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'Renters Are Struggling': Economists Back Tenant-Led Push for Federal Rent Control
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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OK but we have more empty houses than homeless people. We don't need more houses. We need to stop wasting resources for the sake of capitalism and stop letting people die for it as well. There is going to be a point where people start setting fire to vacant houses in protest. It is amazing what millions of desperate people will do when their screams of frustration go unheard long enough.
This is the chaos that our leaders secretly want. Otherwise they would have to be abysmally stupid. There is no excuse for ignorance in the information age.
This is true, but very few of those houses exist where homelessness is a major problem. Location plays a huge role in someone's life and we can't just ship everyone that's homeless or struggling to a dying small town in the US.
The lowest non-condemned house in my city is currently listed at over half a million dollars. There is a three story office building in my block that has been empty since March 2020.
Pity we don't have people whose job it is to do plumbing work. Nope, doesn't exist.
800 billion on the military could probably be enough to fix up all those houses.
Make the military fix them. They are always bragging about vocational training. Right now the only training they give is how to not seeing a therapist for PTSD. This would at least teach them how to do some basic carpentry work. And would benefit us a lot more compared to making planes that can't fly in the rain.
Human suffering is power. Kind of crazy imo. I'm imaging a bit of ritual too, like a sacrifice.
Economists work for banks not for us. Their models have no connection to the real world. They support bailouts but not student loan debt reduction. Says all you really need to know about them.
Meanwhile Ontario removed rent control on all buildings newer than 2018 and now people find their rents going up by 40% over a year with no recourse because the government is favouring the developers over all others, and no government level wants to mandate what developers should build.
Meanwhile areas in North America that didn't have rent control also show skyrocketing rents. Rent control is starting to look pretty good. I would rather get decades of lower rent than not.
Areas that did not have rent control now = rent going up
Areas that did = rent going up
Except that areas that did still got decades of lower rent.
You talk a lot about proof but I am not seeing any.
Almost, except for the parts where there's no proof only wishful statements, and there's more doubt than ever.
Using SF and NYC as the main examples kinda distorts things as these are both some of the most expensive, developed, and dense parts of the country where development costs are staggeringly high. Something not working there doesn't mean it doesn't work anywhere else. The rate of increase in property/rental costs is unsustainable.
It did for the folks using it.
Please explain how.
Are you an economist?
Or did you just see a supply and demand curve and think that's all there is to it?
If you studied economics beyond the 101 level, you'd know the supply and demand curve is a theoretical concept that doesn't actually exist in the real world because the requirements for it are impossible. Supply and demand most definitely exist, but it's more of a fuzzy force kind of thing not clean lines on a graph. Realistically, it's more like fuzzy splotches on the graph instead of clean lines.
And there are multiple levels to it as well. Cities have to compete with other cities to attract businesses and businesses would prefer to be in a city where they don't have to pay someone $100K per year to sweep the floors. Which might happen if that's the pay level required to live in a city. You could get into a yo-yo situation where a city becomes unaffordable, people and businesses leave, causing the rent prices to drop, attracting people an businesses back, causing it to by unaffordable again, etc, etc. This instability comes at an economic cost that's greater than the inefficiencies caused by rent control.
You see an economy isn't just one simple supply and demand curve. You might want to consider that economists might be aware of some factors you aren't aware of.
Yeah and aggregate demand is basically impossible to model because people be crazy.
And sure, rent control could cause issues in the long run, but in the long run we're all dead anyway. Other, bigger, problems will likely happen sooner than something like rent control having a significant economic impact.
Except climate change is backed up by data studied and gathered by real scientists the vast majority of which are under no pressure to prove it.
Rent control attacks are generated by economists. A pseudoscience employed by the banks to create propaganda.
They are not the same.
The point is to provide relief for those who can't afford rent.
Please show me actual economic modelling using real world data of the negative impacts of rent control. You know, something that isn't just theoretical extrapolations based on the non-existent supply and demand curve done by someone who spent too much time reading propaganda on mises.org
What is that link? So over a decade ago, 40 people that I don't know indicated their opinion about rent control on a website. That's your proof? Of what exactly? What was the methodology in which they were selected? Come on, some basic science please!
At any rate that's not an economic model involving real world data. It's just a poll on website that 40 people responded to.
And I did take Econ 101. And also Econ 201 where they explain the requirements for supply and demand: -Free movement of labour -Infinite number of competing companies -Perfect knowledge -No barriers to entry
In other words, things that are impossible in the real world.
Looking at a supply and demand curve and thinking you know about economics is like reading Act 1 of Romeo and Juliet and thinking you're a PhD in English Literature. Supply and demand is theoretically how things are supposed to work which you learn about in Econ 101. Beyond Econ 101, most of economics is about why it doesn't work like that in the real world what regulations are needed to approximate something vaguely resembling supply and demand. And sometimes a regulation that moves away from supply and demand in one market can get us closer to a reasonable supply and demand approximation in other markets. As I mentioned before, rent control helps the labour market, which is kinda important.
Ok, so you got nothing but appeal to authority, and the "authority" is a decade old poll that 40 people responded to on a janky website?
Apparently this IGM forum is something paid for by the Chicago Stock Exchange. I don't see any indication of the methodology they used to select these particular people. Given the source of their funding, it makes me a little suspicious. $1.5 million to 40 economists to answer an email once a week? Was the Chicago Stock Exchange paying that money for honest answers or were they paying for the answers they wanted to hear?
And they don't seem to do any macroeconomic analysis. Methinks it's just some bullshit meant to influence public opinion. I guess it worked on you.
By research do you mean "google for a decade old site where people have a similar opinion to mine and assume that to be concrete proof"?