I dont understand what the argument of this article is. As someone who has tried to maintain a blue collar job in a large city (im an engine mechanic)
Its nearly impossible to live anywhere near your job without rent control.
It was good work and good pay, but spending 65% of it on rent? what incentive do i have to stay when the median home price is a million dollars or more? the thing this article does not take into account is the fact that without rent control or some form of affordable housing, that "amazing city" you live in grinds to a halt pretty fast.
Try living in a city where the bus system never sees regular maintenance because the motor pool is 2 hours away. broken down garbage trucks just sit in the road because wrecker crews cant afford to live anywhere near the metropolis. Ambulances and fire trucks might, or might not, make it to a destination because the fleet techs with diesel certification like myself dont live in your city.
pipefitters and machinists need a place in your city if you want clean healthy water and sewage service. And the next time a drunk backs over a telephone pole, you're going to need a lineman or three to fix it.
When there is high demand for a product, including housing, the market has to respond. High prices attract investment in more housing, usually denser housing. Rent Control prevents the market signals from working. There is no incentive to construct more housing because its not worth it.
Additionally, if blue collar jobs can't be filled because its not worth the pay+commute, then either wages have to raise or these go undone.
If the market isn't allowed to operate, then you can't expect these systems to work.
the problem is there is market failure. The Housing Asset is more valuable as a financial instrument than the actual utility it provides. This is why you see homes sitting empty in Manhattan.
The market is failing because of the distortions introduced by things like mortgage tax deduction, 30-year term mortgages, restrictions on new housing, etc.
There are gov't policies that make it much easier to get money to purchase a home. 30 year mortgages were created by the gov't which locks in low payments. Mortgage tax deduction lowers the effective cost of a mortgage. Easier to get money to buy a home -> price of homes go up.
Normally when prices go up, supplier (homebuilders) have an incentive to produce more housing, countering the increase in price. However, many cities (SF is a great example) make it very hard to build new housing. Restriction on supply with increasing demand -> price of homes go up.
> Rent Control prevents the market signals from working.
Rent control is also unfair, if some people (selected how?) are entitled to it and other people not entitled.
I am against rent controls unless it is a right for all. By this I mean that anyone[1] living in a city can go to the local authority and say "I want a rent-controlled flat" and the local authority would be legally entitled to let them one, building new houses where necessary. This would mean the local authority would be required to act on market signals of people wanting rent-controlled housing.
1: with maybe a few qualifications like residence in that city for a year, citizenship, etc.
Rent control, at least in San Francisco, applies to buildings/units of a certain type. It is not given to people or applied for. You get it automatically if you live in a unit that qualifies.
So it is a right for all... just live in a building that qualifies. Most older buildings already do, so rent control is already applied to the cheapest units (again, in SF)
You don’t want to wreck individual lives just because you want efficient price-finding. Rent control that protects tenants from super-nominal price increases works fine in the presence of abundant supply and liquidity. You can see how successful this can be in places like Belgium where standard lease is rent controlled for nine years with an option for additional nine years. This is enough time for a family to become established and raise children without being sacrificed on the alter of market signals. It is the kind of policy you get when you view tenants as people rather than revenue sources.
Why does an increase in rent wreck people's lives?
Also what does super nominal pricing mean?
And anyone can sign a lease for 9 years. But the vast majority of tenants do not want to make a commitment for that long.
And they could also sign a lease with an option to renew for up to a number of years similar to a commerical lease. But again no-tenant wants to pay the option cost.
Leases aren't offered with such flexibility in markets where the supply of available housing is small. I'm also interpreting "available" to mean available at a resident's income level, i.e. overlapping with "affordable." You sign the lease that's offered, or it goes to next candidate tenant.
Are individual lives ruined by having to move? I understand the pros and cons of rent control and there are valid arguments on both sides, but it doesn't sound like people's lives are being ruined. IMO, a lot of political and cultural tension comes from tying our identity to a piece of land. Maybe if we moved around more often we might be more tolerant of new cultures and people?
It does. I know several kids who suffered severe depression because they had to move far away several times and had no real friend, no feeling of belonging, no home.
This attitude is why American cities aren’t real places. Yes, being forced to move far away, as in the Bay Area where we evict people from Oakland and expect them to live in Antoich, is highly disruptive to lives. It severs friendships, increases travel, and all manner of negative effects.
"san francisco". "new development". hahaha. you don't need to worry about no rent control if you don't allow any new developments. guy_tapping_temple.gif
"I dont understand what the argument of this article is. As someone who has tried to maintain a blue collar job in a large city (im an engine mechanic) Its nearly impossible to live anywhere near your job without rent control."
Although I am not an economist, I believe that the point of the article (and of the economic consensus from both right-leaning and left-leaning economists) is that the affordability issues you cite are actually worse now than if there had not been rent control.
Expanding on that ... rational landlords are going to:
"front-load rent hikes, select tenants likely to stay for short periods, or provide poor service during tenancies if underlying market rents are rising rapidly. At worst, tenancy rent controls would increase overall market rents by raising risks to landlords and reducing investment in new stock, particularly if the controls are perceived as a precursor of more-onerous regulation."
I think part of the confusion is that, other than the misaligned incentives and general bad behavior of landlords, someone who actually receives a rent-controlled unit is definitely better off than those who do not. If you win that little mini-lottery, you've got a definite gain. However, the overall market for rental housing - and any new entrants to the rental market - are made worse off.
If you successfully converted the entire rental market to rent-controlled units, the market would respond:
"That's because landlords confronted with the regulation are incentivized to convert properties to other, higher-return uses. Developers, meanwhile, find new rentable accommodations less profitable to build, compounding the scarcity-of-supply problem that often drives high rental prices in the first place."
I think the point of the article is that rent control, although it may help a select few people, generally decreases the supply of housing, so is actually bad if your goal is to create more housing at an affordable price.
nah man, this argument gets torn apart because "rent control doesn't apply to new developments so it's neutral on new development"
What it does is it takes rental units off the market because being faced with the maintenance risk of 5 or 20 year or however long the tenant stays fixed income vs. convert it to owner-occupied housing and take a large payout now, landlords often choose to ellis up the place.
And if they don't remove rental stock, then they're incentivized to provide shittier service -- delay repairs, delay upkeep, ignore tenant requests -- to encourage the rent-controlled tenant to move elsewhere so they can reset their price.
>this argument gets torn apart because "rent control doesn't apply to new developments so it's neutral on new development"
Most implementations of rent control make it difficult to redevelop those properties into higher density housing. After all, if you could remove people from those units to redevelop, rent control wouldn't be worth much. This reduces total housing available which drives up prices elsewhere. Rent control is always a massive wealth transfer to a couple of winners from a massive number of losers.
That depends almost entirely on what kind of rent control gets implemented.
If you only ever rent control 100 units, then yeah, it should only affect the owners of those units. You might have some other problems with it, it incentivizes slumlording, but it shouldn't be a systematic disincentive to build housing.
But that also only helps 100 people. If you expand rent control onto more existing properties or mandate that new units be built under rent control (or even just have credible candidates talking about doing that), it's a disincentive to anyone looking at offering rental properties - especially cheap rental properties, which are much more likely to become a net loss as prices rise.
Firstly, what you are describing is nothing short of a disaster for society. It’s not just SF either - many urban centers are plagued by this problem.
Unfortunately, if as a society we insist on continuing to concentrate, we have to build denser housing. SF is very behind the building needs, as are most West Coast cities.
Rent control has made the situation a lot worse in Santa Monica because you have a lot of old single story multifamily housing that cannot be redeveloped because it’s too expensive to buy out the existing tenants and the tenants have zero incentive to agree to a buyout. This locks out most development.
In Santa Monica, we could literally triple the density within existing laws, but this will not happen because of rent control laws.
You left out the strongly anti-development electorate in Santa Monica. There was a measure on the ballot last year to restrict all development over 32 feet to require a city-wide vote. It was only narrowly defeated.
I'm starting to shift more and more to the idea that it's no one's right to live in a specific place. Nobody owes you development. People who live in a city are just exercising their own right to fight to preserve something about it that others seek to take away.
In Boston, for example, I would love cheaper places to live in the city, but there's no way I'd want to see the historic brownstone neighborhoods demolished. If they were, my desire to live in Boston would quickly drop. Much of that architecture is what makes the city what it is. The people there who lived through the West End's transformation realized they didn't want that to continue, and their attitudes toward development quickly shifted. Everyone knows what Manhattan is like and not everyone wants to live in such an environment.
In the end, someone will live there. Someone will work there. Someone will open businesses to serve the residents. Someone will need to employ blue collar workers, and blue collar workers will need the means to get to their job from a reasonable distance.
Some residents don't want to turn their neighborhoods into high rises and traffic nightmares. I don't blame them any more than I blame workers for wanting to be able to live near work and not spend 60% of their income on rent.
And frankly these discussions on HN always dance around the special protected class of persion - people who use urban real estate as an investment vehicle slash secondary home. Tax them harder, make vacant buildings less attractive to own and harder to profit on. Clamp down on unlicensed vacation rentals. Force them to release the property or adjust rents so that people can afford to live there. More units will open up, prices will drop, and no one has to see their street turned into a nightmare of ubers in the shadow of a generic high-rise.
> And frankly these discussions on HN always dance around the special protected class of persion - people who use urban real estate as an investment vehicle slash secondary home.
I think a lot of these discussions are inspired by California (SF in particular) where the average homeowner is this person and votes in their financial interests -- to preserve (at all costs) neighborhoods that rarely have the historical cache of Boston brownstones.
Alternatively - if all the engine mechanics decided they could no longer afford to live in the city and moved away, what do you think would happen to engine mechanic wages?
Thank you. The main way people are looking at this article is from the housing cost side and less from the wages side.
If your community prices out certain essential services then those providing the service will leave, raising the price of that service, thereby ensuring that those that stay (or come back after the price changes) can make a living, can have a wage that allows them to pay for housing in the city.
Rent control distorts this type of adjustment, indirectly providing a subsidy that benefits those that could afford to pay market rate for a service by allowing those that provide the service to live below market rate and thus charge less.
> If your community prices out certain essential services then those providing the service will leave, raising the price of that service, thereby ensuring that those that stay (or come back after the price changes) can make a living, can have a wage that allows them to pay for housing in the city.
Or, more likely, the people providing those services will not actually be paid enough to live in the community, but instead forced endure grueling commutes and other practices that lower their quality of life if they want to remain employed.
If they don’t actually move away (and find work locally), then they just trade rent $ for a lower net hourly wage (hours worked + commute time), perhaps to their benefit - changing jobs is not frictionless, but it’s not like it’s a bad economy
Assuming that did happen - which I doubt - what's so wrong with that? Presumably they're only willing to commute 3 hours because they feel they're getting a better deal than what they could get locally? Why would you force them to choose what they consider a worse job?
Nothing wrong with it per se. The externalities of it are a disaster, though: carbon depletion and pollution, traffic congestion, traffic related injuries and death, feeding the automotive industrial beast, less time for family and community commitments, less sense of belonging, etc etc...
> As someone who has tried to maintain a blue collar job in a large city (im an engine mechanic)
What about the new blue collars who enter this city later than you? Rent control doesn't help lower rent for them, but arguably increases it by depressing supply.
> I dont understand what the argument of this article is. As someone who has tried to maintain a blue collar job in a large city (im an engine mechanic) Its nearly impossible to live anywhere near your job without rent control.
Therein lies the problem. Rent control is not the only way to make housing affordable to low-income people. It's not the most efficient or effective way, either.
But it persists, because politically it's an easy concept (even if it's an ineffective one), and it also creates a stable voting bloc that will protect it, even if they don't actually need the rent control[0].
[0] In most places, rent control isn't means-tested, so you can end up with incredibly wealthy people living in very valuable properties for next to nothing. Ed Koch, the former mayor of NYC with a net worth of about $10 million, died living in a multimillion dollar penthouse apartment that he rented for $300/month, because the apartment was subject to rent control.
It persists because it's the only remotely affordable housing positive legislation that appeals to both renters _and_ homeowners.
New market-rate development that would keep pace with demand is consintently zoned and voted out by the electorate. It's an issue in every city in CA for sure.
> It persists because it's the only remotely affordable housing positive legislation that appeals to both renters _and_ homeowners.
It's really not at all, and I don't know where you get the idea that rent control appeals to homeowners (homeowners hate it!).
> New market-rate development that would keep pace with demand is consintently zoned and voted out by the electorate. It's an issue in every city in CA for sure.
There are plenty of other programs which are much more effective. In California, no, but that's not the only place to look for examples.
Well, I guess its more accurate to say it's the only thing that homeowners will even tolerate -- they do in my city. It's the landlords that hate it, but fortunately they don't get a lot of sympathy in my town's electorate.
Now if you talk zoning and granting permits, that's where the hate really begins.
And yes, I'm referring to CA where the housing-as-investment vehicle has distorting things more than most other places.
Rather than imposing arbitrary price caps which cause shortages, another alternative would be for blue collar workers to band together and demand higher wages so that they can afford market rate housing. Union strikes do work. After a couple months without buses, garbage pickup, or emergency services I suspect urbanites would be willing to pay higher taxes in order to give mechanics a living wage.
What would be better is if anyone who wanted to live in the city could afford a reasonably priced dwelling. Rent control inadvertently harms that, turning the city into a two tiered system of the hyper-rich who can afford market rate, and those who serve them, who either have to win the rent control lottery or win the subsidized housing lottery.
That's not a realistic goal for geographically constrained cities. Everyone who wants to can't live in New York or San Francisco. There are limits to density while still preserving a reasonable quality of life.
For the record, rent subsidies are the thing that actually accomplishes the thing that rent control tries to do, but is often a much harder sell because the costs are much more upfront compared to something like rent control.
It doesn't accomplish anything except paying the land lord more money.
If the same tenant gets to stay, it doesn't increase housing availability. And in fact, house prices up because the market is propped up higher by subsidies.
If the same tenant is priced out, it doesn't protect the renter.
> It doesn't accomplish anything except paying the land lord more money.
well yes this is the idea, and then more people want to be land lords to get the sweet sweet rent subsidy money, which ideally would then cause more homes to be built because of all the money coming in as rent, and which would then cause rents to fall.
Compare to absolute rent control (i.e. there is a global cap on rents), now landlords get less money, they don't have any incentive to invest in their property because they can't get any money out of it, nobody wants to get into the landlord business because its hard to make any money in it so there isn't any incentive to build new apartments.
Or compare this to the rent control where you aren't allowed to raise rents on specific tenants. If you have an apartment now, congrats you have a deal, as long as you never have to move in which case you are screwed. Also woe to anyone new to the market because you're rent is going to be higher in order to subsidize the people that the people that have been there forever.
Rental subsidies increase incentives to build new buildings and rentable stock.
But of course once you talk about transferring income to the less fortunate why ear mark it for rent? Why not let them choose to spend it how they want?
nany rent control laws only limit the possibility for the landlords to increase the rent on existing contracts. Their main objective is to avoid that tenants be “priced out” of their own apartment and forcibly evicted. Considering the large negative externalities of evictions, there are good reasons to argue that some form of rent control is good for the society at large, even if it causes some distortion in the real estate market.
On the other hand, to provide _new_ affordable housing the only long term solution is an increase in the stock of buildings available for rent.
Aren’t the costs of evictions borne primarily by the two parties? I’m not saying there are no externalities, but that’s not the same as "evictions are expensive", and you have to weigh them against the costs of the alternative.
For example the tenant has to take days off work and use them for moving (or for court hearings) instead of productive work. The government has to pay the judges, or the police for a forced eviction. Legal clinics use their scarce time. The tenant may become homeless (homelessness is often considered as an issue with strong negative externalities).
"rental contracts ending" is a cute way of saying "evictions" and a way that allows you to mentally distance yourself from the messy gooey people problems that arise -- grandma getting thrown out on the street, communities being disrupted, etc.
I'm generally against rent control, but I still acknowledge that housing is more than a technical business contract.
It IS exactly just that to some people, but if you refuse to acknowledge the people on the other end, the only people you're going to bring to your side are your buddies at the country club.
Eviction is a very specific legal process which is different than a rental contract ending. It's what happens if I don't vacate a property once the rental contract ends.
Legal expenses, if the eviction sees court challenge. Especially if any claims of discrimination are sustained against the landlord. Also, labor cost of emptying the unit, repair/cleaning to make the unit ready for a new tenant, etc. Folks being evicted usually aren't in a cheery mode about it, so stuff might get broken.
The whole debate about rent control drives me nuts. It's framed as callous libertarians vs compassionate progressives. But the debate conflates means and ends in an obvious way that no one ever seems to notice.
If you are concerned about the ability of lower-income people to afford housing, then give them a rent subsidy! As a mechanism, this is superior in just about every way. It doesn't suppress housing supply, and it can be means-tested so that high income people aren't occupying rent-controlled apartments (which happens all the time now). It also gives low income people the freedom to move without losing their rent controlled status.
Subsidies just increase the market price of the properties. The subsidy will be sucked up by the landlord, which of course leads to rent control. Which provides disincentives on capital improvements.
This is similar to the way that student loans have resulted in higher tuition/housing that once again just gets sucked up by the institutions. The recent appeal for "free college" funded by the taxpayer will almost certainly result in increased tuition.
If only we had a simple mechanism that balanced supply and demand. I think there are areas where government regulation is necessary and appropriate (safety, fraud avoidance, pollution, health, etc.) but regulating prices is almost always a failure that leads to an ever expanding Rube Goldberg collection of incentives, subsidies, rules, tax loopholes, and so on that are much worse than just letting prices float naturally.
There are numerous examples of subsidies in the real world that haven't led to price controls. And yes, subsidies distort the market. I'm pretty sure 99% of economists will agree that subsidies are less distortionary than price controls though.
Not a very good one. The author's point that negotiating with each individual tenant is fundamentally the same as negotiating with the landlord so there is no inefficiency is academic garbage. Negotiating separate deals with hundreds of tenants with a strange prisoners dilemma incentive structure is massively more complicated and uncertain in outcome than simply negotiating a price with the owner.
The author's point wasn't that. The point was that the main outcome of rent control was simply to shift the distribution of economic rents. Instead of the landlord capturing all of it, the renter got a large chunk of it.
The article OP linked is about the systemic effect of rent control, which is claimed to be negative for low income renters overall even if it benefits a small group of lucky low income renters in particular.
I would love to see a well argued opposing position, which is why I read your link, but I don't think it really engages with the point about the systemic effect of rent control.
The belief that rent control is counter productive isn't a fringe conservative belief. It's held by economists across the polticial spectrum, and is the closest thing to a consensus opinion in economics.
"This reduction in rental supply likely increased rents in the long-run, leading to a transfer
between future San Francisco renters and renters living in San Francisco in 1994. In addition,
the conversion of existing rental properties to higher-end, owner-occupied condominium
housing ultimately led to a housing stock increasingly directed towards higher income individuals.
In this way, rent control contributed to the gentrification of San Francisco, contrary
to the stated policy goal. Rent control appears to have increased income inequality in the city
by simultaneously limiting displacement of minorities and attracting higher income residents.
These results highlight that forcing landlords to provided insurance against rent increases
can ultimately be counterproductive. If society desires to provide social insurance against
rent increases, it may be less distortionary to offer this subsidy in the form of a government
subsidy or tax credit. This would remove landlords’ incentives to decrease the housing
supply and could provide households with the insurance they desire. A point of future
research would be to design an optimal social insurance program to insure renters against
large rent increases."
I mean, the piece goes out of its way to cite Krugman calling it "among the best-understood issues in all of economics". HN generally discourages old content by labelling it, and the audience-appeal of this piece isn't the authors, it's that it specifically addresses a 2018 California ballot initiative.
I don't think we're going to get a great academic source on the current ballot initiative, because the consensus is that there's nothing new to say! G Sternlieb, The Urban Housing Dilemma (1972) isn't going to hit the front page, but everybody from the Cato Institute to Krugman is working off the same old bases.
The consensus exists only on the thin slice of debate that pertains to economics. Economists agree that rent control, all other things held equal, reduces housing supply. Nobody seriously debates. However there are moral and ethical and sociological dimensions to the question. For example: allowing rents to rise to whatever the market will bear effectively rewards landlords for creating scarcity. Should landlords be rewarded for creating scarcity? Or should they be punished for it? Do long-domiciled tenants who have contributed to the desirability of a place have a legitimate interest in being allowed to stay there?
My main beef with this piece is that HN pretends to keep politics off the front page but here we have right-wing propaganda masquerading as science on election day where the issue is on the ballot in California. If we're going to allow advocacy then the mods should stop automatically flagging whole classes of posts.
You seem to be ignoring the self-regulating aspect of a free market. As landlords rake in more money there are more and more incentives to develop new properties to take advantage of the profit opportunity. The market mechanism works to mitigate run-away profits. It seems to me that government restrictions on supply or new competitors is the most common reason for the absence of competition and higher prices paired with high profits.
You must live somewhere else. Here in California the landlords have rigged everything so that it's impossible to build. They are well-protected from new market entrants. In addition, we have statewide rent control for landlords, in the form of Proposition 13.
It's (at best) a wicked problem, in the original policy sense.
Proposition 13 is understandable for the same reasons rent control is, but also terrible policy for (some of) the same reasons as rent control. California's total unwillingness to build new housing (at least where people want to live) is even worse policy, although I object to seeing it attributed solely to landlords. The combination means all possible cost-fighting solutions will fail; all thats left is to decide how to distribute the damage.
And so all of the policy options also suck. Rent control is at most a stopgap for some current renters, which does nothing for those newly seeking housing, further discourages construction (it may not apply to new developments, but it sets precedent and they're going to be old developments eventually), and rewards landlords for driving away their tenants. Repealing Prop 13 is not only unattainable but likely to drive out the most vulnerable owners as broke cities try to repair their budgets. Restricting Prop 13 to non-rental properties suitably targets rentiers, but threatens even faster tax growth due to the smaller base - which will render leasing unprofitable with rent control or passed on to tenants without it. Even building new housing, the only thing that really stands to unwind the problem, is a mess. At small or moderate levels it will only slow growth and encourage people to move in, while at large rent-reducing scales it will wipe out every non-rentier property owner who bought at inflated rates.
So, yes, California's housing looks more or less hopeless. In most places I'm against rent control as a bad solution to a solvable problem. In California... dilemmas have outcomes.
You don't have to be a libertarian to oppose the folly of rent control.
"In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing."
Assar Lindbeck, Swedish Economist and Socialist
Do you have any evidence that Lindbeck is a socialist? I looked and all I found was the same phrase Swedish economist (and socialist) Assar Lindbeck repeated over and over on right wing websites.
Do you have any evidence for this you'd like to share, or do you just accuse any publications of libertarian viewpoints of being orchestrated by the Kochs?
Seriously? Both authors work for the Cato Institute. The Cato Institute was founded by Charles Koch, and originally called The Charles Koch Foundation.
Thanks, that's useful information; I was unaware of the Cato-Koch connection. I'm not sure why the "Seriously?" is there or what I'm supposed to make of it.
It seems to me that there's still a considerable gap between a Koch having founded Cato and any opinion piece produced by Cato today being a "Koch opinion piece". A quick Google suggests to me that Cato is far from being under total Koch control - indeed, they've been involved in legal battles with each other in recent history.
The response wasn't that it's not an opinion piece by the Koch brothers, but rather, does the OP have any evidence to suggest the opinion piece is incorrect other than who the author is (why isn't a very convincing argument).
No, my response was very much meant an expression of skepticism at the idea that there was any connection between the piece and the Kochs. The comments here (that make clear that there is, at least, a loose connection that can be traced between the two) are entirely relevant responses.
No, I was entirely serious. In future, you may find that you persuade people better by actually presenting some relevant facts (as others have now done) rather than making assertions and then sneering at anyone who asks for an explanation.
The argument is that rent-control can spur the creation of new housing, as landlords are unable to make the same amount of money from their existing units. Of course, this is predicated on the fact that developers/landlords have the option of creating those new units (which they usually don't). That's why I'm not against rent control per se, but I'm usually not in favor since it tends to be suggested in areas with severe restrictions on building new housing.
This argument doesn't make any sense. If there are profits to be made from building new housing and renting it out, some one is going to do that. The higher those profits are, the higher the incentive to do so. People aren't going to respond to artificially suppressed profit margins by doubling down.
This article is also full of other strange arguments. Consider:
"The fact that real estate developers have funded an anti-Proposition 10 campaign to the tune of $45 million suggests that they are eager to defend their market power. If California were a truly competitive housing market where home builders operated with slim margins, they’d load up their cranes and build in some other state. But it’s clear these developers benefit from the status quo and are fighting hard to keep it."
Selling retail gasoline is a low margin business. But you can bet that if there was legislation to impose a price cap, gas stations and oil companies would be opposed. In other words, everyone everywhere is always going to be opposed to legislation that reduces how much they can charge for their product. You don't need to posit other factors such as the existence of market power or lack of competitiveness to explain the opposition.
It was good work and good pay, but spending 65% of it on rent? what incentive do i have to stay when the median home price is a million dollars or more? the thing this article does not take into account is the fact that without rent control or some form of affordable housing, that "amazing city" you live in grinds to a halt pretty fast.
Try living in a city where the bus system never sees regular maintenance because the motor pool is 2 hours away. broken down garbage trucks just sit in the road because wrecker crews cant afford to live anywhere near the metropolis. Ambulances and fire trucks might, or might not, make it to a destination because the fleet techs with diesel certification like myself dont live in your city.
pipefitters and machinists need a place in your city if you want clean healthy water and sewage service. And the next time a drunk backs over a telephone pole, you're going to need a lineman or three to fix it.