this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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The MHA / MFTE program that Seattle has had in place for almost 30 years is, imo, the right framework, but needs to be dramatically upscaled.
It basically is a two option system:
Option 1: Landlords pay a tax upfront that goes toward the funding of your favored social, low income housing.
Option 2: Landlords avoid this tax but willingly agree to a percentage of their units being rent controlled.
This is a good framework, the problem is the numbers aren't there.
You need a larger percentage of a building's units to be rent controlled, you need those rent controls to further and lower rents more, you need the other option's upfront tax to be much higher so as to throw 10x, 100x, 1000x of this pithy $50 million at building low income housing, and probably you also need to expand the MHA / MFTE guidelines to apply to more residential properties than it currently does.
If landlords don't accept this, fuck em, option 3 is the city emminent domain buys your building for pennies on the dollar and turns it into low income housing, like what happened when I5 came through or any other number of public works bought up land.
Hey, while we're at it, pass another law that says if you have a home on the market, or unrented apartment, you legally have to lower the price some amount for every month its just vacant, or work in a tax on the home seller/apartment owner that increases logarithmically for every day on the market, something like that.
Huge problem in the housing market right now is everything just sits there, being theoretically worth the asking price (which in reality is being price fixed by computer systems landlords use to keep prices climbing, don't see you complaining about that) until finally a rich buyer shows up.
Fuck that. If you can't get a tenant in a rental unit or a buyer into a house, tax the listing seller, the apartment opening, for every day beyond 30 for an apartment or 60 for a house.
That'll incentivize people to price things more reasonably.
Do something similar with vacant office space, jam up the cost of that untill they start getting converted into apartments (and subsidize/incentivize that!), or lower their prices such that a commercial tennant moves in.
You keep asserting rent control will being rent down that has never been the case. Rent control only makes rent more expensive. That’s why you see such consensus.
Rent control actually always brings down rent prices in the affected units, this is widely agreed on.
It makes non affected units marginally more expensive, and the other widely agreed on malefects are that people in rent controlled units don't leave as often, and that landlords skimp on maintenance, evict people more frivolously/baselessly, and disincentivizes new construction.
So throw on better tenants rights / eviction protection, crack down on maitenance skimping landlords by making a city hotline / web portal for residents to make complaints to directly, have an actually funded and staffed enforcement agency for that (take away some police funding and move it to that)... and then have a reasonable way to avoid incentivize and fund the new housing construction that the free market won't want to do.
A reasonable implementation of rent control, as I literally just described, is what Seattle has been doing for 30 years, giving certain new or remodelled buildings the option to either pay a tax that goes toward city built/funded social, low income housing, or forgoe the tax but endure a rent control scheme for some of its units.
This approach just needs to be expanded, augmented, increased in scope, increased in magnitude of the low income housing tax and the required number of rent controlled units, and make those rent controlled units even less costly to renters.
Did you read anything I wrote in my last reply to you?
I did and I don’t believe you are correct as average rent in Seattle hasn’t declined as a result of these policies.
Oh cool, thats wonderful, the only thing impacting the housing market that's changed in 30 years is the MHA MFTE program, the entire rest of the economy just stayed perfectly static.
Population hasn't grown, wealth disparity hasn't grown, construction costs are the same, the unemployment rate never changed, zoning laws are the same, the tech sector is still as small.as it was in 96, no neighborhoods have gentrified, covid never happened, nope, everything affecting housing is all down to a single experimental variable and everything else is a control variable.
Did not realize I was actually talking to a clown.
Honk honk!
In a clown because I don't believe ypu have proven that rent control has worked? If it had rent should have stabilized lower income housing which it did not. There should be more available affordable housing and there isn't.
You haven't proved anything. You have made ton of unsupported claims entirely constructed on "trust me bro". Do you have any idea how any of this works?