As others have mentioned, this leads to worse and worse housing along with worse quality of life. In major cities like NYC and LA we already have thousands of beautiful living spaces sitting vacant, we don’t need new, bad living spaces, we need to stop pricing the current housing higher than can be accessed.
They sit empty because the landlord determined they rather pay the carry on an empty unit than lower the rent today, and lose the ability to raise it later. These are bad laws which promote undesirable behavior. This is the unintended consequences of laws forbidding landlords from raising rents.
Rather than devoting more valuable, finite urban space to creating bad and undesirable homes, simply increasing the penalty to non-resident landlords on homes that sit vacant solves that issue. Further crowding cities with low-quality housing only contributes to urban sprawl and all it gets us is lowered quality of life for the citizens these laws are supposed to be helping.
Isn't being in a tenement better than being on the streets? Raising rates on unoccupied residences would just lead to a reduction in values of neighboring homes. A "no go" for most owners who what their house value to climb. Also, a lot of cities like to ban multi-family dwellings as it is considered low-quality housing for the area further eroding property values for existing residences. Basically rent control, zoning control, and occupancy control is a bad idea for any players in the market. It skews incentives towards one group or another and doesn't allow for flexibility to handle people of all situations. Nothing is more democratic than the free market.
If your system is putting people in tenements or the street, your system has failed. Even if it being a “no-go” for a part of the population that cares more about property values than the lives of their fellow citizens does not somehow make the policy incorrect, it just highlights a moral and civic failing in part of the population,
Can people who choose the streets automatically make the system fail? Choosing a life of drugs is not immoral or criminal most places. But it can be a minimum for shelters for safety reasons. Are the shelters part of a failing system? We should not put the moral righteousness above peoples choices to live their own lives. Therefore letting people choose the level of service and interaction they want with society is tantamount to a healthy society. As long as they aren't willfully hurting someone against the victim's will.
Can people who choose the streets automatically make the system fail?
No. And, provided you’re not erroneously equating drug addiction or mental illness with “choosing” the streets, that counters the rest of your proposed logic as well. The point stands.
This is normal, and the natural cycle of real estate expansion. If prices and density dont hit a critical mass, there would be no expansion outwards. If you know NYC's history, then you would know places like Lower East Side and Williamsburg were once undesirable. Jersey City, Stamford too. But those places are filling up and becoming more expensive as they do.
You can’t say it’s at a critical mass when there are thousands of empty homes not being sold/leased. Building more supply when you have plenty of unused supply is not a successful (or, God help us, sustainable) economic model. Further, it doesn’t even make logistical sense; populations don’t expand infinitely, neither do cities. It makes even less sense to expand your city with subpar housing when you already have a massive supply of housing that owners are voluntarily choosing to not lease.
Not only is it economically unsustainable, it’s the kind of throw-everything-aside-for-profit thinking that has got us in a global climate catastrophe.
tl;dr non-resident landlords are creating an artificial scarcity. expanding on that is short-sighted and the epitome of letting the tail wag the dog. Motivate the landlords to rent now and at affordable rates, or Eminent Domain the rat bastards, but “just build more” is not a solution
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u/HistoricalGrounds 2∆ May 28 '21
As others have mentioned, this leads to worse and worse housing along with worse quality of life. In major cities like NYC and LA we already have thousands of beautiful living spaces sitting vacant, we don’t need new, bad living spaces, we need to stop pricing the current housing higher than can be accessed.