Rent Is Too Damn High Guy Increasing Rent For Others Because His Rent Is Too Damn Low
from the how-markets-function dept
Lots of people got a kick out of the "rent is too damn high" guy, Jimmy McMillan, running for governor of New York last year. He certainly was entertaining. However, it appears that McMillan's own rent may be too damn low... meaning that he's a part of the damn reason that the rent is too damn high in New York. It turns out that McMillan's landlords are trying to evict him from his rent controlled East Village apartment for which he pays $872.96 a month. That's crazy cheap for an apartment in the East Village. What he doesn't seem to recognize is that when the laws keep the rent on certain properties artificially low compared to the market, that's a huge part of the reason why "the rent is too damn high" for everyone else. If McMillan really wanted to lower the rent, he'd work to get rid of widespread rent control, as that would help drive down the prices of rent in certain areas.
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Filed Under: economics, jimmy mcmillan, rent, rent is too damn high
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That may be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your point of view, but I believe the economic analysis of the New York area is off
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Obviously, this increase in supply would drive prices up!! It's just simple economics!
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He is not disingenuous, and he is probably echoing Nina Paley's voice here. Truth be told, having lived in Manhattan and Queens, between rent control, co-op's, and the NYC government, and transportation time and cost, the rent situation is a mess. People can not move away. They are stuck where they live, the slowness of the subway and train system leading into the city, and the cost of getting there, makes moving outside the city a non option.
Like every large city you have monopoly rents being applied, due to time of transport, cost of travel, and just being able to.
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It's honestly getting hard to tell the legitimate shills from the lulz shills. It's a pretty brilliant method of marginalizing salaried contrarians.
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I hope you don't really believe that.
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And McMillan is regrettably antisemitic
Without doubt.
Andd it has bothered me somewhat to see Mr. McMillan saluted as a harmless old eccentric.
He has a shameful history of animus directed at the Jewish people.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2010/10/why-rent-is-too-damn-high-candidate-will-never-b e-governor/22592/
"The New York Times reports that McMillan "was called an anti-Semite during his mayoral run in 2005 for blaming rent problems on Jewish people." Athima Chansanchai at MSNBC goes into more detail, reprinting material, supposedly from a Web site McMillan maintained in 2009, claiming that "every religious group other than Judiasm are being run out" of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. "If you are not JEWISH you are 'PROHIBITED' from living in this area," the material reads. "After the world fought hard to free the JEWISH people from the hands of HITLER. They should be shame of themselves for discriminating in housing against the people in the State of New York especially in the city of Brooklyn.""
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As to rent... actually, it would be better to regulate the entire thing* so that one class of people can't have another class of people over a barrel because they're making them pay for something they can't live without.
* I won't call it an "industry", because they don't actually produce anything... it's all based on getting something for nothing.
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Either they are being reimbursed for a much needed service (you can live in the house I own if you give me money for the use), or there is no such thing "wear and tear" as well as use of facilities should be rent-free (yeah, that was on purpose).
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Untrue
I can say with certainty that this is not true. It was one of the reasons rent control was abolished in Cambridge. What happened after that? Rent increased throughout the city. In some areas it doubled within a year. There was not one neighborhood where rent decreased.
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What would actually happen if the controls were gone is rent would immediately go up. All those eViL rich landlords getting greedy and all. Then once everyone left because they couldn't afford to live there anymore the landlords would slowly come to the realization that something is better than nothing and drop the rent prices back to more sane/affordable levels.
So no, it's not an instant realization of dropping rent prices, but after some time rent prices would eventually start to drop below where they started in the first place.
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[For instance, here in Berkeley there is a seemingly endless supply of well-off out-of-state students whose parents are willing to pay big $ for little Johnny & Judy to have a sweet studio apartment for $2000/month (above market).]
The rent'll just keep going up. The question, which isn't what I've been reading in these comments or in the original post, is if the INCREASE in rents is slightly slowed by such releases of rent-controlled units into the market.
Even if this is the case, please note that everyone's rent in a market with limited supply still increases, just not as fast as usual. No one's rent decreases unless there is a massive bubble that bursts or there is a reason that the area becomes much less desirable (say, the Black Plague hits Manhattan).
Out here, rents cooled off when the housing bubble burst, but only backed down a few tens of dollars. Example: A studio that was $600 in 1995 hit $1300 by 2005 and backed down to $1200 in 2009.
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In fact, the elimination of rent control makes rents go up. And not by a little.
It's not hard to see why, even from a classic economics perspective. Rent control forces the market to compete with those rent-controlled prices; in a sense, they are forced to "compete with free."
Now, take that away. They are no longer forced to compete with (artificially lowered) prices; they can therefore charge whatever they like, competing only with other players in the market, who also can charge whatever they like (since the demand far outweighs the supply).
The natural result is that, since they don't have to compete with "free," they will raise their prices. And everyone else will do the same.
And that's exactly what happened in Boston, and in every other city where rent control was abolished. The market did not have to compete with (artificially lowered) prices - so rent went up. Astronomically. Those people who owned property just got richer, and renters paid more for the same property. It was (and is) a slum-lord's paradise.
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This simply is not true. Rent controls reduce competition over non-controlled apartments and drive rents on non-controlled properties up. The market does not have to compete with rent controlled apartments at all unless the controls are not actually low enough to be a price ceiling in the first place.
I think we can all agree demand is super high in areas like this, meaning removing a bunch of people from the market via the rent control 'lottery' is not going to shift the demand curve much, if at all. So all that is left is a reduction in units being offered, so the supply curve shifts to the left. So, with rent control, the equilibrium point is not at a higher price and lower quantity of units than before. It may very well be that, if all units in the are were averaged together, the rents would be lower than before but whats really happening is that the rents in non-rent controlled apartments are subsidizing the rent controlled apartments
So why not just do this directly for the people that need it? Rent controls have a number of serious externalities the full measure of which is hard to capture like reducing the quality if housing, among others. If eligible rentors were given suplements for their rent instead of controlling the price many of these would go away. The primary result, rent controlled rentors are subsidized by non-rent controlled rentors, would be the same.
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Rent Control... a bit far off the beaten path for Tech Dirt...
When California passed vacancy decontrol in the late 1990s (this said that historically low rents stopped when a new tenant moved in, removing the low base rent that apartments previously started from), rents shot up. Since 1998, when a tenant moves out of a unit w/ "historically low rent" the property owner can now charge "market rate," whatever that may be.
(All future rent increases are regulated [based on the CPI], tenants are protected against unjust eviction, and all other protections of rent control are in place)
In California's case, the addition of more rental units didn't make rents fall, due to the desirability of the area- just like in NYC.
If people have specific questions or have an interest in many in-depth analyses of rent control and its effects on social, economic, ethnic diversity, head on over to the Berkeley Rent Board site. We've got many programs that protect law-abiding tenants and landlords, and provide counseling and a mediation process.
Main page:
http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/DepartmentHome.aspx?id=9546
Research reports:
http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/ContentDisplay.aspx?id=53400
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With respect, Mike, your 'logic' is absolutely DAFT.
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Rent control makes the rent high?
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Re: Rent control makes the rent high?
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because appeal to authority doesn't work when the authority is incompetent, which is Generally the case when such economics is applied to reality in any significant way beyond record keeping.
(which doesn't say much one way or the other about rent control, admittedly, but i do fail to see how in an environment with limited supply and ever increasing demand, Any action other than artificial restrictions from an outside source can prevent a consistent rise in price overall.)
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The abuses of the system make the system hard to work with.
It also contributes to the slow turnover of property in New York, and explains why much of the rental stock in the city is crap. There is little economic incentive to build new properties, knowing that your renters will keep the current rents (plus the small annual adjustment) for as long as they stay there, impairing the market value of the property in the future (which is based mostly on average revenue per door). Today's rents might be high, but 20 years from now, many of them will be too cheap for a new owner to be able to justify a market price for the building, and will make it impossible for them to finance it.
Something in here failed.
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There is an overabundance of people who want to live in New York. It seems like even if this rent was not controlled, prices would continue to rise.
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Ah. People who don't understand economics. How sad.
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As it is, all you seem to have it's a little quip and that is really sad.
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Removing rent controls allows the market to function properly. It increases the overall supply, since you have more mobility (with rent control, people never want to give up their places), and with greater supply, price drops.
I was responding mainly to the guy who claimed that "there is no incentive to decrease" the rent. That's obviously false. If people have more options and there's competition, then there are clear incentives to lower the rent.
Now some have argued, reasonably, that in places of super high demand, the impact may not be as noticeable (or it may simply result in a slower increase in rent prices). But it defies basic economics to think that an artificial restriction on rent prices doesn't limit supply and increase price for everyone else.
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Same thing applies here. By the time you finish with all the assumptions, you'll realize that basic economic theory is exactly like the linear mechanics that physics undergrads get taught in the first year.
In theory, there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is.
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Econ 101
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that's not how money actually works
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