>Rent control is good for the people who already have housing who don't see their rents go up, but it's bad for people who might want to move to an area. It's very much a "pull up the ladder behind you" sort of policy and in the case that the article addresses it will tend to weaken coalitions in favor of reducing housing prices for new home buyers/renters and will tend throw currently homeless people under the bus.
You could defray those negative effects by building lots of public housing and/or heavily subsidizing new construction.
> You could defray those negative effects by building lots of public housing and/or heavily subsidizing new construction.
To the extent that you actually do that, you will naturally lower the market rent to the level that you wanted, making rent control pointless (except that it removes the signal that would warn you when you need to build more housing).
>To the extent that you actually do that, you will naturally lower the market rent to the level that you wanted, making rent control pointless (except that it removes the signal that would warn you when you need to build more housing).
You kind of answered your first clause with your second. Demand can rise very rapidly, but supply can only grow slowly. If you want to keep housing prices stabile for people so they're not being thrown out of their homes or displaced, public housing doesn't address that because you don't get the signal that it's a problem until after the displacement has happened.
Or, just let private builders build. Housing is not magically immune to supply and demand. Only advocating for the government to increase supply isn’t a very effective solution.
>Housing is not magically immune to supply and demand.
It kind of is because housing isn't the only component of housing value. Access to transit, safety, and public amenities like parks and schools are a huge component of what makes housing valuable. All of those things are public goods built by the government. Expecting private builders to build is just allowing public expenditure to line the pockets of a landowner who did nothing to add value to it.
Do you think that people would choose to ignore housing that isn't close to certain public services, if it existed? No, they would choose to live there because it'd still be closer to their workplace than neighboring cities and what not.
Don't forget that if the private sector isn't spending money to create value for the rest of us where we need it, then the alternative is spending people's money through government efforts. And as with any government effort, it is still less efficient because of its much bigger bureaucratic overhead.
>Do you think that people would choose to ignore housing that isn't close to certain public services, if it existed? No, they would choose to live there because it'd still be closer to their workplace than neighboring cities and what not.
Yes. People with money would choose to ignore them and they would wind up being peripheral slums and shanty towns because there aren't public services being built out to support the capacity.
> it is still less efficient because of its much bigger bureaucratic overhead.
Have you never interacted with a telecom provider or health insurance company? Heavily regulated industries and monopoly industries tend to approach messy bureaucracies as well. The messiness of bureaucracy comes from having to suit everyone's needs rather than just ignoring segments of the population that aren't profitable to serve.
This article of faith that government is inherently more bureaucratic or less efficient than the private sector is just not borne out by anything but religious devotion. The assumptions of perfectly fungible goods in a perfectly competitive market, which provides the theoretical basis for the idea of market efficiency, doesn't even hold in real estate.
> And as with any government effort, it is still less efficient because of its much bigger bureaucratic overhead.
Government programmes aren’t always less efficient than their private equivalents, e.g. the NHS in the UK is more efficient than many private healthcare systems (source: https://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d5143)
You could defray those negative effects by building lots of public housing and/or heavily subsidizing new construction.