On this planet that we call Earth, there are only two kinds of people: owners and renters. There are various reasons for renting: young folks are typically not yet financially ready for ownership; they lack the proper credit history; and, most importantly, they have yet to accumulate the necessary wealth needed to provide a sufficient down payment. Another reason for renting, often not included, is the mobility that comes with it. It is orders of magnitude easier for renters to pick up and leave when compared to the much deeper commitment of ownership—which we call “putting down roots.”
Meanwhile, political demagogues have worked assiduously at programming the tenant population to think of themselves as victims. Their votes are easily harvested by imposing further restrictions on those wicked landlords. “Housing is a human right” has become sort of a mantra in our dystopian inner cities.
Consequently, tightening the screws on landlords compels the investor class to seek more favorable environments. Localities with strict rent and eviction controls are also burdened with severe housing shortages. The magical utopia of Berkeley, California, was perhaps the leading edge in this process. Before a court ruling mandated rent decontrol on vacant units, university students were strapped with long commutes since they couldn’t find any housing close to campus. It seems that affluent alumni held onto their rent-controlled apartments long after they moved to the suburbs. Why? To use for cheap storage or to house their teen-aged offspring. As something is made to be cheaper, it also becomes available for uses of lower value. Read more
Rent control, as it is usually practiced, incentivizes tenants to stay put for decades.
My mother used to every once in a while forget that if she brought up the “haves vs the have nots” horseshit with me, it would be met with me telling her that I would only consider that as valid after she presented me with an example of a have not who had not of their own volition destroyed what they had. There were the haves vs had and deliberately, systematically and wantonly destroyed in the America I grew up in. I recognized the envy trap very early on as the tool of wicked and evil individuals who were motivated by malicious intent and didn’t have anyone’s best interests at heart.
Unless you live somewhere with no property taxes then we are all renters.
Rent control reduces production of supply, reduces quality of existing supply and reduces mobility of the renters. It ultimately dramatically increases costs on renters as well. But, it is a wonderful avenue for increasing state power and bureaucracy, as well as the types of graft that are available to government functionaries and powerful private interests. Always has been so, always will be. I think, based on previous actions, the communists… sorry… democrats… pushing this assume renters are pig ignorant as a rule, and the communists… sorry… democrats… may be right.
What about the corrupt treasonous Congress crisis?
False premise: There is NO housing crisis.
There is a Central Banking crisis. The crisis is that it still exists to keep us a debt slaves.
“On this planet that we call Earth, there are only two kinds of people: owners and renters”
Three, a Bazillion illegal aliens. That don’t work.
Back in 2008, I stayed in one of those Soviet era apartment buildings in Moscow for ten days while my wife and I visited friends of hers. Imagine if you will, a concrete grain elevator that is divided into tiny apartments. The foyer was bare concrete. The staircases were bare concrete. The hallways were bare concrete and I’m talking the floors, walls and ceilings. it smelled of urine and vomit and there was absolutely no heat. The doors of each apartment were covered by a quarter inch thick plate of steel that had extremely heavy-duty locks. Behind that, there was usually a nice wooden door with locks of it’s own. Without the heavy steel outer door, the wooden door would be chopped away for easy access to the apartment. Everything would be gone when you got back home and nobody would have seen or heard a thing. The heat in your tiny apartment was controlled by the government. If you were lucky enough to have a car, it would stay locked up in a rented metal box behind the building that was barely big enough to drive into. Otherwise, it would be gone or striped of it’s parts. It was a sad, dreary, foreboding place to live, but that’s how Russians lived. That’s how the Socialist Democrats want us all to live, excluding themselves, of course.