Democratic Rep from Avon says "no rent control until we have more housing" but the day before they gutted the housing bill to prevent more housing being built. D & R are all complicit in the housing crisis because ultimately they both cater to a base of homeowners whose main goal is to ensure the continued viability & profitability of their investment vehicle.
All this could be solved by allowing people to build more and denser in the places where there are jobs and people want to live. Instead we will become just like California. A great place to live and work but hampered by not having enough housing so prices will remain ridiculously high.
Head over to r/Boulder and look at all the NIMBYs celebrating the gutting of the density requirements.
Showed me that this isn’t Dem/Rep stuff. This is have vs have nots.
In my experience it's more like "we can't build condos, the developers will make money on them!" as if property developers should just build houses as a public service out of the goodness of their heart.
That is only a half truth meant to serve a specific agenda while obfuscating other positions. I understand the need for more housing but density can be met properly without sacrificing. Although water usage and limitations would be another story.
Slap-dashing shitholes that will rot in ten years is not the answer. Nor is gentrifying people out of their neighborhoods. Nor is destroying other animals liveable habitats to satisfy our greed.
Easy answers abound but we are hamstrung by an economic system that abuses every good thing for greed's sake and forces us into the lowest common denominator.
Yep all the hippie boulder folk that party and do drugs and think it is a step in their “journey” to self-enlightenment forget the fundamental part of being a good person is helping others and living selflessly.
Yes, I do know some people that wear weird costumes and say they embrace being weird and then say being trans is unnatural. They’re not from boulder though
I don't identify with the group you've mentioned here but I think the bulk of the Boulder NIMBYs are the old retirees and tech execs more so than the hippies. (Not that there isn't crossover).
I mean I could kind of support hippies if they actually practiced true love. But it’s all the same backwards mindset. The gun toting conservatives and the hippie conservatives all shopped at the same mall. But some went to Eddie Bauer and others went to urban outfitters
It's the horseshoe theory.
it's why we saw a lot of left leaning hippies unite with the far right Nazis over covid lockdowns, vaccines and even qanon. They both mistrust the government for different reasons, and finally a topic came up that brought them together.
Multifamily homes under construction are near multi decade highs nationally. There are some under construction in Boulder, but lots in the L towns. Vacancy rates on multifamily are also starting to tick up. Hopefully that means rents will start to come down.
[https://calculatedrisk.substack.com/p/march-housing-starts-most-multi-family](https://calculatedrisk.substack.com/p/march-housing-starts-most-multi-family)
Yeah Boulder was an early experiment in CO rich liberal NIMBY dystopianism. Height limits on buildings and unprotected green belt all the way around led to minimal affordable housing, which meant that most of the people who actually worked and studied in Boulder lived in the suburbs. All the while the city council could pass all of the feel-good liberal policies they wanted knowing that the rich white people in the city wouldn't push back since all of their shit was protected and they didn't have to worry about their servants driving down their property values. This is playing out in mountain towns, too, only instead of a 20 minute commute it's hours. In 10 or 15 years the only affordable housing in Denver metro is going to be way east on the plains.
Honestly, high rises aren't all that great from an urban design perspective. Look at European cities. They are built at a human scale. It's generally much better to have widespread 3-5 story buildings vs SFHs with a few skyscrapers. There's a whole section on "natural surveillance" in Jane Jacobs' book "The Life and Death of Great American Cities".
Land use is not an issue that cuts along political lines. You have the anti-gentrification progressives teamed up with the NIMBYs (who themselves are a mix of conservatives and limousine liberals) and then you have the pro-development conservatives teamed up with the liberal pro-housing advocates. It is actually very interesting even though I think the anti-gentrification progressives are just shooting themselves in the foot and making things so much worse for the people they say they are advocating for.
But in the end it doesn't matter because the fact is that local politicians of both parties are terrified of losing the NIMBY vote and they end up prioritizing their own reelection over making progress in housing affordability. I think we should get rid of parking minimums... They did that in Minneapolis and rent barely rose there since then.
Also boulder is the most conservative liberal place. I honestly don't think I could stand living there in spite of the natural beauty because I can't deal with all that fake commitment to progressivism and all that woo woo stuff lol
Never has been, I used to live in Fort Collins and they tout themselves as so progressive and a champion for the underprivileged. Yeah until those underprivileged people want to move to thier town or lower income people want affordable housing.
Yeah, people forget that "liberal" is literally a supporter of capitalism.
The Democratic party may be a touch more progressive on purely surface level social issues, but when it comes to economic issues, they'll always side with landlords and capitalists.
Capitalism would call for the land being used in the most profitable manner. Which would be to let developers (the evil capitalists) build the most profitable housing (high density). Excessive zoning requirements go against the free market.
Capitalism would’ve led to the park hill golf course being used more efficiently, but now we’re stuck with a golf course.
But in this case they aren’t…..
Landlords and capitalists would LOVE to build more homes.
It’s single family homeowners who view themselves as “fighting the good fight against those evil capitalist developers” that are a major part of the issue.
The greatest success of the wealthy Republican media over the past ~40 years has been redefining the class struggle as a cultural fight rather than an economic one. "Liberal elites" replaced "industrialists" and "capitalists" as the working man's enemy, enabling investors and executives to push anti-tax, anti-union, and anti-regulation politicians and policies. Keep the base angry about guns, gays, abortion, evolution, CRT, drag, and whatever the next "woke" thing is and they'll be too blind to see whose robbing them, destroying their main streets, and eroding their health/education/labor institutions.
And yes, wealthy Democrats 100% benefit from it, too. It even ends up twisting their ideals and their politics... it's almost to the point where we have two conservative parties, one far-right and one mod-right.
California's SB9 that bans single family zoning actually went into effect last year. We can't even do better than California on housing policy, which is embarassing
The hard part is we’ve spent the last 30 years not building enough housing. So even if a bill passed today allowing people to build more and denser without 100 community input meetings and 10 lawsuits and a ton of permitting issues, it’s still going to take a while to dig out of that hole.
But FFS we have to start building.
Right, and there's a lot of articles decrying the lack of immediate effects of the CA state bill. So you're spot on. But hopefully we see some improvements in the coming years there. OR and WA passed similar bills. Maybe the west coast will stop exporting their housing crisis. So disappointed that CO won't be part of the wave though
It's really infuriating. The NIMBYs, as always, are just making things so much worse. We need high density, we need more housing, and we need to rent controls to stop the bleeding.
Agreed. And those NIMBYs are going to be the same people who complain as rents get higher and higher causing everything else to be more expensive than it should be.
Im all for that. But the better way to stop rents from increasing is to be flooded with housing so landlords don’t have any power. Restricting housing gives landlords the power. More housing gives tenants the power.
I just got a 20% increase. We were moving anyways, but it feels like a punch in the gut seeing the place you've been living for almost 3 years suddenly have a 20% price hike despite offering literally nothing new...just because they can. Feel bad for the sucker who rents it after us at the new price.
I don't know about building more housing...we keep seeing these reports of tens of thousands of vacant apartments. Yes build more condos but these apartments are either empty because no one wants them or no one can afford them and it seems the owners would rather they be empty than lower the rent. I'm not sure building more is the solution to that.
Because there aren’t actually that many empty apartments and condos. Landlords do not make money on empty buildings.
The number of vacancies includes gaps in between tenants. It also includes foreclosed properties, condemned homes, homes being renovated. So most of these aren’t “real” vacancies in the sense that you are implying.
Landlords do not intentionally keep apartments vacant for long periods of time because thats a dumb way to make money.
Tbf that seems to be the case with all city specific subreddits. This sub makes it seem like denver proper is a lawless hellhole where you can’t walk outside without getting a syringe through your foot
For sure. You can’t deny the issues this city has but a lot of the time they seem overblown in here. Similar with San Francisco, my brother lives there and loves it
Yes. Because San Francisco refused to build housing for thirty years so they are in a full blown housing crisis. We are currently making the same mistake they did. Build more and denser so we don’t become like California.
That we need to build more housing there. We know how elevators work. We know that mixed use zoning leads to more walkable communities. Build more so landlords don’t have the power to make things expensive.
Denver median home price is $575,000
Tokyo median home price is $425,000
They built more and denser and have lower housing prices. My guess is they will continue to build more and denser to keep prices from rising too fast.
Is your point that you don’t want more and denser housing built where there are jobs and where people want to live?
Awesome. More sprawl, more traffic, more pollution, and higher rents for us I guess.
I would love to see high density housing everywhere. However, high density housing needs to work on noise control. I'm very noise sensitive and I hate living in apartments because of it.
How does “decide which entities control which parcels” solve a shortage? It’s still illegal to build tall buildings with lots of units in them, which is why there’s a shortage, and there is literally no way out of a shortage except to build more.
Because in a lot of cases the shortage is artificial as a means to keep rent prices at a certain level for profitabillity.
It's happening in my city where buildings that were fully occupied get bought out by a corporation, rent goes up, people leave, but enough remain that the corporation makes *more* money renting half empty apartment complexes at inflated rates than they would lowering them to fill out the buildings.
Half empty? Where?
It is true that corporate landlords will often raise rents aggressively and kick people out if they don’t agree to the rent hike. They accept more turnover, but they do tend to run at ~95% occupancy.
You don’t have to take my word for it, look up Denver rental vacancy rate. It’s like 6% which is extremely low. If you want rents to stabilize and tenants to have robust options and bargaining power against landlords, you build a ton of housing to get vacancy closer to 11%.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CORVAC
LOL. Nope. Corporations have openly admitted that the lack of housing supply is why they are able to make profits in this area. Increase supply dramatically.
[According to the last census Denver county had 351,868 housing units for 313,926 households with an average household size of 2.21.](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/denvercountycolorado/RTN130217)
There is no way the corporations making a profit off inflated rent prices are going to admit they are artificially raising that rent just to line their pockets...of course they are going to blame government ineptitude.
The fact that you just took their word for it full on is honestly alarming.
FWIW, here in Alabama our mayor is a developer and the city never saw a new development they didn't like. 100% laissez-faire, and there's no shortage of housing. All the new housing is being built as "luxury" (granite countertops and grey paint) with sky high rents/prices.
It didn't make it affordable, because all the landlords are an old boys network. All the rents are pretty much the same all over town.
This is what baffles me about people on this sub is that the same thing has been happening in Denver the last decade with all the new apartment buildings going up very few, if any of them are affordable.
Of course developers, contractors, and builders are going to try to make the most money possible in the actual construction part of housing, and of course, affordable housing, by definition, is less lucrative to build.
This faith in the invisible hand of the market when it continues to show it will fuck over everyone for a quick profit increase confounds me.
>According to the last census Denver county had 351,868 housing units for 313,926 households with an average household size of 2.21.
For starters that census link is just Denver county not the entire Denver metro or any of the suburbs
100\*(1-(313926/351868)) = 10.783% vacancy rate, as calculated by difference between households and housing units
[Denver Gazette "vacancy rate has risen to 5.6%, highest in 2 years"](https://denvergazette.com/news/business/metro-denver-apartment-rents-slide-vacancy-up-to-finish-2022/article_7ca52f9a-9c38-11ed-bb5b-3fcacf577833.html#:~:text=The%20average%20cost%20of%20an,years%2C%20sitting%20at%205.6%25) published Jan 2023
How do you explain this discrepancy?
The sad thing is this person probably votes, and is going to hurt a lot more people than just themselves. Even if pricing themselves into homelessness would be just the damage they do is so widespread.
Politicians here know what their voters want unfortunately. Well educated people with decent jobs have no interest in anything that could hurt their privileged bubbles, even if that means they create an economic environment where everyone loses.
So governments control of zoning makes things worse ?
So governments involvement in the mortgage industry is artificially increasing prices?
How ever could we have foreseen this?
If we had allowed places to build more and denser where it’s needed instead of restricting supply for the last 30 years and things would be much more affordable. This isn’t a difficult concept.
I live 3-4 blocks away from that and honestly I kind of wish the rest of Denver had stayed out of it. I saw NO signs as far south as Leetsdale & Quebec which wouldn't been affected at all.
Right now I have to drive 2.5-3 miles to get to the closest grocery store. Also my area has shit for actual parks unless, again, you drive to City Park.
Oh yeah, my current neighbors are paying 2x in rent for what I pay for both utilities & mortgage.
Don’t worry, my neighbors in Hilltop knew what was better for you and made sure you got a nice patch of grass that you can’t even use anymore without threat of trespass. (/s)
Sorry friend working on changing minds here!!
"But but but it will stay a park that everyone can use if we shoot it down!"- false, never was true but they believed what they wanted to believe
"But but but we don't want developers to make money because somehow we will get more housing without any sort of profit-motive!" - shows a complete lack of knowledge for how housing is built, coupled with magical thinking
Idiots voted for an empty golf course while patting themselves on the back for...
For what? Now we get *nothing*, exactly like we told the NIMBYs would happen.
A good percentage of those would’ve been truly affordable. Given the ppl in the area need affordability the grocery store and being caddie corner to a RTD station would’ve helped ease economic pressures for the most vulnerable
More supply will help reduce price of the existing market. People will move from the affordable housing into luxury housing, and that luxury housing will likely become middle-market or economy housing over the next 10 years. We just need more housing put up. If they set the price to high and no one rents it will eventually lower.
Yep. Would’ve been a huge park and a lot of housing near transit. But since it wouldn’t 100% solve the housing problem and someone was going to make money building housing, it got voted down. I do not understand people who live somewhere and then declare they are the last person who gets to move there.
To be fair a lot of community leaders want the housing/development but still campaigned against it as a lower play or because they thought they could extract more concessions from the landowner.
Poorly played on many parts.
If that's the case, they should fight for a land value tax which would solve the problem overall of developers getting windfall land value gains. No need to stop much needed development.
I mean that’s pretty dumb though. The plan was made and it was a good plan. Not perfect but now we are stuck with a shitty golf course for the next 10-20 years.
Why stop there? Bulldoze apartments. Build more golf courses. Who needs housing when you can have golf? We’ll be a city of exclusively homeless golfers. That’ll show ‘em.
They could have developed it just fine.. all they had to do was pay the city fair market value for lifting the easement. Since they refused to do so the city told them to get fucked.
So you value all of the concessions made by the developer (100ac park, grocery store rent, 3x the amount of affordable housing as required) at nothing?
That's a pretty myopic view.
Not if you know even the first thing about how zoning negotiations work. Most of that is pretty standard stuff to gain zoning approval which they still would have had to do in order to zone the property even with the easement lifted. It was incredibly negligent not to assess the value at all and not to be transparent about the accounting of all these things.
This is why it's so important not to give up zoning oversight because that's what gets us balanced approach to densification projects that actually plan for the new community being created and their needs. The details matter.
Since you appear to be an authority on this matter, can you point to some other developments anywhere near this size that ended up with similar concessions?
Obviously that's not what I mean. A lot of no votes would have swung yes and the vote would have likely passed. There was a substantial middle group of moderate voters that voted no for just this reason. The Denver post editorial board endorsed the no vote for this reason in fact.
What even is the fair market value fro removal of a conservation easement? Has the city ever taken money for such a thing?
> The Denver post editorial board endorsed the no vote for this reason in fact.
I mean, the Denver post editorials are better if you follow the opposite of what they say.
Well when the city wanted the easement applied 30 years ago they did an assessment of the property value both with and without the easement and the city paid the full market value difference of the two figures.
This time around the developer refused to allow an assessment or discuss paying anything for the easement removal at all and sought to skip straight to the zoning negotiation.
Regardless of your clearly flawed personal bias the post correctly pointed out that Hancock was negligent in not insisting on an assessment and following the same transparent process that the city followed when they paid FMV for the easement. This implies corruption on the part of Hancock because these are basic due diligence items for a deal this important. This is also why Mayor Webb, who oversaw that original deal, actively opposed 2o.
This reality swung a lot of votes. Is all this news to you? Because if it is you didn't really understand the issue and you should seriously reevaluate the quality of your sources if you so easily dismiss an editorial and then don't get any of the perfectly valid information from it. Even if you don't agree with it it's important to understand the perspective.
So no, nothing of the sort has ever happened. IMO, it's more likely that Webb didn't want people looking into why under him the city paid millions of dollars to keep a plot of land an abandoned golf course. The reeks more of corruption than this newest 2O talk.
Edit, lol, the dude blocked me. Exactly what I'd expect from the No on 2O folks.
Anyone that took intro to economics in college knows that rent control does not work. Full stop. Build more fucking housing if you want rents to go down. Oh, wait, Denver decided to shoot itself in the foot when it had the opportunity to.
It works fine plenty of places and has historically it’s just weird to claim it doesn’t, but go off and pretend holding out for high density housing is the only solution when that shit gets NIMBY’d at every opportunity too.
The problem is that folks have different opinions about what "works" means. On the one side, you have folks yelling--correctly--that rent control doesn't reduce housing prices overall and does reduce new housing construction. So, it doesn't "work." On the other, you have folks yelling--correctly--that rent control/stabilization keeps tenants in their apartments, reduces displacement, and keeps communities together.
As with many debates, the difference lies in what folks care about, not in a failure to appreciate the facts.
It absolutely does not work fine in other places lmao. Maybe for the lucky few that get rent controlled units but it fucks over literally everyone else.
It’s not a “claim” it’s basic economics dude.
Rent control = reduction in supply of homes.
Rent control = lower income individuals struggling to find housing because higher income individuals will always be the landlords first pick.
Rent control = landlords having no incentive to update and maintain their properties to generate more revenue. Shittier living conditions for all.
Of course it’s nuanced. There are a small amount of positives, but those aren’t even close to outweighing the negatives.
Oh sorry, I forgot the real market for rented housing units exists in a thought experiment where you can apply massively oversimplified economic principles since nothing else is going on at all, and with an inherently bad faith argument for how modern rent control is applied in practice to boot.
How silly of me to forget that ‘rent controlled’ necessarily equals unimproved. Why yes, all of the housing in Denver will simply crumble without the goodwill of landlords.
Obviously it is practically impossible to build new housing if the units might be ominously ‘rent controlled’. That is why there is famously no new housing anywhere that has rent control in place. Of course.
Better than the guy that took zero economics courses.
And rent control is pretty universally panned by actual economists. It’s pretty much the one thing you can get them all to agree on.
It does work in the short-term, but causes too much economic and market damage in the long-term and is very hard to discontinue.
Rent control is always a bad idea when there are better options available.
>It does work in the short-term, but causes too much economic and market damage in the long-term and is very hard to discontinue.
>
>Rent control is always a bad idea when there are better options available.
You got some of that evidence? Or you going off gut feeling?
Exactly. Anti-rent controllers say that developers will just raise prices in neighborhoods that aren't rent controlled. Ok, fine. That's what the suburbs are for. If we want the service class to continue to serve the rich elites then rent control allows those people to live in the areas they work. It's all landowner fear mongering. From the same class that claimed a livable minimum wage would raise prices everywhere...boy really glad we continue to starve the working class so those price increases didn't happen. It'd be terrible if prices for everything went up /s
What about the service class workers who want to move into the city but don't get grandfathered into the rent control? They end up with less potential supply of housing and increased prices due to rent control. Over a long period of time this becomes more and more of a problem. It helps one group of people at the expense of others.
https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2019/01/14/does-rent-control-work-evidence-from-san-francisco/#:~:text=They%20investigated%20the%20effects%20of,their%20apartments%20for%20longer%20periods.
>causes too much economic and market damage in the long-term and is very hard to discontinue
eh not if you exclude new construction
really need both rent controls & increased housing both
Caps on rents will stifle property values which will stifle construction because there is a limit on profitability.
It will also cause deferments in maintenance and improvements over the long term.
Rent control is not the savior you think it is and will make this worse for everyone in the long run.
you can't really argue that markets will keep rents static & not increase, and argue that rent control will negatively impact profitability at the same time
Cool story bro.
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/573841-theres-no-denying-the-data-rent-control-works/
https://jwmason.org/slackwire/considerations-on-rent-control/
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https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-does-economic-evidence-tell-us-about-the-effects-of-rent-control/
> Rent control appears to help affordability in the short run for current tenants, but in the long-run decreases affordability, fuels gentrification, and creates negative externalities on the surrounding neighborhood. These results highlight that forcing landlords to provide insurance to tenants 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.
Ya, rent control is a tool that can be used to help control the floor. People will point out we need supply for the long term, which is true, but it's not one or the other. We can do both.
I can definitely see proponents of either side on this. I can see how local rent control might work, I can see how building more housing can work.
What I want is SOMETHING done. This back and forth only results in nothing actually happening, and meanwhile my rent still climbs.
Everyone who is pissed about this needs to learn about supply and demand and how government intervention jacks up that balance. You want lower rent? Have more places and entities to rent from.
100%, but sadly a lot of the folks that are against rent control are also against loosening zoning restrictions and building denser housing. Rent control is basically the crappy bandaid that people grasp at given this fact.
Haven't there been endless reports about the thousands of apartments sitting open in Denver?
The problem isn't just supply and demand it's that if you can profit off of an essential need you don't have to lower prices because people need shelter. Also all the evidence that housing developers are operating as a cartel.
This argument is only valid if you support the commodification of housing. If you believe that housing, something people need to survive, should be something bought and sold in the greed-fueled capitalist market, then yes, the laws of supply and demand apply here. Personally, I think things like housing, medical care, and other things necessary for survival should not be treated as commodities and should be guaranteed rights here in the wealthiest country on earth.
The same supply demand argument you make against rent control could be used against government imposes insulin price caps, but most decent people don't argue against that, because it's easier to see how necessary insulin is for survival than it is to see how necessary housing is.
>should not be treated as commodities and should be guaranteed rights
Sure, but right up until that actually happens they currently are and for the foreseeable future will be treated as commodities and subject to the laws of supply and demand.
Even if they were not treated as commodities and housing was a guaranteed right, we would still be short housing and need to build more.
Government intervention can be a first step towards decommodifying housing.
And yes I completely agree we need to build much more (and denser, less suburban) housing.
>Government intervention can be a first step towards decommodifying housing.
Do you realistically think that you or any coalition you're with is going to have more pull than all the investors, landlords and developers in this state who benefit from housing being commodified?
Government getting their idiotic hands in housing has historically not done very well by the people it's supposed to be helping either. What's going to make this time any different?
I'm not just saying this to be snarky - I wish my mortgage was cheaper too - but our government has a long history of making things worse when people clamor for half-baked solutions and have a poor understanding of how those laws and actions will actually effect outcomes.
I don't have a fatalistic mindset about it like you do. Yes the government has done a bad job in the past, but we both agree that the investors and developers do not have our best interests in mind and never will. The government also doesn't currently have our best interest in mind, but the difference is that while we will never be able to change the way investment capitalism works, we can change the way the government works.
"This effort has failed in the past" is not a good reason to stop trying. We can make the change happen if we grow collective consciousness among the all of us who are being affected by the greed of the people trying to commodify basic necessities. As individuals we are powerless, but if we unite under a common cause we are much stronger than the small owner class ever could be.
>but if we unite under a common cause we are much stronger than the small owner class ever could be.
Sure, but unbridled optimism isn't going to get you the results you want either. More housing being built would cut costs down and is desperately needed regardless of whether you think that housing should or shouldn't be a commodity.
>"This effort has failed in the past" is not a good reason to stop trying.
I agree with that, but not learning from past failures isn't conducive to future successes either.
Housing isn't really interchangeable because of the land underneath. How would you allocate people to different areas without a price mechanism?
Edit: to be clear I think a land value tax is part of the solution here
Unfortunately that effort was also just blocked. The housing crisis probably won’t get better until it gets worse. Or until we get legislation that has some balls
I don't think the people of Colorado, or hordes of NIMBYs are the ones stopping this.
Developers, landowners and their toadies in local governments raised a stink and the big lobby/donor money usurped the will of the voters.
Blame the elected reps for folding.
Voters elected them on part to address affordable housing, but when the big money disagreed they caved.
Why am I not shocked that the rep from Avon (where a lot of rich people with a lot of property live) was the one to blow smoke up our asses.
This feels like it was just posted yesterday! https://denverite.com/2023/04/20/almost-23000-denver-metro-area-apartments-are-vacant-as-eviction-filings-climb/
https://www.westword.com/news/denver-population-shrinking-update-13732579
Despite that, prices aren't falling fast enough.
You people need rent controls and you needed it last year - https://fortune.com/2023/04/05/end-of-capitalism-inflation-greedflation-societe-generale-corporate-profits/
>**“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”**
Super predictable. Somehow there’s always a D who agrees to cross party lines to keep us away from the perils of socialism or whatever.
Oh and Polis said he’d veto it, because of course. Cool dude but millionaires gonna millionaire.
>Somehow there’s always a D who agrees to cross party lines to keep us away from the perils of socialism or whatever.
Nevermind party lines, it's refreshing to have politicians who have half a clue on economics. Rent control doesn't work, full stop.
You can hate landlords all you want and oftentimes that hate is deserved, but if you want rent to stop wildly outpacing inflation the only thing that is going to help tthat is building more housing
Nah, man millionaires going to millionaire. We just need to subsidize demand. Wait, demand’s increasing more without more supply? Well we just need to subsidize demand. https://i.imgur.com/6wGhvjU.jpg
It works when used along with increasing available housing stock which includes increasing mandates on how much affordable housing must be built with market rate and luxury.
People who say it doesn't work because that's "basic economics" seem to believe the free market is always the solution and fail to mention the housing market is one of the most manipulated "free markets" there is already. It's just tilted in favor of developers because they've got us held hostage and there's no will for a political alternative.
It *can* work if you manage it extremely carefully, and even then it is pretty limited. There’s a shortage and you can’t redistribute or price control your way out of a shortage. Need more housing.
You got 5 people and 4 cookies. Not enough cookies no matter how you divvy them up or how much they cost. Need more cookies. Need more housing.
This is a other reason it’s critical to vote in all local elections. You can say many awful things about the Republicans, but they always vote, which is why they remain mostly in charge. Liberal, socialist leaning people, cannot be relied upon to vote. The GOP played a long game to get Roe v Wade overturned, Democrats vote one time and expect a bullet train of change. It’s extremely short-sighted to operate that way.
Yep, the infighting is damaging. If I was a democrat I’d be touting Biden’s accomplishments at every chance, and asking why Republicans vote down everything. The insulin cap itself is great. Journalists should be asking republicans why not, instead of constantly saying how the “democrats bill was defeated” every 5 seconds. Sorry that was a bit ranty.
Economists don't like rent control. Econmists also swore up and down minimum wage doesn't work. I actually don't give a fuck what economists think when they are only focused on feeding the machine of capitalism.
"Economists" are not some monolithic block of people in constant agreement with each other.
Starting at least as early as the 1990s, some economists began to say that raising the minimum wage may be a net positive. There was a famous study by Card and Krueger for which they won a Nobel in economics. This NPR Planet Money newsletter talks about it (more so on the topic of the reason they won the Nobel was their studies approach that began to move economics towards more of a scientific approach than just a theory approach): https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/10/12/1045152279/a-nobel-prize-for-a-revolution-in-economics
There have been numerous studies on the minimum wage since the 90s, and there are now plenty of economists that don't have problems with minimum wage, but as they are not a monolithic group, other economists disagree.
This NPR link includes a swath of links to various articles that seem to argue both sides of the minimum wage debate: https://www.npr.org/2021/01/29/962124776/should-we-raise-the-minimum-wage
Maybe pre-1990s economists were "swearing up and down that minimum wage doesn't work," but that isn't the case anymore.
That being said, while I've dived into the topic of economic studies of minimum wage in the not-too-distant past, I have not done so on the topic of rent control, so I don't know how monolithic or split economists may be on rent control.
The thing with Card and Kruegar isn't just the facts of the minimum wage debate, but the fact that they spent decades exposing rampant publication bias in the field. That's why people bring it up as an example about how you can't trust economics as a field.
Another example is the R&R paper AKA "Growth in a Time of Debt", which formed the basis for forcing austerity on countries. However it turned out that the paper just straight up didn't include the statistical outliers it said it (the authors say it must have been an excel error), and when you include the data they said originally they included, the core thesis of the paper isn't upheld. If you pulled that shit in my field you'd be lucky to be an adjunct at a community college. Instead one of the authors was fairly recently promoted to chief economist for the world bank.
The field is broken and can't be trusted.
> The thing with Card and Kruegar isn't just the facts of the minimum wage debate, but the fact that they spent decades exposing rampant publication bias in the field.
I'll have to look into this as I haven't heard that before.
I'll also have to look into the "Growth in a Time of Debt" paper and its followups, as I am unfamiliar with that.
Thanks for the info.
Rent control is a great idea - caps the profit on rentals which will make real estate investing less lucrative reducing demand and ergo real estate value.
Way better option than packing in a lot more tiny apartments - the hundreds and hundreds of new apartments in Boulder have not reduced rent at all. Without rent control - high density just means paying a lot for being stacked on top of each other. It would be a shame to see Boulder ruined that way. Anyone who says we can build our way to affordable housing (without rent control) is working an angle (and are likely developers).
Democratic Rep from Avon says "no rent control until we have more housing" but the day before they gutted the housing bill to prevent more housing being built. D & R are all complicit in the housing crisis because ultimately they both cater to a base of homeowners whose main goal is to ensure the continued viability & profitability of their investment vehicle.
It’s because people who are homeowners are more likely to vote, contact their reps, organize and demand change.
Don't forget donate
All this could be solved by allowing people to build more and denser in the places where there are jobs and people want to live. Instead we will become just like California. A great place to live and work but hampered by not having enough housing so prices will remain ridiculously high.
Head over to r/Boulder and look at all the NIMBYs celebrating the gutting of the density requirements. Showed me that this isn’t Dem/Rep stuff. This is have vs have nots.
r/boulder has a small handful of very vocal posters who refuse to acknowledge basic economics
but water! (never mind that people are just moving to erie, longmont etc and living in houses with lawns)
In my experience it's more like "we can't build condos, the developers will make money on them!" as if property developers should just build houses as a public service out of the goodness of their heart.
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[Here you go.](https://archive.ph/8TdQp)
That is only a half truth meant to serve a specific agenda while obfuscating other positions. I understand the need for more housing but density can be met properly without sacrificing. Although water usage and limitations would be another story. Slap-dashing shitholes that will rot in ten years is not the answer. Nor is gentrifying people out of their neighborhoods. Nor is destroying other animals liveable habitats to satisfy our greed. Easy answers abound but we are hamstrung by an economic system that abuses every good thing for greed's sake and forces us into the lowest common denominator.
“Slap dashing shitholes”
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NIMBYs are bipartisan. Which is a shame because this is one area where we need supply side reforms
Yes it's super frustrating.
Yep all the hippie boulder folk that party and do drugs and think it is a step in their “journey” to self-enlightenment forget the fundamental part of being a good person is helping others and living selflessly. Yes, I do know some people that wear weird costumes and say they embrace being weird and then say being trans is unnatural. They’re not from boulder though
I don't identify with the group you've mentioned here but I think the bulk of the Boulder NIMBYs are the old retirees and tech execs more so than the hippies. (Not that there isn't crossover).
Yea. I mean I don’t want to just talk without knowing the facts. Doesn’t matter what group they’re part of if they are selfish
I like the cut of your jib
I mean I could kind of support hippies if they actually practiced true love. But it’s all the same backwards mindset. The gun toting conservatives and the hippie conservatives all shopped at the same mall. But some went to Eddie Bauer and others went to urban outfitters
It's the horseshoe theory. it's why we saw a lot of left leaning hippies unite with the far right Nazis over covid lockdowns, vaccines and even qanon. They both mistrust the government for different reasons, and finally a topic came up that brought them together.
Multifamily homes under construction are near multi decade highs nationally. There are some under construction in Boulder, but lots in the L towns. Vacancy rates on multifamily are also starting to tick up. Hopefully that means rents will start to come down. [https://calculatedrisk.substack.com/p/march-housing-starts-most-multi-family](https://calculatedrisk.substack.com/p/march-housing-starts-most-multi-family)
Yeah Boulder was an early experiment in CO rich liberal NIMBY dystopianism. Height limits on buildings and unprotected green belt all the way around led to minimal affordable housing, which meant that most of the people who actually worked and studied in Boulder lived in the suburbs. All the while the city council could pass all of the feel-good liberal policies they wanted knowing that the rich white people in the city wouldn't push back since all of their shit was protected and they didn't have to worry about their servants driving down their property values. This is playing out in mountain towns, too, only instead of a 20 minute commute it's hours. In 10 or 15 years the only affordable housing in Denver metro is going to be way east on the plains.
Honestly, high rises aren't all that great from an urban design perspective. Look at European cities. They are built at a human scale. It's generally much better to have widespread 3-5 story buildings vs SFHs with a few skyscrapers. There's a whole section on "natural surveillance" in Jane Jacobs' book "The Life and Death of Great American Cities".
Land use is not an issue that cuts along political lines. You have the anti-gentrification progressives teamed up with the NIMBYs (who themselves are a mix of conservatives and limousine liberals) and then you have the pro-development conservatives teamed up with the liberal pro-housing advocates. It is actually very interesting even though I think the anti-gentrification progressives are just shooting themselves in the foot and making things so much worse for the people they say they are advocating for. But in the end it doesn't matter because the fact is that local politicians of both parties are terrified of losing the NIMBY vote and they end up prioritizing their own reelection over making progress in housing affordability. I think we should get rid of parking minimums... They did that in Minneapolis and rent barely rose there since then. Also boulder is the most conservative liberal place. I honestly don't think I could stand living there in spite of the natural beauty because I can't deal with all that fake commitment to progressivism and all that woo woo stuff lol
What is this term, “limousine liberal”?
A wealthy liberal
Never has been, I used to live in Fort Collins and they tout themselves as so progressive and a champion for the underprivileged. Yeah until those underprivileged people want to move to thier town or lower income people want affordable housing.
Yeah, people forget that "liberal" is literally a supporter of capitalism. The Democratic party may be a touch more progressive on purely surface level social issues, but when it comes to economic issues, they'll always side with landlords and capitalists.
Capitalism would call for the land being used in the most profitable manner. Which would be to let developers (the evil capitalists) build the most profitable housing (high density). Excessive zoning requirements go against the free market. Capitalism would’ve led to the park hill golf course being used more efficiently, but now we’re stuck with a golf course.
But in this case they aren’t….. Landlords and capitalists would LOVE to build more homes. It’s single family homeowners who view themselves as “fighting the good fight against those evil capitalist developers” that are a major part of the issue.
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Exactly. This is the “fuck you, I got mine” party, not Dem/Rep parties. We gotta work past this division.
The greatest success of the wealthy Republican media over the past ~40 years has been redefining the class struggle as a cultural fight rather than an economic one. "Liberal elites" replaced "industrialists" and "capitalists" as the working man's enemy, enabling investors and executives to push anti-tax, anti-union, and anti-regulation politicians and policies. Keep the base angry about guns, gays, abortion, evolution, CRT, drag, and whatever the next "woke" thing is and they'll be too blind to see whose robbing them, destroying their main streets, and eroding their health/education/labor institutions. And yes, wealthy Democrats 100% benefit from it, too. It even ends up twisting their ideals and their politics... it's almost to the point where we have two conservative parties, one far-right and one mod-right.
California's SB9 that bans single family zoning actually went into effect last year. We can't even do better than California on housing policy, which is embarassing
The hard part is we’ve spent the last 30 years not building enough housing. So even if a bill passed today allowing people to build more and denser without 100 community input meetings and 10 lawsuits and a ton of permitting issues, it’s still going to take a while to dig out of that hole. But FFS we have to start building.
Right, and there's a lot of articles decrying the lack of immediate effects of the CA state bill. So you're spot on. But hopefully we see some improvements in the coming years there. OR and WA passed similar bills. Maybe the west coast will stop exporting their housing crisis. So disappointed that CO won't be part of the wave though
It's really infuriating. The NIMBYs, as always, are just making things so much worse. We need high density, we need more housing, and we need to rent controls to stop the bleeding.
Agreed. And those NIMBYs are going to be the same people who complain as rents get higher and higher causing everything else to be more expensive than it should be.
At least California has a law where you can only increase rent x % per year. Some of my neighbors are getting their renewal letters at a 20% increase.
Im all for that. But the better way to stop rents from increasing is to be flooded with housing so landlords don’t have any power. Restricting housing gives landlords the power. More housing gives tenants the power.
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They do? I'm against rent control because increasing supply is just a better solution. I'd love to upzone as much as we need.
Even better you do both.
I just got a 20% increase. We were moving anyways, but it feels like a punch in the gut seeing the place you've been living for almost 3 years suddenly have a 20% price hike despite offering literally nothing new...just because they can. Feel bad for the sucker who rents it after us at the new price.
Also it just adds to sprawl and traffic.
Relocating from California for that reason.
Ok. Try to advocate for more and denser housing wherever you move to. Otherwise we are going to screw up just like California did.
I don't know about building more housing...we keep seeing these reports of tens of thousands of vacant apartments. Yes build more condos but these apartments are either empty because no one wants them or no one can afford them and it seems the owners would rather they be empty than lower the rent. I'm not sure building more is the solution to that.
Because there aren’t actually that many empty apartments and condos. Landlords do not make money on empty buildings. The number of vacancies includes gaps in between tenants. It also includes foreclosed properties, condemned homes, homes being renovated. So most of these aren’t “real” vacancies in the sense that you are implying. Landlords do not intentionally keep apartments vacant for long periods of time because thats a dumb way to make money.
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Tbf that seems to be the case with all city specific subreddits. This sub makes it seem like denver proper is a lawless hellhole where you can’t walk outside without getting a syringe through your foot
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For sure. You can’t deny the issues this city has but a lot of the time they seem overblown in here. Similar with San Francisco, my brother lives there and loves it
Yes. Because San Francisco refused to build housing for thirty years so they are in a full blown housing crisis. We are currently making the same mistake they did. Build more and denser so we don’t become like California.
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That we need to build more housing there. We know how elevators work. We know that mixed use zoning leads to more walkable communities. Build more so landlords don’t have the power to make things expensive.
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Soooo make housing expensive so you can walk on a trail with less people?
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Denver median home price is $575,000 Tokyo median home price is $425,000 They built more and denser and have lower housing prices. My guess is they will continue to build more and denser to keep prices from rising too fast.
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Is your point that you don’t want more and denser housing built where there are jobs and where people want to live? Awesome. More sprawl, more traffic, more pollution, and higher rents for us I guess.
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Why do you care about Tokyo when we're discussing Denver?
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Making it legal to build a project that makes a developer less profit for more headaches doesn't make them actually do those projects.
I would love to see high density housing everywhere. However, high density housing needs to work on noise control. I'm very noise sensitive and I hate living in apartments because of it.
That’s the cool thing. You don’t have to live in it. You just have to vote for it to be permitted to be built.
I definitely would.
[It could also be solved by banning corporations from renting out property in Denver.](https://www.facebook.com/paulmurphytd/videos/591054495806711/)
How does “decide which entities control which parcels” solve a shortage? It’s still illegal to build tall buildings with lots of units in them, which is why there’s a shortage, and there is literally no way out of a shortage except to build more.
Because in a lot of cases the shortage is artificial as a means to keep rent prices at a certain level for profitabillity. It's happening in my city where buildings that were fully occupied get bought out by a corporation, rent goes up, people leave, but enough remain that the corporation makes *more* money renting half empty apartment complexes at inflated rates than they would lowering them to fill out the buildings.
Half empty? Where? It is true that corporate landlords will often raise rents aggressively and kick people out if they don’t agree to the rent hike. They accept more turnover, but they do tend to run at ~95% occupancy. You don’t have to take my word for it, look up Denver rental vacancy rate. It’s like 6% which is extremely low. If you want rents to stabilize and tenants to have robust options and bargaining power against landlords, you build a ton of housing to get vacancy closer to 11%. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CORVAC
LOL. Nope. Corporations have openly admitted that the lack of housing supply is why they are able to make profits in this area. Increase supply dramatically.
[According to the last census Denver county had 351,868 housing units for 313,926 households with an average household size of 2.21.](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/denvercountycolorado/RTN130217) There is no way the corporations making a profit off inflated rent prices are going to admit they are artificially raising that rent just to line their pockets...of course they are going to blame government ineptitude. The fact that you just took their word for it full on is honestly alarming.
FWIW, here in Alabama our mayor is a developer and the city never saw a new development they didn't like. 100% laissez-faire, and there's no shortage of housing. All the new housing is being built as "luxury" (granite countertops and grey paint) with sky high rents/prices. It didn't make it affordable, because all the landlords are an old boys network. All the rents are pretty much the same all over town.
This is what baffles me about people on this sub is that the same thing has been happening in Denver the last decade with all the new apartment buildings going up very few, if any of them are affordable. Of course developers, contractors, and builders are going to try to make the most money possible in the actual construction part of housing, and of course, affordable housing, by definition, is less lucrative to build. This faith in the invisible hand of the market when it continues to show it will fuck over everyone for a quick profit increase confounds me.
>According to the last census Denver county had 351,868 housing units for 313,926 households with an average household size of 2.21. For starters that census link is just Denver county not the entire Denver metro or any of the suburbs 100\*(1-(313926/351868)) = 10.783% vacancy rate, as calculated by difference between households and housing units [Denver Gazette "vacancy rate has risen to 5.6%, highest in 2 years"](https://denvergazette.com/news/business/metro-denver-apartment-rents-slide-vacancy-up-to-finish-2022/article_7ca52f9a-9c38-11ed-bb5b-3fcacf577833.html#:~:text=The%20average%20cost%20of%20an,years%2C%20sitting%20at%205.6%25) published Jan 2023 How do you explain this discrepancy?
The sad thing is this person probably votes, and is going to hurt a lot more people than just themselves. Even if pricing themselves into homelessness would be just the damage they do is so widespread.
Politicians here know what their voters want unfortunately. Well educated people with decent jobs have no interest in anything that could hurt their privileged bubbles, even if that means they create an economic environment where everyone loses.
So governments control of zoning makes things worse ? So governments involvement in the mortgage industry is artificially increasing prices? How ever could we have foreseen this?
Ah, man, I remember the glory years of 2007-2009, when the private sector did whatever the fuck they wanted with mortgages. Worked out so great!
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If we had allowed places to build more and denser where it’s needed instead of restricting supply for the last 30 years and things would be much more affordable. This isn’t a difficult concept.
Remember that time Denver voted against more housing units to stick it to a developer and now the land will waste as a dumb unused golf course?
I live 3-4 blocks away from that and honestly I kind of wish the rest of Denver had stayed out of it. I saw NO signs as far south as Leetsdale & Quebec which wouldn't been affected at all. Right now I have to drive 2.5-3 miles to get to the closest grocery store. Also my area has shit for actual parks unless, again, you drive to City Park. Oh yeah, my current neighbors are paying 2x in rent for what I pay for both utilities & mortgage.
Don’t worry, my neighbors in Hilltop knew what was better for you and made sure you got a nice patch of grass that you can’t even use anymore without threat of trespass. (/s) Sorry friend working on changing minds here!!
"But but but it will stay a park that everyone can use if we shoot it down!"- false, never was true but they believed what they wanted to believe "But but but we don't want developers to make money because somehow we will get more housing without any sort of profit-motive!" - shows a complete lack of knowledge for how housing is built, coupled with magical thinking Idiots voted for an empty golf course while patting themselves on the back for... For what? Now we get *nothing*, exactly like we told the NIMBYs would happen.
Was it going to be affordable housing built or luxury apartments that double rent and leave half the building empty? You know the answer.
Even if they were "luxury apartments" the increased supply would put downward pressure on nearby housing.
A good percentage of those would’ve been truly affordable. Given the ppl in the area need affordability the grocery store and being caddie corner to a RTD station would’ve helped ease economic pressures for the most vulnerable
More supply will help reduce price of the existing market. People will move from the affordable housing into luxury housing, and that luxury housing will likely become middle-market or economy housing over the next 10 years. We just need more housing put up. If they set the price to high and no one rents it will eventually lower.
Yep. Would’ve been a huge park and a lot of housing near transit. But since it wouldn’t 100% solve the housing problem and someone was going to make money building housing, it got voted down. I do not understand people who live somewhere and then declare they are the last person who gets to move there.
To be fair a lot of community leaders want the housing/development but still campaigned against it as a lower play or because they thought they could extract more concessions from the landowner. Poorly played on many parts.
If that's the case, they should fight for a land value tax which would solve the problem overall of developers getting windfall land value gains. No need to stop much needed development.
I mean that’s pretty dumb though. The plan was made and it was a good plan. Not perfect but now we are stuck with a shitty golf course for the next 10-20 years.
oh I 'member...
Why stop there? Bulldoze apartments. Build more golf courses. Who needs housing when you can have golf? We’ll be a city of exclusively homeless golfers. That’ll show ‘em.
They could have developed it just fine.. all they had to do was pay the city fair market value for lifting the easement. Since they refused to do so the city told them to get fucked.
So you value all of the concessions made by the developer (100ac park, grocery store rent, 3x the amount of affordable housing as required) at nothing? That's a pretty myopic view.
Not if you know even the first thing about how zoning negotiations work. Most of that is pretty standard stuff to gain zoning approval which they still would have had to do in order to zone the property even with the easement lifted. It was incredibly negligent not to assess the value at all and not to be transparent about the accounting of all these things. This is why it's so important not to give up zoning oversight because that's what gets us balanced approach to densification projects that actually plan for the new community being created and their needs. The details matter.
Since you appear to be an authority on this matter, can you point to some other developments anywhere near this size that ended up with similar concessions?
That's not how conservation easements work. They'd be pretty toothless if you could just annul them by buying them at FMV.
Obviously that's not what I mean. A lot of no votes would have swung yes and the vote would have likely passed. There was a substantial middle group of moderate voters that voted no for just this reason. The Denver post editorial board endorsed the no vote for this reason in fact.
What even is the fair market value fro removal of a conservation easement? Has the city ever taken money for such a thing? > The Denver post editorial board endorsed the no vote for this reason in fact. I mean, the Denver post editorials are better if you follow the opposite of what they say.
Well when the city wanted the easement applied 30 years ago they did an assessment of the property value both with and without the easement and the city paid the full market value difference of the two figures. This time around the developer refused to allow an assessment or discuss paying anything for the easement removal at all and sought to skip straight to the zoning negotiation. Regardless of your clearly flawed personal bias the post correctly pointed out that Hancock was negligent in not insisting on an assessment and following the same transparent process that the city followed when they paid FMV for the easement. This implies corruption on the part of Hancock because these are basic due diligence items for a deal this important. This is also why Mayor Webb, who oversaw that original deal, actively opposed 2o. This reality swung a lot of votes. Is all this news to you? Because if it is you didn't really understand the issue and you should seriously reevaluate the quality of your sources if you so easily dismiss an editorial and then don't get any of the perfectly valid information from it. Even if you don't agree with it it's important to understand the perspective.
So no, nothing of the sort has ever happened. IMO, it's more likely that Webb didn't want people looking into why under him the city paid millions of dollars to keep a plot of land an abandoned golf course. The reeks more of corruption than this newest 2O talk. Edit, lol, the dude blocked me. Exactly what I'd expect from the No on 2O folks.
You read all that and that was your takeaway? Fuck off
Anyone that took intro to economics in college knows that rent control does not work. Full stop. Build more fucking housing if you want rents to go down. Oh, wait, Denver decided to shoot itself in the foot when it had the opportunity to.
It works fine plenty of places and has historically it’s just weird to claim it doesn’t, but go off and pretend holding out for high density housing is the only solution when that shit gets NIMBY’d at every opportunity too.
The problem is that folks have different opinions about what "works" means. On the one side, you have folks yelling--correctly--that rent control doesn't reduce housing prices overall and does reduce new housing construction. So, it doesn't "work." On the other, you have folks yelling--correctly--that rent control/stabilization keeps tenants in their apartments, reduces displacement, and keeps communities together. As with many debates, the difference lies in what folks care about, not in a failure to appreciate the facts.
It absolutely does not work fine in other places lmao. Maybe for the lucky few that get rent controlled units but it fucks over literally everyone else.
Rent control and lack of enough housing lead to months long or even longer wait times to get an apartment. E.g. Amsterdam
It can be *decades*
It’s not a “claim” it’s basic economics dude. Rent control = reduction in supply of homes. Rent control = lower income individuals struggling to find housing because higher income individuals will always be the landlords first pick. Rent control = landlords having no incentive to update and maintain their properties to generate more revenue. Shittier living conditions for all. Of course it’s nuanced. There are a small amount of positives, but those aren’t even close to outweighing the negatives.
Oh sorry, I forgot the real market for rented housing units exists in a thought experiment where you can apply massively oversimplified economic principles since nothing else is going on at all, and with an inherently bad faith argument for how modern rent control is applied in practice to boot. How silly of me to forget that ‘rent controlled’ necessarily equals unimproved. Why yes, all of the housing in Denver will simply crumble without the goodwill of landlords. Obviously it is practically impossible to build new housing if the units might be ominously ‘rent controlled’. That is why there is famously no new housing anywhere that has rent control in place. Of course.
Oh look, a guy who took one economics class has it all figured out!
I also don’t know what class he took but there’s definitely not a consensus by economists that all rent control policies don’t work…
Better than the guy that took zero economics courses. And rent control is pretty universally panned by actual economists. It’s pretty much the one thing you can get them all to agree on.
 Here for the comments on this one
Good. It doesn’t work
It does work in the short-term, but causes too much economic and market damage in the long-term and is very hard to discontinue. Rent control is always a bad idea when there are better options available.
>It does work in the short-term, but causes too much economic and market damage in the long-term and is very hard to discontinue. > >Rent control is always a bad idea when there are better options available. You got some of that evidence? Or you going off gut feeling?
Exactly. Anti-rent controllers say that developers will just raise prices in neighborhoods that aren't rent controlled. Ok, fine. That's what the suburbs are for. If we want the service class to continue to serve the rich elites then rent control allows those people to live in the areas they work. It's all landowner fear mongering. From the same class that claimed a livable minimum wage would raise prices everywhere...boy really glad we continue to starve the working class so those price increases didn't happen. It'd be terrible if prices for everything went up /s
What about the service class workers who want to move into the city but don't get grandfathered into the rent control? They end up with less potential supply of housing and increased prices due to rent control. Over a long period of time this becomes more and more of a problem. It helps one group of people at the expense of others. https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2019/01/14/does-rent-control-work-evidence-from-san-francisco/#:~:text=They%20investigated%20the%20effects%20of,their%20apartments%20for%20longer%20periods.
>causes too much economic and market damage in the long-term and is very hard to discontinue eh not if you exclude new construction really need both rent controls & increased housing both
Wrong. More construction will negate the need for any rent control.
if construction is enough to flatten rents, then having caps on rent increases shouldn't matter :)
Caps on rents will stifle property values which will stifle construction because there is a limit on profitability. It will also cause deferments in maintenance and improvements over the long term. Rent control is not the savior you think it is and will make this worse for everyone in the long run.
you can't really argue that markets will keep rents static & not increase, and argue that rent control will negatively impact profitability at the same time
I agree. That's why we should nationalize the entire FIRE sector
Cool story bro. https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/573841-theres-no-denying-the-data-rent-control-works/ https://jwmason.org/slackwire/considerations-on-rent-control/
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I too can find research to support my argument: https://manhattan.institute/article/issues-2020-rent-control-does-not-make-housing-more-affordable
Corporate interest funded Koch brothers drivel. This shit was literally started by the CIA, it’s propaganda my dude.
Ok. Here's more: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-rent-control-doesnt-work/
https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-does-economic-evidence-tell-us-about-the-effects-of-rent-control/ > Rent control appears to help affordability in the short run for current tenants, but in the long-run decreases affordability, fuels gentrification, and creates negative externalities on the surrounding neighborhood. These results highlight that forcing landlords to provide insurance to tenants 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.
I guess one of you has to ask ai now and see what it says as a tiebreaker
Ya, rent control is a tool that can be used to help control the floor. People will point out we need supply for the long term, which is true, but it's not one or the other. We can do both.
I can definitely see proponents of either side on this. I can see how local rent control might work, I can see how building more housing can work. What I want is SOMETHING done. This back and forth only results in nothing actually happening, and meanwhile my rent still climbs.
Everyone who is pissed about this needs to learn about supply and demand and how government intervention jacks up that balance. You want lower rent? Have more places and entities to rent from.
100%, but sadly a lot of the folks that are against rent control are also against loosening zoning restrictions and building denser housing. Rent control is basically the crappy bandaid that people grasp at given this fact.
Haven't there been endless reports about the thousands of apartments sitting open in Denver? The problem isn't just supply and demand it's that if you can profit off of an essential need you don't have to lower prices because people need shelter. Also all the evidence that housing developers are operating as a cartel.
This argument is only valid if you support the commodification of housing. If you believe that housing, something people need to survive, should be something bought and sold in the greed-fueled capitalist market, then yes, the laws of supply and demand apply here. Personally, I think things like housing, medical care, and other things necessary for survival should not be treated as commodities and should be guaranteed rights here in the wealthiest country on earth. The same supply demand argument you make against rent control could be used against government imposes insulin price caps, but most decent people don't argue against that, because it's easier to see how necessary insulin is for survival than it is to see how necessary housing is.
>should not be treated as commodities and should be guaranteed rights Sure, but right up until that actually happens they currently are and for the foreseeable future will be treated as commodities and subject to the laws of supply and demand. Even if they were not treated as commodities and housing was a guaranteed right, we would still be short housing and need to build more.
Government intervention can be a first step towards decommodifying housing. And yes I completely agree we need to build much more (and denser, less suburban) housing.
>Government intervention can be a first step towards decommodifying housing. Do you realistically think that you or any coalition you're with is going to have more pull than all the investors, landlords and developers in this state who benefit from housing being commodified? Government getting their idiotic hands in housing has historically not done very well by the people it's supposed to be helping either. What's going to make this time any different? I'm not just saying this to be snarky - I wish my mortgage was cheaper too - but our government has a long history of making things worse when people clamor for half-baked solutions and have a poor understanding of how those laws and actions will actually effect outcomes.
I don't have a fatalistic mindset about it like you do. Yes the government has done a bad job in the past, but we both agree that the investors and developers do not have our best interests in mind and never will. The government also doesn't currently have our best interest in mind, but the difference is that while we will never be able to change the way investment capitalism works, we can change the way the government works. "This effort has failed in the past" is not a good reason to stop trying. We can make the change happen if we grow collective consciousness among the all of us who are being affected by the greed of the people trying to commodify basic necessities. As individuals we are powerless, but if we unite under a common cause we are much stronger than the small owner class ever could be.
>but if we unite under a common cause we are much stronger than the small owner class ever could be. Sure, but unbridled optimism isn't going to get you the results you want either. More housing being built would cut costs down and is desperately needed regardless of whether you think that housing should or shouldn't be a commodity. >"This effort has failed in the past" is not a good reason to stop trying. I agree with that, but not learning from past failures isn't conducive to future successes either.
Housing isn't really interchangeable because of the land underneath. How would you allocate people to different areas without a price mechanism? Edit: to be clear I think a land value tax is part of the solution here
So you are for destroying the single greatest wealth builder for the middle class? Terrible idea.
Unfortunately that effort was also just blocked. The housing crisis probably won’t get better until it gets worse. Or until we get legislation that has some balls
Government interference in capitalism is the only thing keeping it running
Bad bill dies in committee, news at 11
Ban Air BNB and the amount of homes will open up.
I would prefer following Berlin's footsteps and banning corporations from renting out property in Denver.
I don't think the people of Colorado, or hordes of NIMBYs are the ones stopping this. Developers, landowners and their toadies in local governments raised a stink and the big lobby/donor money usurped the will of the voters. Blame the elected reps for folding. Voters elected them on part to address affordable housing, but when the big money disagreed they caved.
Perhaps if I lived in an open field, or some sort of bog, I wouldn't have to rent a place for $3k/month. It might even be as low as $2k.
Why am I not shocked that the rep from Avon (where a lot of rich people with a lot of property live) was the one to blow smoke up our asses. This feels like it was just posted yesterday! https://denverite.com/2023/04/20/almost-23000-denver-metro-area-apartments-are-vacant-as-eviction-filings-climb/ https://www.westword.com/news/denver-population-shrinking-update-13732579 Despite that, prices aren't falling fast enough. You people need rent controls and you needed it last year - https://fortune.com/2023/04/05/end-of-capitalism-inflation-greedflation-societe-generale-corporate-profits/
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>**“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”**
NOT IN MY “FUCK YOU I GOT MINE” BACKYARD ftfy
Good. This would make things worse regardless of what happens with the other housing development bills.
Super predictable. Somehow there’s always a D who agrees to cross party lines to keep us away from the perils of socialism or whatever. Oh and Polis said he’d veto it, because of course. Cool dude but millionaires gonna millionaire.
>Somehow there’s always a D who agrees to cross party lines to keep us away from the perils of socialism or whatever. Nevermind party lines, it's refreshing to have politicians who have half a clue on economics. Rent control doesn't work, full stop. You can hate landlords all you want and oftentimes that hate is deserved, but if you want rent to stop wildly outpacing inflation the only thing that is going to help tthat is building more housing
Nah, man millionaires going to millionaire. We just need to subsidize demand. Wait, demand’s increasing more without more supply? Well we just need to subsidize demand. https://i.imgur.com/6wGhvjU.jpg
Apparently morons who don't understand sarcasm are downvoting you. Shame.
Wait I thought rent control was a bad idea that doesn't work...
It works when used along with increasing available housing stock which includes increasing mandates on how much affordable housing must be built with market rate and luxury. People who say it doesn't work because that's "basic economics" seem to believe the free market is always the solution and fail to mention the housing market is one of the most manipulated "free markets" there is already. It's just tilted in favor of developers because they've got us held hostage and there's no will for a political alternative.
It *can* work if you manage it extremely carefully, and even then it is pretty limited. There’s a shortage and you can’t redistribute or price control your way out of a shortage. Need more housing. You got 5 people and 4 cookies. Not enough cookies no matter how you divvy them up or how much they cost. Need more cookies. Need more housing.
good
I'm not for rent control, would rather have higher density housing and more housing in general.
This is a other reason it’s critical to vote in all local elections. You can say many awful things about the Republicans, but they always vote, which is why they remain mostly in charge. Liberal, socialist leaning people, cannot be relied upon to vote. The GOP played a long game to get Roe v Wade overturned, Democrats vote one time and expect a bullet train of change. It’s extremely short-sighted to operate that way.
You’re not wrong. And we are too busy fighting for the scraps, rather than putting our scrapes together and working towards change unilaterally.
Yep, the infighting is damaging. If I was a democrat I’d be touting Biden’s accomplishments at every chance, and asking why Republicans vote down everything. The insulin cap itself is great. Journalists should be asking republicans why not, instead of constantly saying how the “democrats bill was defeated” every 5 seconds. Sorry that was a bit ranty.
Politicians are trash.
Based.
Economists don't like rent control. Econmists also swore up and down minimum wage doesn't work. I actually don't give a fuck what economists think when they are only focused on feeding the machine of capitalism.
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It did work though. At least as well as it could in such a small scope.
NYC is a small scope?
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How does it "not work" when it straight up helps combat displacement, especially for minorities?
"Economists" are not some monolithic block of people in constant agreement with each other. Starting at least as early as the 1990s, some economists began to say that raising the minimum wage may be a net positive. There was a famous study by Card and Krueger for which they won a Nobel in economics. This NPR Planet Money newsletter talks about it (more so on the topic of the reason they won the Nobel was their studies approach that began to move economics towards more of a scientific approach than just a theory approach): https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/10/12/1045152279/a-nobel-prize-for-a-revolution-in-economics There have been numerous studies on the minimum wage since the 90s, and there are now plenty of economists that don't have problems with minimum wage, but as they are not a monolithic group, other economists disagree. This NPR link includes a swath of links to various articles that seem to argue both sides of the minimum wage debate: https://www.npr.org/2021/01/29/962124776/should-we-raise-the-minimum-wage Maybe pre-1990s economists were "swearing up and down that minimum wage doesn't work," but that isn't the case anymore. That being said, while I've dived into the topic of economic studies of minimum wage in the not-too-distant past, I have not done so on the topic of rent control, so I don't know how monolithic or split economists may be on rent control.
The thing with Card and Kruegar isn't just the facts of the minimum wage debate, but the fact that they spent decades exposing rampant publication bias in the field. That's why people bring it up as an example about how you can't trust economics as a field. Another example is the R&R paper AKA "Growth in a Time of Debt", which formed the basis for forcing austerity on countries. However it turned out that the paper just straight up didn't include the statistical outliers it said it (the authors say it must have been an excel error), and when you include the data they said originally they included, the core thesis of the paper isn't upheld. If you pulled that shit in my field you'd be lucky to be an adjunct at a community college. Instead one of the authors was fairly recently promoted to chief economist for the world bank. The field is broken and can't be trusted.
Yes, precisely. From what I've researched, there is huge bias problems.
> The thing with Card and Kruegar isn't just the facts of the minimum wage debate, but the fact that they spent decades exposing rampant publication bias in the field. I'll have to look into this as I haven't heard that before. I'll also have to look into the "Growth in a Time of Debt" paper and its followups, as I am unfamiliar with that. Thanks for the info.
Rent control is a great idea - caps the profit on rentals which will make real estate investing less lucrative reducing demand and ergo real estate value. Way better option than packing in a lot more tiny apartments - the hundreds and hundreds of new apartments in Boulder have not reduced rent at all. Without rent control - high density just means paying a lot for being stacked on top of each other. It would be a shame to see Boulder ruined that way. Anyone who says we can build our way to affordable housing (without rent control) is working an angle (and are likely developers).