If you’ve ever had the misfortune of being around liberals talking about housing policies, you’ll know they just LOVE rent control. They think it’s the solution to all our housing problems because they LOVE the government taking control of stuff and eroding the free market.
They also believe that “gentrification” is a terrible thing – that’s when a neighborhood begins to improve and bring in more affluent denizens while unfortunately driving out less affluent previous denizens.
Well guess what – economists now say that rent control actually makes gentrification WORSE in San Francisco!
Stanford economists Rebecca Diamond and Tim McQuade, who published their findings last month, said occupants of rent-controlled apartments built before 1980 are 20 percent more likely to stay than other renters.
It might seem that rent-control policies, therefore, act as a bastion against gentrification, by allowing and encouraging long-term residents to stay, but the researchers say that’s not exactly the case.
“Rent control exacerbates the housing shortage by pushing landlords to remove supply of rental housing,” Diamond told SFGATE.
She explained that the expansion of rent control “would likely benefit current tenants, especially older ones who likely do not need to move very often,” but in the long term, “the rental market will make all rents even more expensive by causing landlords to remove supply.”
In 1994, San Francisco residents voted to expand rent-control policies and grant certain protections to renters in pre-1980 apartments. Some landlords subject to the initiative responded by converting their holdings into condos and single-family homes, or redeveloping the buildings to exempt them from rent control, said researchers, who added that this reduced the city’s rental housing supply by 15 percent and led to a 7-percent citywide rent increase.
That is hilarious.
SO once again, liberals cause the problems they whine about with their own liberal policies. Who could have predicted that?! Oh, every single conservative who understands the free market.*
*to be fair, there are precious few of us left, but still.