Comment by tancop
19 hours ago
Rent controls work if you go radical enough and enforce a max profit margin for the whole city, with rent limited to something like 30% over maintenance + debt repayment costs.
The amount of housing in the city won't grow but it will free up a big part of peoples income that would otherwise go to landlords. That helps the local economy with more consumer spending, and makes it easier to save up or apply for a loan so you can start a business.
You get a better economy and more money in the average persons wallet without raising taxes. The only ones who lose are commercial landlords, and they will stay profitable by design so it's easy to shut down any complaints. And you get better quality apartments as a side effect because the only way to get more money out of existing properties is to spend more on fixing them.
That policy would 1) fuck over younger generation, 2) result in total sclerosis and death of city. Prices are high because there's not enough housing, that's it. Rent control won't increase number of units so it wont solve real cause of the problem.
> The only ones who lose are commercial landlords, and they will stay profitable by design so it's easy to shut down any complaints.
No, also people who would like to move into city would lose, because that would become literally impossible. You'd have like 15 years waiting lists for housing.
> And you get better quality apartments as a side effect because the only way to get more money out of existing properties is to spend more on fixing them.
Why would anyone fix apartment that's under rent control? If you mean system like in Berlin, then I've got bad news - people there are actually frequently not allowed to renovate even THEIR OWN apartments.