patrick.net

Jon,

Fairness is irrelevant. When you rent, you're paying for a temporary right of occupation to the true owner of the property. There's no reason you should have any rights beyond the terms of the lease.

I simply don’t put someone’s right to (unlimited) profit above the sanctity of another’s home. People go on and on how it ruins the market, etc. I see absolutely no evidence of that here. Fairly applied, rent control is a benefit.

I know a woman who pays $470/month for a four-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, two blocks from Central Park and a block from the Dakota (where John Lennon lived/got capped). She started renting that apartment in the late 70s. That’s an example of unfair rent control. Not all rent control works that way.

Jon,

You just provided the rebuttal to your own argument here. Although rent control --& Prop. 13-- sound like great ideas on the surface (gee, saving $$ at my LL's expense, how wonderful!), such selective redistribution schemes typically result in worse inequities than they were supposedly designed to "fix" (i.e., the cure is worse than the disease). I have yet to see a "well designed" rent control system that did not create severe market distortions that were UN-beneficial to the majority of the general public, as well as lots of bad incentives (to game the system). In other words, it usually creates big, counter-productive moral hazards.

Shelter is a basic necessity and is the ‘base’ around which people structure their productive lives and the lives of their families. I’ll say it again: when people are forced to drop everything, uproot their families, incur moving costs, and in some cases, change jobs, the community and society pay a price that is not justified by the LLs right to maximize profit under and all circumstances.

If you want to remove the profit motive and consider shelter to be a basic citizen "right", then I would suggest supporting government-built housing for the poor. Rent control is one of the most ineffective, inefficient and costly ways of subsidizing housing for poor people. Most of the time, the truly poor see no benefit at all --it's the smart, rich, crooked types that are most successful at gaming the rent control game.

I have yet to see a “well designed” rent control system that did not create severe market distortions that were UN-beneficial to the majority of the general public, as well as lots of bad incentives (to game the system).

Because any price control system will create severe market distortions.

What is fairness anyway?

astrid Says:
Fairness is irrelevant. When you rent, you’re paying for a temporary right of occupation to the true owner of the property. There’s no reason you should have any rights beyond the terms of the lease.

that's a narrow view of decently providing shelter in a society, though...

Peter P Says:
>I have yet to see a “well designed” rent control system
> that did not create severe market distortions that were
> UN-beneficial to the majority of the general public, as
> well as lots of bad incentives (to game the system).

Because any price control system will create severe market distortions.

This is just more of the same neo-liberal market dogma and fundamentalism. It's like a neural network which always oscillates to the same answer no matter what the inputs.

This is completely unsubstantiated by argument. You've looked at *one* system and said therefore that all systems can't work. (And maybe the system *does* work for many, just not in your view.) This is just a nonsense. Talking about scientific reasoning, because one rocket misfires means in your logic that no rocket will ever get off the ground and there will never be a space shuttle. People invoke 'scientific reasoning' when it's convenient and then proceed to prove they don't have any, and they have a 'one size fits all' answer. Where does this neo-classical market brainwashing come from, by the way?

In other words, it usually creates big, counter-productive moral hazards.

The only 'moral hazards' I see are exploitation of workers by landlords, unhelathy economic bubbles which are harmful to both the micro- and macro-economies, and incredible unfairness and disenfranchisement of a sector of the population for the enrichment of others. That's my definition of a 'moral hazard'. The original defn of moral hazard was from insurance companies talking about the question of whether it becomes too tempting for a businessman to torch their business and claim the insurance. It now means anything which jeopardises so-called 'free markets' apparently, as redefined on this blog.

The whole cycle of creating 'haves and have-nots' also increases crime and anomie, which I see as 'counter-productive' also.

just a test post