Another example of the unintended consequences of rent control. Great for the few people who benefit, a disaster for everyone else.
Another example of the unintended consequences of rent control. Great for the few people who benefit, a disaster for everyone else.
9 comments
> Cities from New York to Dublin
I don’t think they thought that phrase through.
If there’s more homes rent control will absolutely be a positive thing. The problem is we’re not building enough. Some big issues are that simple.
Sweden once pledged to build a million homes while our current government is pledging to give billions in subsidies to create a million landlords.
It must be nice to get put on a list at 18 and get a nice apartment at 25.
We need massive social housing. Private landlords should be a tiny minority.
You adjust by price or you adjust by quantity. You can’t do both. This should surprise nobody with the most rudimentary knowledge in economy and math
Just fucking build. Fuck the NIMBY cunts, build. and it won’t matter who is in running the country, it will be the same solution when SF are in charge.
All of these cities with problems, including Dublin (and several other Irish cities) and Stockholm, Berlin, Vancouver, Auckland, San Fran, Sydney, Perth, various cities in Western France, etc etc etc etc are all fundamentally ‘boom towns’ and they’re attractive places to live (despite what many of us might say about Dublin).
We are not building enough housing to meet demand and that’s also suiting speculators’ need for places to invest, which is doing us no favours. It’s hard to know how we can achieve that without a significant time lag. It’s just not going to be fixable quickly, so we need targeted solutions to minimise social impact.
There’s going to have to be a really significant change of mentality in how we deliver housing, otherwise this problem is going to roll on and on until there’s an economic crisis to even things out again.
Ireland is also dealing with the aftermath of 2008 in many ways – that’s why you can’t get a mortgage without passing a lot of risk minimisation criteria and it’s why the costs are so high and why there are so few players in the market. Effectively we’re still paying for that and probably will be for years.
The other factor at present is we’ve a huge supply chain and labour shortage problem – materials are expensive, energy is super expensive (and that’s feeding into materials – things like cement are some of the most energy intensive production processes you can possibly find, so is structural steel etc) and there’s (in Ireland anyway) a serious shortage of construction workers, trades and structural engineers and architects etc. They all left after the 2008 crash and haven’t really been replaced.
I don’t think Ireland and Sweden are directly comparable at a policy or historical approach to housing level, but there are threads of similarity in all of these situations – mostly that they’re relatively booming and have rising populations.
The other factor I’m seeing in all of those places is a ‘I’m alright jack’ mentality which is expressing itself as NIMBYism and refusal to build anything at scale or quickly. If this were the 1950s and 60s they’d be lashing up the buildings, but these days… it’s all about fussing over the fine details first. You can’t be a growing boomtown economy and not build houses, because you don’t like the idea of things being more than 3 stories tall or whatever. It just isn’t something that can function. So, the choices are either end the boom and let it go somewhere else that will build homes, or build more homes.
The western world just seems to have decided its ok homes are investments and that infact building homes damages peoples investments. If we took the same approach with food we would be in the worst famine in history
What happens to the value/price of something when there’s not a lot of it is a question the greatest minds throughout history has asked themselves. As a species we may never know.