In NYC units that might be _actually cheap_, as in rent controlled and not stabilized, number roughly 17k units _in total_. And only about 1/3 of those are significantly below market or in desirable neighborhoods. It's almost insignificant and the number of rent controlled units has gone down by roughly HALF in the last 5 years, because the tenants in them are dying and income limits on any descendants usually kick the units out of being controlled into stabilized.
NYC has a much larger number of rent stabilized units, which is somewhere near 1/3 of all available units that are renting at or below $2700 (twice the national average, btw). The overwhelming majority of these are within a few hundred dollars of market rate.
There are about 4.2M housing units in NYC with roughly 30k being added every year. The "cheap" rent-controlled units are a rounding error.
That is not anything like the situation folks in SF are rightfully railing against.
There's other housing programs like Mitchell-Lama, some that are like what you mentioned, but that's a completely separate thing and a small amount of units. "Rent controlled" and "Rent stabilized" are technical terms in NY.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/rentguidelinesboard/resources/rent...
Specifically:
"Also, some newly constructed buildings may be stabilized due to a 421-a or J-51 tax exemption even if the rent is $2,000 or more."
A program that a significant number of developers have taken advantage of.
Because that's what rent regulation's detractors are arguing, even though your empirical evidence (and mine) suggest the opposite. That's the context we're discussing this in.
Rent control doesn’t apply to new construction in SF. It also allows a regulated annual increase, and rent automatically jumps back up to market upon a number of different conditions - not the least of which is that the owner can push you out to renovate the building!
HN commenters are usually just repeating stuff they heard somewhere, and have no idea what the laws actually say.
Moreover, while there are indeed lots of publications on the theoretical impacts of rent control, few of those publications consider laws as they actually exist, or if they do, the scope of the impacts is rarely communicated when translated into HN talking points. Every study I’m aware of has shown, at worst, diffuse, long-term negative impacts to housing costs. Meanwhile, many of them do exactly what they set out to do: stabilize short-term prices for vulnerable populations.
These laws are simply not the boogeymen that comments here make them seem.
SF rent control is absolutely onerous and definitely shrinks the pool of potential landlords and thus potential units.
In Paris there is a similar impact of bad regulation. It has become so hard to expel a tenant that has stopped paying that landlords will demand extraordinary guaranties: bank credit lines, guaranties from relatives, sometimes even medical exam, etc and will be super picky. I knew of a foreign investment banker, high salary, not allowed to get in financial dispute because of his profession, who just couldn't find a place to rent in Paris because he couldn't provide some of those.
I personally know two people who are renting rent-controlled apartments in SF and don't live in them. Their lives have moved elsewhere and they don't need the place anymore. One uses it as a weekend getaway and the other one visits rarely.
Thanks to rent control their rent is so cheap that it's worth hanging on to it even though they don't live there.
So these two units are off the rental market effectively forever, sitting empty most of the time.
Landlords are not social security. It's probably better for the city to forcefully buy them out and create a new management model of the buildings than to impose strangling limits on prices.
If a renter can't find a landlord to rent from, then what?
"Why should I care about the woes of water treatment plants as opposed to water drinkers?" Do you want drinkable water, or not?
If you lease out your house and you want to take back ownership, yeah, you need to pay out the tenant and that's completely fair. You're upending another family's lives, and they may not be able to afford to stay. You're paying them moving costs and covering a period of time of adjustment for them. If you think this is unfair, you have poor morals.
Also, for good measure: fuck the landlords.
The rent increase law is 60% of CPI. Look it up.
SF introduced a new law a couple years ago that additional people can live in a unit even if they are not on the lease. They only instituted caps on how many. Google search it.
Plenty of apartments have not only water, but also heating included in the rent. If that goes up drastically, the rent board will likely tell the landlord “tough”.
And I’m not against buying out tenants. I am against them having to pay $100,000 or more.
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Sources:
This amount is based on 60% of the increase in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers in the Bay Area, which was 4.4% as posted in November 2018 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.[1]
Legislation that went into effect November 9, 2015 allows tenants covered under rent control to add occupants, if reasonable, despite restrictions in the rental agreement.
[1]https://sfrb.org/sites/default/files/Document/Form/571%20All... [2]https://www.sftu.org/roommates/
It seems fair to me that if you’re going to protect landlords (and companies !) you need to protect tenants as well.
Conveniently, SF doesn't allow new construction either.
