rent control

Lectures on Urban Economics
by Jan K. Brueckner
Published 14 May 2011

This assumption leads to a more extreme picture of rent control’s effects than may be justified, but it captures the view that exemptions may not fully ameliorate developers’ concerns about future implementation of the law. 7.2.4 Effects of rent control on new construction The market’s response to the demand shock under rent control can be analyzed using figure 7.2 and can be compared with the response that would have occurred in the absence of rent control. Instead of increasing all the way up to p', the price immediately after the demand shock rises to pc and increases no further, being limited by the rent control. Whereas the first-round increase in the housing stock was equal to m in the absence of rent control, the lower controlled price pc elicits a smaller stock increase, equal to z in figure 7.2. Without rent control, the second-round stock increase would have been a bit smaller than m (equal to a magnitude like g in figure 7.1).

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Without rent control, the second-round stock increase would have been a bit smaller than m (equal to a magnitude like g in figure 7.1). But with rent control, the price is still stuck at the low pc value, which leads to the same stock increase z as before, smaller than the one occurring without rent control. The upshot is that rent control slows down the construction response to the demand shock. In effect, rent control interferes with market’s signal of 2. This view of rent control is slightly unrealistic because the control is portrayed as a limit on the price per square foot rather than on the rent charged for the entire dwelling. In addition, note that the law puts an upper limit on p rather than limiting the price’s rate of increase.

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Eventually, the slow-growing housing stock reaches a size of Ĥ , at which point the rent-control law ceases to bite. In other words, when the stock size equals Ĥ , the market generates a price of pc independently of the rent control. From this point onward in the adjustment process, the path is the same as it would have been in the absence of rent control. The stock eventually reaches the same equilibrium size H 'e as it would have without rent control, and the price eventually falls to pe. But, as was noted above, it takes longer for the stock to grow up to size Ĥ than in the absence of rent control, which means that it takes longer for the market to ultimately reach the new equilibrium.

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America
by Conor Dougherty
Published 18 Feb 2020

Activist Has Never Shied from Controversy While Building an AIDS Political Powerhouse,” Los Angeles Times, October 19, 2016, www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-aids-healthcare-foundation-propositions-20161019-snap-story.html. an “egotistical billionaire”: Joe Eskenazi, “Prop. 10: Californians Like Rent Control, Hate Ballot Measure That Would Expand Rent Control,” Mission Local, October 29, 2018, https://missionlocal.org/2018/10/prop-10-californians-like-rent-control-hate-ballot-measure-that-would-expand-rent-control/. about $22 million: “California Proposition 10, Local Rent Control Initiative (2018),” Ballotpedia, https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_10,_Local_Rent_Control_Initiative_(2018). big homeless tax: “San Francisco, California, Proposition C, Gross Receipts Tax for Homeless Services (November 2018),” Ballotpedia, https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Proposition_C,_Gross_Receipts_Tax_for_Homelessness_Services_(November_2018).

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CHAPTER 10 THE RENT IS TOO DAMN HIGH ONCE SCOTT WIENER’S up-zoning bill was dead, Damien Goodmon turned his attention to passing a statewide rent control initiative. That measure was called Proposition 10, and it was so confusing that it’s already weak prospects—rent control proposals rarely went far in state politics, and landlords planned to bury this one with money—were further weakened by the fact that many voters couldn’t understand what voting yes or no meant. Voting yes on Proposition 10 meant voting yes to repeal a state law that prohibited certain forms of local rent control, but didn’t add anyone to rent control, just allowed cities the option to do so. So: Vote yes to vote no, so that city legislators may vote yes, or no, on some theoretical future rent control proposal, assuming that proposal is ever introduced (which it probably won’t be).

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Given how much tenant anger there was, landlords were expecting some sort of state rent control fight, but they did not expect anything as big as Proposition 10. That’s because statehouses were where landlords ruled. State legislators are inevitably more conservative than city council people, which, combined with heavy lobbying from apartment owners, is why a healthy majority of states prohibit their cities from passing rent control entirely. California wasn’t one of them, but it still had a law called the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act that limited the scope of what sorts of rent laws cities could pass. Costa-Hawkins prevented cities from applying rent control to single-family houses and condominiums and any apartment built after 1995 (or whatever year the city passed its rent control ordinance, which in San Francisco was 1979).

Basic Economics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 1 Jan 2000

It also illustrates that the goal of a law—“affordable housing,” in this case—tells us nothing about its actual consequences. The Politics of Rent Control Politically, rent control is often a big success, however many serious economic and social problems it creates. Politicians know that there are always more tenants than landlords and more people who do not understand economics than people who do. That makes rent control laws something likely to lead to a net increase in votes for politicians who pass rent control laws. Often it is politically effective to represent rent control as a way to keep greedy rich landlords from “gouging” the poor with “unconscionable” rents.

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Ironically, cities with strong rent control laws, such as New York and San Francisco, tend to end up with higher average rents than cities without rent control.{62} Where such laws apply only to rents below some specified level, presumably to protect the poor, builders then have incentives to build only apartments luxurious enough to be priced above the rent-control level. Not surprisingly, this leads to higher average rents, and homelessness tends to be greater in cities with rent control—New York and San Francisco again being classic examples. One of the reasons for the political success of rent control laws is that many people accept words as indicators of reality. They believe that rent control laws actually control rents.

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Arson is just one of the forms of dishonesty promoted by rent control laws. Shrewd and unscrupulous landlords have made virtually a science out of milking a rent-controlled building by neglecting maintenance and repairs, defaulting on mortgage payments, falling behind in the payment of taxes, and then finally letting the building become the property of the city by default. Then they move on to repeat the same destructive process with other rent-controlled buildings. Without rent control, the incentives facing landlords are directly opposite. In the absence of rent control, the incentives are to maintain the quality of the property, in order to attract tenants, and to safeguard it against fire and other sources of dangers to the survival of the building, which is a valuable piece of property to them in a free market.

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco
by Chester W. Hartman and Sarah Carnochan
Published 15 Feb 2002

David Brigode, “A Broad Overview—the San Francisco Housing Crisis: Data, Analysis, Evaluations, and Recommendations” (Masters thesis, San Francisco State University, 1983), 30. 71. “The Case for Vacancy Decontrol,” 16. 72. Ibid., 4. 73. Corrie Anders, “Showdown on Rent Control,” San Francisco Examiner, 8 January 1984. 74. Evelyn Hsu, “Board Votes Today on Rent Control,” San Francisco Chronicle, 9 January 1984; see also Tim Redmond, “Cliffhanger Finish Expected in Tenants’ Attempt to Strengthen S.F. Rent Control,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, 4 January 1984. 75. “Feinstein Veto Upheld on Rent Control Law,” San Francisco Chronicle, 27 June 1986. 76. A review of housing activism at the state level in California may be found in Allan David Heskin, Tenants and the American Dream (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1983), 39 –65. 77.

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Real estate interests raised ten times that amount, to portray the “Renters Rebate Initiative” as a thinly disguised form of the dreaded rent control. (The proposed ordinance limited rent increases so as to prevent landlords from circumventing the law’s intent via the obvious ploy of raising rents to offset the required rebate to tenants.) Using sophisticated polling and publicity techniques that were to blossom in later elections, the real estate group was able to defeat the Renters Rebate Initiative, 53 to 47 percent. A landlord leaflet quoted Supervisor Dan White to the effect that rent control “will clog the courts, put more criminals on the streets, and lead to less respect for the law.” Winning Rent Control Although failing to pass an ordinance clearly beneficial to tenants in a dominantly tenant city was discouraging, the organizers drew valuable lessons: start earlier, organize better and more widely, aim higher.

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In June 1979, they unanimously passed their own, weak rent control ordinance and acted to limit condominium conversions as well. There were substantial differences in what Proposition R and the supervisors’ rent control ordinance called for. Proposition R limited rent increases to a percentage equal to the Rental Housing Component of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a rate at that time about half the CPI (reflecting that mortgage repayment costs, typically half of a landlord’s costs, generally are fixed and do not rise with inflation), and also required landlords to appeal to an elected rent control board in order to justify a greater increase.

The Streets Were Paved With Gold
by Ken Auletta
Published 14 Jul 1980

According to Frank Kristof, vice president of the state Urban Development Corporation and a student of rent control, approximately 15 percent of the current 500,000 rent-control families could afford to pay more. That’s 75,000 families. Daniel Joy, a supporter of rent control and the city’s Commissioner of Rent and Housing Maintenance, agreed: “Whether it’s 14 or 15 percent, that’s the ball park.” The citizens of New York City pay for rent control. If rich men like Nat Sherman were not in rent-controlled apartments, perhaps more upwardly mobile black families would live on Central Park West rather than move to Scarsdale.

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The new highways became not simply holiday routes for Fourth of July and Labor Day weekends, or highball expressways to bring food and supplies into the hearts of the cities. They were arteries of a new way of American life. Rent Control “Rent control is metaphysical,” sighs George Sternlieb, who has studied it for years. “The subject stops all thinking.” There are many who believe it stopped construction and invited the abandonment of apartments in New York City. On November 1, 1943, every apartment in America was rent-controlled. To dampen inflation and provide housing for returning veterans, on that day the federal government put a ceiling on rents. It was a temporary act and was rescinded in 1948.

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Moritz Hotel and sleek Rolls-Royces parade in front of the long white canopy, 44 of the 143 apartments are rent-controlled. Ms. Carol Hausamen, the owner, says that if those who could afford it paid a fair rent, the building’s $4.6 million assessment would rise 10 percent. A means test, she guesses, would remove 90 percent of these tenants from rent-control privileges. But the only way to get them off, she jokes, is to “shoot ’em. They go out feet first.” A lot of shooting would be required to remove all the comfortable people enjoying rent-control privileges in buildings along Central Park West and South, up and down West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, up the East Side, down lower Fifth and upper Park avenues, and across the river in Brooklyn Heights.

The Economics Anti-Textbook: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Microeconomics
by Rod Hill and Anthony Myatt
Published 15 Mar 2010

He suggests that with the exception of New York City (which retained its first-generation controls) and perhaps Toronto (which had poorly designed second-generation controls) the effects of rent control in North America have been almost imperceptible. This is a dramatic contrast to the treatment in the textbooks. By assuming that the rental housing market is perfectly competitive, and by considering a crude form of price ceiling, most texts suggest that rent controls necessarily have destructive effects. Why are most textbooks (and most North American economists for that matter) so negative on rent controls? Arnott suggests two reasons: ‘The first is ideological. The debate over rent control has been a battleground between those who believe in the free market and those who do not.

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Frank et al. 2005; McConnell et al. 2007). Krueger believes this reaction is unfortunate: A second complication is that the type of rent control prevalent nowadays is very different from the type assumed in textbooks – a rigid rent freeze. Controls of this sort were introduced in major US cities during the Second World War, but every city (apart from New York) had abandoned this ‘first-generation’ rent control by the early 1950s. ‘Second-generation’ rent control, first introduced in the 1970s, is significantly more flexible. For example, it commonly allows automatic rent increases geared to increasing costs, excludes luxury high-rent buildings and new buildings, restricts conversions, decontrols between tenants, and provides incentives for landlords to maintain or improve quality.

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A third complication is that housing units are assets, the desirability of which is impacted by many other factors besides rent control: interest rates, inflation, profit opportunities elsewhere, the local real estate cycle, government housing and tax policies, and current and expected future changes in all relevant variables. In reviewing the empirical evidence on rent control, Arnott says: ‘The impact of these other factors is likely to be significantly greater than any effect due to controls. Trying to discern the effects of rent control in such a situation is akin to trying to hear a whispered conversation across a street of roaring traffic’ (1995: 112).

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What to Do About It, and Why It Matters More Than You Think
by Matthew Yglesias
Published 6 Mar 2012

It is not the pet cause of a crank candidate, or a niche problem of the poor, but a devastating blow to the American economy that reduces wages, harms public health, and poisons the environment. The Trouble with Rent Control Despite his good point, McMillan’s preferred solution—strict rent control laws—is a bad idea. It’s such a bad idea that a bit of a conspiracy has developed among American opinion leaders to obscure the fact that rent control laws do, in fact, work. But even though they work, they’re a bad idea. Indeed, they work for the precise reason that they’re a bad idea. To see this, consider the idea of price controls for something more conventional, such as eggs.

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Those households lucky enough to be in rent-controlled apartments will pay less than the market price for their accommodations. They can either enjoy the cheap living themselves or move out and sublease the apartment on the black market for a profit. Either way, it’s good for them. The primary sufferers from the policy are the hypothetical people who haven’t been able to move to the rent-controlled city. But guess what? Those people can’t vote—they don’t even live there! McMillan’s idea, in other words, would help some people, but it’s not a systematic solution. Lowering the rent via rent control helps insiders, but for outsiders the rent will be higher than ever.

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Putting price controls on eggs immediately provokes the supermarket to reallocate space and reduce the eggs on the market—nobody wins. Putting price controls on rental apartments causes nothing in the short term but reduced profits for landlords. Somebody wins—namely, the tenants. So rent control, unlike egg control, works well. And in many ways that’s the problem. Egg control is such a fiasco that an egg control law would immediately backfire and be repealed. Rent control is more of a slow-burning problem. It exploits the fact that once an expensive building has been built, there’s no sense in un-building it, so you can curb landlord profits without taking away any housing units.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency
by Vicky Spratt
Published 18 May 2022

‘I’ve been a renter for the past twenty-five years,’ she told me when we caught up in May 2021 to discuss the likelihood of rent control ever coming into effect, ‘and I have tried really hard to bring a voice to renters in City Hall by highlighting the growing gap between people’s rents and incomes; to bring the current mayor around to talking about rent controls. The first time I raised rent controls with Sadiq … he was very down on it, he said we would never get the power to implement rent controls from the government. I suggested that he might want to put forward an amendment to the bill on rent control, but he didn’t respond to that. It’s been a long road but now he is a fan of the policy.’

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At the time of writing, the idea has been adopted as policy and featured in mainstream conversations, but London’s mayor still didn’t have the power to implement rent controls in the capital. That could still change – in Paris, rent controls also made a comeback in 2019, and similarly in Berlin where, backed by Angela Merkel’s government, a five-year rent freeze was approved in the same year. Let’s hope it happens here soon. Both Khan and Berry make the point that rent controls in London could become a blueprint for the rest of the country, allowing us to see how a system like Scotland’s locally implemented Rent Pressure Zones might also work across England and Wales.

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Cross-party pressure from within Parliament – as Karen Buck’s work also demonstrates – can move the needle and ultimately result in reform. Siân Berry rightly points out that in London rent controls were initially something she pushed when it was still deemed too radical by other politicians; she did this before Khan made a manifesto pledge in 2019 to lobby central government for the mayor to have the power – as is common with mayors in other European cities – to introduce rent controls. This can be in no small part because Berry is still a private renter. Her rented home is in Archway in north London, and renting continues to shape her politics.

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places
by Sharon Zukin
Published 1 Dec 2009

Limits on residential rents were first imposed during the housing shortage of World War II, when many landlords were accused of raising rents to unaffordable levels. Rent control, the more severe system, prohibits landlords from raising rents without making improvements, and all rent rises must be approved by the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal; tenants in rent-controlled apartments cannot be removed. Rent stabilization, begun in the late 1960s, subjects rent increases to the decisions of a citywide, publicly and privately appointed board representing landlords and tenants; in practice, a stabilized rent is subject to increase every year or every other year when the lease is renewed, and, unlike tenants in rent-controlled apartments, tenants in rent-stabilized units can be removed under certain circumstances.

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In some apartments these bathtubs remained in the kitchen until the 1970s or 1980s because the landlord refused to make improvements on rent-controlled apartments. Even today some buildings still lack elevators. During the past few decades all of the buildings on East Ninth Street have been renovated; several façades have been modernized, and doors and window frames freshly painted. But the block still has an old-fashioned feel. Black iron fire escapes run up the fronts of buildings; low, crumbling stoops lead to the doorways. Most apartment rents are regulated, either “controlled” or “stabilized,” by New York State laws. There is no commercial rent control, but the size of the stores on East Ninth Street is too small to interest chains.

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The current asking price for a six-story, walk-up tenement building on East Ninth Street, with sixteen apartments and two stores, is six and a half million dollars. Because of rent control there hasn’t been much interest in buying buildings like this until recently. By now, however, so many longtime tenants have died or moved away and landlords have been so aggressive at pushing other tenants out, that a lot of rents have been “decontrolled” or “destabilized.” Tenement buildings like this are a checkerboard of speculative opportunities. Only three of the sixteen apartments in this building are still rent-controlled, and six others are rent-stabilized; the remaining seven apartments’ rents have been deregulated.

Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government
by Robert Higgs and Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.
Published 15 Jan 1987

Supreme Court on appeal. 52 The main issue was whether emergency conditions justified the exercise of otherwise unconstitutional powers by a state government. The most compelling precedents for an affirmative answer were Wilson v. New, wherein the Court had upheld the Adamson Act, and the rent-control cases of 1921, wherein the Court had sustained the postwar rent-control laws of New York and the District of Columbia because of conditions represented as constituting or growing out of emergency. The force of the rent-control decisions was uncertain, however, as Justice Holmes himself had previously said that "they went to the very verge of the law." Counsel for the state of Minnesota conceded that "in normal times and under normal conditions" the state's moratorium law would be unconstitutional.

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"[T]he complete and undivided character of the war power of the United States," said the Chief Justice in the railroad decision, "is not disputable."81 Whatever the wisdom of placing the government's emergency powers beyond effective legal challenge during the war, the selfsame powers in several instances lingered on, long after the guns had ceased firing in France. As late as the spring of 1921 the Court ruled that a rent-control ordinance that Congress had imposed in late 1919 in the District of Columbia-"its provisions were made necessary by emergencies growing out of the war""was not, in the prevailing circumstances, an unconstitutional restriction of the owner's dominion and right of contract or a taking of his property for a use not public." The ruling, which placed great emphasis on the temporariness of the disputed rent controls, seemed to the dissenters to open the door HistOTY 150 to all kinds of governmental restrictions of the private right of contract.

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Douglas denied that the government must implement its rent controls so that they impinge uniformly on the affected individuals. He readily conceded that "[a] member of the class which is regulated may suffer economic losses not shared by others." But "that has never been a barrier to the exercise of the police power."65 The Court's interpretation of the Constitution, as usual during national emergency, simply elevated the constitutional stipulation of governmental powers above the constitutional guarantee of individual rights. Again Roberts dissented. "Candid appraisal of the rent control provisions of the Act in question discloses that Congress has delegated the law making The Political Economy of War, 1940-1945 223 power in toto to an administrative officer."

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing
by Andrew Ross
Published 25 Oct 2021

These variations make it difficult to apply one-size-fits-all remedies to the problem of affordability. For example, the debate about rent control is red-hot among housing advocates in New York, California, and Oregon, each of which approved rent caps or rent stabilization laws in the past few years, but discussion of this topic is almost nonexistent in most parts of the country.13 In one of my conversations with Osceola’s housing specialist Susan Caswell, I asked her what rent control would look like in her neck of the woods. “That’s so foreign to me,” she said, eyes widening. “I can’t begin to say. It’s not even a thing that’s talked about around here.”

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It’s not even a thing that’s talked about around here.” In fact, Florida is one of thirty-seven states where rent controls are prohibited or preempted. The Tallahassee legislature routinely kills any bill remotely sympathetic to the goals of the housing justice movement. In 2019, Organize Florida activists proposed a “Housing Bill of Rights” that included rent control, and they persuaded some state lawmakers to draft a bill, but it did not get a hearing. In a response that appeared to be punitive, the GOP-dominated legislature then passed a sweeping act that blocks counties and municipalities from mandating the inclusion of affordable housing units in future developments.14 At the national level, federal policy for the past four decades, under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, has looked to the for-profit market as the principal provider of housing.

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Few recall his predecessor’s persistent complaints about the meddlesome influence of the real estate industry. In 1947, as he sought to preserve wartime national rent controls and save his emergency housing campaign for returning veterans, Harry Truman even sent a “special message to Congress” about the “stubborn obstacles” posed by what he called the “real estate lobby”: Its members have exerted pressure at every point against every proposal for making the housing program more effective. They have constantly sought to weaken rent control and to do away with necessary aids to housing. They are openly proud of their success in blocking a comprehensive housing program.

Why Government Is the Problem
by Milton Friedman
Published 1 Feb 1993

Housing Another social problem is the high cost of housing and the destruction of housing. The North Bronx looks like the pictures recently coming from Yugoslavia of areas that have been shelled. There is no doubt what the cause is: rent control in the city of New York, both directly and via the government taking over many dwelling units because rent control prevented owners from keeping them up. The same results have been experienced wherever rent control has been adopted and enforced, though New York is by all odds the worst case. In addition, the proliferation all over the country of building regulations, zoning laws, and other governmental actions has raised the cost of housing drastically.

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There would be some innocent victims (e.g., crack babies) even if drugs were legalized. But they would be far fewer, and much more could be done to reduce their number and help the remainder. Homelessness What produced the current wave of homelessness around the country, which is a disgrace and a scandal? Much of it was produced by government action. Rent control has contributed, though it has been even more damaging in other ways, as has the governmental decision to empty mental facilities and turn people out on the streets and urban renewal and public housing programs, which together have destroyed far more housing units than they have built and let many public housing units become breeding grounds for crime and viciousness.

Hollow City
by Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg
Published 1 Jan 2001

the development of high-rises downtown with of white-collar workers seeking housing in the managers began to discover the pleasures of commuting), housing prices began to activists managed Though it to the concomitant influx city. urban As professionals and life (and the horrors of escalate. In the early 1980s, tenant win passage of citywide residential rent control. has significant problems, notably the lack of vacancy control, rent control has done much to preserve affordable housing for those who arrived and stayed before the current rental-rate explosion. (Rent control is why I can afford to write this book.) Other activists came together in the early 1980s to protect the residential hotels of the Tenderloin fi-om being destroyed or converted into tourist hotels; attorney-activist Randy Shaw, who was one of the principals in that battle, declares from his desk the Tenderloin Housing Clinic that this housing stock protected.

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Yet another significant victory which put a number of limits is at permanently was Proposition M in 1986, on downtown growth, required office buildings to ameliorate their impact with contributions to transit, lowcost housing and other necessities for the city, and made it policy to pro- THE SHOPPING CART AND THE LEXUS tect industrial districts, hood businesses, 57 neighbor- neighborhood character, historic buildings and other elements of a diversified, Rent control and civilized city. Proposition M represent an era when activists to set housing and development took the initiative than just fighting policy, rather rearguard actions against market forces and policies set by others. The poor continued as well as to the to arrive, be driven out.

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stituted "Never who is, this chapter, fittingly Supervisor Amos Brown evicted an enough, named Love, along with her gay has cerebral palsy, and infant grandson. appointed by Willie Brown (no relation), is Amos Brown, who was an African- American minister MARKS ON THE SOCIAL CONTRACT SKID 131 who has been more hostile to the homeless than any other elected official and who is calling for a study of rent control that is widely suspected to be the first step in dismantling tenant-protection laws. The eviction of Edith Love fi-om the modest Ingleside house Brown owned allegedly took place so that he could run for election in that district rather than against erful Supervisor Mabel Teng, who lives in the (wealthier) district pow- where Brown currently resides.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
by Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton
Published 15 Mar 1991

"Could I ask you a few questions to see whether my facts are right?" TURNBULL: Could I ask you a few questions to see whether the facts I've been given are right? Is the apartment really under rent control? Is the legal maximum rent really $233? Paul asked me whether this makes us parties to a violation of law. Did someone inform Paul at the time he signed the lease that the apartment was under rent control, and that the legal maximum was $67 lower than the rent he agreed to? Analysis. Statements of fact can be threatening. Whenever you can, ask a question instead. Turnbull might have declared, "The legal rent is $233.

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"Let me see if I understand what you're saying" TURNBULL: Let me see if I understand what you're saying, Mrs. Jones. If I've understood you correctly, you think the rent we paid is fair because you made a lot of repairs and improve-ments to the apartment since the last rent control evaluation. It wasn't worth your while to ask the Rent Control Board for an increase for the few months you rented the place to us. In fact, you rented it only as a favor to Paul. And now you're concerned that we may take unfair advantage of you and try to get money from you as the price for moving out. Is there something I've missed or misunderstood?

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Getting them to play: The case of Jones Realty and Frank Turnbullyou a feel for how you might deal with a party who is reluctant to engage in principled The following real-life example of a negotiation between a landlord and tenant should give negotiation. It illustrates what it means to change the game by starting to play a new one. The case in brief. Frank Turnbull rented an apartment in March from Jones Realty for $300 a month. In July, when he and his roommate, Paul, wanted to move out, Turnbull learned that the apartment was under rent control. The maximum legal rent was $233 a month — $67 less than he had been paying. Disturbed that he had been overcharged, Turnbull called on Mrs. Jones of Jones Realty to discuss the problem. At first, Mrs. Jones was unreceptive and hostile. She claimed to be right and accused Turnbull of ingratitude and blackmail.

Milton Friedman: A Biography
by Lanny Ebenstein
Published 23 Jan 2007

It is a predecessor in style, though on a lesser scale, of Friedman’s later great work affiliated with the National Bureau, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. During the year at Minnesota, Friedman and Stigler coauthored a pamphlet on rent control for the New York–based libertarian Foundation for Economic Education, titled “Roofs or Ceilings?” The pamphlet was a polemic against rent control, which had emerged as a wartime measure. Friedman and Stigler argued that rent control leads to fewer rental units, lower-quality rental units, greater nonprice discrimination, and inefficient use of rental units. If controls were eliminated, the shortage of housing that developed during the war as resources were directed to other purposes would quickly end.

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According to the economic historian William Frazer, “Recalling Friedman’s Chicago year 1934–35 with Henry Schultz, Martin Bronfenbrenner [another Chicago student of the era] remembered Friedman mainly as a statistician rather than an economist, and Abba Lerner . . . recalled Friedman as being non-political in 1937.”12 According to Leonard Silk, who has also written on Friedman, early in his career Friedman seemed “more eager to be known as a first-class technician and objective social scientist than as a political crusader.”13 Paul Samuelson remembers Friedman as a grad student as “not primarily a macroeconomist. Just a really smart guy ready to be into anything,” noting that Friedman’s Chicago teachers were “macroeconomists.”14 Friedman expressed these views as late as a 1946 pamphlet with George Stigler opposing rent control: “For those, like us, who would like even more equality than there is at present . . . , it is surely better to attack directly existing inequalities in income and wealth at their source than to ration each of the hundreds of commodities and services that compose our standard of living.”15 In a 1948 article, Friedman wrote that among his long-run objectives was “substantial equality of economic power....

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The pamphlet was attacked by academics and commentators who found its arguments inconsistent with the pro-government and pro-intervention tenor of the times. “Roofs or Ceilings?” “outraged the profession,” according to Paul Samuelson. “That shows you where we were in our mentality in the immediate postwar period.”5 Robert Bangs wrote in the American Economic Review: “Removal of rent controls would not solve the housing problem, but it could easily contribute to a worsening inequality.”6 Half a million copies of the pamphlet were circulated by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and it has been republished many times since. Through 1945, Friedman was closer, geographically and in spirit, to the New York area than to Chicago.

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing
by Josh Ryan-Collins , Toby Lloyd and Laurie Macfarlane
Published 28 Feb 2017

In response to this, the government passed the Increase of Rent and Mortgage Interest (War Restrictions) Act 1915 which restricted rent increases for private tenants and froze the rate of interest that landlords paid on their mortgages. These new rent controls were originally intended as a temporary measure due to expire six months after the end of the war. However, they were repeatedly extended in response to the continued shortage of housing (Kemp, 2002). In a democracy with many more renters than landlords the political appeal of rent control as a means of tackling the problem of rent is obvious, especially as it is a solution that seemingly costs the state nothing. Rent controls of some form endured in Britain for much of the twentieth century, until private rents were fully deregulated in January 1989.

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Rent controls of some form endured in Britain for much of the twentieth century, until private rents were fully deregulated in January 1989. The evidence on the effectiveness of these rent controls is mixed, and today many economists oppose rent controls on the grounds that they create shortages in the rental housing market, and reduce the quality of the stock by discouraging private investment (Jenkins, 2009; Heath, 2014). The interwar years: 1919–39 In the aftermath of the devastation suffered during the First World War, the British government viewed the provision of good-quality, affordable homes for men returning from war as essential for maintaining social harmony and boosting the lagging economy.

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This mixed economy in both housing supply and tenure was supported by strict financial regulations which restricted the amount of credit that could flow into the private housing market (see Chapter 5), and a tax regime designed to balance the economic position of homeowners and renters. Between them, these measures constituted the most comprehensive attempt yet to address the problem of rent. Taxes, financial regulations and rent controls prevented property owners from extracting excessive rents, while state intervention in the land market and council house building reduced market volatility and provided low-cost alternatives. But some of these critical mechanisms of the Keynesian land economy had already been undermined towards the end of this period.

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification
by Peter Moskowitz
Published 7 Mar 2017

That long and unique history of progressivism has also given San Francisco one of the strongest tenant activism movements in the country. After years of pressure, in 1979 the city’s Board of Supervisors approved a rent control bill that pegged rent increases in any apartment built before 1979 to yearly inflation. The bill also made it relatively hard to evict tenants in the city. There are some exceptions: if you live in a single-family home, which many San Franciscans do, you’re not protected, and if you live in a place built after 1979, you’re not eligible for rent control. Still, the city’s rent control ordinance is more stringent than probably anywhere else in the country. The fact that evictions are at record highs despite those laws shows just how valuable the land is.

…

They began looking farther and farther afield until they realized it might not be worth it: between their jobs at opposite ends of Silicon Valley and the housing prices, moving out of the area entirely began to seem more appealing. Rios told me she’s planning on moving her kids to Nevada or Chicago. Her husband will stay behind until they settle into a new life, and then he will come to look for work. Because Mountain View does not have rent control laws, Rios’s eviction-by-rent increase will not be recorded on any official forms. It will not register in any future statistics about the Bay Area. Without such data, it’s hard to paint an accurate picture of the extent of the crisis. Most of what we know comes from census data and anecdotal stories.

…

“The Bloomberg administration was kind enough to rezone most of Brooklyn, and enable developers to do large scale development,” one real estate developer told a local news publication in 2015. “And in turn, people come to create life, to create families, to work and to do everything that we’re doing.” With no one putting the brakes on the system—with no new rent control, no Works Progress Administration–era levels of new affordable housing—the process propels itself into illogical loops: parts of Brooklyn have become more expensive than lower Manhattan, and the borough has become the least affordable housing market in the entire United States. The new, progressive mayor of New York who won in a landslide with promises of affordable housing has now promised to rezone large sections of previously affordable neighborhoods such as East New York, with the caveat that some of the apartments there will be made affordable.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
by Jennifer Burns
Published 18 Oct 2009

was written as Friedman, then a new faculty member at Minnesota, was moving away from a position he characterized as “thoroughly Keynesian” to his later libertarianism. Friedman had long opposed rent control for its inefficiencies. He and Stigler argued that by interfering with the free working of the market, rent control removed incentives to create more housing stock, improve existing units, or share housing. Therefore it created, rather than alleviated, the housing shortage. They did not question the underlying motivation for rent control, even identifying themselves as people “who would like even more equality than there is at present.”44 The problem with rent control was simply that it did not achieve its stated policy objectives.

…

Read was naturally more cautious. Like Rand he believed that government functions such as rent control, public education, the Interstate Commerce Commission, military training, and the Post Office should all be done by “voluntary action.” But he told her, “I had luncheon last week with the chief executive of the country’s largest utility holding Corp. and a financial editor of the Journal American. They are regarded as reactionaries, yet each of these gents, while being [against] price controls generally, suffered rent control. This is typical.” With an eye to public perception, Read had chosen the FEE’s rather bland name rather than use the inflammatory word “individualism,” as Rand had urged.43 Although Rand was generally pleased with Read’s efforts, she could see nothing but apostasy where others saw necessary compromises with political and economic realities.

…

She believed the authors were trying to make the word “respectable” and thus convince Americans to accept permanent and total rationing. Focusing entirely on the hidden implications of the pamphlet, Rand saw the authors’ overt argument against rent control as “mere window dressing, weak, ineffectual, inconclusive and unconvincing.” Rand believed that Friedman and Stigler were insincere in their argument against rent control because they failed to invoke any moral principles to support their case. And when they did mention morality, it was to speak favorably of equality and humanitarianism. She fumed to Mullendore, “Not one word about the inalienable right of landlords and property owners . . . not one word about any kind of principles.

Big Capital: Who Is London For?
by Anna Minton
Published 31 May 2017

‘Community is king: how new London villages can help solve the housing crisis’, Berkeley Group Press Release, 22 July 2016, https://www.berkeleygroup.co.uk/press-releases/2016/how-new-london-villages-can-help-solve-the-housing-crisis 13. Carson, James, ‘Rent controls: lessons from Berlin’, The Knowledge Exchange blog, 6 May 2016, https://theknowledgeexchangeblog.com/2016/05/06/rent-controls-lessons-from-berlin/ 14. Chazan, Guy, ‘Germany: Berlin’s war on gentrification’, Financial Times, 10 October 2016 15. ‘Land Value Taxation’, House of Commons Library, 17 November 2014 Acknowledgements My first thanks go to the 1851 Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition, which awarded me a two-year fellowship in the Built Environment in 2011, to enable me to continue my research and write a second book, to follow Ground Control.

…

Housing associations are also known as Registered Social Landlords, and in the 1990s, council housing underwent its first major linguistic change and became known as ‘social housing’. With their roots in the Victorian charitable and voluntary sector and represented by organizations such as the philanthropic Peabody Trust, housing associations were in a tradition of social provision that appealed to Conservative thinking. The Thatcher government also abolished rent controls, which had been in place since 1915, deregulated the private rented sector and created the framework for the introduction of Buy to Let, all of which contribute to today’s housing crisis. These policies began with the Conservatives but only really got going under Tony Blair’s New Labour government.

…

Overall, American institutional investors own around half a million family homes.29 This may sound a small figure, but as rental property becomes a major new asset class, especially if property prices fall and mortgage credit dries up – not unlikely in London – these are trends we are very possibly to see much more of. Blackstone and other Global Corporate Landlords, such as Goldman Sachs, have been the focus of international protests, culminating in a series of global days of action, under the banner of #StopBlackstone Our Homes Are not a Commodity.30 The anger was caused by the sale of almost 5,000 rent-controlled apartments in Madrid to Goldman Sachs and Blackstone, accompanied by the by now familiar broken promises that rents would remain the same. Instead, as old contracts expired, people were told rents would increase dramatically and were threatened with eviction or moved out to escape the insecurity.

Anarchy State and Utopia
by Robert Nozick
Published 15 Mar 1974

Some such principle presumably underlies rent-control laws, which give someone living in an apartment a right to live in it at (close to) a particular rent, even though the market price of the apartment has increased greatly. In a spirit of amity, I might point out to supporters of rent-control laws an even more efficient alternative, utilizing market mechanisms. A defect of rent-control laws is that they are inefficient; in particular they misallocate apartments. Suppose I am living in an apartment for some period of time at a rent of $100 per month, and the market price goes up to $200. Under the rent-control law, I will sit tight in the apartment at $100 per month.

…

Rent-control laws with subletting provisions allow people to improve their position via voluntary exchange; they are superior to rent-control laws without such provisions, and if the latter is better than no rent control at all, then a fortiori so is rent control with subletting allowed. So why do people find the subletting-allowed system unacceptable?bz Its defect is that it makes explicit the partial expropriation of the owner. Why should the renter of the apartment get the extra money upon the apartment’s being sublet, rather than the owner of the building? It is easier to ignore the question of why he should get the subsidy given him by the rent-control law, rather than this value’s going to the owner of the building.

…

I am better off under such an arrangement than under the rent-control laws without the subletting provision. It gives me an extra option, though it doesn’t force me to use it. You are better off, since you get the apartment for $200, which you’re willing to pay, whereas you wouldn’t get it under the rent-control law with no subletting provision. (Perhaps, during the period of your lease, you may sublet it to yet another person.) The owner of the building is not worse off, since he receives $1,200 per year for the apartment in either case. Rent-control laws with subletting provisions allow people to improve their position via voluntary exchange; they are superior to rent-control laws without such provisions, and if the latter is better than no rent control at all, then a fortiori so is rent control with subletting allowed.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
by Anna Wiener
Published 14 Jan 2020

On the refrigerator was an impressive collection of novelty magnets arranged in a perfect grid. The apartment was gigantic, a duplex with two living rooms and a view of the bay. Both roommates claimed they wanted to live independently but couldn’t abandon the rent control. With a combined household income that easily topped four hundred thousand dollars—not including the product manager’s stock—we were not people for whom rent control was intended, but there we were. When I signed a sublease in exchange for the keys, my new roommates congratulated me on my good luck. I got along better with the product manager, though we occupied different spaces: I was in the startup world, land of perpetual youth, and she was an adult like any other, navigating a corporation, acting the part, negotiating for her place.

…

The city’s passive-aggressive, progressive, permissive politics tended to rankle transplants, but tech’s self-appointed representatives weren’t for everyone, either. Every three months a different engineer or aspiring entrepreneur, new to the city, would post a screed on a blogging platform with no revenue model. He would excoriate the poor for clinging to rent control and driving up condo prices, or excoriate the tent cities by the freeway for being an eyesore. He would suggest monetizing homeless people by turning them into Wi-Fi hotspots. He would lambaste the weak local sports teams, the abundance of bicyclists, the fog. Like a woman who is constantly PMSing, a twenty-three-year-old founder of a crowdfunding platform wrote about the climate.

…

The solutions manager told me he was proud of me, that I had scaled up quickly: I was already able to answer the majority of the questions in the inbox, could hold my own against a botched implementation, was providing excellent support to our customers. The company felt they had made a good investment. As a token of good faith, he said, they were giving me a raise. He looked at me with kind eyes, as if he had given birth to me. “We’re giving you an extra ten thousand dollars,” he said, “because we want to keep you.” I abandoned the rent control. I moved out of the Castro and into a one-room apartment on the first floor of a creaky Edwardian in the northern part of the city, above the fog line. I rode in the back of the moving truck with a mattress, two duffels, and my six or seven boxes of belongings: half a mile down Divisadero, half a mile up Haight.

Vanishing New York
by Jeremiah Moss
Published 19 May 2017

,” New Geography, July 10, 2013. 283One Starbucks every 5.5 blocks in Manhattan—calculated by math student Aleksey Bilogur on his blog at http://www.residentmar.io/2016/02/09/average-chain-distance.html. 283Steven Barrison, forum on “The Death (& Rebirth?) of NYC’s Mom-and-Pops,” New York City, October 20, 2016. 283On the history of commercial rent control in New York, see John J. Powers, “New York Debates Commercial Rent Control: Designer Ice Cream Stores versus The Corner Grocer,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 15, no. 3 (1986). 284Tim Wu, “Why Are There So Many Shuttered Storefronts in the West Village?,” The New Yorker online, May 24, 2015. 286Sarah Schulman quote from While We Were Sleeping: NYU and the Destruction of New York (New York: McNally Jackson Books, 2012). 289“Books smell like old people,” from David Denby, “Do Teens Read Seriously Anymore?

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One thing that may help preserve the Lower East Side is that it’s a little less accessible. . . I guess it’ll be about five years before the Gap shows up.” Five years would be about right, though it would be American Apparel, not the Gap. The Lower East Side gold rush was on, with money-hungry developers snatching up whole blocks of property, and landlords plotting to murder their rent-controlled tenants. By the end of the 1990s, Ludlow had been dubbed “Downtown’s Disneyland” by New York magazine, and “The New Bohemia” by the Times, which credited Giuliani’s NYPD crackdown on drug sales for kicking the street into “high gear.” With the neighborhood turning white and middle-class, cops started swarming, making arrests for minor infractions like painting graffiti and drinking beer out of paper bags.

…

It wasn’t the coming of Montparnasse, the bohemian Left Bank, it was the arrival of superluxe Avenue Montaigne. Activists and artists fought Bowery Bar, in the courts and on the streets. Right next door, in an old merchant’s house turned apartment building, Carl Hultberg waged a one-man battle against the lounge from a window of the rent-controlled apartment he’d inherited from his grandfather, jazz historian Rudi Blesh. “In a few short months,” Hultberg recalled to me via email, “Mr. Goode and Mr. Becker had transformed our once sleepy Bohemian district into an open sewer of mainstream American crap culture.” He remembers the crowds of “rich dissolutes” fighting to get inside Bowery Bar, and nights when off-duty cops wouldn’t let him and his neighbors leave their building because high-profile celebrities like Madonna were arriving.

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age
by Virginia Eubanks
Published 1 Feb 2011

Only the District of Columbia and a few cities in four states—California, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey—have rent control or stabilization laws. These laws limit how much and when rent can be raised and create a rent control board that, among other things, decides the maximum Conclusion 167 amount a landlord can charge for rental units and conditions under which a tenant can be evicted. Rent control and rent stabilization protect individuals and communities in times of rapid economic change, guarding long-time and low-income residents against displacement during speculative real estate booms. Most small cities, like Troy, lack rent control, and are thus especially vulnerable to rapid gentrification.

…

In my life, I’ve always felt restricted and limited in the things I thought I could do. But I learned by being in WYMSM that I can do anything.” Zianaveva was the first to point out that YW residents were increasingly unable to find independent housing in Troy because the economic changes of the early 2000s were forcing poor and working-class people out of the area. She argued, “Rent control is a big thing. These private owners are hiking up their rents. The working class and the poor are going to suffer because they can’t afford it. We need to give landlords an incentive to not jump on the bandwagon and hike up their rents.” Ironically, after WYMSM disbanded, Zianaveva was one of the working-class people who could no longer afford to live in Troy.

…

Most small cities, like Troy, lack rent control, and are thus especially vulnerable to rapid gentrification. Like rent control, community benefits agreements (CBAs) protect existing residents in times of volatile economic change. CBAs are legally enforceable contracts signed by community groups and developers that set out a range of benefits communities can expect for hosting and providing resources to a private development project. These benefits may include securing grocery stores, funding job training or providing apprenticeships, developing youth centers, targeting workforce outreach to minorities and other disadvantaged groups, constructing affordable housing, meeting living-wage requirements, or a wide range of other benefits negotiated between community representatives and developers.4 Public housing is a crucial institution for promoting family and community health that is increasingly under attack.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley
by Cary McClelland
Published 8 Oct 2018

But I’ve learned a lot: in my truck, driving around, knocking on doors, seeing the beautiful architecture and learning those neighborhoods. Or, on foot, seeing different, almost hidden gems. Meeting different people. Understanding the city. Understanding that in some respects, you turn a block here in San Francisco, you’re in a different little world. PAUL GILLESPIE In his rent-controlled apartment looking over Dolores Park, he has a mattress, sheets, a table, some chairs, and a small shelf with books and records, analog only. Outside, through a broken windowpane, San Francisco’s young bask shoulder to shoulder in the early spring sun. Through all the bodies, you can barely see the green of the lawn.

…

That is where we are headed: a whole class of people living a seamless or frictionless life, and they have a series of people working for them. So my landlord doesn’t fix my windows. He doesn’t do too much work for me because I am paying $750 a month. But it keeps me in the city. If you are not really focused on making money, there is no place for you in San Francisco—unless you have a rent-controlled apartment or if you have a wealthy boyfriend or girlfriend. Let’s face it, my girlfriend is as poor as I am. I worry about the soul of the city. And I am really conflicted, because everybody wants a dynamic city and a city where bright young people from around the world want to come. We are the envy of other cities in that sense, but are we big enough?

…

And we have to have regional solutions, because no matter what we do in San Francisco, somebody gets displaced to Oakland, which has weaker renter protections. And then folks get pushed from Oakland to places like Martinez, which are further out and are really expensive already. And then, even if you find a place, you’ll be kicked out the next year because there’s no rent control in most of the surrounding cities. So that’s why we have to look much broader. People say, “Save this sector,” or “Save the teacher,” “Save the artist.” But we need much broader legislation that’s for all poor people. Because we shouldn’t be competing or fighting each other for a basic necessity that we all need to survive.

The Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe
Published 4 Mar 2008

Her little friends will be perfectly capable of filling her in on what all this means…and ready and eager…You can be sure of that…Imagine. That sonofabitch, Winter, he’s so slimy he takes the press in to take a picture of the bed!” Quigley said, “They’re wild men, Mr. McCoy, these landlords in the rent-controlled buildings. They’re maniacs. They got one thing on their minds from morning to night, and that’s getting tenants out. Ain’t no Sicilian hates anybody worse than a rent-control landlord hates his tenants. They think the tenants are stealing their life’s blood. They go crazy. This guy sees Maria Ruskin’s picture in the paper, and she’s got a twenty-room apartment on Fifth Avenue, and he flips out and goes running to the newspaper.”

…

Ray Andriutti was whaling down his pepperoni and his coffee swill, and Jimmy Caughey held half a roast-beef hero up in the air like a baton while he talked to somebody on the telephone about some piece a shit he’d been assigned to. Kramer wasn’t hungry. He kept reading the story in The City Light. He was fascinated. Rent-controlled love nest, $331 a month. The revelation didn’t really affect the case much one way or the other. Maria Ruskin wouldn’t come off as quite the sympathetic little lovely who had wowed them in the grand-jury room, but she’d make a good witness all the same. And when she did her “Shuhmun” duet with Roland Auburn, he’d have Sherman McCoy cocked and locked. Rent-controlled love nest, $331 a month. Did he dare call Mr. Hiellig Winter? Why not? He should interview him in any case…see if he can amplify the relationship of Maria Ruskin and Sherman McCoy as it pertains to…to…to rent-controlled love nest, $331 a month.

…

McCoy looked toward his wife, smiled slightly, and raised his left hand in a clenched-fist salute. The meaning of this gesture was unclear. Mrs. McCoy refused to speak to reporters. “Rent-Controlled Love Nest” Mr. McCoy’s marriage was rocked by the revelation that Maria Ruskin Chirazzi, heiress of the Ruskin air-charter fortune, was in the automobile with Mr. McCoy at the time Mr. Lamb was struck. The couple, it developed, had been conducting an affair in a secret apartment later dubbed the “rent-controlled love nest.” Mrs. Chirazzi’s then-husband, Arthur Ruskin, died of a heart attack shortly before her involvement in the case was made known.

I Hate the Internet: A Novel
by Jarett Kobek
Published 3 Nov 2016

chapter eighteen Christine was under pressure. She had rented the same apartment since 1997. The apartment was rent-controlled, which meant that her landlord could raise the rent by only a small yearly percentage. This percentage was set by the San Francisco Rent Board. The highest increase had been 2.9%. The lowest had been 0.1%. Christine rented her apartment in 1997 at $1,000 a month. With all the percentage increases, Christine at present was paying $1350 per month. By the halfway point of 2013, the median price of 1BRs in San Francisco was $2,800. Rent control is a miracle. Christine lived in an apartment complex with six units spread across two buildings.

…

Created for one purpose, it had assumed another. It had become the de facto method of evicting the elderly and ethnic minorities. The elderly and ethnic minorities were living in rent controlled apartments. They were taking up space that could be occupied by employees of Google. The biggest problem with Christine’s living situation is that all six units had been occupied for years. All of the apartments were rent controlled. The landlord had inherited the buildings from his mother in the late 1970s. He didn’t have eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis. He tried to be a patient man, but every day the news media bombarded him with stories about the city’s rising rents.

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Baby was speaking to Adeline from his Cape Cod home. Cape Cod was a land mass jutting off the coast of Massachusetts that looked like a flexed human arm. Baby had left New York City after people from Wall Street ran up the rents. Rent wasn’t his problem. His apartment on 7th Street had been rent controlled. Plus, he could’ve afforded the market rate. His agents were good at selling film options on his books and Baby’s money manager used Baby’s capital to produce more capital. Trapped Between Jupiter and a Bottle, which Baby titled after an ex-boyfriend’s mishearing of a Bob Dylan lyric, had sold to a eumelaninless film producer and director named Alan Pakula.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
by Matthew Desmond
Published 1 Mar 2016

,” working paper, Harvard University, June 2015; Cutts and Olsen, “Are Section 8 Housing Subsidies Too High?”; Olsen, “Housing Programs for Low-Income Households.” On housing cost regulation, see Tommy Andersson and Lars-Gunnar Svensson, “Non-Manipulable House Allocation with Rent Control,” Econometrica 82 (2014): 507–39; Richard Arnott, “Time for Revisionism on Rent Control?,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9 (1995): 99–120. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development recently released a plan to provide voucher holders “with subsidies that better reflect the localized rental market” by proposing “Small Area Fair Market Rents” that “vary by ZIP code and support a greater range of payment standards than can be achieved under existing regulations.”

…

We know much more about housing vouchers, enjoyed by the lucky minority of low-income families, than about how the majority of low-income families make ends meet unassisted in the private rental market. In 1995, Richard Arnott observed that economists’ “focus on rent control has diverted attention from more important housing policy issues….Not a single paper has been published in a leading journal during the last decade dealing with low-income housing problems.” Richard Arnott, “Time for Revisionism on Rent Control?,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9 (1995): 99–120, 117. 10. Matthew Desmond and Tracey Shollenberger, “Forced Displacement from Rental Housing: Prevalence and Neighborhood Consequences,” Demography, forthcoming. 11.

…

They were not an especially radical bunch, these strikers. Most were ordinary mothers and fathers who believed landlords were entitled to modest rent increases and fair profits, but not “price gouging.” In New York City, the great rent wars of the Roaring Twenties forced a state legislature to impose rent controls that remain the country’s strongest to this day.3 Petitions, picket lines, civil disobedience—this kind of political mobilization required a certain shift in vision. “For a protest movement to arise out of [the] traumas of daily life,” the sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have observed, “the social arrangements that are ordinarily perceived as just and immutable must come to seem both unjust and mutable.”4 This usually happened during extraordinary times, when large-scale social transformations or economic disturbances—the postwar housing shortage, say—profoundly upset the status quo.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook
Published 28 Mar 2016

Take the cost of housing, which is often the greatest financial burden people face. Land-use laws, zoning restrictions, height restrictions, and minimum-lot-size requirements all constrain the supply of housing and help to raise prices in many areas.31 Rent-control laws, among other evils, lead to poor quality of rent-controlled units and higher prices for non-rent-controlled units. So-called urban renewal projects have demolished much of the affordable housing once available to low-income Americans, largely in order to appease outsiders who had enough money to live elsewhere.32 And the government’s “affordable housing” crusade helped spur the housing bubble that drove up the cost of many houses, to the detriment of everyone who didn’t yet own homes.

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Even in America, there were important restrictions on freedom, including economic freedom, from the start. Slavery was the most glaring and vicious example, but hardly the only one. Today, meanwhile, although we have far more liberty than our feudal ancestors, there are countless ways in which the government restricts our freedom to produce and trade, including minimum wage laws, rent control, occupational licensing laws, tariffs, union shop laws, antitrust laws, government monopolies such as those granted to the post office and the education system, subsidies for industries such as agriculture or wind and solar power, eminent domain laws, wealth redistribution via the welfare state, and the progressive income tax.

…

See also Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) opportunity and barriers to success, 123–9 demands of, 66–70 and economic advancement, 70–8 “equality of opportunity” ruse, 78–82 ideal of, 10–14 and innovation, 129–38 and mobility, 117–23 pursuit of happiness, 51–6 and success, 56–9 and voluntary trade, 59–66 welfare state vs., 138–44 Page, Larry, 103, 137–8 Pasteur, Louis, 90 Perry, Mark J., 39 Petersen, Susan, 66 Pickett, Kate, 7, 79, 118, 121, 123, 211–12 Piketty, Thomas, 9, 20–1, 23, 38, 42, 45–6, 121, 153, 156, 217, 220 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 4–5, 7, 165–7, 186 on CEO pay, 158, 160–3 on inequality and growth, 110 on inequality of conditions, 192 on inequality of income, 205 on taxation, 212 Piscione, Deborah Perry, 130 Political Action Committees (PACs), 151, 173 political equality, 16, 80, 100, 114, 203, 250n54 and America’s founding, 12–14, 55 and communism, 52 defined, 12 and economic equality, 178–9, 223–4 and freedom, 103–4 and mobility, 118 poverty, 8, 217, 223, 239n43 absolute and relative poverty, 139 antipoverty programs, 45, 138–44 and Cuba, 52–3 and opportunity, 62–3, 73–5, 81, 129, 223 and progress, 98–9 Powell, Benjamin, 64–5 power, 177–85 private property rights, 6, 12–16, 103, 112 privilege, 145–53, 178–81, 223 progress, 89, 144, 212, 223 conditions of, 83–7 and egalitarianism, 216, 218 and entrepreneurship, 90–1 and finance, 93–4, 154 and freedom, 66, 144, 185 and the Gilded Age, 24–5 and harmony of interests, 95–8 human, 5, 80, 90, 98–101, 110, 130, 132, 174, 199, 205, 225 and inequality, 5–7, 107–14 and innovation, 101–7 and intellectual ability, 87–90 and labor, 94–5 and management, 91–3 medical, 136 and stagnation, 41, 43, 47–8 and taxation, 30 Putnam, Robert, 75 Rand, Ayn on American individualism, 55–6 Atlas Shrugged, 96, 227 on collectivism, 54–6, 200 on equality, 206 Fountainhead, The, 197–8 on genius, 199 “Money-Making Personality, The,” 149 on property rights, 202–3 Pyramid of Ability, 95–6 on rationalization, 215 on social systems, 187 on traders, 60 Rauh, Joshua, 160 Rawls, John, 78–80, 186–93, 198, 202, 204, 211, 217 Reagan, Ronald, 20, 32–3 Reich, Robert, 19, 164 Reisman, George, 62 rent-control laws, 129 responsibility, 67–71, 75–8 Reynolds, Alan, 45 Riley, Jason, 140 risk mitigation, 154–5 Roberts, Russ, 110, 157 Robinson, James A., 166–7 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 9, 146, 198 Rockefeller, John D., 106, 228 Roebling, John, 105 Romer, Christina, 128–9 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 68 Rose, Stephen J., 42 Rosenberg, Nathan, 99–100, 103–4 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 187, 207, 216 Rowe, Mike, 72 Rowling, J.

Billionaires' Row: Tycoons, High Rollers, and the Epic Race to Build the World's Most Exclusive Skyscrapers
by Katherine Clarke
Published 13 Jun 2023

Having a rent-stabilized unit meant that the maximum rent increase per year for one- and two-year leases was set by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board, which would work to ensure that the housing stock within the program remained affordable and rarely raised it more than a couple of percentage points at a time. It also provided certain protections against eviction. The rent stabilization program differed from the more stringent rent control program, which froze rents completely at a certain price. It was under that program, for instance, that longtime New Yorkers like Thomas Lombardi, whose family moved from Italy to Manhattan in the 1940s, were still paying as little as $55 a month for an apartment in SoHo in 2012. Once units became rent-controlled or rent-stabilized, landlords could return them to market rate only under certain conditions. In the case of rent stabilization, those conditions included if the units were vacated or if the building was subject to demolition.

…

But if assemblage was a game of chess, Gary Barnett was its undisputed grand master. Born Gershon Swiatycki in 1955, Barnett grew up in far more modest surroundings than Macklowe. A member of a cloistered Orthodox Jewish enclave on New York’s Lower East Side, as a child Barnett had lived tightly packed with his nine siblings on the top floor of a low-rise rent-controlled building on Pike Street near the base of the Manhattan Bridge. It was not an unusual arrangement for the neighborhood, which had become a hub of Jewish immigrants from Germany, Poland, and beyond, many of whom lived in crowded tenement buildings that often lacked indoor plumbing and were susceptible to fires.

…

It was the 1970s, and the young record producer had just scored a string of hits with the English pop star Engelbert Humperdinck. As Humperdinck began to soar in the charts, Diamond was determined to leave his noisy basement studio on First Avenue—and he had his sights set on a veritable palace in the sky, a penthouse unit in 220 Central Park South, a rent-controlled white brick building at the south end of the park. At 220, Diamond reigned supreme, though he could barely afford his $1,200 a month in rent. The single twentysomething, a bachelor of his era, with shoulder-length wavy blond hair and tight-fitting jeans, lived above high-rolling television executive neighbors and took to hosting celebrity-studded parties with the likes of Regis Philbin, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Joe Pesci.

Everybody's Guide to Small Claims Court
by Ralph E. Warner
Published 2 Jan 1978

As one of the two co-tenants, Helen is still legally obligated to pay all the rent and may be able to recover James’s share by suing him in small claims court. In the same way, Laura, the owner, may sue Helen, the tenant, for the full amount of the rent in small claims court. 5. Rent Control Cases In the few areas with rent control laws, a landlord who charges illegally high rent can be sued by the tenant not only for the excess rent charged, but for a punitive amount as well (often three times the overcharge). C. Drug Dealing and Other Crimes Your landlord has some degree of legal responsibility to provide secure housing.

…

If the Tenant Has No Defense.......................................... 289 2. When a Tenant Breaks a Lease......................................... 290 3. When the Rent-Withholding Tenant Claims the Unit Is Uninhabitable................................................ 290 4. Tenants Suing Co-Tenants for Unpaid Rent...................... 294 5. Rent Control Cases.......................................................... 294 C. Drug Dealing and Other Crimes ........................................... 294 1. Tenants Band Together..................................................... 295 2. Drug-Dealing Tenants...................................................... 296 D.

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Evictions ............................................................................... 301  chapter 20: landlord-tenant cases 279 B y using small claims court, tenants in most states can sue for money damages over a whole host of landlord violations—failure to return a cleaning or damage deposit, invasion of the tenant’s privacy, violation of the duty to provide safe and habitable premises, and rent control violations, to name but a few. In addition, a group of tenants or neighbors can individually (but simultaneously) sue a landlord who allows drug dealing on the rental property. For example, if ten tenants sue a landlord who tolerates drug dealing for $7,500 each, the landlord would face a $75,000 suit.

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities
by Alain Bertaud
Published 9 Nov 2018

In the United States, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit provides a tax credit to developers who provide rental units affordable to households who have incomes below 60 percent of the area’s median gross income. Inclusive zoning programs, like the New York project discussed below, rely on a mix of tax incentives and zoning bonuses. Rent-control programs make the private sector pay entirely for the subsidy, although the municipality loses property tax income because of the low value of rent-controlled properties. Many of these supply side subsidy programs suffer from the same problem as public housing. They prevent beneficiary mobility, because the subsidy is linked to a specific housing unit, which will be lost if the household moves to another apartment.

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However, it requires that the government be able to afford the cost of the vouchers, so that low-income households are not given the false hope of a low-odds lottery. It also requires that supply constraints on land and construction be removed in advance of the distribution of vouchers. Supply Side Subsidies: Public Housing, Inclusive Zoning, and Rent Control In spite of the advantages of demand side subsidies, many governments prefer supply side subsidies. Supply side subsidies do not give the subsidies directly to households but to developers to build a predetermined type of housing in a specific location for a specific price. To benefit from supply side subsidies, households have to move to the dwelling that receives the subsidy, whose location, size, and design have been selected by planners, not by the end user.

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However, with such a large subsidy, no original tenant in subsidized inclusionary zoning apartment is likely to ever move out, even if their income increases twofold, as moving out would represent an immediate large drop in housing consumption. In New York, the subsidy is granted in perpetuity. It is therefore likely that descendants of original tenants will succeed their parents when they retire, as currently happens for rent-controlled apartments. The inclusionary zoning apartments are, therefore, unlikely to constitute a pool of affordable housing in the future. In addition, the large subsidy attached to a specific apartment tends to decrease the mobility of tenants who benefit from it. Incentive to Sublet If presented with a possibility to receive the monthly subsidy as income, tenants would probably prefer this option rather than remaining in the luxury apartment allocated to them.

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society
by Binyamin Appelbaum
Published 4 Sep 2019

The two men, who had first met as graduate students at Chicago, co-authored an attack on rent control playfully entitled Roofs or Ceilings? for the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education. Friedman and Stigler began by describing the rapid reconstruction of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake that destroyed much of the city. Then they jumped ahead forty years, writing that San Francisco once again needed a wave of new construction to house a booming population. But this time, they said, the government was standing in the way. They argued that rent controls discouraged construction of new apartments and maintenance of existing apartments.

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By restraining the profits of landlords, they said, the government was harming tenants, too.22 The Foundation for Economic Education objected to a passage in which Friedman and Stigler wrote that reducing economic inequality was a legitimate goal of public policy, even though they added that rent control was the wrong way to pursue that goal. The foundation inserted a note, without the authors’ permission, describing the pamphlet as all the more compelling for showing that even a pair of bleeding hearts like Friedman and Stigler opposed rent control. A trade group for real estate agents distributed half a million copies.23 By the time the pamphlet appeared in the fall of 1946, Friedman already had left Minnesota to join the economics faculty at the University of Chicago.

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Although nature tends toward entropy, they shared a confidence that economies tend toward equilibrium. They agreed the primary goal of economic policy was to increase the dollar value of the nation’s economic output. They had little patience for efforts to address inequality. A 1979 survey of the members of the American Economic Association found 98 percent opposed rent controls, 97 percent opposed tariffs, 95 percent favored floating exchange rates, and 90 percent opposed minimum wage laws.37 Their differences were matters of degree, and while those differences are consequential — and are described in these pages — the degree of consensus was consequential, too. Critiques of capitalism that remained a staple of mainstream debate in Europe were seldom heard in the United States.

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism
by Grace Blakeley
Published 14 Oct 2020

The corona crash has undoubtedly seen public support for state intervention rise even further. A YouGov poll in April 2020 showed that 72 per cent of people supported the creation of a jobs guarantee scheme, 51 per cent supported a universal basic income ‘where the government makes sure everyone has an income, without a means test or a requirement to work’, and 74 per cent supported rent controls.23 The inefficiencies, inequities and corruption generated by state-monopoly capitalism do not result from centralisation in itself, but from centralisation absent the centrifugal force of democratic accountability. In the wake of this crisis, the resources by then under the command of the state should be allocated by the public, for the public.

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, IMF Finance and Development 53, no. 2 (June 2016), imf.org. 21 Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism, London: Verso, 2016. 22 Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, London and New York: Verso, 2013. 23 IPPR, ‘Public Support for a Paradigm Shift in Economic Policy’, Institute for Public Policy Research, 17 November 2019, ippr.org; Labour for a Green New Deal, ‘Majority of Public Support Ending Net Zero 2030 Emissions Target, Poll Finds’, press release, 7 November 2019, labourgnd.uk; ‘Public Support Universal Basic Income, Job Guarantee and Rent Controls to Respond to Coronavirus Pandemic, Poll Finds’, Independent, 27 April 2020.

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
by Robert H. Frank
Published 3 Sep 2011

Perhaps it’s reasonable to hope for efficient solutions in only those cases that lend themselves to simple compensation arrangements—such as the volunteer auction solution for oversold flights or the monthly rebate palliative for the directory assistance charge. But many issues clearly do not lend themselves to such arrangements. Yet efficient solutions are often elusive even in cases for which transfer remedies could be easily administered. If rent controls are inefficient, for example, why don’t cities use vouchers to buy people out of their rent control leases? Tenants could relocate to smaller apartments at the market rate and be compensated by receiving the equivalent of a cash transfer in the form of a voucher. By the same token, why don’t we use auctions to determine the siting of prisons and other unattractive public facilities?

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The most efficient remedy would be to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), one of the few income-transfer programs that Ronald Reagan endorsed. But conservatives in Congress have grown increasingly hostile to the EITC in recent years. If we can’t transfer income directly, the alternative is usually a more costly one, such as rent controls. Struggling farmers can’t make ends meet? The most efficient solution would be to transfer income to them directly. But with that option closed, we turn to other, far more costly measures, such as price supports for agricultural products. Poor people can’t afford telephone service or pay their gas and electric bills?

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See government regulations relative consumption, importance of, 24–25 relative income, 23, 44 relative performance: CEO pay by, in winner-take-all markets, 150; dependence of reward on, 9, 211–12; in natural selection, 8–9, 21, 23–24 relative position: in human brain, 25–26; importance of, 23–26, 29, 212–13; libertarian rejection of role of, 29, 212–13; in natural selection, 8–9, 21, 23–24; neurophysiological responses to, 26–27. See also rank rent controls, 113, 116 reproductive fitness, 7–8, 20–21, 24, 25 Republican Party, on cap-and-trade system, 181 research grants, 133–35 retirement savings: in economic models versus real life, 54; mandatory, 205–6; reasons for libertarian compromise on, 208, 210 revealed preference doctrine, 44 reward: dependence on rank, 11; dependence on relative performance, 9, 211–12 Reynolds, Glenn, 142–43 Ricardo, David, 16 rights, 207–11; constitutional limitations on, 208; cost-benefit analysis of, 93–99, 209; versus government regulations, 208–11; majority versus minority, 207–11 right-wing think tanks, on government as problem, 5 roads.

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing
by John Boughton
Published 14 May 2018

The resultant crisis came to a head in an eight-month rent strike in Glasgow in 1915, involving at its peak 20,000 households, which forced the government to introduce rent controls. This unprecedented intervention into the free market reflected government fears of a working-class militancy that might threaten the war effort. Practically, it testified to the simple fact that the housing market was broken – that supply and demand were catastrophically out of kilter. The irony, which contemporary politicians understood only too well, was that the imposition of rent controls further reduced the incentive of private builders to build for rent and for landlords to let. As the war draw to a close and the pent-up demand for new housing grew ever more pressing, it became clear that state action was unavoidable.

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He added the admonition that housing design shouldn’t be ‘an adventure playground for architects’.38 A neglected strand of conservation and rehabilitation politics of the 1970s is the programme of municipalisation – the purchase and council management of former privately rented homes. Municipalisation had briefly been official Labour policy in the 1950s, seen primarily as a means of rent control and property improvement. It was revived in the 1970s. The councillors of Clay Cross in Derbyshire thought of themselves ‘as basic Socialists’ – they regarded housing as ‘a social service, not as something the private sector can profit from’ – and declared in 1972 their intention to purchase every privately rented home in the district.39 In 1974, the chair of Hackney’s Housing Development Committee, Alderman J.H.

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It had been favoured by some Conservative-controlled authorities from the 1920s but sales initially had to be authorised by central government (which had, after all, lent the capital) and were expected to achieve the best price. Churchill’s Conservative government removed those restrictions in 1952, and in 1959 Labour went even further in a manifesto commitment offering every tenant ‘a chance … to buy from the Council the house he lives in’.1 It also, however, pledged to take existing private, rent-controlled homes into municipal ownership. The cross-party expectation was that income from council house sales was reinvested in the programme of new council house construction that continued apace. Thatcher’s decisive 1980 Housing Act found a willing cohort of councils, especially those on the right, who had already started to sell off council housing.

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 11 Oct 2021

Twenty passed.48 In Redwood City, south of San Francisco, anti-growth arsonists burned down single-family homes under construction in twenty separate locations after the City Council lifted a moratorium on new home construction.49 In California, Bay Area cities, including San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, and Southern California cities, including Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and West Hollywood, all imposed rent control. The only major cities in California that rejected it were San Diego and Sacramento.50 Local governments in California are able to reject new housing even when it complies with the zoning rules. More than 80 percent of all lawsuits filed under the state’s 1970 California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA, commonly pronounced “see kwa”) are against urban infill housing, not new development in natural areas.51 As a result, California has the second-highest cost of living in the country, behind only Hawaii, with just a handful of lucky people benefiting from rent control.52 Forty-three percent of California voters and 61 percent of those aged 18–34 said in 2019 that they couldn’t afford to live in the state.53 One-third of Californians say they have seriously considered moving out of the state entirely due to housing costs.54 Few people are aware of how unfair rent control has become.

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More than 80 percent of all lawsuits filed under the state’s 1970 California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA, commonly pronounced “see kwa”) are against urban infill housing, not new development in natural areas.51 As a result, California has the second-highest cost of living in the country, behind only Hawaii, with just a handful of lucky people benefiting from rent control.52 Forty-three percent of California voters and 61 percent of those aged 18–34 said in 2019 that they couldn’t afford to live in the state.53 One-third of Californians say they have seriously considered moving out of the state entirely due to housing costs.54 Few people are aware of how unfair rent control has become. “We have people making $500k+ in rent-controlled apartments all over town,” tweeted Michelle Tandler. “In SF we have surgeons living in Atherton subletting out their med school apts. How is this equitable?”55 Newsom campaigned and was elected on a pledge to build 500,000 new units of housing every year from 2019 to 2025, but California’s housing production declined in both of the years Newsom has been in office, 2019 and 2020.

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In San Francisco, progressives have for fifty years suggested that redevelopment must result in evictions and the bulldozing of whole neighborhoods, but that’s not what happened in Zeedijk. The city extended rental subsidies to tenants so they would not be driven out as rents rose. One-third of the housing stock is rent-controlled. “We could make a higher revenue on our portfolio, but we choose to keep diversity,” the housing developer explained. “The money is reinvested in new properties and also more affordable housing in the area, unlike some landlords, where it is probably being invested in their holiday villa.” The model was so popular that it is now being used in the neighboring red-light district.3 All redevelopment comes at a price.

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
by Walter Scheidel
Published 17 Jan 2017

From 1943 the government enforced an all-encompassing shift into armaments production: ill-founded promises of future compensation were the only inducement. In 1944 the state assumed further powers, and some businesses were nationalized. One survey lists about seventy different economic controls that were created between 1937 and 1945—a wide range of measures that included rationing, capital controls, wage control, price control, and land rent control.6 The zaibatsu system of business conglomerates that were tightly controlled by a few wealthy families began to weaken. As corporate savings and investment by the rich proved insufficient to raise the necessary capital for wartime industrial expansion, funds had to be borrowed from outside these formerly closed circles, and the Industrial Bank of Japan reduced the market share of private financial institutions.

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Rural poverty had triggered disputes and unrest during the interwar period, but reform attempts had remained feeble at best. This changed with the Farmland Adjustment Law of 1938, which pushed owners to sell tenanted land and allowed for compulsory purchase of uncultivated land. In 1939 the Land Rent Control Order froze rents at current levels and gave the government the right to order rent reductions. The Land Price Control Order of 1941 fixed land prices at 1939 values, and the Land Control Order of the same year gave the government the power to decide which crops were to be planted. With the Food Control Law of 1942, the authorities began to determine the price of staples.

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Real farm rents fell by four-fifths between 1941 and 1945, and from 4.4 percent of national income in the mid-1930s to 0.3 percent in 1946. Outcomes for landlords could have been even worse, as various proposals for confiscation were circulated but never implemented.8 Workers benefited not only from rent controls, state subsidies, and increasing government intervention in business management but also from an expansion of welfare provisions that were created out of concern for the physical condition of recruits and workers and for the express purpose of reducing anxiety among the citizenry. A Welfare Ministry was set up in 1938 and immediately became a major driving force behind social policy.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz
Published 13 May 2020

In November 2019, the US Census Bureau announced that Americans’ rate of moving was the lowest it had been in decades; Balazs Szekely, ‘Renters Became the Majority Population in 22 Big US Cities’, Rent Café Blog, 25 January 2018, https://www.rentcafe.com/blog/rental-market/market-snapshots/change-renter-vs-owner-population-2006-2016; Wendell Cox, ‘Length of Residential Tenure: Metropolitan Areas, Urban Cores, Suburbs and Exurbs’, New Geography, 17 October 2018, https://www.newgeography.com/content/006115-residential-tenure. 28 Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Anna Brown, Richard Fry, D’Vera Cohn and Ruth Igielnik, ‘What Unites and Divides Urban, Suburban and Rural Communities’, Pew Research Center, 22 May 2018, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/what-unites-and-divides-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/. 29 Peter Stubley, ‘Berlin to freeze rents and give tenants rights to sue landlords after rising costs force residents out to suburbs’, Independent, 23 October 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/berlin-rent-freeze-tenants-sue-landlords-housing-crisis-germany-a9167611.html. 30 Ben Knight, ‘Berlin’s new rent freeze: How it compares globally’, Deutsche Welle, 23 October 2019, https://www.dw.com/en/berlins-new-rent-freeze-how-it-compares-globally/a-50937652. 31 Prasanna Rajasekaran, Mark Treskon, Solomon Greene, ‘Rent Control: What Does the Research Tell Us about the Effectiveness of Local Action?’, Urban Institute, January 2019, https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/99646/rent_control._what_does_the_research_tell_us_about_the_effectiveness_of_local_action_1.pdf. For some examples, see, e.g., Noah Smith, ‘Yup, Rent Control Does More Harm Than Good’, Bloomberg Opinion, 18 January 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-01-18/yup-rent-control-does-more-harm-than-good; these include Amsterdam, which in 2019 instituted a law dictating that entire homes may be rented out for only thirty nights per calendar year.

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In Berlin, for example, the local government announced in October 2019 that it was going to enforce a five-year freeze on rents.29 Other cities already either imposing some sort of rent stabilisation measures or contemplating their introduction include Paris, Amsterdam, New York and Los Angeles.30 It’s too early to know whether such initiatives will have the desired impact. Economic theory suggests that because rent controls reduce incentives to build new housing, they can end up exacerbating housing supply shortages and thereby lead to price increases.31 It may therefore be that other forms of intervention would produce better outcomes, such as the granting of longer leases, or even leases with an indefinite time period, so that tenants know they can build a long-term home in a neighbourhood – although even these would presumably also need some kind of associated rent stabilisation measures if they were to work.

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
Published 14 Jan 2020

There was also a racial dimension: almost all the residents of the condos were white, while virtually all those living in the homeless shelter were black. On the political left, some people have advocated rent controls for people like Marquita, but these haven’t worked well when they’ve been tried, for reasons of basic economics. Rent control doesn’t increase the supply and tends to constrict it because people don’t give up bargain apartments, and developers are wary of building if they think their returns will be held down. In some cities, owners can also convert rentals to unregulated condominiums. Meanwhile, rent control tends to increase demand, so you have more people competing for fewer apartments. There’s also a growing consensus among economists that zoning rules—such as limiting many areas for single-family dwellings—reduce the supply of affordable housing and thus increase homelessness.

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* * * — BY EVEN A CONSERVATIVE COUNT, there are more than half a million homeless people in America at any one time, including nearly two hundred thousand living on the streets rather than in shelters. Homelessness has increased in the last forty years even as America has become much wealthier, because of a confluence of factors. After World War II, new rent controls and land-use zoning rules discouraged new affordable housing. Then President John F. Kennedy had a vision of moving the mentally ill and physically disabled out of specialty institutions into community centers closer to family. But not enough centers have been created, so vulnerable people end up homeless.

The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law
by Timothy Sandefur
Published 16 Aug 2010

With the coming of the 20th century, however, the police powers were increasingly stretched by Populist and Progressive activists.36 The Modern Contracts Clause At the end of World War I, several East Coast cities faced serious housing shortages. Rents were rising, and many residents faced foreclosure and eviction. New York, Washington, and other cities responded by passing rent-control measures prohibiting landlords from evicting tenants who paid a “reasonable” rent. The landlords challenged these laws as violations of the contracts clause because they impaired their lease contracts. But the Supreme Court upheld the laws, explaining that “contracts are made subject to [the] exercise of the power of the state”37 and that the emergency justified the government’s actions.

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The state’s socialist governor, Floyd Olson, warned that “if the legislature—the Senate in particular—does not make ample provision for the sufferers in this state,” he would “declare martial law” and “[a] lot of people who are now fighting the [proposed debtor-relief] measures because they happen to possess considerable wealth will be brought in by provost guards.”39 The legislature caved in to these threats on April 18, 1933, unanimously approving a law modeled on the New York rent-control law. The Minnesota act extended the period during which a resident could reclaim mortgaged property after the bank had foreclosed and sold it. That period had been one year, but the new law allowed judges to extend it to two years. The law also sought to avoid constitutional conflict by declaring that no such extension would be granted if it would “substantially diminish or impair the value of the contract . . . without reasonable allowance to justify the exercise of the police power.”40 The law also allowed courts to reject a foreclosure sale and to require a new sale if the sale price was judged to be “inadequate.”41 The problem with this law is that the Constitution’s ban on laws impairing contractual obligations contains no “emergency” exception.

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Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence and ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Harper Perennial, 1969), p. 292. 36. Olken, “Charles Evans Hughes,” 548. 37. Marcus Brown Holding Co. v. Feldman, 256 U.S. 170, 198 (1921). See also Block v. Hirsh, 256 U.S. 135 (1921) (upholding a Washington, D.C., rent-control ordinance). 38. William L. Prosser, “The Minnesota Mortgage Moratorium,” Southern California Law Review 7 (1934): 353–55. 39. Ibid., p. 355. 40. Olken, “Charles Evans Hughes,” 574. 41. Prosser, “Minnesota Mortgage Moratorium,” 362. 42. Ibid., 357. 43. Home Bldg. & Loan Ass’n v. Blaisdell, 290 U.S. 398, 444 (1934). 44.

Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis
Published 1 Mar 2006

Accordingly, in the first golden years of the revolution, there was a huge national effort to rehouse the poor, even if many of the projects, in retrospect, were drab adaptations of modernism.35 Although revolutionary Cuba's commitment to a "new urbanism" , was avant-garde, the ideal of a popular entitiement tojiousing wasjiot i unique in the contemporary Third World in the late 1950s and early ' 1960s: Nasser, Nehru, and Sukarno also promised to rebuild slums and create immense quanitities of new housing. In addition to subsidized housing and rent control, Nasser's "contract with Egypt" guaranteed public-sector jobs to every secondary-school graduate. Revolutionary Algeria legislated free universal healthcare and education, together with I rent subsidies for poor city-dwellers. "Socialist" African states, beginj ning with Tanzania in the early 1960s, all started off with ambitious programs to relocate urban slum-dwellers into new low-cost housing.

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The challenge was to reconcile a continuing supply of cheap labor with soaring land values, and the preferred solution was not high rents — which would have forced up wages — but peripheralization and overcrowding By 1971, writes Smart, one million squatters had been resettled "on land equivalent to only 34 percent of the land previously occupied, and on peripheral land of much lower value." Likewise hundreds of thousands of poor tenants had been relocated from their former rent-controlled housing in the central area. Space allocation in public housing in the early 1960s was a minuscule 24 square feet per adult, with toilets and kitchens shared by an entire floor. Although conditions improved in projects built later, Hong Kong maintained the highest formal residential densities in the world: the price for freeing up the maximum surface area for highrise offices and expensive market-price apartments.39 38 Berner, "Learning from Informal Markets," p. 244. 39 Smart, Making Room, pp. 1, 33, 36, 52, 55. 

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However, this first military attempt to roll back informal settlement was only partly successful, and with the restoration of civilian rule in the early 1970s, the slums again became hotbeds of radical Peronist and socialist agitation. When the generals came back into power in March 1976, they were determined to destroy the villas miserias once and for all; during the terrible years of el Proceso, rent control was repealed, 94 percent of the "illegal" settlements in Gran Buenos Aires were razed, and 270,000 poor people were rendered homeless. Rankand-file organizers, including lay Catholics as well as leftists, were systematically "disappeared." As in Chile, the liquidation of slum-based 47 Alfredo Rodriguez and Ana Maria Icaza, " Chile," in Azuela, Duhau, and Ortiz, Evictions and the Right to Housing p. 51. 48 Harms, "To live in the City Centre," p. 198. 49 Cathy Schneider, Shantytoivn Protest in Pinochet's Chile, Philadelphia 1995, p. 101. 

10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less
by Garett Jones
Published 4 Feb 2020

The evidence on the effects of elected electricity regulators isn’t as conclusive as the evidence for the costs of voter-dependent central banks. But taken together, it’s consistent with a simple freshman economics story where elected regulators tend to impose price ceilings for consumer electricity—a little like rent control—thus keeping prices low but at the cost of keeping the quantity (and quality) of supply low. The lower mandated prices are likely to cause less investment in electricity infrastructure. That means that with price ceilings, you might get more brownouts or blackouts, or it might be harder to build a new subdivision amid the restricted electricity supply, but for most consumers, the low rates feel like a free lunch.

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Perhaps even worse, they’re more likely to fall for bad economic ideas. My George Mason colleague Bryan Caplan conclusively documented in his famed book The Myth of the Rational Voter that the least educated are the most likely to support policies that are largely rejected by academic economists: higher taxes on imported goods, rent control, and tougher government-enforced rules that make it harder for firms to fire workers, to name just a few.⁹ As Princeton’s Blinder puts it in Advice and Dissent, “A more economically literate public would be a blessing.”¹⁰ It’s likely no surprise that the least educated are most likely to disagree with experts in economics; they’re more likely than the educated to disagree with experts in medicine and history as well!

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, 25–26 Olson, Mancur: on selective benefits, 141 Orange County, California: bankruptcy of, 77, 79–80 Pareto efficiency, 160 Paris Club conditions on loans, 125–26 Parkin, Michael: on central bank independence (CBI), 44–45 peace: and democracy, 15–17, 186; and liberal institutions, 16–17; relationship to trade, 16–17 Plosser, Charles: on real business cycle (RBC) theory, 55 Plunkitt, George Washington: Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, 105, 137–38, 141, 175; on reelection, 137–38 Poland: EU membership, 158; unanimity rule in, 160, 162 political culture and central banks, 47, 58–59 political donors, 31 political machines, 137, 142–43, 175–76, 179 Polity IV index: Autocracy index, 18–19; Democracy index, 18–19, 171 Polybius: on mixed form of government, 181, 183–84 Pop-Eleches, Cristian: on judicial independence and economic freedom, 73–76 pork projects, 29–30 Posso, Alberto: on inflation and central banks, 47–48 Prescott, Ed: on real business cycle (RBC) theory, 55 prices, 87–88, 89; price controls, 84, 100 Pritchett, Lant: on “Getting to Denmark”, 169 productivity, 35 property rights, 73, 74, 75, 76 proportional representation, 151 public choice theory, 28–29 Putnam, Robert: research on trust in one’s neighbors, 159 Quarterly Journal of Economics, 50 Quek, Kai: on peace and democracy, 15–16 racially integrated schools, 65 Rauch, Jonathan: on crisis of followership, 144; on democracy, 143; influence of, 142; on party insiders, 142–43, 179; on political machines, 137, 142–43, 179; Political Realism, 142–43 Read, Carveth, 187 real business cycle (RBC) theory, 54, 55–56 real per capita GDP, 30 reciprocal altruism, 139 reform proposals: bondholders with explicit, advisory role in governance, 11, 119, 126–27, 133, 134–36; continued restrictions on voting by felons, 108–9; costs of, 20, 23, 25, 93; education requirements for voters, 96–98, 105–6, 107–8, 114–17, 188; impact on socioeconomic development, 17; longer terms for politicians, 39–40, 178, 188; and microfoundations, 25; national tax board, 61, 92–94, 143; as nonutopian, 8, 20–21, 60–61; relationship to personal morality, 187–88; risks of, 25, 94, 179; six-year term for U.S. president, 188; staggered elections, 146–47, 179; and transitional gains trap, 112–14; upper house as Sapientum, 110–12, 127 regression discontinuity design (RDD), 78–79 religious liberty, 65 rent control, 100 Republican Party, 140–41 reputation with lenders, 128–32 Rickard, Stephanie, 34–35 right to competent government, 103, 104, 109 right to health care, 103–4 Riordan, William, 137 Rocher, François, 107 Rogers, Will: on Democratic Party, 159 Rogoff, Kenneth: conservative central banker theory, 53–55, 56, 60, 86 Roosevelt, Franklin, 125 Root, Hilton: on corporations in Old Regime, 129–30; “Tying the King’s Hands”, 129–30 Rossi, Martin: on term lengths of politicians in Argentina, 37–38 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 102 rule of law, 14, 16 Samuelson, Paul: on inflation and unemployment, 43 Sargent, Thomas: on monetary policies, 44, 46 Schelker, Mark: on short terms, 31 Schulhof, Natalie: article in Fourth Estate, 1–3 Sen, Amartya: on democracies and famines, 9–11, 12, 171; Development as Freedom, 9; on minimal requirements for democracy, 11, 171 Shanmugaratnam, Tharman, 175 Shepsle, Kenneth: on voters’ short memories, 29–30 Shleifer, Andrei: on judicial independence and economic freedom, 73–76 Sims, Christopher: “Paper Money” lecture, 122 Singapore: buffet syndrome in, 20; democracy in, 170–72, 173, 174, 175–76; vs.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 1 Sep 2020

In the 1950s, the movement’s center of gravity moved from Europe to Hayek’s new home, the University of Chicago, where a group of economists explained how bureaucrats, even if they were well intentioned (which they often weren’t), could do more harm than good. The loudest voice was the American economist Milton Friedman. Small, wiry, intense, Friedman attacked just about everything that the center-left held dear: foreign aid was siphoned off by dictators, rent controls reduced the supply of housing, public spending on universities forced poor people to subsidize rich ones. He was like a naughty schoolboy frightening old ladies with firecrackers. Big government would always mess things up: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand,” Friedman said.

…

In America, it is mainly the well-off who read the IRS’s ninety-page booklet that explain the fifteen different tax incentives for higher education. For all the blame that unfettered capitalism took for the subprime mess, there were few more culpable organizations than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government agencies that pumped money into the housing market. Rent control has increasingly become a perk for the privileged, whether it be in Stockholm or New York. More money goes into subsidizing mortgages than social housing for the poor. This fits a pattern. No matter how much Americans moan about their government, more than half the households in the country get some kind of handout.

A History of Future Cities
by Daniel Brook
Published 18 Feb 2013

In a surrender to central planning that became known as the “Bombay Plan,” the industrialists agreed to limit foreign direct investment in their companies and give the state the power to fix their prices and regulate their production—even seize their companies outright. In 1953, the government used this new authority to nationalize Tata Airways, creating Air India. Similarly, Bombay’s landlords acceded to a 1947 rent-control law, capping rents at 1940s levels and destroying the incentive for maintenance and upgrading of properties even as the population of Bombay tripled in the postindependence decades. Some economic historians remain puzzled as to why Bombay capitalists would surrender so much power to the state.

…

The metropolis the studios presented was not the License-Permit Raj–restricted city of office clerks and public employees, but a mythic throwback to the glamorous Bombay of the Jazz Age. It was not difficult to conjure such a city, for Bombay had been physically frozen in its preindependence, cosmopolitan state. The same rent-control laws that preserved the city’s housing stock, albeit in increasing levels of decay as well-to-do homes were converted into de facto chawls, provided the city’s multinational corporate tenants with an offer they couldn’t refuse. Paramount Pictures, the Hollywood studio, maintained the same downtown office it first rented in 1933 right through the socialist period until today, all for a token rent.

…

So do the jobless boys playing cricket in the courtyard—and the employed boys who work construction, shoveling earth while standing atop a pile of mud in flip-flops. The popularity of these slum redevelopment projects has birthed a larger ambition to remake entire neighborhoods on the same ad hoc model, the sum of several contiguous parcel-by-parcel redevelopments. A newly passed Mumbai exemption from India’s politically untouchable rent-control rules established the neighborhood redevelopment process: if 70 percent of tenants in a building agree, a real estate developer can demolish their building and rehouse them in new apartments on-site in exchange for the opportunity to build new market-rate units. The larger the plot, the higher the developers can build, so there is an incentive to assemble large parcels out of several contiguous buildings.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It
by Richard Florida
Published 9 May 2016

Not surprisingly, a 2016 study of the San Francisco Bay Area found that a combination of building more private-market-rate housing and more subsidized housing is required to address the region’s housing affordability challenge.19 There has been no shortage of proposed solutions for providing more affordable housing for those truly in need. They include expanding rent control, building more publicly subsidized housing, and making use of so-called inclusionary zoning, that is, mandating that developers construct affordable housing units in exchange for being able to build bigger, taller, high-end projects. While the aims of such policies are admirable, they can be costly and inefficient. Rent control discourages landlords from improving their properties, and it can be gamed. Inclusionary zoning works best in expensive superstar-city real estate markets where developers have incentives to build affordable units in exchange for the ability to build taller buildings.

…

venture capital investment in, 44 (table) Philips Livable City Awards, 182 Phoenix, 44 (table) Piketty, Thomas, 32–33 Pittsburgh, xiii–xiv, 142–143, 142 (fig.), 154 place-based investment, 11, 207–210 plutocratization, 6, 39 politics anti-urban bias in, 190 cities neglected in, 185–186 conservatism in, 112, 190, 204, 222 Democrats in, 163–165, 185, 211, 222 infrastructure and, 195 liberalism in, 112, 190, 222 local officials in, 213–214 New Urban Crisis Index and, 188 Republicans in, 163–165, 190, 202, 212, 222 suburban crisis influencing, 163–165 urban policy and, 185–186 See also election, US poor challenges facing, 56 segregation of, 101–103, 101 (table), 219 popular music, location of, 53–54 population growth, 18–19, 163 population size, variable of, 221 Portland, OR, 67 poverty in Baltimore, 97–98 gentrification and, 56, 59, 72–75, 77–78 in global urbanization crisis, 168–169, 172–173, 177–181 investment tackling, 11, 207–210 racially concentrated, 77–78, 98, 116–117 in suburban crisis, 155–156, 159–160 worsening, 98 Progress and Poverty (George), 194 property tax, 194–195, 208 Putnam, Robert, 122 race creative class and, 115 economic segregation and, 115–119 in Ferguson, 157–158 gentrification and, 63, 65, 75–78 poverty and, 77–78, 98, 116–117 suburbs and, 65, 152, 154 variable of, 221 Raleigh, NC, 29, 29 (fig.) real estate corporate, 39 prices, 22, 32, 38–39 refugee cities, 210–211 rent control, 201–202 rental housing, affordable, 11, 28, 199–202 rentier behavior, 25–26 Republicans, 163–165, 190, 202, 212, 222 restaurants, 76 re-urbanization, 24, 62, 73–74, 78, 190 Ricardo, David, 26, 194 Rio de Janeiro, 179 The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida), xiv, 46, 48, 115, 142 rise of the rest, 19 Rognlie, Matthew, 32 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 214 Rosen, Kenneth, 60–61 Rosen, Sherwin, 14 Rustbelt cities economic segregation in, 100–101, 119 economies of, xvii, 5 New Urban Crisis Index and, 188 Patchwork Metropolis and, 123, 137, 139, 142 Saiz, Albert, 30 Sampson, Robert, 207 San Bernardino, CA, 156 San Diego, 44 (table), 186, 187 (fig.)

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare
by Ryan Dezember
Published 13 Jul 2020

The National Rental Home Council had shown impressive flex in California, Baldridge said. A lobbying firm it hired in Sacramento opened doors and helped it defeat legislation that would have allowed cities throughout the state to establish rent control. “Had it won, it would have allowed every city to interpret what it wants for rent control,” he said. “Not only would it open up rent control, but every city would have its nuance. To try to operate in that environment would have been crazy. What happens in California then goes all over the country, so we really wanted to take a stand there. American Homes 4 Rent and Invitation Homes played a part in pushing that back.”

Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality
by Vito Tanzi
Published 28 Dec 2017

However, for political, administrative, or financial reasons, regulations may be preferred. Examples include rent controls, minimum wages, controls on the prices of some essential goods, rationing, 146 Termites of the State requirements for enterprises to ensure that a proportion of the workers they hire have some physical handicaps or ethnic characteristics, or requirements for universities to admit some proportion of students from minority groups. Better results might be achieved by taxing some groups while subsidizing others. However, the alternatives might not be considered politically or administratively feasible or desirable. Rent controls and similar programs may contribute to the creation of poverty traps if those who benefit from them lose the subsidy when they get a higher-paying job that disqualifies them from the benefit.

…

Rent controls and similar programs may contribute to the creation of poverty traps if those who benefit from them lose the subsidy when they get a higher-paying job that disqualifies them from the benefit. A country that adopts a policy of rent controls loses national income, while the government loses tax revenue, because of the lower rental income and lower property values. Similar arguments could be made for regulations that establish minimum wages. They help some workers but are likely to hurt others who remain unemployed by restricting the demand for labor. Regulations that establish price controls for some products often lead to black markets and to scarcity of the goods whose prices are controlled. (3) Purely social regulations establish official working hours for shops, obligations for them to be closed on holidays, vacation times for workers, limits to overtime, age limits for workers, limits on when alcoholic beverages can be sold, quotas for some categories of workers, etc.

…

It should, thus, not be surprising that economic policies and institutions in Italy, which are, as they should be, much influenced by jurists, have developed in line with the Italian Constitution. At times, Quality of Public Sector and Legal Framework 271 they have allowed policies (such as the expropriation of land with very low or no compensation to the owners, rent controls, the occupation of privately-owned but unoccupied houses by local governments, the failure by enterprises to fire unneeded workers, and controls over interest rates. All these actions were not consistent with the principle of protection of property (see Tanzi, 2015a). This may also explain why Italy has had one of the lowest scores, in terms of “economic liberty,” among the many countries assessed by the experts of the Economic Freedom Network.

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science
by Paul Krugman
Published 18 Feb 2010

New York’s pro-tenant policies have produced very good deals for some people, but they have also made it very hard for newcomers to find a place to live. France’s policies have produced nice work if you can get it. But many people, especially the young, can’t get it. And, given the generosity of unemployment benefits, many don’t even try. True, some problems are easy to diagnose but hard to deal with. If George Pataki can’t end rent control, why should we expect Jacques Chirac to cure Eurosclerosis? But what is mysterious about France is that as far as one can tell, absolutely nobody of consequence accepts the obvious diagnosis. On the contrary, there seems to be an emerging consensus that what France needs is—guess what?—more regulation.

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France’s problem is unemployment (currently almost 13 percent). Nothing else is even remotely as important. And whatever a unified market and a common currency may or may not achieve, they will do almost nothing to create jobs. Think of it this way: Imagine that several cities, all suffering housing shortages because of rent control, agree to make it easier for landlords in one city to own buildings in another. This is not a bad idea. It might even slightly increase the supply of apartments. But it is not going to get at the heart of the problem. Yet all the grand schemes for European integration amount to no more than that.

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy
by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle
Published 12 Mar 2019

The East Village led the list, with a staggering 28 percent of its units going as illegal hotel rooms on Airbnb.54 A 2015 Streeteasy report notes, “According to census data, New York City rent prices grew at almost twice the pace of income between 2000 and 2013, meaning that over time rent has taken up a much larger piece of New Yorkers’ incomes.”55 EV Grieve, an East Village blog, lists East Village residents as spending 56 percent of their incomes on market-rate rent.56 New York City has strong renter protections, but renters in other cities aren’t as lucky. In San Francisco, rent-controlled residents face the threat of owner-occupied move-ins, where an owner or immediate family member can evict a tenant in order to personally use the apartment. Although the Ellis Law, which allows landlords to leave the rental business, is a legally acceptable reason for eviction, these newly vacant apartments are often turned into Airbnb rentals, making thousands of dollars more profit each month.57 A recent Economist report on the digital revolution acknowledged the growing divide between a few lucky ones and the rest of society: “In the past new technologies have usually raised wages by boosting productivity, with the gains being split between skilled and less-skilled workers, and between owners of capital, workers and consumers.

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New York: Random House. Portes, Alejandro. 1994. “The Informal Economy and Its Paradoxes.” In Handbook of Economic Sociology, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg, 426–49. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Poston, Ben, and Andrew Khouri. 2015. “Ousted Tenants Sue after Their Former Rent-Controlled L.A. Apartments Are Listed on Airbnb.” Los Angeles Times, December 17. Potts, Monica. 2015. “The Post-ownership Society.” Washington Monthly, June–August. Price, Emily. 2016. “This ‘Uber for Dog Poop’ App Is Definitely Fake—Sorry, Sharing Economy Enthusiasts.” Fast Company, July 29. PricewaterhouseCoopers. 2015.

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See also piecemeal system race issues: digital divide and, 193; discrimination, 35–36, 193; race of chefs, 59; race of TaskRabbit workers, 56; segregation, 119; vulnerability categories, 193–94 Ravenelle, Alexandrea, 194 Reagan, Ronald, 178 recession effects, 26–27 recession of 1981–1982, 178 recirculation of goods, 27 recruitment: by Kitchensurfing, 57, 58–59; by Uber, 50 redress options, 6, 22 registration requirements, 222–23n64 regulation issues, 37 regulatory issues, 50 RelayRides, 33 rental cars, 2, 5 rentals: in East Village, 41, 129; Ellis Law, 41; landlord-tenant disputes, 13; long-term rentals, 39, 39–41; necessity of shared rentals, 132; rent-controlled residents, 41; renter protections, 41; short-term rentals, 19–20, 40, 149–50. See also Airbnb repeat business: Kitchensurfing Tonight, 58; TaskRabbit, 56, 80 research methodology: case studies, 7; critical perspective and, 7–8; Hawthorne effect, 232n24; interview matrix, 216–17; participant recruitment and methodology, 21–22, 223n85, 225n34, 228n30, 229n5; service platforms, 7 response rates, 1, 78–79, 81–82, 160 retirement funds: access to, 190; as contributory plans, 37; decreases in, 9; productivity and, 190; sharing economy and, 94, 156; temporary workers lack of, 180; use of, 61 reviews, negative, 4 review systems: customer review sites, 26; employee monitoring and, 204–5; negative reviews, 4, 13, 91, 143; transfer between sites, 20 Rideshare Guy website, 76 ride-sharing, 223n75, 233n72 risks: overview, 22; mitigation of, 170; as transaction costs, 27 risk shifts: overview, 31, 36–38; advanced planning and, 97–100; assumption of risk, 92; dangers of driving for hire, 101–4; entrepreneurship and, 36–37; financial risks, 37; financial sustainability, 31; marketing of self, 181; risk reduction, 27 Robinson, Spottswood, 119 Rockefeller family, 68–69 Rodriguez, Ydanis, 51 Rogers, Jackie Krasas, 122 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 70 Russell, Mike, 189 safety issues: overview, 113; background screening mechanisms, 113–15; pedestrian dangers, 228n32; yellow taxicab standards, 227n16 Santander Bank, 3, 73 Sapone, Marcela, 187–89 Sasso, Anthony, 58 scams: overview, 23; overpayment scams, 148–49; platforms misuse and, 141–42 Scharf, Michael, 109, 189–90, 192 schedules: client response rates and, 84; computerized scheduling systems, 180; flexibility in, 207; just-in-time scheduling, 179, 180–81; long, 5 scheduling availability, 1, 62, 87 Schierenbeck, Warren, 58–59 Schoar, Antoinette, 38 Schor, Juliet, 16, 26, 27, 56, 100, 183, 194, 224n1 Schultz, Ken, 191 Schumpeter, Joseph A., 207 scientific management, 178 Scott, Marvin, 124 secondary labor market, defined, 37 secondhand economy companies, 27, 28fig. 2.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)
by Mindy Kaling
Published 1 Nov 2011

He lived with what seemed like two younger male relatives, with “younger” meaning in their sixties. In the dead of summer or winter they would wear those ribbed white tank tops grossly named wife beaters, which is how we knew they were rent-control tenants (if anyone wears year-round wife beaters, it is the same as saying they are enjoying the benefits of a rent-controlled apartment). They also spoke a language with one another that seemed like a hybridized version of an Eastern European language and the incomprehensible mumble of Dick Tracy henchmen. They would’ve been frightening, except they were incredibly timid and scared of us for some reason.

The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010
by Selina Todd
Published 9 Apr 2014

In 1957 the government had passed a Rent Act that removed all rent controls from unfurnished properties with a rateable value in excess of £40. Landlords could also have rent controls removed from empty properties worth less than £40. Ministers argued that this would give more impetus to the private housing market and encourage landlords to reinvigorate those inner-city areas where people still wanted to live. In reality, profiteering landlords flourished, among them, London’s infamous Peter Rachman, who bought up dilapidated houses, evicted white tenants, kept the accommodation empty in order to have rent controls removed, and then took on recent immigrants as new tenants.

…

When the Leeds Education Authority began consultation on Crosland’s plan, ‘we formed the Chapeltown Parents’ Association to fight … schools were changing to comprehensive to give the children a better chance.’11 During the 1970s the proportion and number of working-class university students increased for the first time since the 1930s.12 Other changes directly affected adult workers. Between 1964 and 1970 the Labour government built more council houses than the Conservatives had managed in the previous ten years, and reintroduced rent controls into the private sector.13 People could afford to fill their homes with new domestic appliances. In 1960 less than one-third of British households had possessed a fridge or a washing machine; by 1970 more than half did.14 Many working-class people experienced something approaching affluence for the first time.

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century
by George Gilder
Published 30 Apr 1981

But the movement of welfare blacks into the communities of middle or lower middle-class whites or blacks is an act of social disruption, particularly if done by the subterfuge of rent or mortgage subsidies. These policies are self-fulfilling prophecies of racism. In a housing market distorted by rent controls, affirmative action, and other devices, the middle class, in defense of its chief financial and social assets, takes the safest course—hostility to all government projects threatening the neighborhood. In the process, many apparent opportunities arise for journalists and reporters to “prove” the false liberal hypothesis that racism still prevails in American society.

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Subsidies and tax benefits for the purchase of pollution-control equipment broadly distribute the costs of combating environmental damage inflicted and often suffered by the few. Much of the activity of the Department of Energy comprises an attempt to disperse through the entire country effects of energy scarcity that would otherwise fall most heavily on a small number of vulnerable constituencies. Rent controls attempt to diffuse the effects of urban housing scarcity and rising costs. The result of all this activity by both the public and private sectors—shifting, diffusing, equalizing, concealing, shuffling, smoothing, evading, relegating, and collectivizing the real risks and costs of economic change—is to desensitize the economy.

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As government grows, there all too quickly comes a time when solutions are less profitable than problems. Throughout the Washington of the seventies, behind the inevitable rhetoric of innovation and progress, the facades of futurity, the forces of obstruction gathered: an energy department imposing counterproductive new taxes and price controls; a department of housing promoting rent controls; even a National Center for Productivity forced to celebrate the least productive of all unions per man hour—the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. Despite his best intentions, the government planner will tend to live in the past, for only the past is sure and calculable.

Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel
by Stephen Budiansky
Published 10 May 2021

“One cannot talk about prices,” the German physicist Max von Laue reported from Vienna on a visit in 1922. “Before one’s sentence has ended, they have increased again.”3 One of the few advantages of the inflation of the Austrian krone was that following its replacement in 1924 by the new schilling, at a rate of 1 to 10,000, the socialist government of the city of Vienna imposed rent controls on apartments that set the amount of the new rents in schillings at the same amount as the old rents in krone. The result was “a certain luxury in living space,” recalled Karl Menger, son of the economist Carl Menger, and soon to be one of Gödel’s closest mentors and colleagues. The apartment that Gödel shared with Rudi at Florianigasse 42 was the first of a series of spacious apartments the brothers would rent, moving each year to yet another solidly built four-story, bourgeois, turn-of-the-century building in the neighborhood of the university.

…

The apartment that Gödel shared with Rudi at Florianigasse 42 was the first of a series of spacious apartments the brothers would rent, moving each year to yet another solidly built four-story, bourgeois, turn-of-the-century building in the neighborhood of the university. The other consequence of the city’s rent control, however, was to exacerbate Vienna’s longstanding housing shortage. There was little incentive for owners to construct new buildings, or for that matter to maintain existing ones. Menger one day narrowly escaped death when a half-ton piece of stucco crashed down from the upper story of a house onto the pavement two steps in front of him.4 But by the mid-1920s, Menger recalled, “at long last the traditional optimism of the Viennese reappeared.”

…

When, at the end of the year, Edgar Zilsel attempted to organize a biweekly meeting to keep alive a remnant of the old Gomperz and Schlick circles and one person after another objected to each proposed day because of other engagements, Gödel ruefully observed, “I am the only one who has no conflict on any day.”25 For her part, Gödel’s mother, finding life in Vienna ever more expensive and with her savings locked up in Czechoslovakia, decided to move back to the villa in Brno, which meant that if Gödel were indeed to stay in Vienna he would need to find an apartment of his own by the end of the year.26 He exhaustively interviewed friends and his uncle Carl Gödel about rent control laws and where to look for a suitable place, all the time making elaborate calculations of how much he might earn, and save, if he were to go to America again. He wrote out one formula, subtracting expenses (including the $2,000 he had run up staying at Rekawinkel and Aflenz), and adding back what he would save by not having to rent an apartment in Vienna: Menger had written to Gödel over the summer promptly relaying President O’Hara’s offer and enclosing information about Notre Dame, but still Gödel dithered.

Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
by Brett Chistophers
Published 25 Apr 2023

As will become clear, asset-manager society is a child of broader political–economic shifts, relating in particular to the changing role of the state: indeed, Blackstone and other leading real-asset managers can be usefully understood as, in one observer’s words, ‘an unelected elite … increasingly standing in for the state’, making ‘big money’ from owning assets that ‘the public used to own [and] on which citizens vitally depend’.1 After German reunification in 1990, state-owned rental housing in the former East Germany was sold to the private sector, and rent controls were gradually removed. Beginning in 2005, a local real-estate company called Level One began buying up large stocks of such privatised rental housing, principally in Berlin. But it did so almost entirely with debt, and when the global financial crisis hit in 2008, Level One’s unserviceable debt pile forced it into bankruptcy.

…

By the end of 2018, by which time Carnegie had been renamed Hembla and owned more than 21,000 apartments, Blackstone had increased its ownership share to 61 per cent. Much of the Hembla housing stock had not been substantively upgraded since its construction in the 1960s and 1970s. Should Blackstone invest in such upgrading? Sweden’s system of ‘soft’ rent control allows landlords to raise rents if they undertake renovations that improve a unit’s physical condition and quality. The question Blackstone faced, therefore, was: if it carried out renovations, could it secure an immediate rent increase of an order that (a) demonstrated to other potential investors that the expenditure generated adequate returns, and would thus encourage them to compensate Blackstone for said expenditure if and when Blackstone decided to sell Hembla, but also (b) did not negatively impact occupancy?

…

Vogell, ‘When Private Equity Becomes Your Landlord’, 7 February 2022 – at propublica.org. 71 The committees in question were the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, the House Committee on Financial Services and the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. 72 Cited in E. Rios, ‘Four Corporate US Landlords Deceived and Evicted Thousands during Covid, Report Reveals’, Guardian, 4 August 2022. 73 Conlin, ‘Spiders, Sewage and a Flurry of Fees’. 74 D. Sirota and A. Perez, ‘How California Public Employees Fund Anti-Rent Control Fight Unwittingly’, Guardian, 23 October 2018. 75 R. Dezember, ‘Blackstone Moves Out of Rental-Home Wager with a Big Gain’, Wall Street Journal, 21 November 2019. 76 An especially disquieting example has been related in depth by Y. Rafiei, ‘When Private Equity Takes Over a Nursing Home’, New Yorker, 25 August 2022. 77 A.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Piketty
Published 10 Mar 2014

Given the high level of German saving, this low level of German wealth compared to other European countries is to some extent a paradox, which may be transitory and can be explained as follows.4 The first factor to consider is the low price of real estate in Germany compared to other European countries, which can be explained in part by the fact that the sharp price increases seen everywhere else after 1990 were checked in Germany by the effects of German reunification, which brought a large number of low-cost houses onto the market. To explain the discrepancy over the long term, however, we would need more durable factors, such as stricter rent control. FIGURE 4.4. Private and public capital in Europe, 1870–2010 The fluctuations of national capital in Europe in the long run are mostly due to the fluctuations of private capital. Sources and series: see piketty.pse.ens.fr/capital21c. In any case, most of the gap between Germany on the one hand and France and Britain on the other stems not from the difference in the value of the housing stock but rather from the difference in the value of other domestic capital, and primarily the capital of firms (see Figure 4.1).

…

This introduces an element of arbitrariness (markets are often capricious), but it is the only method we have for calculating the national capital stock: how else could one possibly add up hectares of farmland, square meters of real estate, and blast furnaces? In the postwar period, housing prices stood at historic lows, owing primarily to rent control policies that were adopted nearly everywhere in periods of high inflation such as the early 1920s and especially the 1940s. Rents rose less sharply than other prices. Housing became less expensive for tenants, while landlords earned less on their properties, so real estate prices fell. Similarly, the value of firms, that is, the value of the stock of listed firms and shares of partnerships, fell to relatively low levels in the 1950s and 1960s.

…

Public debt rose sharply in the United States due to the cost of waging war, especially during World War II, and this affected national saving in a period of economic instability: the euphoria of the 1920s gave way to the Depression of the 1930s. (Cameron tells us that the odious Hockley commits suicide in October 1929.). Under Franklin D. Roosevelt, moreover, the United States adopted policies designed to reduce the influence of private capital, such as rent control, just as in Europe. After World War II, real estate and stock prices stood at historic lows. When it came to progressive taxation, the United States went much farther than Europe, possibly demonstrating that the goal there was more to reduce inequality than to eradicate private property. No sweeping policy of nationalization was attempted, although major public investments were initiated in the 1930s and 1940s, especially in infrastructures.

You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations
by Michael Ian Black
Published 28 Feb 2012

Then she starts enumerating all the reasons why it “makes more sense” for us to live together: it would be fun and easier and we would get to spend more time together, and more than anything, because she loves me. She is so full of shit. I mean, I do believe that she loves me but that’s not why she wants to move in together. She wants to move in with me because I have a rent-controlled apartment, which is New York City’s greatest and rarest treasure. Having a rent-controlled apartment in New York is like living in medieval Europe and having spices. “I really like living alone,” I repeat. The last couple years have been the first time in my life that I’ve lived alone. I love it. Even though Martha and I really do spend most of our time together, having my own place means knowing that at any moment of my choosing I can ask her to get the hell out, and she will have to do it, as once happened when I walked in on her reading my journal.

Digging Up Mother: A Love Story
by Doug Stanhope
Published 9 May 2016

On December 13, 1995 I officially moved to L.A., almost three years to the day that I began living out of my car. 15 The Big Time I STAYED WITH MITCH AND JANA IN WEST HOLLYWOOD FOR A short time while I looked for a place of my own. Jana said she had a friend who had a place opening up in her building just a few blocks away—and it was rent-controlled. To this day I still don’t have any idea what rent-controlled means legally but I know it equals cheap as fuck. I looked at the place, a one-bedroom in West Hollywood, walking distance to all the comedy clubs. It was perfect. It was also only $410 a month. I gave them six months up front just to secure it. Between thrift stores and the Dollar Store, I was set up in days.

…

Can’t be hanging around the homestead farming cats! I got shit going on! I stayed away as much as possible. I had a good amount of road work that summer, giving her time to settle in on her own and figure out the neighborhood. In July, I got a hand job from God. The apartment two doors down was opening up and it was also rent-controlled. I jumped on it. Not only was it vagrant-cheap, but I was still within shouting distance from Mother. And still she couldn’t understand why I’d want to move out when I’d still be literally 25 feet away. I think she liked cock-blocking me from Khrystyne. The sad fact was that I had to ask Khrystyne for the money to move in.

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
by Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman
Published 2 Jan 1980

New Yorkers naturally sought to blame outside forces for their problem, but as Ken Auletta wrote in a recent book, New York "was not compelled to create a vast municipal hospital or City University system, to continue free tuition, institute open enrollment, ignore budget limitations, impose the steepest taxes in the nation, borrow beyond its means, subsidize middle-income housing, continue rigid rent controls, reward municipal workers with lush pension, pay and fringe benefits." He quips, "Goaded by liberalism's compassion and ideological commitment to the redistribution of wealth, New York officials helped redistribute much of the tax base and thousands of jobs out of New York." 8 One fortunate circumstance was that New York City has no power to issue money.

…

He deplored also the effect of the public housing developments on juvenile delinquency and on the neighborhood schools, which were disproportionately filled with children from broken families. Recently we heard a similar evaluation of public housing from a leader of a "sweat-equity" housing project in the South Bronx, New York. The area looks like a bombed-out city, with many buildings abandoned as a result of rent control and others destroyed by riots. The "sweat-equity" group has undertaken to rehabilitate an area of these abandoned buildings by their own efforts into housing that they can subsequently occupy. Initially they received outside help only in the form of a few private grants. More recently they have also been receiving some assistance from government.

…

After the housing is built, the government and these various "constituencies" take less interest in it. So the FTC has been getting complaints about the quality of housing built under federal programs, about leaky roofs, inadequate plumbing, bad foundations, etc.19 In the meantime, even where it was not deliberately destroyed, low-priced rental housing deteriorated because of rent control and similar measures. Medical Care Medicine is the latest welfare field in which the role of government has been exploding. State and local governments, and to a lesser extent the federal government, have long had a role in public health (sanitation, contagious diseases, etc.) and in provision of hospital facilities.

Working
by Robert A. Caro
Published 8 Apr 2019

Its residents had been poor—pressers, finishers, and cutters in the downtown garment district—and their apartment houses were old, some without elevators and almost all with aging plumbing. But the rooms were big and high-ceilinged—“light, airy, spacious” was how the residents described them to me—and the apartment houses were precious to the people who lived in them, because, rent-controlled as they were, their residents could afford, so long as they kept them, to live in their community. As long as they had those apartments, they had a lot—a sense of community and continuity; in some of those buildings, two and three generations of the same families were living; young couples who moved away often moved back.

…

The residents of the apartment houses that bordered the mile-long excavation on both sides—perhaps one hundred buildings—began to move out, and as more and more moved one of the principal reasons for staying—friends who lived near you—began to vanish, and so did the sense of community. Still more tenants disappeared from East Tremont. Some landlords were happy to see them leave the rent-controlled apartments, and replaced them with welfare families, who demanded fewer services and moved more often, so that rents could be raised more often. The gyre of urban decay spiraled and widened, faster and faster, and more and more residents began to move. East Tremont became a vast slum. I spent many days and weeks, terrible days and weeks, walking around that slum.

Die With Zero: Getting All You Can From Your Money and Your Life
by Bill Perkins
Published 27 Jul 2020

Consider this headline, above one of the most emailed New York Times stories in the week it came out: “96-Year-Old Secretary Quietly Amasses Fortune, Then Donates $8.2 Million.” Wow! The story explained how a Brooklyn woman named Sylvia Bloom managed to amass so much wealth on her salary as a legal secretary. Though she’d been married, she had no children, and she worked for the same Wall Street law firm for 67 years, lived in a rent-controlled apartment, took the subway to work even into her nineties—and made her savings grow by replicating on a smaller scale the investments made by the lawyers she worked for. Nobody close to Ms. Bloom had any idea of her wealth until after her death. She made a bequest of $6.24 million to a social service organization called the Henry Street Settlement; another $2 million went to Hunter College and a scholarship fund.

…

The problem is terrible inefficiency: People who were needy during her lifetime did not benefit from her largesse. Here was a person who, by her own choice to consume very little of her growing wealth, routinely lived far below her means. She chose to keep taking the subway to work and to keep living in a rent-controlled apartment (which, incidentally, could have gone to a needier person). Let’s assume that she was saving specifically so that her money could go to these charities. So why didn’t she give it to her beloved charities earlier, when she clearly could have? Well, maybe part of her motive for saving was precautionary—she might have thought there was a good chance she would need to spend $2 million at 72 to take care of herself.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It
by Owen Jones
Published 3 Sep 2014

‘You can really feel like you’ve spent all your life trying to get to this place where power is, only to find it isn’t there,’ says Philip Collins, recalling the painfully slow process of implementing policies. But, because of Thatcher’s overwhelming success at eliminating opposition, today’s civil service shares the dominant Establishment mentalities. When, after the Labour landslide of 1997, Labour MP Angela Eagle became a junior minister in the Blair government, she suggested imposing rent controls as a solution to the ever-growing amount of taxpayers’ money being spent on housing benefit, increasingly lining the pockets of landlords. Eagle described the response from civil servants, a nebulous ‘sort of official line’. She was, she remembers, told ‘loftily’ that her proposal ‘would be against the Human Rights Act’ – much to her bewilderment.

…

And yet most mainstream newspapers remained supportive of the Conservative-led government, which gave the lie to any idea that they were simply the mouthpieces of British public opinion. While polls consistently demonstrated that a large majority of the British public wanted, say, renationalization of the railways, energy and the utilities; rent controls; the introduction of a living wage; and increased taxes on the rich – no mainstream newspaper endorsed such calls. Quite the reverse. The media is almost entirely committed to Establishment policies and ideas, which they attempt to popularize for a mass audience. The tax-avoiding Barclay Brothers – Britain’s richest media figures – gain their formidable power through the Daily Telegraph.

…

But astonishingly, on many issues, UKIP voters are more radical than the British public as a whole. One YouGov poll found that 78 per cent of UKIP voters supported public ownership of energy companies (compared to 68 per cent of all voters); 73 per cent wanted the railways renationalized (as against 66 per cent); 50 per cent advocated rent controls (the wider figure was 45 per cent); and an astounding 40 per cent believed in price controls on food and groceries, compared to 35 per cent of all Britons.3 What does this tell us? On the one hand, the Establishment has such little public support that even voters for a fiercely right-wing party find themselves, on economic issues, dramatically to its left.

World Cities and Nation States
by Greg Clark and Tim Moonen
Published 19 Dec 2016

Urban issues higher on agenda compared to rural in state assembly. Available at http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/urban‐issues‐higher‐on‐agenda‐ compared‐to‐rural‐in‐state‐assembly/. Accessed 2016 Feb 9. The Indian Express (2016). Govt seeks to amend Rent Control Act to keep out larger houses. The Indian Express. Available at http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/govt‐ seeks‐to‐amend‐rent‐control‐act‐to‐keep‐out‐larger‐houses/#sthash.okQXJPrV.dpuf. Accessed 2016 Feb 9. 256 References The Times of India (2014). Govt plans to attract private players to help develop Smart Cities. The Times of India. Available at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india‐business/ Govt‐plans‐to‐attract‐private‐players‐to‐help‐develop‐Smart‐Cities/articleshow/44735719. cms.

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Mumbai’s metro extensions are to be half financed by the state of Maharashtra, with the remaining capital supplied by international financial institutions (for example, the Asian Development Bank) and potentially Japanese government assistance. Central government assistance is currently not on the table, but could come later in the construc­ tion phase. The centre has also taken steps to tackle the housing market, by partially phasing out rent controls. These have long been associated with a stagnant housing market with a low investment and maintenance rate and low supply level. The new bill to be enacted by the states (Maharashtra included) is, however, contentious as it makes middle class tenants vulnerable to price increases, while the strengths of safeguards for poorer families are unclear (Nair, 2015; Phadke, 2015a, 2015b; Bonislawski, 2016; Lewis, 2016; The Indian Express, 2016).

Imagining India
by Nandan Nilekani
Published 25 Nov 2008

And city development has become both opaque and ad hoc—as when governments in Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore up and conduct demolition drives on encroachments every few years but fail to enforce building regulations the rest of the time. Our “unintended cities” By the 1970s a pork-barrel politico could not have had it better in the city. A series of well-meaning but horribly counterproductive laws passed during this decade, which gave an immense leg up to interest groups in the city. The rent-control legislation and the Urban Land Ceiling Act had effects that, in the best of socialist tradition, were just the opposite of what they had intended. The rent act, by stating minimal leasing periods and strict eviction limits, basically gave renters carte blanche to squat and quickly took unoccupied housing off the market, and the land ceiling act shifted large amounts of land into the illegal market.

…

The urban renewal mission has a provision of Rs 500 billion, and adding in the contribution of states and municipalities, the amount goes up to Rs 1250 billion over a seven-year period. The JNNURM has also adopted an effective carrot approach, man-dating various reform preconditions for states, including changing rent control and land ceiling acts, overhauling urban property-tax systems and rationalizing stamp duties, in order to access its development funds. Our urban consciousness “You can sense it in the air,” Swati tells me, “there is a new concern, both in the government and the private sector around city growth.

…

Land has been an especially charged concern in our politics. The 1950s and 1960s land reforms had failed across most of the country with the exception of Kerala and West Bengal. The landowning zamindars were politically powerful, and in most states the loopholes in the legislation had made the reforms largely impotent. At the same time, rent control policies imposed massive restrictions on urban land, taking it off the market. The 1950s controls around land markets only grew worse when Indira introduced land ceilings and limits on the height of buildings in the mid-1970s. These laws, as Vinayak notes, single-handedly exacerbated overcrowding and lack of urban space in India several times over.

Capitalism and Freedom
by Milton Friedman
Published 1 Jan 1962

Parity price support programs for agriculture. 2. Tariffs on imports or restrictions on exports, such as current oil import quotas, sugar quotas, etc. 3. Governmental control of output, such as through the farm program, or through prorationing of oil as is done by the Texas Railroad Commission. 4. Rent control, such as is still practiced in New York, or more general price and wage controls such as were imposed during and just after World War II. 5. Legal minimum wage rates, or legal maximum prices, such as the legal maximum of zero on the rate of interest that can be paid on demand deposits by commercial banks, or the legally fixed maximum rates that can be paid on savings and time deposits. 6.

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See vocational schooling proletariat, 197 property rights, 26–27, 34, 127, 162 proportional representation, 15, 23; regarding spending for education, 94–95; vs. indivisible issues, 23 public housing programs, 36, 177, 178–80, 181; special interests dominating, 179–80; unintended consequences of, 179–80, 198 public monopoly, 28, 29 public school system, 91, 92, 93, 97, 118. See also schooling Puritans, 108 Quakers, 108 quotas, import, 9, 35, 65, 66–67, 74, 139, 182, 198 racial integration, 100 n. railroads, 29, 35, 123, 126, 156, 197 recession, 76, 78 registration, 144, 145–46, 149 regulation, industry, 35, 38 rent control, 35 “right-to-work” laws, 115–17 riparian rights, 27 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 11 roadways, 30–31, 36, 125, 199 Rome, 10 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 59 royalties, 27 Russia, 7–8, 20, 59, 164, 169, 196, 197, 101–2 salaries, teacher, 93–94, 95–96 Schacht, Hjalmar, 57 schooling, 85–98; and citizenship, 86, 88, 90, 96, 98, 199; conformity as result of, 94, 95, 97; denationalization of, 91; effect of competition on, 93; effect of teacher salaries on, 93–94; for-profit institutions of, 89; governmental administration of, 85, 87, 89, 90, 94, 95, 97, 98, 117; government funding of, 85, 86–88, 90, 93–94, 95; nonprofit funding of, 85, 89; and segregation, 117–18; subsidies for, 87 88–89, voucher system of, 89, 90, 91–98 Schumpeter, Joseph, 5 n.

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present
by Thomas J. Dilorenzo
Published 9 Aug 2004

It is not surprising, then, that progress against poverty in America stopped and reversed itself at precisely the moment when the federal government declared “war” on it.5 Government-directed social engineering fails mainly because human beings cannot be manipulated like so many mathematical symbols. Human beings are rational, thinking actors who react to changes in government policy. Thus the government’s social engineering often follows the Law of Unintended Consequences. Rent-control laws, for example, are designed to help the poor by holding down the price of housing, but these laws artificially stimulate the demand for rental housing while reducing its supply, which causes housing shortages. And usually the poor suffer most from such shortages. Likewise, minimum-wage laws designed to help low-income workers force wages up above the levels set by supply and demand, which makes it uneconomical for employers to keep those low-income workers.

…

Several key parts of the Constitution, adopted in 1789, provided important safeguards. The Contract Clause, for example, prohibited any laws abridging freedom of contract (“No state shall . . . pass any . . . law impairing the Obligation of Contracts”). Though it is no longer very well enforced—minimum-wage laws, rent control laws, virtually all of employment law, antitrust regulation, and the American regulatory state in general all violate the clause—this perversion of the law took many decades to accomplish. For the founders, this freedom was essential, for they understood that property rights would not be secure without some mechanism to enforce the sanctity of contracts.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

With that he was gone, along with my hopes of moving in to the city’s best Bitcoin playpen. * * * Although I envied them from my dark and squalid quarters, the San Francisco longtimers who lived in rent-controlled apartments were in situations nearly as precarious—and certainly more sympathetic—than my own. I met a musician, a young lesbian bohemian who performed on streets and in clubs and organized a backyard concert series called the Garden Sessions. Her name was Julie Indelicato, and she lived in a $600 rent-controlled apartment in the Mission. When I first met her, Julie was terrified that her landlord would evict her and sell the building so that it could be rented out at six times the price to white techie colonizers such as myself.

The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival
by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan
Published 8 Aug 2020

Globalisation and Demography We shall consider each in turn. 7.3.1 Ineluctable Trends For authors in this camp the aberration was the period 1914–1979 when inequality generally declined within many, perhaps most, countries. They see this as primarily the result of a series of special factors, two World Wars, the Great Depression, post-war inflation, Communism/Socialism/price/rent controls, all temporarily depressing the natural condition of rising inequality. For Piketty (2014), this is because the return to capital (i) is assumed, normally and naturally, to exceed the growth rate (g) of the rest of the economy. For Scheidel (2017), this is because the strong will always bully the weak unless restrained by one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, war, pestilence or rebellion.

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Real interest rates in USA cointegrated with world real rates Real living standards Real wage growth Real wage increases Real wages Real wages, falling Real weekly earnings Rearmament Redistribution policies, flattened ‘Reform for a century’ Refugees Regulators Regulators, a form of accountability Regulatory diktat Relocation abroad, by corporates in Japan Renegotiation Renegotiation of debt service Renminbi Rent controls Repossessions, avoided Republican administration, considers border taxes ‘Reserve army of the elderly’ Reserve army of the unemployed Reserve array of the elderly Restructuring, by Japanese firms Retirees, over 65 increasing rapidly Retirement age, increase Retirement, age of Retirement age, rising Retirement, benefits of Retirement, duration of Retirement, saving for Return on Equity (RoE) Reverse L, early Keynesian supply curve of labour Richardson, L.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Published 12 Aug 2020

It’s what that income can buy, in terms of access to the things we need to live well. It’s the ‘welfare purchasing power’ of income that counts. Trying to run a household on $30,000 in the United States would be a struggle. You can forget sending your kids to a decent university. But the exact same income in Finland, where people enjoy universal healthcare and education and rent controls, would feel luxurious. By expanding people’s access to public services and other commons, we can improve the welfare purchasing power of people’s incomes, enabling flourishing lives for all without needing any additional growth. Justice is the antidote to the growth imperative – and key to solving the climate crisis.

…

To cover the gap, ordinary Londoners have had to either work longer hours or take out loans (which represent a claim on their future labour), just to access a basic social good they used to be able to get for a fraction of the cost. In other words, as house prices have soared, the welfare purchasing power of Londoners’ incomes has declined. Now, imagine we drive rents down with permanent rent controls (a policy that 74% of British people happen to support38). Prices would still be outrageously high, but suddenly Londoners would be able to work and earn less than they presently do without any loss to their quality of life. Indeed, they would gain in terms of extra time to spend with family, hanging out with friends, and doing things they love.

How Asia Works
by Joe Studwell
Published 1 Jul 2013

Japan operated a more repressive regime in Korea in the face of greater political opposition to her rule than she faced in Taiwan. By the end of the colonial era in 1945, Japanese interests owned about one-fifth of all Korean land and the majority of farmers were pure tenants. The American Military Government (AMG) that became the occupying force in South Korea from September 1945 instituted rent controls and requirements for written leases on previously Japanese-controlled land. However the US military governor, General Archer L. Lerch, was not disposed to land reform, regarding it as a socialist policy; his concern was to keep the Soviets north of the 38th parallel and to suppress communism in the south.

…

Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang government, which could see the end of the civil war coming well before its formal defeat, introduced legislation on Taiwan to limit rents to 37.5 per cent of crops at the beginning of 1949. The Kuomintang had just started working with the American-sponsored JCRR on the mainland, and Taiwan rent control represented an act of ingratiation towards the rural population of an island that was not universally thrilled by the idea that the Nationalist military and political machine might be coming to stay. Landlords were also required to sign written tenancy agreements of a minimum of six years, under which the requirements for repossession of land were onerous.

…

The Act set up an Agricultural Land Reform Office (ALRO), which ever since has concentrated on distribution of publicly owned lands, most of which are already occupied by squatters. This is consistent with the focus on public lands in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia instead of actual redistribution of existing private agricultural land. Similarly, a 1974 Land Rent Control Act in Thailand was generally not enforced because of opposition from landlords and local government officials. 108. Pasuk and Baker, Thailand, p. 45. 109. Note that the delta and central plain areas are not themselves particularly fertile by south-east Asian standards. Their heavy clay soils are much less agriculture-friendly than other parts of the region. 110.

Endless Money: The Moral Hazards of Socialism
by William Baker and Addison Wiggin
Published 2 Nov 2009

Further aiding Finland and the entire Nordic region was secular growth for paper and timber necessary to fuel a revival in housing that swept through Britain beginning in the 1930s.26 According to Arthur Lewis: “There is a housing boom in Britain about once every 20 or 30 years, and it seems to occur whether prices and interest rates are rising or falling, or whatever is happening to the terms of trade. A boom was due some time in the 1920’s, and was delayed, mainly through the affects of rent control in keeping rents below costs. After the fall in prices, this factor ceased to operate, and the boom probably would have come about even if interest rates had not fallen.”27 The next big impetus for Nordic outperformance of the world economies was the quick return of Germany to health and its rearmament.

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But more might follow, and the December 2009 deadline for cleaning up the companies might need to be extended if the real estate market remains in oversupply. The real estate market had dropped about 25 percent through yearend 2008, and the thesis popular in mid-2009 that the economy had bottomed out is highly dependent upon no further decrease in value. The New Rent Control What is missed by most observers is that interest rates outside the government-subsidized market have risen sharply and may continue to remain high for two reasons. The mortgage rate seen earlier in this decade was at a generational low, in part because of Fed policy. Additionally, this cycle is the first in the postwar era that has exhibited falling prices, and as a result credit quality has become an issue.

…

Rates on jumbo loans, which are not guaranteed by the GSEs, climbed to nearly 8 percent by year-end 2008, thus standing some 3 to 4 percent above the subsidized rate. The socialization of credit has caused a tremendous bifurcation in the market unseen before. It is reminiscent of other dysfunctional markets, such as the New York City housing market, where rent controls created artificial shortages, discouraged investment, repair, and rehabilitation, and led to oddities such as millionaires over the age of 50 living for decades in subsidized one-bedroom apartments while 20-somethings and young families were priced out of the market or paid well over 50 percent of their income for rent.

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism
by Arun Sundararajan
Published 12 May 2016

In mid-2015, San Francisco’s city authorities released a study suggesting that Airbnb was reducing affordable rental housing significantly. Airbnb responded with its own study by Anita Roth suggesting the impact was negligible. (My own view, which I discussed in a New York Times op-ed, is that, as of 2015, factors like rent control and population growth are the primary contributors to the shortage of affordable rental housing in San Francisco.) The level of acrimony toward Airbnb from the hotel industry is captured well by the statements made by Vanessa Sinders, Senior Vice President and Head of Government Affairs of the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA), at a 2015 Federal Trade Commission meeting to discuss the sharing economy, where she noted: “Right now, there is an unlevel [sic] playing field that is compromising consumer safety, endangering the character and security of residential neighborhoods across the country, and changing the housing market in some negative ways.”

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See http://www.scribd.com/doc/265376839/City-Budget-and-Legislative-Analysis-Report-on-Short-term-Rentals and https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/the-airbnb-community-in-sf-june-8-2015.pdf. Regardless, the magnitude of any impact is dwarfed by other larger effects like those of population growth or rent control. See http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/06/16/san-francisco-and-new-york-weigh-airbnbs-effect-on-rent/airbnb-is-an-ally-to-cities-not-an-adversary. 4. Share Better, “About the Campaign,” 2014. http://www.sharebetter.org. 5. New York State Office of the Attorney General, “Airbnb in the City,” October 2014. http://www.ag.ny.gov/pdfs/Airbnb%20report.pdf. 6.

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City
by Anna Minton
Published 24 Jun 2009

The government continually pledges to increase the amount of social housing built and has announced that councils will finally be allowed to build again, but given the current figures and the sheer amount lost, this is unlikely to make a significant difference. The other market policy which was facilitated by the Tories but really came into its own under New Labour was the provision of public housing through the private rented market. In 1988 the Conservatives deregulated all lettings and ended nearly seventy years of rent control. In the mid 1990s a new form of mortgage finance, the ‘buy-to-let’ mortgage, was introduced. This was aimed specifically at investors who wanted to buy properties for the purpose of renting them out. The result today is that ‘buy-to-let’ makes up nearly a third of the private rented sector. In a typical blurring of terms, when the government talks of the private rented sector, they rarely distinguish between homes let to young professionals in their twenties, whose lifestyles are well suited to short-term renting, and the phenomenon of providing public housing through this market, which has come about because of the lack of social housing.

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In continental Europe, on the other hand, there are many options, including private renting and cooperative housing, in addition to home ownership and public housing. But in Britain other options were squeezed out, in particular the continental model of choosing to rent rather than to own, with rent controls introduced during the First World War decimating the apartment lifestyle so popular in Europe. It is this more than anything which has perpetuated the myth that an Englishman’s home is his castle and that the English prefer houses to flats. However, what differentiates Britain from the continent is not how much of the population owns or rents, but ideology.

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America
by Alissa Quart
Published 25 Jun 2018

Like the Uber drivers, middle-class people who now want to live in or near desirable cities may need to work second jobs. This is what the working poor have long done, of course, to stay afloat. One solution is to broaden rent stabilization, a system that permits a middle class to stay and flourish in expensive cities. I grew up in such a rent-controlled apartment—a book-lined prewar with a sunken living room and a roach problem—that cost far below market rate. Until this year, I lived in a similarly book-lined rent-stabilized unit that has glowing Ashcan School views of water towers to go along with the apartment’s silverfish. Rent stabilization and control go along with better-regulated real estate development overall, especially in desirable cities.

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Fischer, “Reversal of Fortune,” Boston Review, June 20, 2016, https://bostonreview.net/us/claude-fischer-reversal-fortune-urbanization-gentrification. urban scholar David “DJ” Madden: David Madden and Peter Marcuse, In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis (New York: Verso, 2016). Rent stabilization and control: Rent control started in New York City in 1969 when rents really began to jack up in postwar buildings; today one million apartments are covered by these guidelines, which protect tenants from big rent increases. Some think that rent stabilization helps create a fairer housing market, protecting it from gentrification.

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy
by Dani Rodrik
Published 8 Oct 2017

The University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers cheered the consensus in his New York Times blog.1 The virulent public debate about whether fiscal stimulus works, he complained, has become totally disconnected from what experts know and agree on. Economists agree on many things that are often politically controversial. The Harvard economist Greg Mankiw listed some of them in 2009.2 The following propositions garnered support from at least 90 percent of economists: import tariffs and quotas reduce general economic welfare; rent controls reduce the supply of housing; floating exchange rates provide an effective international monetary system; the United States should not restrict employers from outsourcing work to foreign countries; and fiscal policy stimulates the economy when there is less than full employment. This consensus about so many important issues contrasts rather starkly with the general perception that economists rarely agree on anything.

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The proposition that trade restrictions reduce economic welfare is certainly not generally valid, and it is violated when certain conditions—such as externalities or increasing returns to scale—are present. Moreover, it requires that economists make value judgments on distributional effects, which are better left to the electorate itself. Likewise, the proposition that rent controls reduce the supply of housing is violated under conditions of imperfect competition. And the proposition that floating exchange rates are an effective system relies on assumptions about the workings of the monetary and financial system that have proved problematic; I suspect a poll today would find significantly less support for it.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 14 May 2014

The young Friedman arrived at the University of Chicago in 1932 as a supporter of Norman Thomas, the socialist presidential candidate, got his first job as a New Deal apparatchik in Washington, D.C., and remained on the government payroll until 1943, even helping invent one of the most fiendish tools of big government, the payroll withholding tax. But by the time he moved back to Chicago, Friedman had begun to forge a different course. Three years later he announced his arrival with a furious attack on rent control, “Roofs or Ceilings” (1946), which immediately marked him out as part of the free-market resistance to Keynesianism. For most of the previous two decades the resistance to big government had been headquartered in Europe rather than in America. The founding father of “the Austrian school” was Ludwig von Mises, who told government officials, “You are not the vicars of a god called ‘the State.’ ”3 During the Second World War, Karl Popper labored away on The Open Society and Its Enemies in far-off New Zealand, while in blitzed London his friend Friedrich Hayek, a pupil of von Mises, produced The Road to Serfdom in 1944, worrying that the book would sink without a trace because of paper shortages.

…

Prasad Eye Institute, 204–5 Mac 400, 205 Macartney, George, 41 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 222, 224–26 McConnell, Mitch, 256 McDonald’s, 157, 185 McGregor, Richard, 151, 157 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 29, 33 McKinsey, 194–95, 204 Macmillan, Harold, 69 Macrae, Norman, 75 Madison, James, 265 Ma Hong, 158–59 majority, tyranny of, 226, 250, 255 management, reinvention of, 189–92 Mandela, Nelson, 252 Mandelson, Peter, 95 Manhattan Institute, 82 Mann, Thomas, 125–26, 227 Manning, Bradley, 230 Manor, Tex., 210 Man Versus the State, The (Spencer), 59 Mao Zedong, 151 Marshall, Alfred, 233 Marshall, T.H., 74 Martineau, Harriet, 54 Marx, Karl, 45, 62–63, 70 state as seen by, 63–64 Marxism, see Communists, communism Mary II, Queen of England, 43 Mary Barton (Gaskell), 57 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 54 means testing, 243, 245 Meat Inspection Act (U.S., 1906), 72 Medicaid, 242 Medicare, 120, 123, 242 Medisave, 243 mercantilism, 40 Merkel, Angela, 12, 16, 230, 231 Mettler, Suzanne, 121 micro-powers, 260, 266 middle class, 124 entitlements and, 11, 17 government spending and, 11 as primary beneficiary of welfare state, 122 welfare state and, 17, 88 Middle East: China and, 152 failure of democracy in, 253 local government in, 217 Miliband, Ed, 114, 153 Milken, Michael, 129 Mill, James, 47, 48–49, 53, 140 Mill, John Stuart, 7, 9, 21, 27–28, 69, 80, 85, 135, 136, 219, 251, 255 background of, 47 expanded role of government embraced by, 56–57 freedom as overriding concern of, 47–48, 55, 222, 224, 226, 228, 250, 256, 268 free trade promoted by, 55 intellectual freedom as tenet of, 55 meritocracy promoted by, 53, 237 as public intellectual, 47 Mindlab, 220 Mises, Ludwig von, 83 Mississippi, 111 Modi, Narendra, 218 Moïsi, Dominique, 166 money politics, 256–58 Montefiore Medical Center, 209 Monti, Mario, 259 Mont Pelerin Society, 83, 85 Moody’s, 119 Morrill Act (U.S., 1862), 62 Morsi, Mohamed, 253 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 89 Mubarak, Hosni, 144, 253 Muggeridge, Malcolm, 67 Mughal Empire, 36 Mulgan, Geoff, 132 Musacchio, Aldo, 153 Muslim Brotherhood, 144, 253 Mussolini, Benito, 252 Myrdal, Alva, 169, 170 Myrdal, Gunnar, 37, 169, 170 Naím, Moisés, 186, 260, 266 Nanjing, 35 Napoléon I, Emperor of the French, 46 Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital, Bangalore, 201 National Audit Office, British, 199 National Education Association, 114 National Front, French, 259 National Health Service, British, 62, 82, 109, 183, 199, 205 spending on, 130–31 National Health Service Act (British, 1948), 75 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), 243 National Insurance Act (British, 1946), 75 National Journal, 256 National Labor Relations Board, 73 national minimum, 68, 69 National Statistics Office, British, 19, 177 nation-state, 6, 8, 221 commerce and, 33 democracy and, 259, 262 globalization and, 259–60, 262 government efficiency in, 37 innovation and, 37, 39 legitimacy of, 33 local-government resistance to, 260 minimal welfare vote of, 33 representative institutions in, 38 rights of citizens in, 30, 43–44 rule of law in, 37–38 security as primary duty of, 29, 30, 32, 37, 39, 181, 222, 268 Navigation Acts, 50 Nazis, 71, 232 neoconservatives, 89 Netherlands, government spending in, 75 New Brutalism, 89 New Deal, 72, 82, 192, 236 New Digital Age, The (Schmidt and Cohen), 210–11 New Labourites, 94–95, 99 Newnham College, 58 New Republic, 71 New Statesman, 67 Newsweek, 86 New York Daily News, 227 New Zealand, 239 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 265 Nigeria, 234 night-watchman state, 7, 9, 48, 61, 80, 86, 101, 136, 140, 181, 232 1984 (Orwell), 71 Nixon, Richard, 77 Nobel Prize, 82, 86, 91 Nock, Albert Jay, 177 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), Chinese, 158 Northcote, Stafford, 52–53 Norway, 1990s financial crisis in, 176 Novey, Don, 112–13, 181 Nye, Joseph, 3, 198 Obama, Barack, 100, 126, 192, 236, 241, 255, 256 big-government ideology of, 98 health-care reforms of, 20, 98, 117, 199, 208, 217 pragmatism of, 98, 220 Obama administration, 220, 231 regulation and, 117 occupational legislation, 117–18 O’Donnell, Christine, 227–28 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), 186 Office of Social Innovation and Participation, U.S., 220 “Old Corruption,” 6, 49, 51, 58, 149, 185, 227, 256, 268, 269 Oldham, John, 195 Olivares, Count-Duke, 37 Olson, Mancur, 109–10, 111 Olson’s law, 111–15, 117, 124, 237 On Liberty (Mill), 55, 59, 69 Open Society and Its Enemies, The (Popper), 83 Open University, 180 opinion, freedom of, 224 Orban, Viktor, 254 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 186 Ornstein, Norman, 125–26, 227 Orwell, George, 71 Ottoman Empire, 35 Our Enemy, the State (Nock), 177 Packard, David, 105 Paine, Thomas, 21, 43–44 Pall, Niti, 206 Palme, Olof, 170, 175 Palo Alto, Calif., 105, 106 Papademos, Lucas, 259 Parag, Khanna, 218 Parliament, British, 31, 43 Party, The (McGregor), 151 Party for Freedom, Dutch, 259 patronage, 50, 52–53, 222, 237, 240 Paul, Ron, 34 payroll withholding tax, 82 Peace Corps, 216 Peace of Westphalia (1648), 38 Pearson, Karl, 68 Peel, Robert, 51, 54 pensions, 16, 267 Asian expansion of, 141–42 in Brazil, 18 in California, 113, 115, 119–20, 130 in China, 156, 183 defined-benefit vs. defined-contribution systems of, 184 as entitlements, 79, 184, 243 in Scandinavia, 171, 173, 184 spiking of, 184 as unfunded liabilities, 14, 119 People’s Action Party, Singapore, 134, 137–38 Peterson, Pete, 131 Peterson Foundation, 255 Peterson Institute for International Economics, 154 PetroChina, 152, 154, 155 Philippines, health insurance in, 141 Philippon, Thomas, 239 philosophical radicals, 48, 49, 85, 181 physician’s assistants, 204 Plato, 250, 255, 260, 264 pluralism, 211–14 police, technology and, 181–82 Political Economy (Mill), 57 political parties, declining membership in, 11, 261 politics: government bloat and, 10–11 money in, 256–58 polarization of, 11–13, 100, 124–27, 164, 255, 256 talent flight from, 127 Pomperipossa effect, 170 poor, poverty: failure of welfare state programs for, 87–89 public spending as biased against, 122–24 welfare state and, 68 Popper, Karl, 83 population: aging of, 15, 122–23, 124, 165, 174, 178, 183–84, 232, 241–42 urban shift of, 149, 218 Porter, Michael, 131 Portugal, public spending in, 99–100 Potter, Laurencina, 65–66 Potter, Richard, 65 Principles of Political Economy (Mill), 55 Pritchett, Lant, 147 private life, freedom of, 224 privatization, 8, 94, 96, 234–37 Procter & Gamble, 190 productivity, 178 Baumol’s disease and, 110 in public vs. private sectors, 18–20, 177, 285 state capitalism and, 154 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 148, 206–7 Progressive Party, 72 progressivism, 240 as self-defeating, 229–30 property rights, 40, 43, 224 Proposition 13, 91, 92, 107 Protestants, 38 public sector, 76, 89, 115, 177, 180 technology and, 180 Pudong, China, 1–5, 8 Pune, India, 218–19 Pure Food and Drug Act (U.S., 1906), 72 Putin, Vladimir, 144, 153, 253 Pythagorean theorem, 31 Qianlong, Emperor of China, 41 racism, 88 Rauch, Jonathan, 231 Reagan, Ronald, 8, 28, 88, 91–92, 97, 198 Friedman and, 86 small-government ideology of, 95 see also Thatcher-Reagan revolution reason, religion as opponent of, 48 Reform, 203 Reformation, 48–49 Reinfeldt, Fredrik, 184 religion: freedom of, 224 reason as opponent of, 48 rent control, 82 rent seeking, 239 “Report on Manufacturers” (Hamilton), 150 Republic, The (Plato), 250 Republican Party, U.S., 123, 236–37 increased taxes opposed by, 100, 255 tax rises approved by, 12 Reshef, Ariell, 239 retirement age, 184–85, 242 Reykjavik City Council, 261 Ricardo, David, 49 Richelieu, Cardinal, 37 Right, 82, 93 government bloat and, 10–11, 98 government efficiency and, 187 and growth of big government, 10, 95, 98, 228, 230–31 privatization and, 234, 236–37 welfare services opposed by, 88, 185 rights: Fourth Revolution and, 270 liberal state’s expansion of, 7, 48, 49, 51 in nation-state, 30, 43–44 of property, 40, 43, 224 protection of, as primary role of liberal state, 45 see also freedom Rights of Man, The (Paine), 44 Ripley, Amanda, 206–7 road pricing, 217 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 10, 83, 86 Rodrik, Dani, 262 Romney, Mitt, 217 “Roofs or Ceilings” (Friedman), 82 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 72–73, 252 Roosevelt, Theodore, 71–72, 258 rotten boroughs, 51, 125, 227, 251, 257, 269 see also gerrymandering Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 44, 45 Rousseff, Dilma, 153 Royal Society, 42 Rumsfeld, Donald, 77, 253 Russia, 71 China and, 152 corruption in, 186 failure of democracy in, 253, 262 privatization in, 96 Singapore model admired by, 144 state capitalism in, 153, 154 Russian Revolution, 45 Rwanda, 144 Sacramento, Calif., 105, 106, 127 Sahni, Nikhil, 200 St.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
by Frank Trentmann
Published 1 Dec 2015

When Doane was in London and saw a picture of an American suburb in a toothpaste ad, he was homesick. ‘There’s no other country in the world that has such pleasant houses. And I don’t care if they are standardized. It’s a corking standard!’55 In the real America, the job of the many real estate Babbitts was made easier by the housing shortage and by rent control. One reason for the rise in home ownership was that rental property was taken off the market and turned into a more profitable commodity for sale. A study immediately after the Second World War asked one thousand Americans why they had bought a home: 24 per cent saw it as an investment, 11 per cent were driven by a ‘desire for independence’.

…

By 1938, one in five working-class families owned their home.58 Although rent and mortgages were a major part of the household budget, we have little systematic knowledge about their impact on people’s spending patterns, or vice versa. In English cities, for example, rents were galloping ahead of wages in the late nineteenth century – this must have put a brake on working-class consumption. The introduction of rent controls during the First World War offered some help but was soon rolled back. The proliferation of tenants’ associations and rent strikes was testimony to a growing anger. Countries took different roads to better housing. In Belgium, strikes pushed the government in 1889 to give the national savings bank the power to invest in better homes for the poor; France followed with a similar law in 1894.

…

In the 1930s, workers spent around 20–25 per cent of their pay on rent and fuel – those who paid a mortgage, slightly more.60 There were already some initiatives with more affordable housing in Austria in the 1920s, but mainly it was only with the expansion of welfare states after the Second World War that public housing, more rigorous rent controls and social transfers put down a supporting floor for poor consumers; how critical such public transfers were for affluent societies we shall see in a later chapter. Since the 1970s, the cost of housing as share of household consumption has once again been on the rise, at least in Western Europe.61 Better homes thus had many contradictory effects.

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America
by Bruce Cannon Gibney
Published 7 Mar 2017

It would also be efficient, as caps distort all sorts of economic decision making, reducing labor market flexibility by encouraging people to stay put, which makes no sense in an era where lifetime employment has vanished and jobs migrate. (The same is true of rent control, another strategy that favors seniors while constraining supply and forcing the price of unrestricted rentals upward.) The usual counterargument is that such revisions will displace seniors who cannot afford to live in the homes of their choice, to which the answer is: tough. The law confers rights of citizenship in the United States, not a right to reside in a particular place. Abolishing caps and rent control may create short-term price declines, though this would serve as something of a generational equalizer, putting more homes in reach of younger cohorts, among whom rates of homeownership are notably depressed.

…

So while renting is often a better financial decision, Clinton, Bush II, and so on extolled this peculiar American dream, and consumers came to view home ownership not just as a necessity or luxury consumable, but as a surefire investment, even a kind of entitlement. People bought bigger and more expensive houses, a consumption problem of its own, while rent control, property tax freezes, zoning restrictions, and other inefficient limits favored existing residents. And the banks willingly facilitated, often reducing down payments from the conventional 20 percent to as low as 3.5 percent or even 0 percent—i.e., allowing leverage to increase from 4:1 to 27.6:1, or in the case of zero down, ∞:1.

Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century
by Mark Walker
Published 29 Nov 2015

As an example of the former, suppose country E is just like country D, but then attempts to FULLTIME CAPITALISM 47 become more capitalistic by lifting the prohibition on making money on real estate. People renting homes start complaining to their government representatives as their rents go up, so the government puts in rent controls, which limits the amount rents can rise in any given year. Rent controls limit the amount of profit that real estate capitalists can generate, still, country E is more capitalistic than country D, since it allows at least some profit to be made on real estate. However, E is not as capitalistic as country C. Countries often allow particular forms of capital to be used for some profit-making purposes, but not others.

Do You Mind if I Cancel?: (Things That Still Annoy Me)
by Gary Janetti
Published 21 Oct 2019

And just underneath that, its twin voice whispering: “Why not you? Why hasn’t it happened for you yet? Why is it easier for everyone else? It’s not fair!!” During this time, I’m working the overnight shift four days a week. I’m off the other three. More time to not write. I live in a sixth-floor walk-up on Christopher Street in a rent-controlled apartment. The kind of tenement building that you usually see in movies about Italian immigrants or the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Walking my bicycle up and down the six flights of stairs to ride to and from the hotel. In my early twenties I work as a bicycle teen-tour leader for American Youth Hostels, an organization that has long since gone out of business, probably because they had people as unqualified as myself leading their tours.

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
by Brad Stone
Published 30 Jan 2017

Among city and state officials, the screed went over poorly. Liz Krueger, the New York senator who slammed Airbnb as disingenuous, says her office at the time was deluged with complaints from constituents. With New York real estate starting to recover from the recession, landlords were leaping at excuses to free up rent-controlled apartments and lease them again at the higher market rates. Krueger met with Airbnb representatives and urged them to warn hosts on the site, with clearly visible language, that they might be violating both state law and their leases. Airbnb, she says, responded with a rotating series of explanations of why that was too complex or how it exposed the company to legal liability.

…

“The girls were attractive and everyone was up for a party.” After Schneiderman’s subpoena, Rich Chalmers, unlike Seth Porges, thought that it was time to get out. A real estate agent friend told him it was too dangerous and that some landlords were wising up and starting to strictly enforce prohibitions against sublets in their leases. If rent-control laws restricted them from charging market rates for their own properties, they were going to make damn sure that their own tenants weren’t going to turn around and reap the full market rate via Airbnb. Chalmers stopped listing in 2012 and paid all the hospitality taxes on his Airbnb income, even erring on the side of caution by refiling for one year.

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess
by Robert H. Frank
Published 15 Jan 1999

The lines of cars queued up for gas at many urban stations stretched for several blocks, each car belching fumes and wasting fuel as it inched toward the pumps. Far better for all would have been allowing gasoline prices to rise to their market-clearing levels, and then increasing the monetary supplement to ease the burden on the poor. Rent controls and subsidized public housing are similarly clumsy and wasteful ways of trying to deliver services that the poor could better purchase for themselves in the open market, if only they had more income. To ask whether we can afford to switch to a public-service employment approach is simply to ask the wrong question.

…

See also Houses Rebitzer, James, 161 Redshirting, 154-55, 166 Red-tailed hawk, evolution of keen eyesight in, 148-49 Regulation(s) environmental pollution, 102, 208-9 labor, in Europe, 274 limiting work hours, 275 as remedy of liberals, 268 “slippery-slope” argument against, 198 of vacation time, 275 workplace safety, 169-71, 275 Reinforcement, learning and, 135-36 Relative income, 133-34 health and, 142-45 subjective well-being and, 111-20 Relative position, concerns about, 109-11, 120-45 ability signaling and, 139-40 allocation and regulation of effort, 135-37 biochemical markers of, 140-45 commitment problems in bargaining and, 137-39 conspicuous consumption and, 122 context, perception, and evaluation in, 129-32 dependence of reward on rank, 133-35, 136 human nature and, 123-28 wage distribution and, 117-19 Rent controls, 264 Reproductive fitness of individuals, natural selection for, 149-52 Resources saved with progressive consumption tax, 217-18 Restaurant Daniel, 18 Restaurant stoves, 24, 25 Retailing, on-line, 42 Retirement, savings and, 102-3 Reward dependence on rank, 133-35, 136 effort and, 228-31 Rice, Stephen K., 20 Rickard, Roger, 28-29 Ripple effects of progressive consumption tax, 222-23 Robb Report, The, 25 Robin, Vicki, 187 Robinson, John, 49-50 Robison, Jon, 86 Rockefeller, John D., 15 Roderick, D., 243 Rodgers, T.

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present
by Jeff Madrick
Published 11 Jun 2012

Aside from the aborted Wisconsin offer a few years earlier, few invitations came his way until he was at last offered a position at the University of Minnesota. There, he joined his fellow Chicago graduate George Stigler, already a professor, and together in 1946 they co-authored a stinging, ideological article criticizing rent control. The central thesis was that rent control restricted the supply of new housing and artificially kept the price (the rent) down. The article, like his graduate thesis, focused on the dangers that arise when government sets prices. The piece was based on skimpy data regarding rents in a single month in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake (forty years earlier).

…

The formation of the Mont Pelerin Society was financed by Europeans and a highly conservative tax-exempt American foundation, the William Volker Charitable Fund of Kansas City, founded by prosperous right-wing local businessmen. The fund also helped finance the Foundation for Economic Education, which published the Friedman-Sigler paper on rent control. After the remarkable success of The Road to Serfdom, the Volker Fund attempted to bring Hayek from London to an American university. The fund’s president, Harold Luhnow, was determined to underwrite an Americanized version of the Hayek book—though there was already a condensed version of it published by Reader’s Digest.

Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now
by Guy Standing
Published 19 Mar 2020

Having a basic income in place, even one that paid a fraction of what is required for a decent living standard, would help ameliorate the disruptive costs of Brexit, which will surely be borne by many of those least able to bear them. A basic income would complement a much-needed radical new housing policy, including reversing the decline in social housing and imposing rent controls. For the time being, however, Housing Benefit would need to be retained. A basic income would reward unpaid work, so would encourage people to spend more time doing care work. As an ageing society, Britain is suffering a substantial and growing ‘care deficit’. A basic Battling Eight Giants 54 income would enable more people to care for those they love, thereby reducing pressure on public spending for care services.

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
by Thomas Frank
Published 5 Aug 2008

And we’re going to go after 20 PIRG fights this year . . . and you have an interest in this, or you ought to.’”25 Thus did the young entrepreneurs of the USAF get out there and sell themselves as political hit men. According to one 1986 study, the group managed to collect tribute from canning and bottling companies, two oil companies, an electric company (PIRGs were then working to set up utility watchdog groups), Amway, Coors, an assortment of San Francisco landlords worried about the possibility of rent control, and the Campbell’s Soup Company, which reportedly paid USAF to attack a campus support group for a migrant farmworkers union.26 It was pugnacity for pay. Grover Norquist explained the strategy to an interviewer as a simple matter of cost-effectiveness. “PIRGs have cost the bottlers and the auto industry millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said.

…

See also government career employees Putnam, Robert racism radio talk showsn railroads Rand, Ayn Reader’s Digest Reagan, Ronald deficits and government incompetence and Iran-Contra and South Africa and Reagan youth real-estate boom Reason Rebel-in-Chief (Barnes) red-baiting redlining reductions in force (RIFs) Reed, Ralph reform tradition Regent University Law School regulation attacks on Ciskei and CNMI and control of, by industries defunding left and eminent domain clause and follow-the-dime story and free market vs. libertarianism and lobbying and Regulation magazine regulatory agencies Reich, Robert Reinventing Government (Osborne and Gaebler) religion RENAMO rebels rent control “rent extraction” Republican Party early 20th century Freshman Class of 1994 lobbying and massive debt produced by National Committee National Convention of 1984 nomination fight of 1964 Requiem in the Tropics (Cox) “revolving door” Reyes, Pete P. Rhodesian Sellout, The (Skimin) Rice, Condoleezza Rich, Frank Ridenour, Amy Moritz Robertson, Pat Rock the House (Norquist) Roe v.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 13 Nov 2007

The only real difference between Right and Left was the readiness of the Conservatives to deregulate the private rental market, in the hope of encouraging private landlords, and the equal and opposite resolve of Labour to reimpose rent controls and stamp out ‘Rachmanism’ (exploitative behaviour by landlords), exemplified by Peter Rachman, who used intimidation to evict the sitting tenants of rent-controlled properties, replacing them with West Indian immigrants who had to pay market rents.31 As late as 1971, fewer than half of British homes were owner-occupied. In the United States, where public housing was never so important, mortgage interest payments were always tax deductible, from the inception of the federal income tax in 1913.32 As Ronald Reagan said when the rationality of this tax break was challenged, mortgage interest relief was ‘part of the American dream’.ao It played a much smaller role in Britain until 1983, when a more radically Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher introduced Mortgage Interest Relief At Source (MIRAS) for the first £30,000 of a qualifying mortgage.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)
by Charles Wheelan
Published 18 Apr 2010

But I’ll wager that if you asked ten economists why there is a shortage of cabs and apartments in New York City, all ten would tell you that limitations on the number of taxi medallions and rent control are what restrict the supply of these goods and services. There are certainly many areas where economists are in virtual unanimous agreement. Economists overwhelmingly agree that free international trade can improve the standard of living of the trading countries and that tariffs and import quotas reduce general welfare. Economists generally agree that rent controls reduce the volume and quality of housing. Economists were virtually unanimous in their forecast that the horrific tragedy of September 11, 2001, would lead to a contraction of economic activity.

This Land: The Struggle for the Left
by Owen Jones
Published 23 Sep 2020

When, in 2011, Miliband committed to challenging business ‘predators’ and the economic consensus, he was met with vitriolic Tory condemnation and internal Blairite contempt.3 When Miliband announced that, under Labour, the state would intervene to freeze energy bills, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron denounced the policy as ‘Marxist’ (ironically, his successor, Theresa May, later raided the policy); his commitment to scrap private rent increases was vilified by the Conservatives and their many media cheerleaders as ‘Venezuelan-style’ rent controls. Since the late 1980s, Thatcherism had established a consensus which saw state intervention as beyond the political pale; that Miliband was, however tentatively, suggesting a modest revival of social democracy was enough of a threat to provoke a violent reaction from the political establishment.

…

Liberated from a hostile shadow cabinet, the frontbench crammed with his own loyalists, Corbyn could now push the ambitious radical policies that he had always wanted to champion. At a post-contest meeting on 20 September, the policy pledges of Corbyn’s leadership campaign – such as public ownership, a progressive tax system, a National Educational System and rent controls – received unanimous support from the party’s executive council. ‘The effect of the whole coup and Jeremy’s re-election was to strengthen his leadership,’ recalls one senior adviser, ‘and gave us more authority to make changes.’ There was an understanding, too, that this was a second chance, that things at the top really did have to change.

My Misspent Youth: Essays
by Meghan Daum
Published 2 Mar 2001

Although I’m not sure if there were faded Persian rugs on the floors and NPR humming from the speakers, it was just the sort of place for that. The music copyist and his wife had lived there for almost twenty years and although rent was the furthest thing from my mind at the time, I can now surmise, based on what they probably earned, that the apartment was rent controlled, perhaps $300 per month. It’s now difficult to imagine a time when I didn’t walk into someone’s apartment and immediately start the income-to-rent ratio calculations. But on that summer night, standing in the living room of this apartment, looking down on the streets whose voluptuous, stony buildings formed the shore to the river that so famously keeps here safely away from there, my life was changed forever.

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume
by Josh Kaufman
Published 2 Feb 2011

Once the chain starts, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to stop or reverse the cascade of cause and effect. Rent control in New York City after World War II is another sobering example of unintended consequences. Originally intended to provide returning veterans with affordable housing, the policy capped rent prices (and the ability of landlords to raise them) in certain areas of the city. Affordable housing for veterans is a noble idea, right? Here’s what the city planners didn’t expect: every year, the cost to maintain properties in New York City continued to rise, but landlords couldn’t raise rent prices to compensate for their increased costs. By law, rent control couldn’t be removed unless the original leaseholder moved or the building was condemned, so landlords refused to maintain their property—it was a waste of money.

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business
by Rana Foroohar
Published 16 May 2016

Consider the bungled 2006 deal involving investors Tishman Speyer and BlackRock, which raised a private equity fund to purchase the famous Manhattan rent-controlled apartment buildings of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. The $5.4 billion deal was done with 20 percent equity and 80 percent debt (maximizing its tax advantages, since our tax code favors debt over equity, as we’ll learn in the next chapter). The partners wanted to kick out tenants and turn the rent-controlled apartments into condos, but when that plan was foiled by numerous protests and a court ruling, they defaulted on the mortgage. Their investors—including the Church of England, the government of Singapore, CalPERS, and two other public pension funds based in California and Florida—lost a of total of $850 million as a result.

The Downfall of Money: Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class
by Frederick Taylor
Published 16 Sep 2013

The pricing strategies of German manufacturers were further aided by the fact that, although workers, especially union members, were constantly demanding inflation-adjusted wage increases, those same wages were starting from a low real base. The need for inflation-adjusted increases was also mitigated by continuing government support for food prices and by the continuance of wartime rent controls (what that meant for the government’s control of the deficit – or lack of it – was another matter). The patriotic British, French or American (or Danish, or Dutch) businessman might prefer to buy from his own countrymen, but German quality was high and German prices, at that time, were hard to resist.

…

For those who, unlike the pensioners and the impoverished middle class, and the hand-to-mouth working class, had spare money over and above what was needed for subsistence, acquiring ‘things’, material assets, was the key to surviving and even prospering in these uncertain times. More important than anything was to get rid of your cash, which might tomorrow be worthless. The relaxation of the rent control laws was a signal for a new wave of investment, as the Manchester Guardian reported: The boom that has just set in in the building trade is responsible for the reduction in the figures of the unemployed, sunk this week to 50,000. This sudden activity is due to two reasons. The older one is that the fortunate or unfortunate possessor of too many paper marks is desirous of exchanging them for something tangible in bricks and mortar even at the incredible cost of construction.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers
by Stephen Graham
Published 8 Nov 2016

Importantly, ideas of vertical growth have also resonated with city leaders and development agencies keen to engineer glitzy, futuristic skylines as a means of building urban ‘brands’ that compete with other so-called world or global cities for investment, tourism, media exposure and the ‘creative class’ (mobile and well-educated high-tech elites).3 The problem with Glaeser’s arguments, however, is that they invoke densification and verticalisation for cities as a simple economic imperative while completely ignoring the structural social and political forces shaping the production and consumption of urban housing in contemporary cities.4 In economic terms, Glaeser focuses exclusively on alleged links between inelastic housing supply (caused by constrained building and low building heights) and housing afford-ability. At the same time, in line with the wider neoliberal rhetoric within which his arguments fit,5 he argues that state regulation is merely a barrier to the building of housing in cities. The implication is that housing and planning regulations and subsidies – rent controls, social and collective housing provisions, height restrictions – need to be cut away in the interests of an entirely privatised housing regime unleashing the vertical growth processes that they supposedly constrain. In many cities, the result of this confluence of ideas concerning densification, ‘smart’ growth, neoliberal vertical housing and ‘global’ city planning – despite Glaeser’s rhetoric – has been profoundly regressive socially.

…

The construction of these towers represents the latest phenomenon in a thirty-year process of hyper-gentrification whereby the global super-rich – Malaysian financiers, Indian building moguls, Mexican power brokers, Russian ministers (some of dubious provenance) and the like – have used untraceable shell companies to aggressively assert increasing control in Manhattan.56 In 2016 the US state is so concerned about the role that Manhattan’s elite real estate is playing in the laundering of ‘dirty’ money from around the world that it started requiring real estate agents to track the identities of purchasers.57 Indeed, the towers are only the most visible sign of a much broader shift. This has involved the loosening of social obligations or regulations in housing and planning; the withdrawal of long-standing rent controls; the eviction of lower-income tenants; the privatisation of public space; aggressively race-based ‘zero tolerance’ policing and other social controls; and the deepening power of finance and real estate capital over urban planning. These forces have combined powerfully in the explicit repackaging of Manhattan as a luxury brand for the world’s super-rich, a process that has led directly to the rapid growth of New York’s increasingly dispersed homeless population (from 23,000 in 1993 to more than 60,000 in 2014).

Howard Rheingold
by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)
Published 26 Apr 2012

PEN was doing what it was designed to do: enabling citizens to discuss their own agendas, surface problems of mutual concern, cooperatively design solutions, and make the ideas work in the city's official government. Santa Monica is an exceptional city in terms of local citizen interest, stemming from the renter's rights movement in the early 1980s. The citizens' organizations that helped pass a historically stringent rent-control ordinance also helped elect a city council that was publicly committed to opening up the government to wider citizen participation. The city council, inspired by the way an American company had helped a Japanese city use CMC to resist destruction of a local forest, hired the same American company to help them design a municipal CMC system.

…

Personal computers at home, terminals at work, and the dozens of public terminals provided to libraries, schools, and city buildings enable Santa Monicans to read information provided by the city, exchange e-mail with other citizens or city hall officials, and participate in public conferences. The police department runs the Crimewatch conference. "Planning" is a forum for discussions of land use, zoning, and development; "Environment" is where air quality, water pollution, and recycling programs are discussed; "Santa Monica" covers rent control, community events, and information about city boards and commissions. Other forums allow discussion of topics far afield from municipal concerns. MDG, well aware of Oldenburg's ideas about informal public spaces, made sure there was enough virtual common space for people to create their own formal and informal discussions in addition to following the ones established by the system's organizers.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

Hotel taxes go unpaid, depriving cities of needed revenue and penalizing law-abiding hotels, which provide necessary low-wage jobs. Apartment complexes become filled with tourists and rotating guests who are potentially disruptive. Slumlords and other unscrupulous operators are encouraged to subdivide properties into smaller rentals from which they extract hefty fees. Rent-controlled apartments can be leveraged to extract illegal rents from unsuspecting subletters. That has become an acute problem in San Francisco, Airbnb’s home city, where housing prices have risen exorbitantly due to the influx of moneyed young start-up employees. In the process, otherwise suitable long-term rental units become unavailable, turned over to tourists and short-term corporate rentals, which in turn drives up prices for locals.

…

In the process, otherwise suitable long-term rental units become unavailable, turned over to tourists and short-term corporate rentals, which in turn drives up prices for locals. In the summer of 2013, evictions in San Francisco were at their highest in eleven years, due in part to the latitude the city gives landlords in evicting residents of rent-controlled apartments and the tempting payday of short-term, under-the-table rentals. Among the most pernicious aspects of the sharing economy is the way it presents itself as a populist operation, a loose community coming together to engage in mutually beneficial, informal economic exchanges. In reality, it is anything but these things.

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science
by Dani Rodrik
Published 12 Oct 2015

A large federal budget deficit has an adverse effect on the economy. (83%) 8. A minimum wage increases unemployment among young and unskilled workers. (79%) Unless you skipped the previous chapters, the degree of consensus on these propositions should surprise you. For at least four of the eight, we have already seen models that contradict them. Rent controls (ceilings on what landlords can charge) do not necessarily restrict the supply of housing if landlords behave monopolistically, trade restrictions do not necessarily reduce efficiency, fiscal stimulus does not necessarily work, and minimum wages do not necessarily raise unemployment. In all of these cases, there are models with imperfect competition, imperfect markets, or imperfect information where the reverse outcome prevails.

The Passenger
by AA.VV.
Published 23 May 2022

Over the following decades, despite numerous attempts, the park has still not been redeveloped and is now home to a few people who have holed up there since 2020 when the encampment bans were suspended during the pandemic: numbers of homeless people in California are soaring, along with petty crime, and Berkeley is no exception. Rents are extremely high, and only 40 per cent of students live in the city (the lowest percentage for any US university). To tackle the problem the university has promised to build new rent-controlled student accommodation in People’s Park and set up a memorial to commemorate the events of 1969. But there is opposition to the plans, with claims that the initiative will not go far enough to solve the issues affecting the park or students. It doesn’t take much to get evicted from your home in a housing system like this one, especially since, compared with standards in Europe, labour laws in the United States are weak and it is easy to let employees go.

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?
by David G. Blanchflower
Published 12 Apr 2021

Countries that experienced the biggest increases in unemployment • had large financial sectors (UK and United States); • had major rises and subsequent collapses in house prices (UK, United States, Ireland, and Spain); • did not have their own central banks and currencies (France, Italy, Spain, Greece); • had limits on the mobility of labor especially in the housing market (Greece and Spain had the highest levels of homeownership rates and the highest unemployment rates in Europe, while Germany and Switzerland had the lowest homeownership rates and the lowest unemployment rates); and • did not have fully functioning capital, product, and/or housing markets (Spain, Italy, and Greece).8 Mobility mattered. As we will discuss, a very high proportion of young adults in countries with high youth unemployment rates still lived with their parents even into their late twenties, especially in Greece, Spain, and Italy. The housing market controls, including rent controls, prevented youngsters from striking out on their own. It was easier to go abroad than to move across town. The proportion of youngsters living with their parents and not striking out on their own to form households increased sharply around the world including in the United States after the Great Recession.

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See also flexible work schedules; gig economy; self-employment part-time for economic reasons (PTFER) cohort, 118, 126, 129–32 part-timers who want full-time jobs (PTWFT), 118, 128, 129, 131–32 Patterson, Tom, 287 Paul, Karsten I., 43 Paulson, Henry, 163 Pecket, Elliott, 186–87 Peek, Liz, 16 Pencavel, John, 122, 123 Pennsylvania, 24, 236, 265, 288, 289 Pennycook, Matthew, 104 pensions, 32, 57, 62, 281, 338–39 Peri, Giovanni, 248–49 Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE), 72 Peskowitz, Zachary, 326 Peters, William, 213 Phelps, Ned, 302–3 Phillips, William, 308, 309 Phillips curve, 208, 305, 307–11 Phone 4U, 335 Pickard, James, 272 Pidd, Helen, 273 Piketty, Thomas, 108, 109, 165, 337 Pinto, Sergio, 220 plastic surgery, 184 Poland, 81, 136; emigration from, 86, 93, 131, 251–54; Great Recession in, 79; underemployment in, 132; unemployment in, 134; wage growth in, 61 political correctness, 284, 324 Portes, Jonathan, 255, 342 Portugal, 38, 77, 78, 229; business and consumer confidence in, 196, 321; declining trust in, 321, 331; immigration to, 238; underemployment in, 136; unemployment in, 41, 132, 134 Posen, Adam, 70 Pouliakis, Konstantinos, 140 Powell, Jerome, 67–68, 304–5, 316 Pozuelo, Julia Ruiz, 226 Praet, Peter, 207 Pratt, Laura A., 224 Precis (clothing retailer), 209 Present Situation Index, 210 Pressman, Sarah D., 220 Prezzo (restaurant chain), 209 Prisoner Dilemma, 190 productivity, 63, 166–67; in housing-constrained cities, 91–92; immigration linked to, 255, 256; wage growth linked to, 64–65, 69, 84, 120, 121, 191, 302 progressive taxation, 342 protectionism, 114, 285 Protective Labor Market Institutions (PLMIs), 86 public schools, 72 Pulliam, Christopher, 74 Purchasing Manager Indices (PMIs), 194, 196, 205, 206 Putin, Vladimir, 293 Putnam, Robert, 329, 334 quantitative easing, 4, 62, 160, 162, 339 Quévat, Benjamin, 58 Quinones, Sam, 217 Rachman, Gideon, 282 Rapley, John, 165, 181, 193 Real Clear Politics (RCP), 321 recessions, 7, 191, 209 Rees, Daniel I., 36 Rees-Mogg, Jacob, 321 refugees, 7, 238, 241, 247, 250, 281, 325 Reinhart, Carmen, 3, 175 Reis, Ricardo, 178 rental housing, 34–35 rent controls, 85 replacement rate, 86 retirement age, 100, 278, 282–83, 339, 345, 346 return migration, 252 Rexnord Corporation, 290 Richards, Lindsay, 340 Rieder, Travis, 217 Rinne, Ulf, 57 Rivington Biscuits, 187 The Road to Wigan Pier (Orwell), 46, 270 Roberts, Russ, 169 Robinson, Eugene, 325 Rogoff, Kenneth, 3, 175 Romania, 93, 131, 251 Romney, Mitt, 24, 267, 268, 292 Rosen, Sherwin, 123 Rosengren, Eric, 153 Roth, Christopher, 340–41 Roubini, Nouriel, 152 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), 160, 162, 188, 335 RSA Insurance, 188 Rugaber, Christopher, 320 rules of thumb, 8 Russia, 281, 293, 330 Ryan, Richard W., 102 Ryanair, 188 Ryssdal, Kai, 67 S&P, 188 Sabadish, Natalie, 109 Sacerdote, Bruce, 71–72 Saez, Emmanuel, 108, 109–10, 337 Salvini, Matteo, 282 Sánchez, Aida Caldera, 92 Sanders, Bernie, 115, 343 Santander, 159, 281 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 344 Saunders, Michael, 100 savings, 75 Sawhill, Isabel V., 74 Schlagenhauf, Don, 74 Schwarz, Moises, 154 Seager, Ashley, 153–54 seasonal employment, 56 self-employment, 141; in Netherlands, 62, 364n26; primary vs. secondary, 140; in United Kingdom, 62, 83, 103–4, 140.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

Liberalization of radio spectrum licences was a prominent example of such work in the infrastructure space; perhaps the prime example in the land context has been a series of policy measures bearing on privately rented residential property. The 1988 Housing Act was a seminal intervention. It effectively signalled the end of rent controls in England and Wales, deregulating all new private rented tenancies created after January 1989, and hence restricting regulated tenancies – those with ‘fair rents’ assessed by independent rent officers – to a pool of legacy lettings that by 2000/01 had declined to just 6 per cent of the private rental sector in England.36 Rents were henceforth set by the market.

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Property Industry Alliance, ‘Property Data Report 2009’, July 2009, p. 6 – pdf available at bpf.org.uk. 35. Estimated residential rents are shown for profit-making private-sector landlords only; rents received by local authorities or housing associations (which are generally private, non-profit making organisations) are excluded. 36. W. Wilson, A Short History of Rent Control, House of Commons Briefing Paper Number 6747, 30 March 2017, pp. 9–10. 37. P. A. Kemp and M. Keoghan, ‘Movement into and out of the Private Rental Sector in England’, Housing Studies 16 (2001), pp. 21–37, at p. 22. 38. Note that, in April 2019, the UK’s Conservative government announced plans to ban Section 21’s ‘no fault’ evictions.

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy
by Tom Slee
Published 18 Nov 2015

Our housing and residences are surrounded by rules because we are part of a community and need to get along. Not all these rules are good ones, but co-operative housing organizations place limits on what ­members can do, landlord–tenant agreements place limits on what ­tenants can do, city rules put limits on what landlords can do, and rent-­controlled apartments are made available with a set of conditions about how they are used. Airbnb has no interest in these rules. Instead, despite its talk of community, the only logic it seems to understand is that of the free market: the right of property owners to do what they want with their property.

How to Retire the Cheapskate Way
by Jeff Yeager
Published 1 Jan 2013

He also generates some additional income from a host of little side businesses he “plays around with,” including professional photography, PR consulting, and selling customized cards and invitations, an enterprise that he started at the age of fourteen and has maintained ever since. He estimates that he spends roughly $1,500 per month on all of his living expenses, including what he pays for his quasi-rent-controlled apartment. Official poverty-level gauges aside, it’s clear that Jerry is among that half of all Americans who rely primarily on Social Security for their retirement income. Without it, he would be “poor” by any and every definition of the term. But what’s indisputable is the second half of Jerry Dyson’s statement: “I’ve learned how to be poor and very happy.”

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality
by Brink Lindsey
Published 12 Oct 2017

Likewise, collective bargaining under the Wagner Act confers a wage premium of roughly 15 percent for unionized workers. Overtime regulations, the Davis-Bacon Act mandating the payment of prevailing wages on public works projects, universal service requirements for telephone service and public utilities, rent control and tenant protection laws, and the Americans with Disabilities Act provide further examples of regulatory policies that create rents for the less-well-off. Even when regulations limit or distort competition in favor of big corporations, the distributive consequences aren’t always clear. Exactly how those rents are ultimately divided up among the corporations’ workers, managers, shareholders, and customers depends on a complex interplay of factors.

Me Talk Pretty One Day
by David Sedaris
Published 4 Jun 2001

The communists I’d known in the past had always operated on the assumption that come the revolution, they’d be the ones lying around party headquarters with clipboards in their hands. They couldn’t manage to wash a coffee mug, yet they’d been more than willing to criticize the detergent manufacturer. Patrick’s mugs were clean and neatly lined up on the drainboard. He lived alone in a tiny rent-controlled apartment filled with soft snack foods, letters from imprisoned radicals, and the sorts of newspapers that have no fashion section. His moving collective consisted of him, a dented bread truck, and a group of full- and part-time helpers hired according to availability and the size of any given job.

Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America
by Dan Conway
Published 8 Sep 2019

I was twenty-eight years old. My plan was to drastically reduce my spending and start a one-person PR consulting practice that would generate $10,000 per month or more. I’d sock it away, bite the bullet and accumulate enough so I had options for how I’d live the rest of my life. I figured I’d eventually get a small, rent-controlled apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco and keep it for decades or move to Eureka up north, a low-cost-of-living destination full of Bay Area cast-offs I’d visited a few times. I could write for a living, start a small one-person business, or find some other way to make enough money to live frugally without having to rejoin the traditional workforce.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation: A Novel
by Ottessa Moshfegh
Published 9 Jul 2018

They reminded me of Reva, but they had more money and less self-loathing, I would guess. This was Yorkville, the Upper East Side. People were uptight. When I shuffled through the lobby in my pajamas and slippers on my way to the bodega, I felt like I was committing a crime, but I didn’t care. The only other slovenly people around were elderly Jews with rent-controlled apartments. But I was tall and thin and blond and pretty and young. Even at my worst, I knew I still looked good. My building was eight stories high, concrete with burgundy awnings, an anonymous facade on a block otherwise lined with pristine town houses, each with its own placard warning people not to let their dogs piss on their stoops because it would damage the brownstone.

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
by Danielle Evans
Published 22 Sep 2010

Liddie and I got out of the car and stood on the front porch, bracing ourselves for the sound of the doorbell. Jellyfish The roof of William’s Harlem apartment building fell in on a Wednesday, three weeks before he was due to renew his lease. Everyone seemed to think it was a sign of something. Janice in 2F thought the landlord caved the roof in on purpose, to chase out the last of the rent-controlled tenants. Ed, the eighty-something widower two flights down, thought it was an accident on the part of the city, something gone wrong while they were covertly practicing riot-control tactics. The kids next door pasted fliers around the block, claiming the damage was the result of a minor earthquake caused by global warming.

The Fran Lebowitz Reader
by Fran Lebowitz
Published 8 Nov 1994

“Well,” she said, “some people use the second bedroom as a dining room.” I replied that I needed the second bedroom to write in. This was a mistake because it reminded her of all the ambassadors to the U.N. on her list of prospective tenants. “Well,” she said, “the master bedroom is rather large.” “Listen,” I said, “I already eat on my bed. In a one-room, rent-controlled slum apartment, I’ll eat on the bed. In an ornately priced, high-maintenance co-op, I want to eat at a table. Call me silly, call me foolish, but that’s the kind of girl I am.” She escorted me out of the apartment and left me standing in the lobby as she hurried off—anxious, no doubt, to call Cardinal Cooke and tell him okay, the apartment was his.

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 27 Nov 2012

I have an option, not an obligation. It came at no cost since I did not even solicit it. So I have a small, nay, nonexistent, downside, a big upside. This is a free option because there is no real cost to the privilege. Your Rent Second example: assume you are the official tenant of a rent-controlled apartment in New York City, with, of course, wall-to-wall bookshelves. You have the option of staying in it as long as you wish, but no obligation to do so. Should you decide to move to Ulan Bator, Mongolia, and start a new life there, you can simply notify the landlord a certain number of days in advance, and thank you goodbye.

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What is top-down is generally unwrinkled (that is, unfractal) and feels dead. Sometimes modernism can take a naturalistic turn, then stop in its tracks. Gaudi’s buildings in Barcelona, from around the turn of the twentieth century, are inspired by nature and rich architecture (Baroque and Moorish). I managed to visit a rent-controlled apartment there: it felt like an improved cavern with rich, jagged details. I was convinced that I had been there in a previous life. Wealth of details, ironically, leads to inner peace. Yet Gaudi’s idea went nowhere, except in promoting modernism in its unnatural and naive versions: later modernistic structures are smooth and completely stripped of fractal jaggedness.

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes
by Mark Skousen
Published 22 Dec 2006

And land prices, like wages and capital goods, are determined by their marginal productivity—"at the margin"—allocated according to its most "productive" use (346-48). According to Clark, taxing away the value of land, even if unimproved, will drive capital out of land into housing, and misallocate capital in favor of housing. Rent and land prices help investors to allocate a scarce resource (land) to its most valued use in society. Rent controls and confiscatory land taxes can only create distortions in land use.2 Finally, Clark applied his marginal productivity theory to capital and interest. He differed strenuously with the Austrians on the structure of the capital markets, arguing that investment capital was a "permanent fund," like a big reservoir, where "the water that at this moment flows into one end of the pond causes an overflow from the other end" (Clark 1965 [ 1899], 313).

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 23 Aug 2006

But it would make no sense to make policy by asking everyone in the world whether the United States should sign the Kyoto Protocol, or whether genetic engineering poses serious risks, or whether a significant increase in the minimum wage would increase unemployment, or whether the death penalty has a deterrent effect on crime, or whether rent control policies help or hurt poor tenants. In these cases, there is a great risk that error and confusion at the individual level will be replicated at the level of group averages. The implications for group behavior and democracy are mixed. To the extent that the goal is to arrive at the correct judgments on facts, the Condorcet Jury Theorem affords no guarantees.

You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing
by John Scalzi
Published 28 Jan 2007

It's shitty in exchange for the amount of labor involved in writing a book, and it's shitty in the real world of paying rent, buying groceries and keeping the lights on. $3K is a nickel a word (or less, if you write more than 60,000 words). If you live in New York City or San Francisco and don't have rent control, $3K is a writer's monthly "nut"—i.e., your cost of living (note to writers: Get the hell out of NYC and SF). Lassen's exhortations of paltry book economics aside, no author wants to make $3,000 or less from their work. It's "I won't bring up what I was paid to the parents who wanted me to be an accountant" money.

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be
by Diane Coyle
Published 11 Oct 2021

The conventional (or perhaps caricature in this context) economic view would be that price is the most efficient rationing device: if supply is restricted, the best use of scarce resources is to allocate them to people who value them the most as reflected in their willingness to pay a higher price. Similar arguments are made about rent controls or controls on foreign exchange. But access to food or clothes in wartime is not the same as access to the housing market in normal times. Similar arguments explain why regulators acted against price gouging during the 2020 lockdowns, stamping out or punishing big hikes in prices of medical supplies and essentials.

Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way
by Tanja Hester
Published 12 Feb 2019

And you may find yourself unable to move when you wish to if you aren’t able to sell your house at a fair price. On the other hand, when you rent, you aren’t building equity, you often can’t make changes to the property, and you benefit from no tax write-offs. Your rent can also go up unexpectedly, depending on local rent control rules. But for the majority of people, you’ll spend less money renting than buying, you won’t lock up huge sums of money in your investment, and you don’t have to deal with repairs yourself. And research shows that if you’re disciplined about investing the money you would be spending to buy in your market versus what it costs to rent, you can come out ahead of those who do buy their homes, because the stock markets tend to give better long-term returns than the housing market.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together
by Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin
Published 21 Jun 2023

Whether falling crime rates have led to gentrification, or whether gentrification has in fact driven the fall in inner city crime rates, also remains contested. Well-off residents have less to gain and more to lose from participating in crime. One study by a group of MIT economists sought to resolve this ambiguity by looking at what happened to crime rates following a public ballot in Cambridge (Massachusetts) that ended rent control and therefore brought about a rapid surge in gentrification in the area.26 The fact that the researchers found a significant drop-off in crime after the policy change lends support to the idea that gentrification could be the cause of falling crime, rather than the other way around. There is also reason to believe that a fundamental reconfiguration in lifestyle preferences has been underway in recent decades, contributing to the growing desirability of living in urban centres.

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism
by Wendy Liu
Published 22 Mar 2020

The British Digital Cooperative model, proposed by Dan Hind for the Common Wealth think tank, offers a useful alternative to our current profit-driven landscape of digital media, and would create a healthier and more democratic ecosystem through public ownership of media platforms.8 Finally, housing should be seen as a human right, and thus provided as a public good. Social housing should become the norm, and local governments should progressively reclaim housing stock from private hands while also building more if needed. At the same time, private landlords should have their power curtailed, with strict rent controls (including rent caps) so that no one needs to rent out their primary residence on Airbnb simply to afford rent, and so that owners of multiple units are not able to reap excess rents from doing the same.9 Overall, the purpose of public funding should be to decouple the funding from the service.

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover
by Katrina Vanden Heuvel and William Greider
Published 9 Jan 2009

Their situation is typical of the crisis’ impact on communities of color where, according to an ACORN study, African-American and Latino homeowners are more than three times as likely as whites to have a high-cost loan. Once evicted, former tenants find they have few rights. Unless they live in a city with rent control and are covered by eviction regulations, they are at the mercy of state laws, which give evicted tenants limited recourse. And the laws don’t look like they’ll change anytime soon. Bills and Remedies In late January, the California State Senate defeated a bill sponsored by Senator Don Perata (D) of Oakland that would have required banks to give 60 days notice to tenants in foreclosed properties.

Dark Summit: The True Story of Everest's Most Controversial Season
by Nick Heil
Published 3 Feb 2009

What did that imply when it came to the welfare of others? In March 2007 I traveled to Brice’s home in Argentière, France, a quaint mountain hamlet a couple of miles upvalley from Chamonix. Brice put me up in his sister-in-law’s vacation condo; he and Caroline lived across town, in a modest but tasteful rent-controlled two-bedroom apartment. I spent a week visiting with them and others, including Brice’s old friend Harry Taylor, several members of the documentary film crew (who were in town to prep for Discovery Channel’s follow-up show on Himex), and Brice’s staff at Chamonix Experience, a.k.a. Chamex, the guiding business that he ran in tandem with Himalayan Experience.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 1 Jan 2010

In many countries, there are also necessary permissions for the location of sales outlets – such as restrictions on street-vending or zoning laws that ban commercial activities in residential areas. Then there are price regulations. I am not talking here just about those highly visible phenomena such as rent controls or minimum wages that free-market economists love to hate. Wages in rich countries are determined more by immigration control than anything else, including any minimum wage legislation. How is the immigration maximum determined? Not by the ‘free’ labour market, which, if left alone, will end up replacing 80–90 per cent of native workers with cheaper, and often more productive, immigrants.

The New Class Conflict
by Joel Kotkin
Published 31 Aug 2014

This has been the predominant way that the Yeomanry develops assets and establishes its independence. Without property, they essentially work to pay someone else’s mortgage. In many cities, affordable apartments can be had if your parents bought early or, in places like New York, you are able to use your parent’s rent-controlled units, which are often several times cheaper than market-rate ones. For those who don’t have such advantages, some have proposed a return to the boarding house, suggesting that we hurl away “middle-class norms of decency” governing housing and go back to the ad hoc ways in which many were forced to live during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.63 If current trends continue, when millennials move out of their parents’ houses, many may be forced to live in apartments they do not own, and probably never will have the chance to own.

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income
by Guy Standing
Published 3 May 2017

In the end, the post-war government decided to meet actual housing costs but to means-test claimants needing supplements above national insurance benefits based on contribution records. The ‘problem of rent’ is much worse today. In the early years of the welfare state, 60 per cent of the population lived in privately rented accommodation subject to strict rent controls, and an ambitious council house building programme was underway. Now, area differences in rents and house prices are much greater, rents in the private sector have soared, and the sale at a discount of council and social housing has resulted in a massive shortage of affordable homes. The cost of means-tested housing benefit has ballooned to some £25 billion a year.

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties
by Paul Collier
Published 4 Dec 2018

The affluent and the smart have benefited from a double bonanza: being better able to borrow than young families, they can charge rents that exceed their interest payments. On top of this, as house prices have risen, they have accrued huge capital appreciation. So, what can be done about it? Again, ideology is a menace. Those on the left want to return to the rent controls of the 1940s; as then, this would freeze people into the home they are currently renting, reducing job mobility. Those on the right want to increase finance for first-time house purchase; by further fuelling demand, this would jack prices up yet further. Yet addressing this problem is not difficult, because we know what worked: the same policies would work again.

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age
by Annalee Newitz
Published 2 Feb 2021

I was working at a free weekly paper, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and we had to start laying people off. Our livelihood was advertising, and the city’s businesses were shrinking. I wondered whether I was foolish to stay. But I had entangled my identity with the hills and swales of this city; losing it would be like losing a limb. Plus, I was lucky enough to have a cheap room in a rent-controlled house in an unfashionable neighborhood. I decided to stick it out and hope the city would survive. It did. In fact, San Francisco today is suffering through the opposite kind of crisis, as the population explodes and the city government struggles to remake our infrastructure to support it. The second generation of tech companies is raking in cash.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

Or they can force everyone to pay more for something than they would otherwise, such as with high minimum wages that mean that job opportunities disappear for those with poorer qualifications and less experience.18 If politicians want a deficit instead, they can just force producers to sell at a price that is clearly lower than what consumers are willing to pay. Regardless of whether it is rent control or the Venezuelan price controls on food, the result is the same: supply decreases, waiting times increase and an informal market emerges. The only way to make sure one can get the coveted product is to have contacts with power and influence. Another way to undermine the price system is inflation.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist
by Alex Zevin
Published 12 Nov 2019

The Economist can tell us a great deal about them, in particular the way the centre of the extreme centre now shifted right. As Marshall aid began to flow, the Economist called for dismantling the restrictive microeconomic policies that the Labour government had carried over from the war – food subsidies, rationing, rent controls and industrial quotas – and by 1950–51, it was telling readers to vote Conservative, in order to end these ‘inflation-breeding’ distortions. If Keynes remained its preferred guide to macroeconomics, the Economist rejected interpretations of him that went beyond demand management. Labour was not to be entrusted even with that much.86 By 1955, Crowther was accusing Labour leaders of ‘surrendering common sense to doctrinaire obstinacy’ for refusing to admit the obvious wisdom of a shift in policy that Labour itself had initiated with health service charges and that the Conservatives had sensibly carried forward since 1951: the denationalization of steel, the lifting of price controls, and the rise in interest rates had all helped to tame inflation and plug holes in the balance of payments.

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‘If he had his way, he would be the most economically radical premier since Margaret Thatcher’: Ibid. 137.‘The Land that Labour Forgot’, 5 September 2015. ‘Only in the time-warp of Mr Corbyn’s hard-left fraternity could a programme of renationalisation and enhanced trade-union activism be the solution to inequality.’ Rent controls would ‘exacerbate the shortage’ in housing and a ‘people’s QE’ – after the quantitative easing undertaken by central banks to prop up asset prices and stimulate private lending after 2008 – ‘threatens to become an incontinent fiscal stimulus’. Scrapping university tuition fees ‘would be regressive and counterproductive’: ‘Backwards Comrades’, 19 September 2015. 138.

Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States (P.S.)
by Pete Jordan
Published 1 May 2007

What little I did know was that in my hometown, housing prices were so high—and rising so rapidly—that it wasn’t just an impossibility for a dishman to buy a house there, but even renting was out of the question. In fact, not long before, as a result of the explosion in San Francisco’s housing prices, my parents had been evicted from their own rent-controlled apartment of twenty-three years. Yet each time I counted the zeros of the listed housing prices in Colby, unbelievably, the figures came out the same. It got me thinking. Between Kansan prices and Alaskan wages, maybe I could get a place of my own. Sitting smack in the middle of America, a house in Kansas could be used as a base of operations.

Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays
by Witold Rybczynski
Published 7 Sep 2015

Housing vouchers are an attractive solution inasmuch as they get municipal governments out of the housing business, but there are drawbacks: the poor are not as mobile as the middle class and cannot seek out the best housing opportunities (in that sense, housing vouchers are different from food stamps), nor are commercial builders eager to provide new rental housing at rock-bottom rates, at least not while they are subject to rent control. Others have proposed that the government assist poor people in purchasing houses or in forming housing cooperatives. While this might help some families, the added burden of homeownership is a questionable benefit for those already battered by the multiple difficulties of poverty. (There is also a political obstacle: in America, homeownership has always been considered an economic reward, not a right.)

The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021
by Greg Clark
Published 31 Dec 2014

For this reason, Professor Tony Travers has argued, with only some exaggeration, that “[t]he mayor of New York is the city’s emperor. It is an amazingly powerful position, comparable in London terms to having virtually all the responsibilities of the mayor and boroughs added together, plus police, health, criminal justice, colleges, universities, rent control and water supply” (Travers, 2013a). Well over half of revenues in New York are generated from three taxes: real estate, sales and income. The income tax is structured similarly to the federal income tax, and ranges from 3–4 per cent. As such, New York City has a 168 London today and in the future relatively high reliance on non-property tax sources of revenue, comprising about two-thirds of all revenue, compared to just a quarter in other American cities (Chernick et al., 2010).

The Blue Cascade: A Memoir of Life After War
by Mike Scotti
Published 14 May 2012

And the crackhead was just a little ashamed, but not so much anymore, because he had accepted his place in the order of things and was mostly just worried about whether or not I was going to call the cops. But the smell in the air in the hallway was similar to the smell of the vehicles burning and the dead on the side of the road. Sleep comes fully clothed and with the laptop resting on my lap, as the guy who lives above me, a holdover from the sixties on rent control and paying a third of what I pay, does a bunch of blow and decides to rearrange his furniture or fuck his girlfriend or dance and whoop. And across the courtyard, a few floors above me, a puppy yaps and yaps and then cries out like the baby in her mother’s arms I saw silhouetted against the moon and across the barbed wire as I tried to sleep in the dirt in the battalion perimeter just off of Route 7.

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It
by Timothy Noah
Published 23 Apr 2012

Old fortunes were dissipated, and new fortunes sprang up to take their place. Another countervailing circumstance was that various government actions had worked to limit the concentration of wealth, either indirectly by permitting higher levels of inflation (which eroded the value of existing wealth) or directly through such policies as rent control and ceilings on long-term interest rates (which slowed wealth’s accumulation). Even when such government actions were not intended to redistribute income, Kuznets wrote, they nonetheless reflected “the view of society on the long-term utility of wide income inequalities. This view is a vital force that would operate in democratic societies even if there were no counteracting factors [italics mine].”

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America
by Giles Slade
Published 14 Apr 2006

Their major innovation, however, was the introduction of long-term self-amortizing mortgages with uniform payments spread over the life of the debt. This development was to have a remarkable effect on American real estate after 1944, when section 505 of The Serviceman’s Readjustment Act (the GI Bill) guaranteed every veteran a fully finan ed mortgage for any home meeting FHA standards. Then in 1947, the Housing and Rent Act introduced rent controls to keep rental housing affordable. One consequence of this act was to make rental properties much less lucrative for investors, who turned their capital and energies to the construction and sale of privately owned homes. On the outer rings of cities where land was cheaper, suburban developments sprang up almost overnight, aimed at a new bluecollar mass market.26 Houses in this new suburbia were pared down to their most essential features, as developers found ways to economize on construction.

Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism
by David Friedman
Published 2 Jan 1978

The lack of student power which the New Left deplores is a direct result of the success of one of the pet schemes of the old left, heavily subsidized schooling. Students in public universities and, to a lesser extent, in private ones do not pay the whole cost of their schooling. As a result the university does not need its students; it can always get more. Like a landlord under rent control, the university can afford to ignore the wishes and convenience of its customers. If the subsidies were abolished or converted into scholarships awarded to students, so that the university got its money from tuition, it would be in the position of a merchant selling his goods at their market price and thus constrained to sell what his customers most want to buy.

Paris Revealed
by Stephen Clarke
Published 12 Aug 2012

, usage of 26 Pré Saint-Gervais: métro line 7bis 93 pre-Haussmann Paris, photographs 113 Prêcheurs, rue des 35 prehistoric settlement, Bercy 101–2 Prêtres, rue des 31 Prévôt, rue du 31, 34 Prison de la Santé 41 pronunciation, fashion terms 214–15 property buying 259, 262–78 ads, vocabulary 268n De Particulier à Particulier 266–7, 287 owners, buying from 267–78 prostitutes business records 168 Napoleon’s first amour 135 Palais-Royal gardens 135–6 part-time 162–3 squeezed out 7 Prouté, Paul, gallery 251–2, 287 Prussian siege 1870–1 55, 56, 70, 174, 177–9 public toilets, idiosyncratic usage 2, 40–2 publishing houses, intellectual 10 puns 64, 262, see also hairdressers’ names PSG, see Paris Saint-Germain Quai de la Rapée métro station 85 Quai de Loire MK2 131, 132, 284 Quai de Seine MK2 131, 284 Quartier de l’Horloge 8, 121 Queneau, Raymond (writer), Zazie dans le Métro 94, 290 queues general rules for conduct 20–1 supermarket checkouts 2 racaille 7 railways, urban 70–1 Ramponeau, rue 236 Ramuz, Charles Ferdinand (writer), Paris, Notes d’un Vaudois 18 RATP (Paris transport agency), flood preparations 62 rats, as part of Parisian cuisine 174, 177 Réaumur-Sébastopol métro station 83 redevelopment/remodelling 99–100, 101, 103–4 Fournel on 115–16 Haussmann 54, 58, 65, 101, 111–14 recent 121–3 redevelopment zones 234 regional cuisines 190 Renaissance Paris 107 Rennes, rue de 31 Renoir, Auguste (artist) 232, 240, 247 rent controls, loi de 1948, abolition 260–2 rented apartments, rules for conduct 24–5 République métro station 83 République square 150 RER (réseau express régional) 7, 69-70, 89 Resistance fighters, commemorative street plaques 35 restaurants and baguettes 185, 188 authentic 127 French cuisine, selecting 190–7 romantic 148–52 rules for conduct 19–20 Revolution, French 108–9, 110 and street-name signs 33 sex after 157–8 ‘revolutionary’ time 108 revolutions, French, various 111, 112, 114–15 rich people dressed down 9 Montmartre 15 old ladies 11 ostentatious 9–10 Richard, Pierre (actor) 225 Rimbaud, Arthur (poet) 89, 236 ring road, see boulevard périphérique 3 Ritz bar 147–8, 284 Rivoli, rue de 35, 133 road signs, see street signs Robert Esnault-Pelterie, rue 35–6 Rochefort, Jean (actor) 226 Roi de Sicile, rue du 32 Roman Paris 102–6 romance 125–53 or sex?

Bastard Tongues: A Trailblazing Linguist Finds Clues to Our Common Humanity in the World's Lowliest Languages
by Derek Bickerton
Published 4 Mar 2008

By an incredible stroke of luck-perhaps fate had decided to compensate me for the loss of my project-it landed on the desk of a sympathetic editor, Barbara Hammer, who promptly accepted it and got me a $5,000 advance. It may well have been the very last over-the-transom sale in the history of publishing. I'd like to be able to say it was a great book, but at least it kept the wolf from the door. Immediately $2,000 went to buy the furniture of an old man who was the tenant of a rent-controlled apartment on West Twenty-fifth Street but was going into a home. In return for this cash payment we took over his apartment and the ridiculously low rent that went with it. Illegal? Sure, but this was New York. And T 132 BASTARD TONGUES Yvonne was able to walk to work through the Bowery, stepping carefully over the bodies of drunks still clutching their empty bot~ tles of Thunderbird.

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America
by Jamie Bronstein
Published 29 Oct 2016

As men joined the war effort and left the domestic labor market, the wages for unskilled labor rose. Higher-skilled and white-collar workers with longer contracts that were less responsive to inflation found that their pay did not keep up. At the same time, the government experimented with price controls, rent control, and excess-profits taxes.106 Ironically, however, even as actual inequality temporarily decreased, Americans backed away from the discussions about the importance of fostering equality. During World War I, the government reached out to the AFL while at the same time cracking down on the IWW, which was branded as subversive.

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars
by Samuel I. Schwartz
Published 17 Aug 2015

The velocity-time graphs used by physics students to study acceleration might look a little like the supply and demand curves that economics students use to study prices. They’re not. Demand curves can be manipulated. If we—and by “we” I mean all of us, acting through our local, state, and federal governments—decide to do so, we can alter the supply of most things, and thereby change their prices. If a rent-control law keeps prices below what people are willing to pay for housing, the housing supply contracts; if a new zoning law favors construction in a previously vacant area, the supply expands. Which is exactly what happened with the GI Bill’s requirement that government-guaranteed home loans go only to new construction, or the Eisenhower administration’s decision to build forty thousand miles of heavily subsidized highways.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

A 2014 report by the McKinsey Global Institute highlighted the problem of housing affordability. It found that 330 million urban households around the world live in unsafe or inadequate housing, or are financially stressed by housing costs. The number is expected to rise to 440 million by 2025. The causes include property prices, land availability, development conditions, and rent controls. Even in rich cities like New York and London, many low- and middle-income households cannot afford basic housing and spend a high percentage (30–50) of their income on rent or mortgage repayments. The lack of affordable housing constrains economic activity, and decreases productivity by reducing labor mobility and increasing transportation times and costs.

Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone
by Eric Klinenberg
Published 1 Jan 2012

Practically every neighborhood has a senior center that serves lunches, organizes social events, and helps senior citizens enroll in public programs. Community groups and neighborhood organizations encourage people to age in naturally occurring retirement communities, which keep them from losing touch with friends, family, and local institutions; rent control policies, while weaker than they once were, allow retired people on fixed incomes to stay in their homes. Volunteer programs connect the retired healthy elderly with their less mobile counterparts, so that the visitors maintain a sense of purpose while the visited get a break from the monotony of long, solitary days.

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy
by Eric O'Neill
Published 1 Mar 2019

Now that we’d won the war, we had to replace our shared struggle with something grander. Life together made our dank apartment seem brighter. We still missed the sprawling brownstone high above Adams Mill Road, and a stone’s throw away from the clubs and restaurants of Adams Morgan, but we had made this home together. Our cold, rent-controlled apartment was a palace as long as we shared it—at least until I was tasked to the Hanssen case. Now we were spending far too much time fighting, and had raised those swords against each other. I muttered into my steaming mug. “It’s tough stuff, kiddo,” Kate said. If anyone else had called me that, I would have blown my top.

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
by Claire L. Evans
Published 6 Mar 2018

I am suddenly moved by the idea: here lived Echo, where New Yorkers loved and laughed and complained and told one another just how much they hated themselves, and why. When we finally do get a chance to talk, Stacy tells me a story about Perry Street. She has an expressive Long Island accent cemented by three decades as a rent-controlled Manhattanite. When she speaks, you can hear the italics. Telling me about how her neighborhood has changed over the decades, she inflects at pointed intervals. “There were laundromats, delis, and all of that is gone,” she says. “I have to walk forever to get to the laundromat, which is a drag.”

The Warhol Economy
by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Published 15 Jan 2020

Or what sort of illegal contracts gallery owners have with buyers or if artists’ demand is being rigged, as Attorney General Spitzer has done in attempting to control payola practices in the music industry. Further, by supporting industry associations, institution building, academic fellowships, rent control, and support for “real” artists, and knowledge exchange, the social networks that only the wealthy and highly privileged have access to could be more reachable for those with fewer social skills but lots of talent. Policymakers may not be able to build the types of nightclubs and restaurants where creative producers will want to fraternize until 4 a.m., but they can encourage dialogue and access for more artists through the support of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, Fashion Week, and the various music and art fairs that New York holds several times a year.

Rats
by Robert Sullivan
Published 8 May 2009

Dave Davis applauds Milwaukee's rodent control in an article in the Milwaukee Journal entitled "Rat Program of City Praised," which appeared on March 30, 1968. In 1971, Milwaukee's rat control program was rated among the best of eleven cities surveyed by the federal department of Health, Education, and Welfare, according to the Journal of September 11, 1971 (the early edition of the paper accidentally referred to the program praised as a rent control program). The quote on the monument at the Wisconsin Workers Memorial was originally taken from a book called The Rise of Labor and Wisconsin's Little New Deal. That Milwaukee lost some sixty thousand jobs in the recession between 1979 and 1982 came from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. When I met with Don Schaewe, he demonstrated an experimental rat-hole-activity monitoring technique—crumpling a ball of paper and stuffing it into a rat hole and returning the next day to see if the paper has been expelled.

The greatest trade ever: the behind-the-scenes story of how John Paulson defied Wall Street and made financial history
by Gregory Zuckerman
Published 3 Nov 2009

In truth, Paulson and Pellegrini still were unsure if their growing trade would ever pan out. They thought the CDOs and other risky mortgage debt would become worthless, Paulson says. “"But we still didn’'t know.”" 10. ANDREW LAHDE WAS OUT OF WORK IN THE SUMMER OF 2006, HE had little left in his savings account, and he was stuck in a cramped one-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment. But Lahde was convinced he had at least one thing of value: a trade that was sure to make him a fortune. He just couldn’'t get anyone to believe him. The thirty-five-year-old had been let go by Los Angeles investment firm Dalton Capital, after a series of clashes with his boss and an abrupt shuttering of the hedge fund that Lahde was working on.

Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years
by Richard Watson
Published 1 Jan 2008

Personally, I think that technology will eventually come to the rescue and productivity rates will soar as a result, thereby funding retirement requirements. I also think that people will simply adjust and learn to live on less with less. Real estate, for example, is not a god-given right and many more people may decide to live in government- or company-owned, rent-controlled apartments. We may lease or borrow more products too. Rather than lending to buy real estate outright, lenders may “give” people property free of charge or at a low monthly cost, then take some or all of the future capital gains. Indeed, perhaps we will see a return to a feudal model whereby property or land is owned by your employer and must be returned once your employment ceases.

Berlin Now: The City After the Wall
by Peter Schneider and Sophie Schlondorff
Published 4 Aug 2014

Eighty percent of its buildings—mostly six-story residential structures with apartments without individual bathrooms and a communal toilet on the landing—had survived largely unscathed. The communist regime had dispossessed the vast majority of private owners. Only a few avoided this fate; the Kommunale Wohnungsverwaltung (KWV)—Communal Housing Administration—managed most of the apartments. Those owners who did manage to hold on to their property titles were punished through rent control, which kept their income from tenants so low that it didn’t even cover the cost of repairs. The buildings deteriorated so rapidly that the authorities lost track of which apartments were even still habitable. Young families and tenants who believed in the “real socialism” were drawn to the newly erected Plattenbauten in Hellersdorf, Marzahn, and Hohenschönhausen.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

More are living in overcrowded or inadequate accommodation; more young adults are living with parents, unable to set up a household of their own; and homelessness is increasing, including among families with children. In Britain and elsewhere, low interest rates and tax breaks have propelled property prices to levels that have put home ownership out of reach for many and, coupled with the abolition or erosion of rent controls, generated an increasingly expensive private rental market. Landlordism has become a feature of global rentier capitalism. It has not been resurrected by chance or by free markets. The UK’s present housing crisis has its origins in Thatcher’s decision in the 1980s to give council tenants the ‘right to buy’ their homes at a substantial discount, a subsidy scheme that decimated the stock of social housing.

The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape
by Brian Ladd
Published 1 Jan 1997

The new residents recognized what official policy long denied: that the buildings were solid, adaptable, and represented the irreplaceable handiwork of craftsmen. By the 1980s, they were more sought-after than the postwar highrises nearby. Rents in these buildings were kept particularly low by rent controls enacted during the severe housing shortage after the war. West Berlin leftists suspected that the government was colluding with developers who wished to let the old buildings fall into disrepair until they could be demolished and replaced with more profitable structures. In 1980 squatters began to move into abandoned buildings, which then became centers of protest against everything from housing policies to exploitation of the Third World.

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China
by Jonathan Kaufman
Published 14 Sep 2020

It was perhaps the realization that he himself had lost so much, and that so much of the family fortune now stood at risk as the Communists advanced on Shanghai. The radical free-market outlook Lawrence had embraced in Shanghai yielded to one that at times looked more like the New Deal, with government stepping in to repair and rebuild the city. He backed government rent controls to stop Hong Kong landlords from profiteering and chaired a committee that drew up plans to build a new fire station for Kowloon, a new police headquarters, an immigration office, a new post office and mail-sorting station, a new abattoir for slaughtering pork, and a new mental hospital. Next, he tackled transportation.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
by Jia Tolentino
Published 5 Aug 2019

In the seventies, he was sued by Richard Nixon’s Department of Justice after crafting policies to keep black people out of his housing projects. In 1980, he hired two hundred undocumented Polish immigrants to clear the ground for Trump Tower, putting them to work without gloves or hard hats, and sometimes having them sleep on-site. In 1981, he bought a building on Central Park South, hoping to convert rent-controlled apartments into luxury condos; when the tenants wouldn’t leave, he issued illegal eviction notices, cut off their heat and hot water, and placed newspaper ads offering to house the homeless in the building. He has a long history of stiffing his waiters, his construction workers, his plumbers, his chauffeurs.

Fresh Off the Boat
by Eddie Huang
Published 29 Jan 2013

Besides McDonald’s, Wendy’s, or Chick-fil-A, restaurants were for old people. I wanted Baohaus to be a youth culture restaurant that the neighborhood could post up at. Not moms and dads and nine-to-fivers, but the kids across the street, the freelancers, the unemployed, and the people that hung in the neighborhood because they’d scammed their way into rent-controlled apartments. At the core of Baohaus would be this truth: no one would kick you out, call the cops, or serve you shitty 7-Eleven pressed Cubans. Most restaurateurs you talk to, the food comes first. It really didn’t with me. Food was never the issue. My food was, is, and always will be ill. New York was full of restaurants with good food, but few with a mind.

Corbyn
by Richard Seymour

At first, everything seemed to be going exceptionally well, despite the tiny parliamentary majority with which the government was formed. Labour began to implement its National Plan for industry, secured agreement with the CBI and TUC, and implemented many of its policies including pension increases, rent controls and the abolition of prescription charges. This may not have been the sweeping transformation of 1945, but with the Tory opposition scattered and in decline, there was reason to be optimistic. Further, despite the enduring influence of Gaitskellite revisionism and the talk of ‘affluence’, the limits of the post-1945 settlement were becoming visible – the existence of a wide swathe of impoverished people, especially pensioners, was recognised.38 Even the early attempts by Lord Cromer, the Governor of the Bank of England and a close ally of the City, to force a reverse in policy were seen off.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

Atlantic, April 19, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/04/san-francisco-city-apps-built-or-destroyed/587389/; Dave Clark, “San Francisco’s Black population is less than 5 percent, exodus has been steady,” KTVU, November 24, 2016, http://www.ktvu.com/news/san-franciscos-black-population-is-less-than-5-percent-exodus-has-been-steady. 30 Kathleen Maclay, “More gentrification, displacement in Bay Area forecast,” Berkeley News, August 24, 2015, https://news.berkeley.edu/2015/08/24/more-gentrification-displacement-in-bay-area-forecast/; Sam Levin, “‘Largest-ever’ Silicon Valley eviction to displace hundreds of tenants,” Guardian, July 7, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/07/silicon-valley-largest-eviction-rent-controlled-tenants-income-inequality; Rong-Gong Lin II and Gale Holland, “Silicon Valley homeless no longer welcome in ‘the Jungle,’” Los Angeles Times, December 3, 2014, https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-silicon-valley-homeless-20141204-story.html. 31 John Barber, “Toronto Divided: A tale of three cities,” Globe and Mail, December 20, 2007, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto-divided-a-tale-of-3-cities/article18151444/. 32 Kat Hanna and Nicolas Bosetti, “Inside Out: The New Geography of Wealth and Poverty in London,” Centre for London, December 2015, https://www.centreforlondon.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CFLJ3887-Inside-out-inequality_12.125_WEB.pdf; Rupert Neate, “Rich overseas parents buy £2bn of property to get top school places,” Guardian, September 5, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/05/wealthy-overseas-parents-london-property-private-school-places. 33 David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics (London: Penguin, 2017), 135–39. 34 Sako Musterd et al., “Socioeconomic segregation in European capital cities.

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives
by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman
Published 2 Mar 2021

And this debate reaches far beyond self-ownership in our bodies. When people view tangible resources as especially constitutive—that is, as essential to who we are as free and equal people—they often receive distinctive legal protection. This is why we sometimes defeat market forces to keep people in their homes using rent controls, homestead preservation rights in bankruptcy, and “partition in kind” of co-owned land (which we come to in Chapter 6). Whenever any new resource appears, ownership is ambiguous and contested. We need an initial rule to determine who starts as the owner and what it is they own. To see how the dimmer can work, let’s return to Levy Rosenbaum’s stock-in-trade: kidneys.

Artificial Whiteness
by Yarden Katz

In North and South America, Europe, and Asia, Blackstone has acquired buildings and converted them into rental units, which tenants have demonstrated are often uninhabitable. As the company increases rent prices, it ruthlessly evicts those who cannot pay, and in the United States, Blackstone has also been fighting against rent control. The United Nations’ housing advisor has flagged Blackstone as a major contributor to a global housing crisis in which tenants increasingly find themselves at the mercy of “faceless corporations.”46 Blackstone has also extended its reach into the Amazon rainforest. Blackstone-owned firms develop ports and roads, thereby fueling the hostile takeover of lands by agribusiness that damages indigenous land and sovereignty.47 Blackstone’s practices fit within a long history of dispossession sanctioned by state violence and international government alliances.

The Road to Character
by David Brooks
Published 13 Apr 2015

Susanna chose a flamboyant green dress and wore her hair piled wildly atop her head, with garish flowers adorning her hair and neck. “I have given way to morbid superstition that I am the cause of others’ nervous collapse, my husband, my daughter,” Perkins confessed. “[It] frightens and oppresses me.”37 Susanna was never really able to work and was supported by Frances. Even at age seventy-seven, Frances turned over her rent-controlled apartment in New York so that Susanna would have a place to live. She had to take a job to pay her daughter’s bills. Every virtue can come with its own accompanying vice. The virtue of reticence can yield the vice of aloofness. Perkins was not emotionally vulnerable to those close to her. Her public vocation never completely compensated for her private solitude.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman
Published 14 Feb 2012

I call these types of changes “scale transitions,” unexpected outcomes resulting from increases in scale. For example, increases in the number of people interacting in a system can produce unforeseen outcomes: The operation of markets at large scales is often counterintuitive. Think of the restrictive effect that rent-control laws can have on the supply of affordable rental housing, or how minimum-wage laws can reduce the availability of low-wage jobs. (James Flynn gives “markets” as an example of a “shorthand abstraction”; here I am interested in the often counterintuitive operation of a market system at large scale.)

Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values
by Sharon Beder
Published 30 Sep 2006

Monetarism appealed to free market ideologues because it reduced the role of government in the economy. Similarly, it aided the argument against government spending and social programmes, which free market advocates railed against. Friedman was against all government interventions in the market including tariffs, rent controls, minimum wages, regulation, social security, public housing, national parks, and government provision of infrastructure and services such as post offices and roads. Monetarism was also attractive to free market advocates because it explained the Great Depression in terms of government failure rather than market failure – that is, the failure of the Federal Reserve to manage money supply properly, rather than declining demand, overproduction and income inequality in the market.22 The pursuit of monetarism also had a marked political agenda.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
by Martin Ford
Published 4 May 2015

Imagine giving every resident of a city like New York, San Francisco, or London an extra thousand dollars per month. There are probably good reasons to expect that a very large fraction of that increase—perhaps nearly all of it—would eventually end up in the pockets of landlords as residents compete for scarce housing. There are no easy solutions to this problem. Rent control is one possibility, but it comes with lots of documented downsides. Many economists have called for relaxing zoning restrictions so that denser housing can be built, but this is sure to be opposed by existing residents. There is a counteracting force, however. A guaranteed income, unlike a job, would be mobile.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

‘We’re stuck with this obsession about being a property-owning democracy,’ says Lynsey Hanley regretfully, ‘this notion that full citizenship only goes with owning property, even to the extent that you couldn’t vote once if you didn’t own property. So now for the first time in fifty years, there are more and more people at the mercy of private landlords, without rent controls by and large, than in social housing. The government subsidises these landlords and the banks make it easier to get buy-for-rent mortgages. OK, both the Labour and Tory 2017 election manifestos promised that large numbers of council housing must and would be built. But they still said the priority is to build affordable housing to buy.

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions
by Jason Hickel
Published 3 May 2017

This new system relied on a class compromise between capital and labour: the state would guarantee strong rights and good wages in exchange for a docile, productive workforce that would have sufficient money to consume mass-produced goods, thereby keeping the economy stable and growing.7 As part of the New Deal, the United States also implemented a universal Social Security programme, provided affordable housing and, with the GI Bill, handed out large university tuition subsidies for veterans. In Britain, a growing union movement – propelled largely by coal miners – brought to power Clement Atlee’s Labour Party, which rolled out the National Health Service, free education, public housing, rent controls and a comprehensive social security system, as well as nationalising the mines and the railways. Many politicians on the right were willing to go along with it, hoping that granting the working class a fairer deal would stave off the social discontent they feared might spark a Soviet-style revolution.

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol
by Holly Glenn Whitaker
Published 9 Jan 2020

The attempts to fix me only added more chaos, the chaos added more pain, and so I added more wine. And pot. And cigarettes. And food. And clothes. I was a monster who couldn’t stop consuming things I thought would make me the human I was supposed to be. Until one morning, just three months after my trip to Costa Rica, it all broke. Or rather, I broke. I woke up in my rent-controlled San Francisco apartment to the aftermath of one of my binges, one of my failed attempts at escape. My bed had no sheets. My mattress was stained with food and wine and puke. My computer was still on, so was the TV, and bags of trash and half-eaten food cartons and empty beer bottles were strewn about my apartment.

Austerity Britain: 1945-51
by David Kynaston
Published 12 May 2008

There were two principal reasons why the private landlord was, in some cities anyway, in almost headlong retreat. Firstly, a welter of rent-control legislation, going back to 1915 and involving a freezing of rent levels from 1939, was indeed a significant deterrent. ‘Before the war, people were willing to pay between one-quarter and one-sixth of their income on rent,’ noted the Economist’s Elizabeth Layton in 1951. ‘Now they are not so prepared because they have become accustomed to living cheaply in rent-controlled houses and do not appreciate that, while incomes have increased, rents have lagged behind what is required to keep old property in repair or to cover the annual outgoings of new houses.’

The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square
by James Traub
Published 1 Jan 2004

He was a kind of homespun philosopher who kept his pockets stuffed with folded-up papers upon which he had scribbled his thoughts on the great issues of the day, and which he would withdraw with a flourish as the conversation turned to the relevant topic. He sent an endless stream of letters to The New York Times, often on the subject of rent control, which he considered the root of all housing evils. Seymour often purchased tiny advertisements at the bottom of the front page—“bottom lines,” the family called them—in order to ensure that his views got the airing they deserved. Seymour could be extraordinarily creative in finding venues in which to ride his various hobbyhorses: in 1989 he mounted what he called the Debt Clock, on a building he owned just east of Times Square, in order to tick off the growing federal debt.

Arrival City
by Doug Saunders
Published 22 Mar 2011

Subhashini was the child of a veteran arrival-city family, a gregarious woman of singular self-confidence, and she made it a well-organized project, from her marriage at 18, to get her family out of the slum. His annual salary of $6,600 was not going to be enough to do it. The Parabs encountered two problems that are endemic across the world of arrival cities: an illiberal property market rigidly reined in by zoning and rent-control regulations and ownership restrictions, and an underdeveloped credit market that makes proper mortgage loans available only to the very highest-income groups. One set of restrictions discouraged anyone from building or selling homes affordable to the lower middle class (or to almost anyone, as millions of Mumbai home buyers have discovered); the other made it impossible for the Parabs to get a home loan of any sort, even with a sizable down payment.

Roads to Berlin
by Cees Nooteboom and Laura Watkinson
Published 2 Jan 1990

It is dark, the tall buildings have shed their irrepressible ugliness and are casting a circle of light around us. He speaks about the mistakes that have been made, the renewal of the party, which is far from complete, about what, in spite of everything, has been achieved over the past forty years, about the reparations that the East has been obliged to pay, but the West has not, about property and rent control, about the certainties that will disappear. I look at the faces around me. They are listening, all seriousness. He does not shout, barely argues, employs no demagogic tactics, neither does he suggest how the problems might be solved. Here is someone who is talking against the flow of history, but that does not mean that he represents nothing.

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America
by Jon C. Teaford
Published 1 Jan 2006

It was, then, a far cry from the stereotypical family-oriented, home-owning suburb, but in 1984 it chose to join the ranks of suburban municipalities, becoming the eighty-fourth city in Los Angeles County. Rebelling against existing rule by Los Angeles County authorities, the renter population, both homosexual and heterosexual, was especially dissatisfied with the weak protection afforded by the county’s rent control ordinance. Moreover, that modest safeguard against rent inflation was due to expire the following year, leaving West Hollywood tenants vulnerable to escalating housing costs. Yet many West Hollywood residents also viewed incorporation as a welcome means to gay empowerment (figures 5.3 and 5.4).

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory
by Kariappa Bheemaiah
Published 26 Feb 2017

While initially we were looking at technology from the vantage point of markets, regulations, and policy—the pillars of capitalism—looking at the minutiae of a single strand of technology brings us to same conclusion. Technology’s impact on jobs is the big yellow elephant in the room. Moreover, as technology continues to grow and evolve, it provides benefits to a few (who extort rent controls from it) and eliminates labor in the process. The charts in Figure 3-5 are from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. They help us see this paradigmatic shift in process. Notice the way employment and profits have taken distinctly opposing trajectories since the crisis. Figure 3-5. Comparative charts of employment and corporate profit over the last 10 years This trend is to be expected.

Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street
by Sheelah Kolhatkar
Published 7 Feb 2017

Some of Patricia’s friends couldn’t understand what she was doing with Cohen, who seemed so unsophisticated, a money-obsessed schlub from Long Island. But Patricia had grown up without money, and she hadn’t finished high school. She knew what it was like to worry about paying for all her expenses. She was supporting herself working for a publishing company and had a rent-controlled apartment in the West Village. She wasn’t unhappy, but there was no denying that Cohen’s drive for riches was attractive. She didn’t have a clue about the stock market, but he talked about it endlessly, boasting about how much money he planned to make. He said that he would take care of her. Cohen, for his part, had little else going on in his life.

Together
by Vivek H. Murthy, M.D.
Published 5 Mar 2020

It expands those interests to include our whole community and thus increases our motivation to work together. By the same token, the absence of connection that accompanies loneliness makes us less likely to participate in civic engagement. We tend to ignore or shrug off problems that don’t affect anyone we know. Why help clean up a park in a stranger’s neighborhood? Why pay attention to rent control issues if we know no one who rents? Why even bother voting if we don’t know anyone who might be affected by the ballot choices? This is why the kind of microdemocracy that de Tocqueville described matters so much: because it gives everyone a shared stake in the future. What Matthew and Derek and their college friends established was indeed a microdemocracy.

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia
by Adrian Shirk
Published 15 Mar 2022

In an interview for the PBS series Makers, Brooks says, “When funders would come in, and they said ‘How are you going to do this? Everything around here’s abandoned,’ I’d say, ‘We’re going to do it house by house, block by block, building by building.’” The MBD helped allocate city funds to restore apartment buildings, secure rent subsidies and rent-controlled leases, buy up abandoned parks for one dollar a pop, on and on. But their flagship project—the most visible in part because it was the most surreal—was Charlotte Gardens. In 1983, MBD presented a plan to build eighty-nine freestanding, single-family houses along the decimated corridor of Charlotte Street.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems
by Linda Yueh
Published 4 Jun 2018

Capitalism and Freedom was largely collated from his Volker Lectures given between 1956 and 1961, organized by the William Volker Fund to promote libertarian views, and was strongly influenced by John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. The book argued for a limited role for government in a free society with more to be done by the market. He highlighted a number of unjustified activities of government. The list included unnecessary intervention in markets. Friedman opposed price support for agriculture, tariffs, rent control, minimum wages, maximum ceiling prices and fixed exchange rates. He also opposed direct government involvement in the economy, highlighting the detailed regulation of industry, the control of radio and television, toll roads, public housing and national parks, and the legal prohibition of carrying mail for profit as examples of taking government too far.

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The
by Mariana Mazzucato
Published 25 Apr 2018

Since real estate adds value and income (rent) from the actual rent charged (as opposed to the ‘imputed rent' calculated), the first country would have an unfairly high GDP compared to the other, at least in terms of the percentage of GDP deriving from property. From a different perspective - one that sees no greater value in renting over owning a house, especially when there is no rent control - we could equally well ask why real-estate rents should add value in the first place. Another valid question is why a hike in rent should increase the value produced by real-estate agencies, especially if the quality of the rental service is not improving. London and New York City tenants, for example, know only too well that property management services do not improve even though rents rise - in London's case, rapidly in recent years.32 It's also worth noting that the national accounts treat property and real estate (both residential and commercial) as comparable to a firm.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today
by Linda Yueh
Published 15 Mar 2018

Capitalism and Freedom was largely collated from his Volker Lectures given between 1956 and 1961, organized by the William Volker Fund to promote libertarian views, and was strongly influenced by John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. The book argued for a limited role for government in a free society with more to be done by the market. He highlighted a number of unjustified activities of government. The list included unnecessary intervention in markets. Friedman opposed price support for agriculture, tariffs, rent control, minimum wages, maximum ceiling prices and fixed exchange rates. He also opposed direct government involvement in the economy, highlighting the detailed regulation of industry, the control of radio and television, toll roads, public housing and national parks, and the legal prohibition of carrying mail for profit as examples of taking government too far.

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
by Matthew Ball
Published 18 Jul 2022

Epic can still change its license for subsequent builds and updates, such as 4.13 and especially 5.0 or 6.0—and giving away such a right would be financially impractical and probably harmful to developers as a result. But the result of this policy is that developers need not worry that by choosing to use Unreal, they’re forever reliant upon the whims, desires, and leadership of Epic (after all, there’s no rent control board in the Metaverse, nor appeals court). And as Unreal’s license allows developers nearly free rein on customizations and third-party integrations, developers can choose not to use future updates and instead build their own in lieu of whatever Epic adds in 4.13, 4.14, 5.0, and beyond. In 2021, Epic made another important modification to its Unreal license: it gave up the right to terminate that license, even in the instance where a developer had failed to make an outstanding payment or violated the agreement outright.

Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone
by Juli Berwald
Published 14 May 2017

But if there’s anything that crowdsourcing and social media have taught us, it’s that having eyes looking, ears listening, and brains thinking in many places and in various directions can be even more effective and elegant than a single authority. The collective wields great power. — In my final year of grad school, I snagged a lease on a rent-controlled studio apartment in a desirable zip code near the beach. It was still about two streets away from respectability, but it was much better housing than I’d had during my previous seven years in L.A. The walls were freshly painted, and the floor had new carpet. The kitchen and bathroom fixtures were cheap but clean.

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
by Henry Grabar
Published 8 May 2023

New York City had the good fortune to hold on to many of its older buildings—buildings like the one I grew up in, which was supposed to be demolished for an expressway—and wound up sowing the seeds of downtown’s revival instead. There is always a price gap between free street parking and conventionally priced real estate, but nowhere is the contrast sharper than in Manhattan. On Grove Street, my mom grew up in a rent-controlled apartment building that was, in 2011, converted into a massive single-family home and sold for $11 million. But the 170 square feet in front of the building cost just what they did when she was a kid there in the 1960s: nothing. Land in Manhattan was the most valuable in the world, but it was free if you wanted to use it for just one thing: storing your car on the street.

The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution
by Marc Weingarten
Published 12 Dec 2006

Manhattan’s inhabitants were obstinately proud to call themselves New Yorkers, but they were also urban survivalists; their self-preservation skills were a crucial test of their commitment to enduring the best city on the planet. New York would be a how-to guide for this white, upwardly mobile demographic segment. A subscription solicitation that ran in the magazine in early 1969 trumpeted New York’s attributes. “We’ll show you how to get a rent-controlled, semi-professional apartment, even though you’re not a semi-professional person,” the copy read. “We’ll tell you how to go about getting your kid into private school with confidence, even though you graduated from P.S. 165.” Previous issues had addressed status (the December 9, 1968, cover featured a white-collar beggar in a Burberry coat holding a tin cup and a sign that read I MAKE $80,000 A YEAR AND I’M BROKE), but now Felker would push it harder.

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People?
by John Kay
Published 2 Sep 2015

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two parastatal agencies that dominated US housing finance, collapsed. The share of owner-occupation in the housing stock declined for the first time in a century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, most households – not just low-income households – rented their homes. But landlords have always been unpopular. A history of rent control, and legislation that limited the rights and extended the obligations of landlords, reduced the economic and political attractions of investment in housing, while tax advantages made owner-occupation an attractive means of saving. And owners tend to be better occupiers. By the end of the twentieth century owner-occupation had become the norm.

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
by Peter Singer and Jim Mason
Published 1 May 2006

So when, in the early 1990s, a New York animal activist named Henry Spira decided to try to pressure McDonald's into developing less inhumane ways of raising the animals, he knew it wasn't going to be easy. Spira was essentially a oneman-band, running an organization called Animal Rights International that had no paid staff and no office except the modest, rent-controlled New York apartment in which Spira lived. But Spira knew what it was like to take on the big boys. He had been involved in the civil rights movements in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. As a sailor in the merchant marines, he had been part of a reform group battling a corrupt union boss who was not averse to hiring thugs to beat up his opponents.

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
by Charles Montgomery
Published 12 Nov 2013

The Woodward’s block’s street edges may be disappointingly bare, but inside that block is a grand public atrium through which the entire spectrum of neighbors pass and occasionally mingle, while students take shots at the basketball hoop at its heart. Woodward’s has proved so convivial that it has accelerated gentrification in the area, but it has done so while locking two hundred affordable homes in place. It’s not enough to nudge the market toward equity. Governments must step in with subsidized social housing, rent controls, initiatives for housing cooperatives, or other policy measures. I don’t want to stray beyond the scope of this book—which is about design rather than social policy—but I must acknowledge that such mixing rarely happens if governments don’t step in to smooth the way. What’s clear is that fairness demands that cities stop concentrating subsidized housing in poor zones so all residents and their children can enjoy equal access to decent schools and services.

Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David
by Lawrence Wright
Published 15 Sep 2014

Despite her chronic asthma she smoked incessantly, and frequently resorted to the inhaler in her purse. If Carter had been hoping that Aliza would moderate her husband’s views, he miscalculated. She was known by the Israeli delegation to be a staunch ideologue. For three decades before Begin became prime minister the couple lived in a rent-controlled, three-room ground-floor flat in north Tel Aviv, on an income of about five hundred dollars a month. While they were raising their three children, the couple slept on a fold-out couch in the living room. Unlike the wives of previous prime ministers, who sometimes sought power for themselves, Aliza strained to keep out of the public eye.

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market
by Nicholas Wapshott
Published 2 Aug 2021

Keynesianism was dismissed as logically flawed, in that new money pumped into an economy through government spending on borrowed money provided a false and temporary sense of prosperity that undermined true progress. As one liberal commentator observed, “Whatever government did, he wanted to undo: farm parities, tariffs, rent control, minimum wages, industry regulation, social security, public housing, conscription, national parks, the post office, public roads, and the licensing of the professions.”18 In assessing the faults in existing government policies, the strong strain of contrarianism in Friedman’s character came to the fore.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
by Edward L. Glaeser
Published 1 Jan 2011

Houston’s freewheeling growth machine has actually done a better job of providing affordable housing than all of the progressive reformers on America’s East and West coasts. In the early 1920s, New York was also a builders’ paradise, and as a result, housing stayed affordable. In the postwar years, New York increasingly restricted development and tried to make up for the lack of private supply with rent control and public housing. This strategy failed miserably, as it has throughout Europe. The only way to provide cheap housing on a mass scale is to unleash the developers. Levittown, The Woodlands, and hundreds of other large developments can be built so cheaply because they are built on a large scale.

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature
by Matt Ridley
Published 14 Aug 1993

In a good year for mice, a male can catch so many mice that he can simultaneously give two females the impression that he is a fine male; he can provide each with more mice than he could catch for one in a normal year.36 Nordic forests seem to be full of deceitful adulterers, for a similar habit by a deceptively innocent-looking little bird led to a long-running dispute in the scientific literature of the 1980s. Some male pied flycatchers, in the forests of Scandinavia, manage to be polygamous by holding two territories, each with a female in it, like the owls or like Sherman McCoy in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, who keeps an expensive wife on Park Avenue and a beautiful mistress in a rent-controlled apartment across town. Two teams of researchers have studied the birds and come to different conclusions about what is going on. The Finns and Swedes say that the mistress is deceived into believing that the male is unmarried. The Norwegians say that, since the wife sometimes visits the mistress’s nest and may try to drive her away, the mistress can be under no illusions.

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities
by John Cassidy
Published 10 Nov 2009

There he stayed for thirty years, enthusiastically combining the roles of academic researcher and policy advocate. As early as 1946, Friedman and George Stigler, another noted critic of government interventionism who for many years taught at Chicago, published a pamphlet in which they argued that rent controls, rather than shortage of building space or greedy landlords, were responsible for the lack of affordable apartments in New York. The article shared two attributes with many of Friedman’s subsequent publications. It took a simple economic concept—the law of supply and demand—and applied it to a practical problem; and it proved popular with business interests.

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 14 Jul 2001

Grady and Jay I. Alexander, “Patent Law and Rent Dissipation,” Virginia Law Review 78 (1992): 305 (arguing that patents reduce rent dissipation from races to initial invention, races to improvements, and wasteful efforts to keep secrets). For a critique of Grady and Alexander, see Robert P. Merges, “Rent Control in the Patent District: Observations on the Grady-Alexander Thesis,” Virginia Law Review 78 (1992): 359. 92 As Professor Julie Cohen describes it: Kitch based his “prospect” theory on an analogy to nineteenth-century mining claims, which reserved for first-comers all rights to explore the described terrain.

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives
by Danny Dorling and Kirsten McClure
Published 18 May 2020

Your attempts to hire “the brightest and the best” are beginning to fall short. Few young adults with much self-respect still worship the god of Profit or believe in his little sister, the goddess Trickle Down. The states where your personal rental properties are located are threatening to bring in rent controls, and President Trump had changed the tax code back in 2019 so that you can no longer offset all those higher taxes being paid in New York against your federal tax liabilities. You contemplate moving to Florida—but life is too short and the risk of skin cancer too high. You look at the timeline, the one you had so successfully and with such excitement followed just over a quarter of a century ago, back on Christmas Eve 1996.

A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
by Rebecca Solnit
Published 31 Aug 2010

Most camped outside their former homes, concerned that if they left the area they would lose their right to return—and the PRI proposed moving many displaced people far away, as they had feared. The earthquake could have become a pretext for a large-scale displacement of the poor and for gentrification. Many poor Mexicans had long benefited from rent-control measures that reduced their monthly payments to figures so low that some landlords didn’t bother to collect and had little incentive to make repairs. By October 24, the citywide housing-rights movement had a name, the Unified Coordinating Committee of Earthquake Refugees (Coordinadora Única de Damnificados).

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas
by Janek Wasserman
Published 23 Sep 2019

Although he continued to take part in the MPS, Mises felt he was liberalism’s only defender.32 Mises’s perceived isolation in the United States exacerbated his anger and despondency. As much as he wanted to return to academe and establish a new circle of followers, he struggled to make scholarly connections or find gainful employment. Despite ample savings and an affordable rent-controlled apartment, his first years in Manhattan were trying. Unlike his younger Austrian colleagues or his contemporary Joseph Schumpeter, Mises did not receive a permanent academic appointment, nor did he garner academic attention for his polemical writing. Eventually he received a series of one-year fellowships from the RF to work for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
by Alec MacGillis
Published 16 Mar 2021

venture capital was flowing to just three states: Justin Fox, “Venture Capital Keeps Flowing to the Same Places,” Bloomberg Opinion, January 8, 2019. “A handful of metro areas have seen”: Manduca, “Antitrust Enforcement,” 156. one-bedroom apartments renting for $3,600: “Democrats Clamor Again for Rent Control,” The Economist, September 9, 2019. Moody’s issued a warning: E. J. Dionne, “The Hidden Costs of the GOP’s Deficit Two-Step,” The Washington Post, October 21, 2018. upper-income households living in wealthy neighborhoods: Carol Morello, “Study: Rich, Poor Americans Increasingly Likely to Live in Separate Neighborhoods,” The Washington Post, August 1, 2012.

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

Strict land-use restrictions and building regulations have made it increasingly difficult to build anywhere people might want to live. And once a permit is given, it can be appealed by local residents whose primary motivation is often to protect the view from their windows and the value of their homes. The rate of housing construction in the rich world is half of what it was in the 1960s. And rent control – supposedly to benefit renters – incentivizes renters to hold on to their contracts, and so also reduces mobility and the incentive to build more rental apartments. One study showed that a doubling of a US state’s homeownership rate is followed in the long run by a doubling of the unemployment rate.11 So many are left in places with little opportunity, and can only watch dynamic, urban areas with growing opportunities from a distance.

The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline
by Russell Jones
Published 15 Jan 2023

Moreover – and this was forgotten two years later – this was the response officially recommended by the IMF at the time, even if the UK was one of the few nations to actually put the advice into practice.9 Others preferred to instead focus more intently on addressing the inflationary implications of the oil price shock. Healey’s first budget was broadly neutral. However, he sought to massage the headline inflation rate lower through a combination of price and rent controls; food subsidies; increased financial support to the increasingly inefficient, if not loss-making, nationalized industries; and a reduction in value-added tax (VAT). He also raised the top income tax rate to an eye-watering 83% and imposed a 15% surcharge on ‘unearned income’. Together these measures amounted to a marginal tax rate of 98% for a small proportion of the population.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

The last thing he wanted was to reconstruct the rigid model of centralized planning that was creating so many problems in the USSR. Instead, he sought to pave his own “Chilean path to socialism,” involving a thorough democratization of the economy.2 As soon as he was elected, Allende announced plans to build tens of thousands of new homes, introduce rent controls, improve and expand the pension system, introduce free and universal medical care, provide new mothers and young children with free milk and free school meals, and greatly expand the social security net.3 Public works programs were introduced to create employment and boost wages. Allende also cut top salaries, clamped down on government corruption, and substantially reduced taxes for low- and middle-income Chileans.

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000
by John Steele Gordon
Published 12 Oct 2009

In a free market it is prices that signal, in their uncountable millions, where resources should be allocated and where opportunity lies, what is becoming scarce and what plentiful, allowing people to adjust their economic behavior accordingly. When prices are fixed, however, shortages and surpluses inevitably and quickly develop. That is why there is a permanent shortage of housing wherever there is rent control. Price controls also transfer power from free markets—in other words, the people—to politicians. Politicians, of course, are always tempted to use this power to benefit favored groups, while the disfavored continue to pursue their self-interests through black markets. Price controls were first tried on a grand scale by Diocletian, who became emperor of Rome in the late third century.

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth
by Robin Hanson
Published 31 Mar 2016

Scholars in economics, finance, business, and law have long identified many simple changes to business and social practices that seem to improve efficiency, but that are rarely adopted, and that tend to generate little interest when explained to potential adoptees. For example, economists tend to consistently recommend charging non-zero prices for scarce resources like parking and road use, and recommend weakening import tariffs, immigration restrictions, rent control, mortgage subsidies, taxes on products where both supply and demand are elastic, and penalties for victimless crimes such as drug use or prostitution. While clever scholars can often invent auxiliary hypotheses to explain why these polices are useful, contrary to appearance, it is far from obvious that such hypotheses are the real reasons for disinterest in these policies.

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
by Quinn Slobodian
Published 16 Mar 2018

A remedy, he suggested, would have been “some form of federal constitution which would have averted the threatened disintegration.”88 In 1938 Mises set to work drafting just such a federal constitution, and in 1940 he began to work on it in earnest. He hoped that his proposal would ­counter what he saw as the institutional failure of the world ­after Versailles, St. Germain, and Trianon. He wrote from his new home in New York City, a rent-­controlled apartment at 96th street and West End Ave­nue on the Upper West Side where he would spend the rest of his life.89 The focus of his work was on East Central Eu­rope. Seeing “anarchy” in the wake of the dissolution of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, he proposed a new Eastern Demo­cratic Union (EDU) that would span an enormous swath of territory, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, Aegean, and Black Seas, from the eastern borders of Switzerland and Italy to the western borders of Rus­sia.

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth
by Selina Todd
Published 11 Feb 2021

‘I saw poverty all around me while people worked long hours, often in physically demanding and filthy jobs.’8 Lyn O’Reilly’s father, a casual worker hired by the day, did not enjoy the benefits of secure employment and overtime that some factory workers had – ‘if my dad didn’t have work then we’d be hungry’.9 And many families better off than the O’Reilly’s endured housing poverty in the 1950s. Although the Conservatives built more council accommodation in the 1950s, they relied heavily on the private sector to solve the housing crisis. Their refusal to implement rent controls helped a few slum landlords – most famously London’s Peter Rachman – to make their fortune, but left thousands of families languishing in overcrowded, dilapidated rented housing. Don Milligan, his parents and his older brother ‘lived in three rooms … it wasn’t a flat; there were three separate rooms in a tenement house … no bath’.

Bleeding Edge: A Novel
by Thomas Pynchon
Published 16 Sep 2013

“Actually, Grandma, Grandpa, all due respect,” it occurs to Otis now, “it’s Aretha Franklin, the time she filled in for Pavarotti at the Grammys back in ’98.” “‘Back in ’98.’ Long, long ago. Come here, you little bargain,” Elaine reaching to pinch his cheek, which he manages to slide away from. Ernie and Elaine live in a rent-controlled prewar classic seven with ceilings comparable in height to a domed sports arena. Needless to say within easy walking distance of the Met. Elaine waves a wand, and coffee and pastries materialize. “Not enough!” Each kid holding a plate piled unhealthily high with danishes, cheesecake, strudel.

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune
by Alexander Stille
Published 19 Jun 2023

The apartments are vast, with high ceilings, elaborate architectural details, six or seven generously sized rooms, formal dining rooms, and, of course, a maid’s room. The surrounding neighborhood was very mixed—drug and crime blocks alternating with handsome prewar apartment buildings that, because of white flight and rent control, had become ridiculously cheap, inhabited by less affluent folks like members of the Sullivanian training program. One of the women living in this apartment was Deedee Agee’s younger sister, Andrea, a young training analyst. Cohen’s new Sullivanian friends welcomed him into their lives and their beds and helped him find a permanent place to live in another Sullivan apartment with a group of men.

God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican
by Gerald Posner
Published 3 Feb 2015

Other proposals that got serious consideration included selling some of the IOR gold Nogara had accumulated or streamlining the Curia’s lay employees (when the Vatican did sell some of its gold four years later, its timing was bad since bullion prices had dropped almost 40 percent).133 There was also a debate about renting some of the nearly 2,000 church-owned apartments in prime Roman neighborhoods at market rates instead of subsidizing rents of lay workers and clerics. Italy’s rent control law—widely ignored by ordinary Italians—prohibited such a move by the church. So that idea was shelved.134 Beyond the question of how to best cut the deficit, Philadelphia’s Cardinal Krol was the first to suggest it was time to retain an internationally recognized accounting firm to perform an annual audit of all the church’s finances.135,VIII Not everyone was impressed by the Pope’s reforms.

…

Desmond O’Grady, “Vatican Plan for Tax on Catholics,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 28, 1987, 10. One cardinal, Joseph Höffner, sent chills through most Catholics when he suggested a worldwide tax on the faithful. 132 Tully and Dorion, “The Vatican’s Finances.” 133 Lai, Finanze vaticane, 84–85. 134 “We’re probably the only organization in Italy that takes rent control seriously,” one unnamed prelate moaned to Fortune. Tully and Dorion, “The Vatican’s Finances.” 135 Besides Krol, the commission included New York Cardinal John O’Connor. “The Pope Creates Vatican Bank Panel,” Lexis Nexis, Herald, Business Section, June 29, 1988, 21. See also Tully and Dorion, “The Vatican’s Finances.” 136 Shawn Tully and Marta F.

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century
by Christian Caryl
Published 30 Oct 2012

Attlee himself had worked in the slums of East London as a young man, and the experience had left him with a profound sense of the need for wide-ranging social protections. It took the Labour government just a few short years to implement a raft of social welfare policies that transformed British society. The Labourites established child subsidies, expanded a range of social insurance programs, built vast new tracts of public housing, imposed far-reaching rent controls, and launched a comprehensive program of state-run, single-payer health care (the National Health Service). It all proved enormously popular. Labour’s economic policies were even more far-reaching. “It is doubtful whether we have ever, except in war, used the whole of our productive capacity,” the Labour election manifesto proclaimed.

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire
by Neil Irwin
Published 4 Apr 2013

A waiter interviewed by Ernest Hemingway said that a year earlier he had saved up enough money to buy a tavern; by that time, in 1923, “that money wouldn’t buy four bottles of champagne.” A British social worker in 1922 wrote that “in well-furnished houses there are chairs devoid of leather which has been used for shoes, curtains without linings which have been turned into garments for the children. This sort of thing is not the exception but the rule.” Strict rent-control laws meant that rents couldn’t keep up with soaring prices, so by the third quarter of 1923 the typical German household paid only 0.2 percent of its income for housing; landlords were essentially bankrupted. But whatever workers saved on rent, they spent on food as farmers hoarded harvests and drove prices up further still—92 percent of their income, up from 30 percent before the war.

The Origins of the Urban Crisis
by Sugrue, Thomas J.

“Bootleg landlords” illegally divided single-family homes into apartments, and charged high rents. “Out around Chrysler,” recalled a black wartime worker, “they used to rent the houses by shift, rent the rooms by shift.” By breaking up buildings into several small “housekeeping rooms,” landlords met the rising demand for space, evaded rent control laws, and doubled or tripled their rental income. Others converted formerly all-white apartment buildings into housing for blacks, often dividing rooms, cutting services, and increasing rents.73 The economic boom of the 1940s and early 1950s lost its luster for families who were forced to spend a large portion of their income on inadequate housing.

Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art
by Michael Shnayerson
Published 20 May 2019

The biggest winners were not the mega dealers: they bought big parcels of property at market value for their big new gallery spaces. It was the occasional smaller dealer, like Lisa Spellman, who just came up lucky, as if blessed by the gods for championing artists she loved. One reason Spellman had survived as a dealer since 1979 was that she had found a rent-controlled loft downtown. In 2007, she heard about a Chelsea property that might be even more advantageous. The property was a 5,000-square-foot, one-story garage with air rights on West 21st Street, literally on the corner of the West Side highway by the Hudson River. The deal hinged on architect Jean Nouvel, who had just designed a soaring new condominium building at 19th Street and Eleventh Avenue.

The autobiography of Malcolm X
by Malcolm X; Alex Haley
Published 15 Aug 1999

I went to one of these-thirty or forty Negroes sweating, eating, drinking, dancing, and gamblingin a jammed, beat-up apartment, the record player going full blast, the fried chicken or chitlins with potato salad and collard greens for a dollar a plate, and cans of beer or shots of liquor for fifty cents. Negro and white canvassers sidled up alongside you, talking fast as they tried to get you to buy a copy of the _Daily Worker_: “This paper's trying to keep your rent controlled . . . Make that greedy landlord kill them rats in your apartment . . . This paper represents the only political party that ever ran a black man for the Vice Presidency of the United States . . . Just want you to read, won't take but a little of your time . . . Who do you think fought the hardest to help free those Scottsboro boys?”

Wealth, Poverty and Politics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 31 Aug 2015

When Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times sweepingly condemned those who opposed minimum wage laws, while showing no interest in, or even awareness of, empirical evidence on the actual consequences of such laws— on which there is voluminous evidence— he was following a quite familiar pattern among crusaders for third-party interventions. Although rent control laws were passed in San Francisco in 1979, it was 2001 before local authorities produced an empirical study of its actual consequences.17 Although affirmative action in college admissions began in the 1960s, efforts of independent researchers to gain access to raw data with which to test the educational consequences have been impeded for decades.18 FACING THE FACTS— AND THE FUTURE In dealing with the social and economic problems involving wealth, poverty and politics, specific policy prescriptions are not necessarily the most urgent need.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk
by Satyajit Das
Published 14 Oct 2011

In a series of popular books, including Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose (based on a TV series of the same name), he argued that governments could only provide a framework of enforceable contracts, secure property rights, fair competition, stable money, and limited protection for the “irresponsible.” In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman listed activities that the American government should not undertake, including farming subsidies, tariffs and trade quotas, minimum wages, rent control, national parks, postal services, and the regulation of various industries, especially banking. The intellectual struggle between Keynes and Friedman shaped the age of extreme money. Economic Politics After the Great Depression, Keynesian demand management required economists to adjust taxation and government spending to engineer desired growth levels.

The Making of Modern Britain
by Andrew Marr
Published 16 May 2007

A comparatively old man of sixty-eight by the time he finally became prime minister, he had spent the second half of his life in national politics, working hideously long hours and feeling himself the real worker who underpinned the lazy habits of prime ministers. He was not, properly, a Tory but an old-style Liberal whose reform measures on rent control, housing and unemployment assistance partly mitigated his iron-hard economic views. He knew he was right. So when he reached Number Ten, as neither his father nor his half-brother Austen had managed, he preened: ‘It has come to me without my raising a finger . . . because there is no-one else.’

Frommer's Egypt
by Matthew Carrington
Published 8 Sep 2008

It may be a little hopeful to call it “Paris on the Nile,” but it’s stuffed with grand old buildings, many of them built by turn-of-the-century Italian stonemasons who came to Egypt masquerading as architects. Very few of the buildings have seen any maintenance since Gamal Abdel Nasser’s time (partly because of some ill-advised rent-control measures that keep rents today at 1960s levels), and many are now being deliberately destroyed to make way for the kind of shoddy buildings that have blighted much of the rest of the city. Islamic Cairo Misleadingly named (it doesn’t seem to be any more Islamic than any other part of the city), this is the oldest part of the city, built originally in A.D. 969 as a walled, secure environment for the leaders of the Fatimid dynasty.

Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson
Published 11 Sep 2023

Tosca got a job at a hamburger joint, Elon as an intern in Microsoft’s Toronto office, and Maye at the university, a modeling agency, and as a diet consultant. “I worked every day and also four nights a week,” she says. “I took off one afternoon, Sunday, to do the laundry and get groceries. I didn’t even know what my kids were doing, because I was hardly at home.” After a few months, they were making enough money to afford a rent-controlled three-bedroom apartment. It had felt wallpaper, which Maye insisted that Elon rip down, and a horrid carpet. They were going to buy a $200 replacement carpet, but Tosca insisted on a thicker one for $300 because Kimbal and their cousin Peter were coming over to join them and would sleep on the floor.

Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age
by Lizabeth Cohen
Published 30 Sep 2019

The ultimate blow was the construction of Robert Moses’s Cross Bronx Expressway—the first American highway built in a crowded urban environment. It slashed through viable Bronx neighborhoods, displacing sixty thousand residents and depressing the value of the remaining homes nearby.13 As property values plummeted and, landlords claimed, rent control constrained their profits, building owners often found insurance payments more lucrative than rents, leading to an epidemic of arson. The journalist Bill Moyers laid out the brutal truth: you could buy a large occupied apartment house in the Bronx for less than $1,000, take advantage of the city’s three-year tax moratorium while collecting several thousand dollars a month in rents, provide minimal heat and services, and when enough tenants gave up in disgust, you could buy a first-class arson job for $200 and collect on the federally subsidized fire insurance to walk away with $70,000 to $80,000.14 In the 1970s, the Bronx averaged twelve thousand arson fires a year, over thirty a day, making the local New York Fire Department Engine Company No. 82 the busiest by far in the city.

Cuba: An American History
by Ada Ferrer
Published 6 Sep 2021

In 1937, he released a “Three Year Plan” that included health and old-age insurance, the abolition of large landed estates, profit sharing between sugar workers and mill owners, new schools, crop diversification, and a literacy campaign. Batista’s Three Year Plan was so ambitious that skeptics dubbed it the three-hundred-year plan. In April 1938, he began granting small parcels of state lands to peasants. In 1939, he enacted national rent control and lowered mortgage rates. Increasingly popular, Batista moved to expand his base further, legalizing the Communist Party and removing restrictions on union organizing. Henceforth, trade union leadership would be dominated by members of the Cuban Communist Party, working closely with Batista.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made
by Anne C. Heller
Published 27 Oct 2009

One evening, Rand visited and announced that when Ventura’s statue was finished she would like to buy a copy; two other visitors chimed in that they wanted to buy copies, too. This was a momentous endorsement, and word of it spread quickly. “From then on,” Ventura recalled, “I began to receive telephone calls and letters from people who wanted to see my work. Overnight, I became ‘the Objectivist sculptor.’” He decided to look for a studio of his own. He found a rent-controlled unit in a nearby building, but lacking the required proof of income from his art, he solicited official orders from a few friends. Then he flew too close to the sun. He wrote to Rand, explaining his predicament and asking for a small deposit on Icarus Fallen, whose price he set at three hundred dollars.

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax
by J K Lasser Institute
Published 30 Oct 2012

Real estate taxes paid by the cooperative (16.6). However, if the cooperative does not own the land and building but merely leases them and is required to pay real estate taxes under the terms of the lease, you may not deduct your share of the tax payment. In some localities, such as New York City, rent control rules allow tenants of a building converted to a cooperative to remain in their apartments even if they do not buy into the co-op. A holdover tenant may prevent some co-op purchasers from occupying an apartment. The IRS ruled that the fact that a holdover tenant stays in the apartment will not bar the owner from deducting his or her share of the co-op’s interest and taxes.

…

In New York, liability for tax is placed directly on the tenant and the landlord is a collecting agent for paying over the tax to the taxing authorities; the landlord also remains liable for the tax. The IRS ruled that it will not permit tenants to deduct a portion of rent as a payment of taxes. EXAMPLE A municipal rent control ordinance allowed landlords to charge real property tax increases to the tenants as a monthly “tax surcharge.” The ordinance stated that the surcharge was not to be considered rent for purposes of computing cost-of-living rental increases. The IRS ruled that the tenant may not deduct the “tax surcharge” as a property tax.

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2014
by J. K. Lasser
Published 5 Oct 2013

Real estate taxes paid by the cooperative (16.6). However, if the cooperative does not own the land and building but merely leases them and is required to pay real estate taxes under the terms of the lease, you may not deduct your share of the tax payment. In some localities, such as New York City, rent control rules allow tenants of a building converted to a cooperative to remain in their apartments even if they do not buy into the co-op. A holdover tenant may prevent some co-op purchasers from occupying an apartment. The IRS ruled that the fact that a holdover tenant stays in the apartment will not bar the owner from deducting his or her share of the co-op’s interest and taxes.

…

In New York, liability for tax is placed directly on the tenant and the landlord is a collecting agent for paying over the tax to the taxing authorities. However, since the landlord also remains liable for the tax, the IRS ruled that the tenant’s payment is in reality rent that cannot be deducted as a payment of real estate tax. EXAMPLE A municipal rent control ordinance allowed landlords to charge real property tax increases to the tenants as a monthly “tax surcharge.” The ordinance stated that the surcharge was not to be considered rent for purposes of computing cost-of-living rental increases. The IRS ruled that the tenant may not deduct the “tax surcharge” as a property tax.

Rough Guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area
by Nick Edwards and Mark Ellwood
Published 2 Jan 2009

Such action was inspired by the mood of the time and continued well into the 1970s, while during the conservative 1980s and Clinton-dominated 1990s, Berkeley politics became far less confrontational. But despite an influx of more conformist students, a surge in the number of exclusive restaurants, and the dismantling of the city’s rent-control program, the progressive legacy has remained in the city’s independent bookstores (see box, p.308) and at sporadic political demonstrations, particularly those inspired by the growing resistance to George W. Bush’s warmongering policies. Indeed, Berkeley returned to being a bastion of the anti-war movement and streets like Telegraph Avenue became festooned with posters, stickers, and T-shirts questioning the occupation of Iraq and the war against terrorism or lampooning the “dunce-in-chief ” during his occupation of the White House. 301  #&3,&-&: /*/5)
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Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

In 2010 the libertarian economists Daniel Klein and Zeljka Buturovic published a study aiming to show that left-liberals were economically illiterate, based on erroneous answers to Econ 101 items like these:33 Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable. [True] Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services. [True] A company with the largest market share is a monopoly. [False] Rent control leads to housing shortages. [True] (Another item was “Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago,” which is true. Consistent with my claim in chapter 4 that progressives hate progress, 61 percent of the progressives and 52 percent of the liberals disagreed.) Conservatives and libertarians gloated, and the Wall Street Journal reported the study under the headline “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?”

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2016: For Preparing Your 2015 Tax Return
by J. K. Lasser Institute
Published 19 Oct 2015

Real estate taxes paid by the cooperative (16.6). However, if the cooperative does not own the land and building but merely leases them and is required to pay real estate taxes under the terms of the lease, you may not deduct your share of the tax payment. In some localities, such as New York City, rent control rules allow tenants of a building converted to a cooperative to remain in their apartments even if they do not buy into the co-op. A holdover tenant may prevent some co-op purchasers from occupying an apartment. The IRS ruled that the fact that a holdover tenant stays in the apartment will not bar the owner from deducting his or her share of the co-op’s interest and taxes.

…

In New York, liability for tax is placed directly on the tenant and the landlord is a collecting agent for paying over the tax to the taxing authorities. However, since the landlord also remains liable for the tax, the IRS ruled that the tenant’s payment is in reality rent that cannot be deducted as a payment of real estate tax. EXAMPLE A municipal rent control ordinance allowed landlords to charge real property tax increases to the tenants as a monthly “tax surcharge.” The ordinance stated that the surcharge was not to be considered rent for purposes of computing cost-of-living rental increases. The IRS ruled that the tenant may not deduct the “tax surcharge” as a property tax.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

Look at Argentina, cut off from international loans by its populist habit of not paying its creditors. A world of never lending again, or never offering an apartment for a rent set by unhindered deals, or never selling anything at all if the populist state has outlawed the seller’s surplus, is not a good plan for helping the poor. Look at badly maintained housing stocks under rent control. Jack in the English folktale sells his mother’s cow for a silly handful of beans, and the mother is outraged by her son’s gullibility. “Have you been such a fool, such a dolt, such an idiot, as to give away my Milky-White, the best milker in the parish, and prime beef to boot, for a set of paltry beans?

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016

Sources of unmeasured price increases include bribes, black markets, and unmeasured declines in the quality of goods and services, including the need to wait in lines and distort consumption choices due to rationing, crowding due to migration, and a shortage of housing exacerbated by declines in rental housing maintenance due to rent controls. Three responses to this critique range from narrow to broad. At the narrow level, the shift of 12 million people, or 9 percent of the 1940 population, into the armed forces implies that there were 9 percent fewer civilians to share the available personal consumption expenditures. Because measured real consumption was roughly the same in 1944 as in 1941, this implies that real consumption per civilian increased by 9 percent.

Rainbow Six
by Tom Clancy
Published 2 Jan 1998

"No, first time, what about you?" "Last few months, nice place to meet people." Another lie, but they came easily in a place like this. "Music's a little loud," she said. "Well, other places it's a lot worse. You live close?" "Three blocks north. Got a little studio apartment, subleasing it. Rent control in the building. My stuff gets here in another week." "So, you're not really moved in yet?" "Right." "Well, welcome to New York ?" "Anne Pretloe." "Kirk Maclean." They shook hands, and he held hers a little longer than necessary so that she'd get a feel for his skin, a necessary precondition to casual affection, which he needed to generate.

The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York
by Caro, Robert A
Published 14 Apr 1975

La Guardia's personal style was screaming, ranting, fist-shaking and more than a little irresponsible. (Learning that a family had been burned to death while the mother tried unsuccessfully to telephone the Fire Department, he insinuated that the telephone company was guilty of murder. Testifying before a legislative committee on rent controls, he said, "I come not to praise the landlord but to bury him.") These men who distrusted excess distrusted him. And he did not hesitate to play melting-pot politics, to wave the bloody flag, to appeal, in one of the seven languages in which he could harangue an audience, to the insecurities, resentments and prejudices of the ethnic groups in the immigrant district he had represented in Congress.

…

They loved them—and they could afford them. If the water pressure was low, so was the rent, scaled originally to their ability to pay by landlords who could afford to do so because they had bought land in East Tremont for as little as two dollars per square foot, and kept at that scale by city-instituted rent control. Mrs. Silverman was paying $100 per month for her four rooms, and that was high. Lillian Roberts was paying $62 for her four rooms. Cele Sherman had a six-room apartment—three bedrooms, a living room, kitchen with large dining area, and a foyer with a recess large enough to be a full-scale dining room—and for that apartment Mrs.

New York
by Edward Rutherfurd
Published 10 Nov 2009

“Listen, I can see you’re a smart kid. You’re polite, you’re going to college. Think about it—do you know any other kids on this block going to college? Most of them never finished high school. So listen to what I’m telling you. Your mother pays me a low rent. You know why? Because this building is rent-controlled. That’s why I can’t make any money out of it either. It’s why I can’t afford to do many repairs. But this is a good building, by comparison. Some of the buildings around here are falling apart. You know that.” Mr. Bonati waved his hand toward the north-west. “Do you remember that building a few blocks away which burned down eighteen months ago?”

J.K. Lasser's Your Income Tax 2022: For Preparing Your 2021 Tax Return
by J. K. Lasser Institute
Published 21 Dec 2021

Real estate taxes paid by the cooperative (16.6). However, if the cooperative does not own the land and building but merely leases them and is required to pay real estate taxes under the terms of the lease, you may not deduct your share of the tax payment. In some localities, such as New York City, rent control rules allow tenants of a building converted to a cooperative to remain in their apartments even if they do not buy into the co-op. A holdover tenant may prevent some co-op purchasers from occupying an apartment. The IRS ruled that the fact that a holdover tenant stays in the apartment will not bar the owner from deducting his or her share of the co-op's interest and taxes.

…

A locality may place liability for property tax directly on the tenant but the landlord is a collecting agent for paying over the tax to the taxing authorities. Where the landlord also remains liable for the tax, the IRS has ruled that the tenant's payment is in reality rent that cannot be deducted as a payment of real estate tax. EXAMPLE A municipal rent control ordinance allowed landlords to charge real property tax increases to the tenants as a monthly “tax surcharge.” The ordinance stated that the surcharge was not to be considered rent for purposes of computing cost-of-living rental increases. The IRS ruled that the tenant may not deduct the “tax surcharge” as a property tax.

Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan
by Lynne B. Sagalyn
Published 8 Sep 2016

Wax, “Starting at Ground Zero: Architectural Firm Known for Historic Renovations Faces Its Greatest Challenge—Planning Lower Manhattan’s Future,” Newsday, June 2, 2002; Alexander Garvin, “Reflections and Choice,” http://alumninet.yale.edu/classes/yc1962/garviniview03.html. 9 Edward Wyatt, “Six Plans for Ground Zero, All Seen as a Starting Point,” NYT, July 17, 2002; Edward Wyatt, “Bloomberg Pushes More Housing at Site,” NYT, July 20, 2002. 10 Editorial, “The Downtown We Don’t Want,” NYT, July 17, 2002; editorial, “Talk to the Man in Charge,” NYT, July 20, 2002. 11 Editorials, DN: “Rent Controls Ground,” July 17, 2002; “Port Authority: Flawed by Design,” July 20, 2002; “PA Backs Off, but Not Far Enough,” July 23, 2002; “Just Say ‘No’ to Port Authority,” July 31, 2002. 12 Editorial, “None of the WTC Proposals Is Good Enough,” Newsday, July 21, 2002; editorial, “A Fair First Draft,” NYP, July 17, 2002. 13 Ada Louise Huxtable, “Another World Trade Center Horror,” WSJ, July 25, 2002. 14 Though these other schemes were not public, they were known to an “inner sanctum” of professionals.

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980
by Rick Perlstein
Published 17 Aug 2020

(Dartmouth students were hardworking because they paid high tuition, and thus appreciated the value of their education; UCLA students slept in class, played pinball, and lolled by the pool because their state-subsidized tuitions were so cheap.) He explained the gold standard inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s giant vault, perched upon a bench of gold bars; illustrated the perils of rent control and government jobs programs on a burned-out block in the Bronx. (That episode, like the one on public schools, mimicked Ronald Reagan’s practice of casting African Americans as those most harmed by government.) At the Bureau of Engraving and Printing he pushed the button that started the currency printing presses that his monetary theory said were responsible for inflation; in a Las Vegas casino, he delivered a discourse on the importance of risk in a free society.