Comments on Precedent for highrises

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Housing Costs

I totally agree Bill. Rent control in the form that it exists today makes no sense to me either. Many (maybe most?) of the beneficiaries seem to be middle class or upper middle class folks. I wonder if anyone's studied this. Must have.

But do we do away with it completely or keep it only for those people who earn below a certain level and cannot afford market rates. San Francisco and New York also face the problem of being confined in size due to their location -- most other cities just continue to expand in all directions resulting in that everpresent urban sprawl we see across America that Julie was writing about.

San Francisco still needs teachers and nurses and policemen et al. (and what about all my unemployed friends?! :). Where do they live if there's absolutely no rent control and SF can't really grow unless we grow upwards. There's no parking in SF already but if we build a reasonable number of high rises for people who're willing to give up their cars and take Muni everywhere, maybe we have a solution. There's always Carshare if you need a car (or if Muni's having an especially bad day).

Recently I heard a conspiracy theory that the reason why things are so bad here is because the SF local governement/politicians has no interest in removing rent control nor making it easier for renters to buy the apartments they live in because home ownership makes people more conservative (renters vote differently) which would start to alter the political outcome in the city. I don't know enough about local politics yet to know if there's a grain of truth here or not.

posted by Mihail on August 21, 2002 at 11:12 PM | link to this | reply

Housing Costs

The simplest way to bring housing costs under control is to get rid of most of the interminable bureaucratic red tape involved in building housing stock, and do away with rent control immediately.

The two highest-cost housing urban areas in the country are SF and NYC - both rent controlled.  The lowest-cost major urban areas all share one feature: no rent control.

Yes, it really is that simple.  Rent control equals sky-high housing costs, loss of housing stock, and a ton of other Bad Things.  And I'm goring my own ox here.  I live on Russian Hill, in a seven room flat I moved into fifteen years ago.  I figure I'm about seventy percent below the market price.  (Which, by the way, is another reason rent control doesn't work - in effect, it ends up being a subsidy for yuppies....)

posted by dailypundit on August 21, 2002 at 4:29 PM | link to this | reply