Kinda hard to have sympathy for people looking to repeat the same problems of the past and having learned nothing from the past lessons.
Ignorance of economics is not supposed to be an excuse.
The Detroit News: As housing prices surge, rent control is back on the ballot
Because limiting the income landlords receive on their rentals to -- under many of the proposals and laws already passed and described in the article -- below even the rate of inflation, is really going to encourage landlords to provide new, more, and better housing stock.
Yes there are ore tenant voters than landlord voters which is how this stuff gets through, but having landlords lose money on every tenant is hardly going to encourage them to keep renting properties out - they will not makee up the loss in volume.
It's the same stupid progressive magical thinking, using other people's money (in this case landlords) to pay for their fever-dreams.
While one might sympathize with tenants facing higher rents in very desirable areas to live as depicted in the article, with many of those areas limiting housing development and supply by local ordinance, what exactly did they expect?
Combine:
a) high inflation with and the cost of everything from utilities to repair materials and labor costs going up;
b) very high demand for rental space by people with Biden bucks in their pockets bidding up the rent and investment companies (often Biden and Dem contributors and promoters of ESG theories) looking for high return; and
c) then throw in the reality of landlords getting hosed for two years with the CDC allowing tenants to live in rental units without having to pay rent for two years with landlords being unable to evict them and getting stuck eating the costs.
Put all that together and you get the current big increase in rental costs, courtesy of misguided progressive economic policy.
Adding yet another progressive misguided economic policy of rent control to try to fix the prior progressive misguided economic policy brought to you by the same people is not going to make it any better.
2 comments:
If the market says a unit is worth $x and the compounding effect over time means that a long-time renter is paying half that amount, then he can make a tidy profit by moving back in with his mother, paying the $x/2 to the landlord and subletting the unit for $x...pocketing the difference.
Or he can sublet half of the unit and the rent he receives from the sub-tenant will pay his entire rent meaning he lives in his half rent-free.
Lots of games get played.
The housing stock depreciates.
The landlord still must maintain the property, which costs continue to increase for them. I was 19 and had been pouring steel for a year, and making what to me was a lot of money, and pissing it away, when I bought a house, on a land contract.
I was living with my parents, and rented the house out, to make the payments, so I was a landlord. It was not a bad experience, although it was not a very long time, before I ended up living there, getting married about a year later.
I would not want to do it on a large scale though. For some people, such as a friend of mine, who started doing the same thing I did, about 4 years earlier, he kept doing it, and eventually became a realtor, becoming a very large name on this side of the state. I think it takes an entrepeneur type to do something like that.
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