattan that is building ultra-luxury skyscrapers. There is no trickle down effect here. It's simply money laundering and parking capital.
What we need is a healthy supply of quality, affordable housing. We simply won't get that relying on private landlords. The only solution to thisis so-called "social housing". That is, government owned and supplied housing. Vienna is a prime example here where over 60% of the housing is social housing. Americans will tend to immediately rject this as "projects" or "ghettoes" (or, worse, "socialism").
Housing unaffordability is the number one factor leading to houselessness. It's not even close.
Denying people shelter is, quite literally, state violence. It is causing direct and immediate harm for the sake of wealth accumulation by a few.
So where does rent control fit in all this? It can be a short-term aid at stabilizing prices but it is not a long-term solution. It tends to make it impossible for people to move. Landlords will resort to unethical or even illegal tactics to force out tenants so they can relist at market rates. Or they'll leave units vacant (IIRC there are 100K+ purposefully vacant units in Mnahattan).
Pretty much our entire society is designed to extract wealth from the poorest through rent, student debt, housing debt, medical debt, vehicle debt and maintenance (because in 99% of the US you cannot exist without a car).
Billionaires spend big to block public transit [2]. Why do you think that is?
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-...
On one hand you blame government red tape for preventing housing development.
On the other hand you propose the government should manage housing construction and administration.
It's strange to be both pro- and anti-government intervention.
Maybe you are saying local govts are stifling new housing starts, while state/federal govt should step in?
> It's strange to be both pro- and anti-government intervention.
It's strange to claim you either have to support or oppose all types of government intervention. There is nothing unreasonable about supporting what you view as good types of intervention while opposing what you view as bad types of intervention.
I wasn't trying to insult parent, just observed some cognitive dissonance
Hmmm I noticed you like good things and dislike bad things, hypocrite much?
antifa? is your name ironic, or you're actually one of the mob?
That commenter is completely correct: you can be for one policy and against another. It's not cognitive dissonance because I'm for or against certain policies and outcomes. This isn't a team sport. The government isn't the Dallas Cowboys.
Making housing unaffordable = bad. Making healthcare accessible and affordable = good.
Why on earth would you think yo uhad to support the government either 0% or 100% and nothing in between?
It reads like an attempt at hypocrisy baiting because you didn't like what I had to say, not that anything was actually wrong with it. I could be reading that wrong but Ithat's how it reads.
You're off the scent, but I wish you well
In other news, dollar is cheaper than it was in February, national oil company just announced that the gas prices will be going down, and dollar deposits in banks have also gone up 40%.
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Sadly, these results are going to be ignored by those in favor of rent controls —of course these same people will cite any undergrad study results to support whatever policy they agree with. Hard numbers? No way.
Kamala is talking about grocery price controls (and calls it gauging laws). However, this is a dubious proposition given that the grocery retail industry is notorious for slim margins 1 - 1.5% profit margins. Like what the hell is this going to accomplish, other than create shortages in some areas?
It’s dumb. I don’t know who in hell is giving her economic advice, but they need to fire whoever the hell he or she is.
You could have actually paid attention to what she said instead of taking the MAGA approach where you only hear what you want to hear and jettison everything else. Her plan for grocery price controls was about emergency situations to prevent gouging. Every single state in the union which has political representation that YOU like already has such laws in place, they just aren't enforced unless there's political theater to be made.
The simple fact of the matter is that vendors will sell their product anyway. It takes time to bring product to the market and most food is highly perishable. To the extent that the US subsidizes agriculture, there's absolutely no excuse for gouging during emergencies.
So-called "gouging" (a propaganda term) is needed to balance supply and demand.
I wonder, will they go house to house to check for "hoarders" people who have an excess of the thing in short supply? How would they determine what is excessive?
If you listen to her speeches, she tries to weave this in when talking about inflation: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/a84rQCyQ7mk
So she's trying to imply price gouging laws would bring down inflation. When people talk about inflation they mean a national economic trend, they don't mean a very transient increase in the price of goods during an emergency, such as hurricanes, etc. Also, during emergencies, there is not much gouging in groceries (she heavily implies she's addressing grocery prices), but rather in other goods (plywood, fuel, generators, etc).
>Her plan for grocery price controls was about emergency situations to prevent gouging.
Is the US in an emergency situation regarding grocery prices? Has a hurricane hit the entire country at once?
PS - NYC instituted rent control in 1943 as an "emergency" remedy during WW2.
Argentina is in a deep recession right now. People having no money can make rents fall as well.