Conservative
A place to discuss pro-conservative stuff
-
Be excellent to each other. Civility, No Racism, No Bigotry, No Slurs, No calls to violences, No namecalling, All that good stuff, follow lemm.ee's rules, follow the rules of your instance, etc.
-
We are a Pro-Conservative forum. Posts must have a clear pro-conservative, or anti left-wing bias. We are interested in promoting conservatism and discussing things that might get ignored elsewhere. All sources are acceptable, however reputable sources with a reputation for factual reporting are preferred.
-
Dissent is allowed in the comments, but try to be constructive; if you do not agree, then provide a reason which is backed up by references or a reasonable alternative interpretation of the provided facts. That means the left wing is welcome to state their opinions, but please keep it in good faith.
A polite request, not a rule, if you feel the need to report a comment, please don't reply to it.
view the rest of the comments
...Except that it's entirely possible that the landlord decides that they'll sit on the property rather than selling, if they would have to sell at a loss.
Freakonomics did an episode or few about rent control, and how it creates disincentives to building more housing. And, because people know that they won't be able to find similar pricing if they move, people that want to move, or would move if they could, don't. Copenhagen is another great example of a city with terrible supply because of the way rental prices are controlled. (Not that rent is controlled at all, but the way that it's implemented.) Rent controls a la New York City seems like it's a good solution, but it ends up working quite badly. You can create and manage other incentives to make sure there is enough housing for everyone, at prices people can afford, but rent control simply doesn't do it.
IMO, the option that appears to be the most effective for controlling rent is to have housing that is publicly owned, and non-profit. When it's done well--and it is done well in NYC, for instance--it creates affordable, high-density housing that's decently maintained. Such housing remains affordable because there's no profit motive involved in the building or maintenance. On the other hand, it can also be done badly, such as with all of the public housing projects that were built in the 60s and 70s in Chicago; then you have horrible, crime-filled slums that are owned by the city, but have zero maintenance.
Obvs. private industry hates public housing, because they can't compete with it. But overall, it's likely the most effective way to ensure adequate housing in urban areas.
Cabrini Green, and the other housing projects in Chicago, seem to have been the exception rather than the rule. There are a fairly large number of housing projects in NYC, and most of them are quite decent, far better now than Cabrini Green and other CHA projects were at their best. Ultimately, the issue seems to be Chicago in particular, rather than housing projects in general. The decline in quality is almost always because of a lack of willingness to do basic maintenance. That was certainly one of the major issues that dragged Cabrini Green down; there were smoke stains on at least two of the buildings due to fires that had burned out apartments, and the city had just boarded those apartments up rather than renovating.
The CHA still has housing projects in Chicago, but they're mostly mixed-income now, with a certain number of units allocated for housing choice vouchers (AKA section 8), with the remainder being market rate; the market-rate units end up covering the maintenance costs for all of the units. The ones I'm most familiar with were built across the street from Cabrini Green, right in the Gold Coast area, and, last I knew, were doing quite well. But, to bring it back around, those were started under Rahm Emmanuel, not one of the Daleys.
That's the same thing when you're talking about public housing. A commercial landlord is operating as a profit-centered business. Gov't is operating as essential services. Gov't shouldn't be making a profit; housing for the poor should be treated as a public good, and something that's paid for through taxation, much like infrastructure and public schooling. So it is fundamentally a lack of will to spend the tax dollars necessary to maintain a thing.
That's a good question, and I don't know. I know that NYC manages to make them work very well, and some other places have not. Public housing works quite well in other countries as well.