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Fangz posted:.... Lmao if you think the only thing holding back the working poor in Detroit or East St. Louis is because they're staying due to rent controls. Man you people have to have brain damage or something. Lisbon, NYC, SF are all places where the jobs go, not the other way around.
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Oct 18, 2014 18:02
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Peven Stan posted:Lmao if you think the only thing holding back the working poor in Detroit or East St. Louis is because they're staying due to rent controls. Man you people have to have brain damage or something. Lisbon, NYC, SF are all places where the jobs go, not the other way around. I already told you this is a strawman. Freaking hell. Rent control does not have to be the 'only thing holding back the working poor' to make legislation that promotes staying in the same geographic location a bad thing that exacerbates inequality. Reducing the financial costs of moving around is something that in general softens one of the main advantages that the rich have over the poor. Jobs go to these places, then jobs leave those places - thus we need to help poor people to follow around changes in the job market. Fangz fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Oct 18, 2014 |
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Oct 18, 2014 18:18
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Phyzzle posted:Hmmm, the term really means "somewhere between working class and upper class". The median average person would be working class, and a neurosurgeon would be middle class. (The definition has become a bit hazy over the years.) quote:Top-paying jobs quote:$250,000 and over 97.68% Congrats! You're listing someone literally from the Top 1% as the sole worker in a household as middle class. By like February 10th, that single worker has made more than most ENTIRE families make in a year. If that is truly your definition, then I don't give a poo poo about that person's ability to earn ADDITIONAL money without risk and most other people don't either. Ignoring making expenses affordable for the median income and poor so that a neurosurgeon can take advantage of a federal program to become richer seems hosed to me.
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Oct 18, 2014 18:21
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So if we filter out all the unprovoked insults from Peven Stan's posts, what's left?Peven Stan posted:Lisbon's rent control is pretty awesome and long time residents pay like 30 euros a month for rent in a hot area. -it will hurt labour mobility, but not that much, because "rent is only one factor." Presumably, given point (1), Peven Stan sees this as a downside, and would prefer a moat-and-drawbridge based solution which can keep everyone out. quote:It also gives the city a distressed and authentically shabby look. Rent control reduces the incentive to maintain buildings in good working order, which is a good thing, because crumbling ruins are in vogue. If we add it all up, the evidence is clear: Peven Stan only lives in Portugal because he couldn't afford an apartment in Gormenghast.
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Oct 18, 2014 18:34
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Goons and sarcasm do not mix.
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Oct 18, 2014 19:02
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Huh, every place that proponents say rent control works actually has very high average rents. Weird.
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Oct 18, 2014 20:03
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Guy DeBorgore posted:-rent control favours the people who already live here over newcomers, which is selfish at best and xenophobic at worst There is a larger argument to be made though people have lived anywhere for a long time, but particularly in cities, tend to care about the general wellbeing of their neighborhoods more and it's a good thing to support to help improve cities as a whole.
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Oct 18, 2014 20:06
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Amused to Death posted:There is a larger argument to be made though people have lived anywhere for a long time, but particularly in cities, tend to care about the general wellbeing of their neighborhoods more Do you have any evidence for that?
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Oct 18, 2014 20:09
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Best Friends posted:Do you have any evidence for that? No but it's not exactly a new or radical position. It was a main point in The Death and Life of Great American Cities when arguments came up for public subsidies of housing and it's a mainstay of new urbanism thought. People who have lived in an area for a long time are going to have an emotional connection to said place, they're probably going to care more about the place assuming a desire to continue to keep living there over someone who has just moved there and only plans to be there for a year or 2 and there's going to be a better chance of longtime residents having developed personal connections with each other. Yeah it's not an absolute, there are plenty of people who have lived in a place for 15 years and don't really care about it and plenty of newcomers who are avid about the state of their community, but I think it's a pretty fair generalization.
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Oct 18, 2014 20:20
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Best Friends posted:Huh, every place that proponents say rent control works actually has very high average rents. Weird. Could it be that suburban fuckholes and flyover country don't have high rents?
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Oct 18, 2014 21:16
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SedanChair posted:Could it be that suburban fuckholes and flyover country don't have high rents? Germany has suburbs and rural areas and they have very high rents in them too. It's completely normal in these suburbs and rural areas for middle class people with gainful employment to be living with their parents into their 30s, due to the very high housing costs. Holding Germany up as a housing policy success story demonstrates the ignorance and the pure "my team right team" essence of the pro-rent control arguments. Which, speaking of, I'm not really sure how raising costs on most people, including most poor people, so that a handful of lucky few can thrive (in disintegrating buildings), became associated with Team Left in the first place. Amused to Death posted:No but it's not exactly a new or radical position. It was a main point in The Death and Life of Great American Cities when arguments came up for public subsidies of housing and it's a mainstay of new urbanism thought. People who have lived in an area for a long time are going to have an emotional connection to said place, they're probably going to care more about the place assuming a desire to continue to keep living there over someone who has just moved there and only plans to be there for a year or 2 and there's going to be a better chance of longtime residents having developed personal connections with each other. Yeah it's not an absolute, there are plenty of people who have lived in a place for 15 years and don't really care about it and plenty of newcomers who are avid about the state of their community, but I think it's a pretty fair generalization. First, that seems like a provable, measurable assertion. But, second, elsewhere in this thread a rent control proponent correctly linked rent control with "charmingly" disintegrating buildings, which I do not believe are well regarded in urban planning circles, or by criminologists. Or architects - when the next major earthquake hits San Fransisco, the housing regulations impeding or disincentivising new construction, including rent control, will have a significant body count associated with them. Third, even if it is true that long time residents care more for their communities, rent control schemes create a situation where you have a whole lot of people resenting each other living right on top of each other, with a handful of long time residents paying very little, most long time residents pay more, and most new residents being rich enough to pay the extreme premium to afford what little new construction there is. I am skeptical that situation leads to positive, deep communities. Best Friends fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Oct 18, 2014 |
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Oct 18, 2014 22:07
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Best Friends posted:Huh, every place that proponents say rent control works actually has very high average rents. Weird. Huh, every place where proponents say food stamps work actually has very high poverty rates. Weird.
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Oct 18, 2014 23:11
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on the left posted:People living in the wealthiest cities for the longest time should rightfully be given preferential treatment and abnormally cheap rent instead of outsiders from economically depressed areas, this is a good and equitable use of government power that leftists can get behind. Why? I guess this group of poor people is arbitrarily more important than this other group? Is this a joke post and I'm just not getting it?
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Oct 18, 2014 23:32
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Amused to Death posted:There is a larger argument to be made though people have lived anywhere for a long time, but particularly in cities, tend to care about the general wellbeing of their neighborhoods more and it's a good thing to support to help improve cities as a whole. Okay, but this applies equally well to middle and upper class people as the poor. To me this seems like just as much an argument to fill cities with middle class white people and keep them there for a while SedanChair posted:Could it be that suburban fuckholes and flyover country don't have high rents? AHA, we have the real answer. Rent control is necessary because we can't condemn people to living in Flyover Country, AKA outside the NYC or SF city limits icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Oct 18, 2014 |
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Oct 18, 2014 23:35
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OwlBot 2000 posted:Huh, every place where proponents say food stamps work actually has very high poverty rates. Weird. No, there are food assistance programs in a number of countries with low poverty rates. If anything the correlation is negative.
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Oct 18, 2014 23:53
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Best Friends posted:No, there are food assistance programs in a number of countries with low poverty rates. If anything the correlation is negative. Look at neighborhoods with the highest rates of food stamp usage, and tell me whether those are poor or rich neighborhoods.
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Oct 19, 2014 00:36
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OwlBot 2000 posted:Look at neighborhoods with the highest rates of food stamp usage, and tell me whether those are poor or rich neighborhoods. This is so loving stupid I don't even know where to start. There are many places that are expensive that don't have rent control. Best Friends fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Oct 19, 2014 |
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Oct 19, 2014 00:38
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You're just being deliberately obtuse now. Edit: oh I should have quoted you, you changed it around.
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Oct 19, 2014 00:44
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OwlBot 2000 posted:You're just being deliberately obtuse now. Yes I missed it the first time because I assumed your point had at least some merit on some level, even if mistaken, then I realized that no you are basically just going "nuh uh," which is not surprising, because there literally are zero evidence based arguments for rent control from the standpoint of improving the lives most people affected.
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Oct 19, 2014 00:49
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"Huh, every place that proponents say rent control works actually has very high average rents. Weird." You don't discredit rent control by saying, "hey, these cities are still really expensive" any more than you discredit food stamps by saying, "the neighborhoods where people use food stamps are still very poor". If you want to make the case that food stamps don't work, you'd need to show that people using them wouldn't be even poorer without them. If you want to show rent control doesn't work you need to do more than say Germany and SF are still expensive, you must show that they wouldn't be even more expensive without rent control. You may in fact be able to do so, but saying "a city where people are trying to control rents is still expensive" is facile reasoning. No poo poo, you don't use rent control in inexpensive cities. I'm not saying your conclusion is necessarily wrong, just that your argument is terrible.
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Oct 19, 2014 00:57
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icantfindaname posted:AHA, we have the real answer. Rent control is necessary because we can't condemn people to living in Flyover Country, AKA outside the NYC or SF city limits So a situation where access to public transportation and culture are the privileges of the wealthy is better than dealing with problems caused by rent control? I am not saying that rent control is the cure the for the problems of gentrification, that has been very well established, but gentrification is not a good thing by any stretch.
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Oct 19, 2014 00:57
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OwlBot 2000 posted:"Huh, every place that proponents say rent control works actually has very high average rents. Weird." There are many studies on rent control, and holding Germany up as any sort of success story is insane because the housing situation in Germany is in fact, bad. For comparison, food stamps actually keep people from starving.
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Oct 19, 2014 00:58
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Best Friends posted:There are many studies on rent control, and holding Germany up as any sort of success story is insane because the housing situation in Germany is in fact, bad. And the question is bad compared to what? Bad compared to other countries with different urban geographies, or bad compared to how Germany would be without rent control? The second question is the only relevant one, and you probably can find the answer to that. Again, I'm not disagreeing with your conclusions (I'm still exploring the topic), but I do think your line of reasoning is really poor.
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Oct 19, 2014 01:03
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OwlBot 2000 posted:And the question is bad compared to what? Bad compared to other countries with different urban geographies, or bad compared to how Germany would be without rent control? The second question is the only relevant one, and you probably can find the answer to that. Again, I'm not disagreeing with your conclusions (I'm still exploring the topic), but I do think your line of reasoning is really poor. Obviously there is not a negative Germany we can compare, but there are many different countries. SedanChair noted that rent controlled cities are hard to compare to suburbs or rural areas. Germany has all three of those things, has had rent control laws and other similar adverse regulations for a very long time, and also has rents in the most rural areas that compare with Los Angeles. In rural America this is not the case. The economics of rent control are fairly unanimous. It's about as basic to economic theory as gravity is to physics. Here is liberal hero and author of a economics textbook Paul Krugman on the topic: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/07/opinion/reckonings-a-rent-affair.html quote:The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go -- and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out -- what yesterday's article oddly described as ''free-market horror stories'' -- and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable.
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Oct 19, 2014 01:07
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icantfindaname posted:AHA, we have the real answer. Rent control is necessary because we can't condemn people to living in Flyover Country, AKA outside the NYC or SF city limits People don't want to condemn themselves to living there, they want to live in cities. They move there to get jobs.
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Oct 19, 2014 01:23
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OwlBot 2000 posted:If you're going to quote polls of mainstream economists, let's find out what other opinions are popular: So now we're at "economics is a lie, you love Reagan!" Awesome. Also, none of those are at 93%. Rent control raising average costs of rent is pretty much exactly the equivalent of "gravity exists" so have fun arguing the contrary.
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Oct 19, 2014 01:39
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OwlBot 2000 posted:If you're going to quote polls of mainstream economists, let's find out what other opinions are popular: Hmm it seems like fully 60% of economists did not know what to make of that question, even though viewed as a naive hypothetical (what would happen if we kept spending the same, but removed less in taxes?) it's trivially true. OwlBot 2000 posted:Public school students would receive a higher quality education if they all had the option of taking the government money currently being spent on their own education and turning that money into vouchers that they could use towards covering the costs of any private school or public school of their choice (e.g. charter schools). Economists coming down on both sides of a complex question with no certain answer? 45% of respondents unsure? What a bunch of lockstep neoliberal shills amirite? OwlBot 2000 posted:Connecticut should pass its Senate Bill 60, which states... During a “severe weather event emergency, no person within the chain of distribution of consumer goods and services shall sell or offer to sell consumer goods or services for a price that is unconscionably excessive." Hmm. A bill that at best is too vague to enforce and at worst could lead to shortages during severe weather conditions? Clearly this result shows the profession of economics is morally bankrupt. OwlBot 2000 posted:Let's cite specific studies instead of appealing to neoliberal received doctrine. Let's not do this for one thread, maybe? If standard econ is wrong about rent control why don't you show why it's wrong instead of dismissing it as neoliberalism without actually rebutting anything? If you're right it ought to be pretty easy.
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Oct 19, 2014 01:49
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OwlBot 2000 posted:Yikes. And after 2008, I don't know how seriously you should take the neoclassical synthesis Econ 101 textbooks which often treat the Laffer Curve as something other than a joke, argue that minimum wages and unions kill economies, and promote trickle-down garbage that has been thoroughly discredited. Neoclassical synthesis Econ 101 textbooks were never meant to be taken seriously in the first place.
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Oct 19, 2014 02:08
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Peven Stan posted:Fortunately for politicians (and unfortunate for the aspergers ridden economics discipline) rent is only one factor in why people move to or away from a particular city. Almost like real life is not full of frictionless surfaces???? For sure rent is just one factor among many in where people decide to live. It's like one of the top 1-3 reasons for most people though, and if getting an equivalent housing somewhere else is going to cost $1000/month more than where I'm living now because I won the vaginal lottery on where I was born I might just decide to stay in the same place forever. Typo fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Oct 19, 2014 |
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Oct 19, 2014 02:13
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OwlBot 2000 posted:If you're going to quote polls of mainstream economists, let's find out what other opinions are popular: It's stuff like this why it's so difficult to take D&D leftists seriously. People in this very thread have cited plenty of reasons other than "economists say so" in arguing against rent control, and they are good and valid reasons, and yet the pro-rent control side seems to be spouting "well mainstream economists agree with this so it must be wrong because 2008" line of argument. The only conclusion you can really make is that rent control sounds ideological appealing to you and you don't care about practicalities because socialism.
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Oct 19, 2014 02:16
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side_burned posted:So a situation where access to public transportation and culture are the privileges of the wealthy is better than dealing with problems caused by rent control? So once again we have "the real solution is to build out public transportation, but I'm going to argue for this other, shittier solution, because reasons"
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Oct 19, 2014 02:18
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Typo posted:It's stuff like this why it's so difficult to take D&D leftists seriously. I'm actually not arguing for rent control right now, just against some bad arguments in opposition to it. The record of what happens when you remove rent controls is pretty mixed, as you can see in Boston 1993-present: higher rents for low wage people, more homelessness, increased construction of complexes (but many for high-end renters), and better maintenance, showing that both sides have a point. People have made good arguments against rent control in this thread, but "look at what my econ textbook says" is not one of them. And as far as socialism, I wouldn't be talking about rent control at all but mass construction of modern, responsive, state of the art public housing as happened in Sweden in the 60s and 70s. That's my preference, by far. Rent control is a really blunt, often misapplied tool for not letting neighborhoods get torn apart by market fluctuations.
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Oct 19, 2014 02:24
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OwlBot 2000 posted:I'm actually not arguing for rent control right now, just against some bad arguments in opposition to it. The record of what happens when you remove rent controls is pretty mixed, as you can see in Boston 1993-present: higher rents for low wage people, more homelessness, increased construction of complexes (but many for high-end renters), and better maintenance, showing that both sides have a point. People have made good arguments against rent control in this thread, but "look at what my econ textbook says" is not one of them. Didn't Britain tried public housing in that period as well and it turned into ghettos?
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Oct 19, 2014 02:29
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Well, rent controlled housing also tends to turn into ghettos, so that's not necessarily an argument. Ghettoization has more to do with a lack of jobs available and poor layout. Scandanavian public housing is pretty much the gold standard. Public housing does seem to be the best solution to ensuring quality housing for the poor
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Oct 19, 2014 02:42
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Scandinavian public housing was really world-class up until the 80s and 90s when the SAP lost power and neoliberal housing policies were implemented.
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Oct 19, 2014 02:45
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I'll ask a bit in the UK megathread about Thatcher's impact on council houses, "right to buy", making council housing something exclusively for the poorest of the poor rather than 1/3 of the population, etc. to answer your question, Typo.
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Oct 19, 2014 02:56
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OwlBot 2000 posted:I'll ask a bit in the UK megathread about Thatcher's impact on council houses, "right to buy", making council housing something exclusively for the poorest of the poor rather than 1/3 of the population, etc. to answer your question, Typo. Thank you, I would genuinely be interested in an answer.
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Oct 19, 2014 03:03
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OwlBot 2000 posted:I'm actually not arguing for rent control right now, just against some bad arguments in opposition to it. The record of what happens when you remove rent controls is pretty mixed, as you can see in Boston 1993-present: higher rents for low wage people, more homelessness, increased construction of complexes (but many for high-end renters), and better maintenance, showing that both sides have a point. The Boston rental market has not stayed constant since 1993. Everything you cite is exactly what one would expect from a market showing increased demand. Edit: oh no that sounds just like what an Econ textbook would say. Let's then put our pants on our heads and blame bogeymen instead. Or maybe it's magic. Evil magic! Best Friends fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Oct 19, 2014 |
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Oct 19, 2014 03:11
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OwlBot 2000 posted:If you're going to quote polls of mainstream economists, let's find out what other opinions are popular: 1. That is because the question is proposing a tax cut *without* a spending cut. A tax cut is a direct, albeit inefficient, stimulus measure. The core point is that economists agree, because economists think increasing the deficit is not as bad as the media think, and while a tax cut fueled boom might lead to a bust down the line, it would not be within 5 years, probably. I will note that NOT A SINGLE economist agreed with part B of the question - the Laffer curve argument that lower taxes increases government revenue. 2. I don't know enough about the US public schools system to comment. It might well be the case that the current system is sufficiently broken that vouchers would be am improvement in the short term. 3. Economists think price controls are dumb, news at 11. Especially during a severe weather emergency where you are not going to be able to spare law enforcement to police people for selling their flatscreen tvs too expensively. Despite your cherry picking, these opinions seem pretty reasonable to me.
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Oct 19, 2014 03:50
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