Comment by hnav

I don't think you appreciate the scale of the discount on market rates. If you've lived somewhere for 30+ years, you might be paying $400/month for something that would now be $8000/month.

In NYC, they stopped giving out rent control leases in 1971. What you see advertised now are rent-stabilized (which is what rent-controlled apartments became once vacated). Those are two entirely different things however. But, rent control apartments can be inherited by someone who had been living in the apartment. Naturally, landlords become desperate to stop this happening because, if it does, they're facing possibly another 50+ years of having to rent out a 3 bedroom apartment overlooking Central Park for $600/month (actual example).

Now I don't like rent control as a long-term solution because it's this very American model of pushing what is intended to be a social safety net onto private individuals. I don't care about the landlords. I care about the tenants. With this system you have constant fights where landlords don't do repairs, won't turn the heat on when it's cold (even when legally obligated to do so), will make it unpleasant to live in (eg by doing excessive construction), etc to essentially force tenants out.

Instead we should have the government own and supply below-market rents for people who need it. Nurses, teachers, firefighters, etc. Anyone can get a rent-stabilized apartment now no matter how rich. The only real requirement is you need to be resident in the city, which means 6 months and a day per year. Back when Boston still had rent-control, the mayor had one.

Also, we need to stop letting people hoard property like this.

I used to live in NYC. My apartment was exactly $2k. The previous tenant at the time paid $600/month (they have to tell you this). The owners used a loophole at the time to break it out of rent-stabilization (by doing exactly enough improvements to take the rent to $2000/month at a 40-to-1 ratio IIRC). I think it now rents for $5000/month.

Houses should be for living in, not for parasitic speculation.

Rents reset to market for new tenants. While it's true some well-off people hang onto apartments while living elsewhere, this is really rare. Turn over is usually quite high. Rent control mostly effects small multi-tenant buildings and especially in-laws, where 1 or 2 hangers-on can really mess with the economics.

My mother lives in a 12 unit building in a very nice SF neighborhood. Only 2 people have been there longer than 10 years, and only 1 other longer than 5.[1] The building was recently sold for only $2 million. The low price is less because of rent control, more because of all the other regulations that make it very costly to renovate or rebuild, lowering the value of the property. That building could/should be replaced with something having twice the number of units, but it never will be. In theory it should be trivial to have a system where existing tenants could be relocated while preserving their rent, but that would only work if there were much more supply coming online creating more structural vacancies so people could be shuffled around efficiently.

I think rent control is an acceptable policy in so far as it directly addresses people's need for a sense of security that simply can't be met by promises of low housing prices in the future. It does come with a cost, a kind of tax, but taxes can be justified. There are much more costly housing policies than rent control. However, those policies unfortunately tend to coexist with rent control (often preexist), so it's really just a mess.

[1] Years ago there used to be 2 tenants who had moved to and lived in Marin, but kept their units because they worked in the city and didn't want to commute every weekday. One was a dentist. But they moved out years ago. The building had no dedicated parking, so that may have factored into their decisions to finally leave. Dealing with that kind of hassle probably worked well (or at least sounded better) when they were younger, less so once they established a life in Marin, even if they continued to commute into the city. And it's not like housing is cheaper elsewhere in the Bay Area, so the extra expense is difficult to justify even for well-off professionals.

You can't just change your tenant. I know someone who bought a place and wanted to move in (which is normally a valid reason to evict) and they still had to get a lawyer and ultimately bribe the person (who actually lived in ny for most of the year) 10k to just leave. 1 story but the tenants have a lot of rights in sf