I wish they had a reasonable argument that benefitted everyone. They want the owners of properties not to be able to set the rent. But my family had an apartment building in NJ that unfortunately, due to laws, we couldn't raise the rent more than a set amount per year. Soon there was just no way to even pay for maintenance when the roof leaked and things like that and it had to be shutdown.
So giving these people what they want, the ability to force owners not to raise rent, just does not benefit anyone in the end.
She runs a chile shop, how would she feel if protestors were sitting in front of city hall demanding she can only charge ten cents per bowl of chile? Sure the protestors love the idea of nearly free food, but that is just going to kill the business, not give them nearly free food forever.
And that is the problem in a nutshell. Price fixing a single thing (in this case rents) means the market moves without those prices changing and that results in huge imbalances.
Now if the NJ government funded a fixed rate building maintenance team you're family could use the price appropriate maintenance team to keep the building in repair, of course they could not pay them market wages (that is why maintenance costs more) so the people working for the maintenance group would have to go to the state run stores where they could get their fixed priced foodstuffs. Of course the manufacturers selling to that store would need fixed price ingredients which you would get from state run farms selling their crops at a set price.
It is a silly ad nauseum sort of response but the kernel is accurate, you cannot successfully control one aspect of prices without somebody getting disadvantaged. Since you want more housing, the answer is to let people build more market rate housing, not to control rents.
Trouble is what people really want is for nothing at all to change. Prices stay flat, no new housing is built, nobody gets evicted, no new people come to town.
Sadly, since they want to have their cake and to eat it too, nobody seems to be approaching it from the POV of:
We are up against an inexorable force of change; how do we channel that change in a way that is most acceptable?
Instead they demand the impossible and lose all control of where that inexorable force is going to take them.
I know us programers have a proclivity towards binary thinking, but these people aren't arguing for a world without any change, just a way to decrease the volatility of a housing market that fluctuates beyond human scale.
Humans are big, blundering slow moving beasts at the top of the food chain. It takes us years to settle in to new homes and communities and find our footings. Having rents double over just a few years is just too much for most people to handle.
Call it "rent stabilization", not "rent control" and it makes more sense. The goal is to slow the rates of change and make sure things are happening at human scale. Real estate, contract law and marketplaces are all human constructions and we shouldn't let them get the best of us.
Rent control is also something corrupt local politicians can do to increase the value of their own properties in the neighboring districts outside of where the rent is controlled, because the prices in those districts will go up even higher than they would have otherwise.
In principle, you an end the regress at any point with subsidies. Ramifications are manifold, I've no idea if it's a good idea, and it's not what's being proposed, but it seems a potential way out of what you've described.
Price fixing can be indexed. Happens all the time in many countries with many things, like housing and benefits.
Like the thread about trailer parks and poverty elsewhere on HN right now, these are solved problems.
If you don't like the solution because it offends your ideologies, fine, but stop pretending certain solutions can't or won't work. They can and they do.
Housing can hardly be the poster child of free-market: there's a lot of information asymmetry, barriers to entry, it takes a lot of time, even in the best conditions, to get a project built... It's highly cyclical: supply can take years to even start to address demand, whereas projects can be killed very quickly when the economy goes down. This is why housing needs regulations if we want it to function properly. We need the right set of incentives to make sure we have housing for everyone.
I fail to see, however, how actively restricting building, i.e. supply, is going to alleviate tensions in the market. Anti-development people use an argument that is very similar to "build it and they will come", only in reverse: if you don't build it, they won't come. Believing that they will be able to deplete demand by restricting supply.
>I fail to see, however, how actively restricting building, i.e. supply, is going to alleviate tensions in the market. Anti-development people use an argument that is very similar to "build it and they will come", only in reverse: if you don't build it, they won't come. Believing that they will be able to deplete demand by restricting supply.
Well, it keeps turning out that 80% of new housing construction targets the ultra-high-end luxury market. You would think this would push down the prices of lower-end housing through supply/demand, but then the luxury apartments get turned into ghost apartments for investment purposes, leaving even the high-income without a place to actually live, with the result that sometimes increased housing construction actually increases prices.
Luxury condominiums, organic ice cream stores, cafes that serve soy lattes and chocolate shops that offer samples from Ecuador and Madagascar are rapidly replacing 99-cent stores, bodegas and rent-controlled apartments in the Mission District
It's a minor tragedy to set up the conflict this way. "Largely useless and hedonistic shops replacing stores that actually matter! How long can the city tolerate these too-wealthy, dandy scum?!"
Certainly, if the stores are being replaced, that's a function of property-owners' decisions to change tenants, is it not? Why are we blaming financially-successful technologists for actions taken by greedy land-owners? Don't you think these "gentrifiers" would be happy to pay the same amount that the "natives" have been paying for so long?
The property-owners are extracting as much from the world as they can, because they have a monopoly on the land/property and nobody except maybe the government can argue with them. They were taking as much as they could from you before, and now they're taking as much as they can from the wealthier people moving in. This is capitalism: they've earned their right to set the price for their property by buying it/building it/inheriting it before you did.
What options do we have, if we want this to change? Let's not pit the victims against each other.
imho the landlords shouldn't shoulder the blame either. Regional wealth in general seems to lead to a surplus of culture consumers and a deficit of culture creators, for a variety of structural reasons.
it's funny, because we conflate two sides of gentrification that are actually separate: 1) the harsh reality we impose on oppressed communities of people living in poverty, and 2) the loss of artistic culture-creators from a neighborhood that they are living in because society doesn't know how to reward those who create culture.
Both the marginalized and creative artistic class share a problem, and so have reason for solidarity, but they're not necessarily tightly coupled in all possible societies.
> luxury condominiums .... are rapidly replacing ... rent-controlled apartments in the Mission District
Anyone who comments on this subject should disclose if they hold rent-controlled apartment. It is a huge conflict of interest. I know from my own country, how journalists and politicians will jump through hoops to keep it.
Also article tries to create unfair image of new comers. If I would move to SF, I would probably shop in a dollar store as well, since I have children.
It's ironic ... The NIMBY's didn't want the BART to go through their neighborhoods, but having two stops in Mission is part of why it's so attractive now.
My understanding of the NIMBY thing is it's either: A) keep everything the way it is so that things don't change for me or B) keep everything the way it is so that my home value goes up. The arguments you use to enact a NIMBY strategy are not really important.
So type A NIMBYs were "right" in that they didn't want BART to go through their neighborhood because it would case the neighborhood to change, and lo and behold it did. Type B NIMBYs were "wrong" if they argued against BART because it had a positive effect on their home values.
There is clearly a problem with the rapid rise in inequality and the tensions gentrification create within a community like The Mission District, but what's the solution? Have there been successful efforts elsewhere that have helped moderate the negative effects of such rapid changes?
For comparison, a nearby city (Mumbai) takes a more SF-style approach - height/FSI restrictions, rent control, etc - rent there can exceed a lac/month (yes, Mumbai rent is a little less than NYC rent).
Gentrification would still exist as the previous owners and renters would be forced to live in the perifery of their towns, as newcomers would settle in their neighborhoods.
Only if you don't build enough houses in the central part of town.
These housing issues work out to nothing but simple arithmetic - if N people want to live in a region and you have K < N houses, N-K people are unhappy. Set K=N and all the problems are solved.
Old buildings have to be demolished and new ones built, which may not be in the range of the former tenants. Old residents have to leave either way, which is both the problem itself and the root of other ones.
Anyway, it's the mutation of a city into another one, there are too many variables. Higher density sounds appealing but it may bring other problems, and the old residents end up displaced anyway. It's not going to be pretty, and the result is not going to be the San Francisco everyone loves, but well... it's not my city so why do I care.
If you can build arbitrary amounts of new housing the only way that anyone will be displaced is if (marginal cost of building new unit, amortized to a monthly rent) > (what old tenant can pay).
You are right that new Pune isn't the same Pune it used to be (or so I'm told) - now there are Gujus, Punjabis, Africans, white dudes and other non-Marathis there. As an American I'm a bit unsympathetic to "there goes the neighborhood".
Buildings take time to build, do I have to make that clear?
Also, it's not about ethnic make up, it's about culture and identity. The neighborhood can go in a wildly different direction, and that's what people are lamenting, specially if it's culture-producing centers (let's admit it, the most that tech nerds produce are open source libraries for other tech nerds to consume). Anyway, urban centers come and go, SF's death will be a sad thing, but it happens all the time.
Can there be a solution? I don't really think so. More people want to live there than the area can fit. Someone has to lose out. The newcomers think they should get to live there because they have a lot of money to pay for scarce resource. The incumbents think they should get to live there because they were there first. Right or wrong, one group loses.
Here's a politically infeasible solution: Make the pie bigger. People want to live in San Francisco because Silicon Valley is an awful alternative. What are some concrete steps we could take to increase the stock of housing?
* Repeal Prop 13. While Prop 13 stands, cities have a huge interest in combating new residential development because it'll erode the tax base. It serves as a tax on newcomers and discourages people from moving and downsizing.
* Prohibit rent control, it's the surest way to destroy housing stock short of bombing.
* Strip local zoning authority from municipalities. Los Altos Hills has a 1 acre lot requirement and prohibits multi-family construction. Menlo Park has a 30' height limit and a 15' curb setback requirement.
People want to live in San Francisco because Silicon Valley is an awful alternative.
Maybe that's the answer right there. San Francisco doesn't need to fix itself if Silicon Valley can be made attractive, and Silicon Valley has a lot more space than San Fran.
If you presuppose that an entire group must win and the other lose, then there probably can't be a solution. Any real solution would prevent that outcome.
The only thing I'm presupposing is that more people want to live there, than the area can fit. Maybe too many even if they built lots of high density housing, which SF won't allow anyway.
It won't happen on a purely group vs. group basis, that's just a simplification for the purpose of forty-word internet comments.
An article on HN just a week or two ago argued that allowing more building is one approach, and gave Miami as an example. The old neighborhoods there stay as they were, while a lot of the new influx of people go to a small set of newly-built hi-rise luxury buildings.
I'm sure it's not as simple as that, but it makes sense that if building is very constrained, as in SF, then it increases the pressure and raises prices.
The statistic that "29% of rental inventory is being leased on AirBnB" is absurd. They're calculating it on the number of rentals that just happen to be unoccupied/available right now which makes no sense at all as a statistic.
So giving these people what they want, the ability to force owners not to raise rent, just does not benefit anyone in the end.
She runs a chile shop, how would she feel if protestors were sitting in front of city hall demanding she can only charge ten cents per bowl of chile? Sure the protestors love the idea of nearly free food, but that is just going to kill the business, not give them nearly free food forever.