10mo ago

Supreme Court turns down rent control challenge

www.latimes.com Supreme Court turns down property rights challenge to rent control in New York and California

Apartment owners lose bid to say rent control laws in New York and California violate the Constitution's ban on the taking of private property by government.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down a major property-rights challenge to rent control laws in New York City and elsewhere that give tenants a right to stay for many years in an apartment with a below-market cost.

A group of New York landlords had sued, contending the combination of rent regulation and long-term occupancy violated the Constitution’s ban on the taking of private property for public use.

The justices had considered the appeal since late September. Only Justice Clarence Thomas issued a partial dissent.

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Controversial opinion, but shouldn’t capitalism allow the free market to decide rental rates and tenancy durations? Why are rental incomes regulated. I completely understand having regulations for health and safety reasons (maintenance needs to be enforced, apartments need to be liveable) but why control the prices in a capitalist society?
- If landlords collectively agree to double the rent of every apartment in a city, tenants can't simply move to a cheaper unit. There should be someone telling those landlords no.
  
  But that’s the free market at work. Prices will continue to rise until they become unaffordable and landlords have empty properties. Where I live there is no rent control, and the prices keep rising as the economy and inflation rises. When rental properties are in high demand, rental prices increase across the board. When construction provides many new properties to buy, people buy, rental demand decreases, and rental prices stagnate. No need for regulation from some government body. I thought this was capitalism 101?
  
  When a handful of colluding parties control the entire supply of something people can't live without, that's not a free market. It's despotism. The parties in control can do anything they want, and anybody who tries to tell them no can be deprived of that resource and left to die.
  
  until they become unaffordable and landlords have empty properties
  That is precisely what is happening, by design, and it sucks. Wouldn't it be much, much better if there was a safeguard to prevent this?
  
  Free market doesn't mean that all rules go out the window. Colluding over prices eliminates the natural competition that occurs in a free market. That is why it is generally prohibited, though businesses still try it from time to time and they (rightly) get in trouble for it.
  
  They do it all the time and mostly get away with it...
  FTFY
  
  No that’s an oligopoly, not capitalism. Why are you arguing against your own best interests?
- It's very disruptive when people are forced to move due to rent increases. Rent control helps smooth over the effects of cyclic changes in the rent market on individual people.
- In my opinion, basic human rights such as adequate housing shouldn't be left solely to the free market. That's just asking for human rights violations.
  That said I'm kind of disappointed in how black and white this issue is usually dealt with on lemmy (I get the feeling most users have the opinion: capitalism equals evil)
  In my ideal society, we as a society would facilitate basic housing for people where needed. Everything above the basic necessity of a roof above your head and a place for yourself (adequate housing), I think can be left up to the free market. I think the prices of the free market would be more 'proportional' if the free market knows it can't ask ludicrous prices because there's basic housing as a safety net.
- The free market cannot provide affordable housing for everything, including essential service workers
  
  I thought pure capitalism meant that a removal of controls and regulations would lead to natural consequences (like essential services workers being priced out) which would eventually lead to a lack of essential workers, which would eventually lead to the creation of affordable accommodation in the city by some enterprising business looking to capitalise on that opportunity. The free market would eventually take care of the problem. It might be disruptive in the short term, but ultimately that problem would be self resolved by the market. Bringing in regulations and controls starts to smell like socialism?!
  
  In a world with infinite resources maybe. But consider places like NYC where there is no more land to build on and agencies with money gobble up whatever land/buildings become available before an enterprising agency can come in to shake up the market and you’ll start to realize one of the major failings of capitalism.
  Capitalism always favors the rich at the expense of the poor. The only way that the poor can prosper is at the good will of the rich, which is something that exists in such small quantities that it may as well not exist at all.
  
  Correct
  
  But consider places like NYC where there is no more land to build on...
  Then NYC needs to manage itself better by purchasing property and knocking shit down to build larger buildings with more tenements in the same footprint. That "flavorful" 2 story with 12 apartments in Manhattan? Bulldoze that clunker and build a new 20 story with 120 apartments in it!
  Then you keep doing it. NYC buys property, knocks down whatever tiny thing is there and rebuilds it to 10 or 20 times the previous capacity. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
  All that's happening with their current scheme is that the rent controlled apartments are being subsidized by everyone who lives in the market rate apartments so that they don't damage the "character" of certain areas. The only winners are the people in the relatively few available rent controlled apartments and they're only winning because they're literally taking money from other people.
  It's not sustainable.
  
  Who are you proposing do this exactly? Certainly not the city, that's government intervention. Maybe an enterprising developer, one that would see the shape of the market and realize that prices go up far faster than square footage does? You can see the same issue happening with single family housing, no developer wants to build small but affordable homes because large and expensive ones cost only two or three times as much to build yet sell for probably ten times that much, and there is always a market for them because there are always corporations and hedge funds willing to pay that much and just sit on it as an investment. With apartments the issue is actually worse because you first need to buy the property and evict all the tenants, then you need to get your plans certified by the bureaucracy (and there are several), then you need to demolish the building, and only then can you start building a new one with all those cheap apartments that definitely aren't worth building just because the people buying or renting them can't afford to make up the difference even with the increased number of them.
  
  For clarity, I believe in socialism, and live in Australia, arguably one of the more successful social democracies. I’m trying to highlight how capitalism has some massive gaps when it comes to implementation.
  Interestingly, in Australia we have no rental controls, and the market just works. Prices rise and fall based on the demands of the market. At times, renting in Australia becomes unaffordable for many, and it’s all over the news, and people try to address the issue. But I don’t know that I’ve ever heard rental price controls being offered as a solution. The more common proposed solutions are to: build more affordable houses in newly created suburbs further from the city, increase public transport options to the city making outlying suburbs more viable, all of which provide downward pressure on the rental prices in the popular city districts. As construction booms, the rental market softens.
  (I copy/pasted this comment from its original location as the person I replied to deleted their comment)
  
  Your minimum wage is $23.23 USD/hour. Ours is $7.25/hour.
  You don’t have rent control but you DO have a government that drives wages with regular review and increases determined by the FWC. Our wages have practically stagnated for 30 years. It’s been 15 since we last saw a minimum wage increase.
  You really can’t compare Australia’s housing situation to the US’s because of the massive economic differences.
  
  it might be disruotive in the short term
  This handwave sentence is always what libertarians use to hide the utter destruction of a working society.
  "Yes, millions of people in a city suddenly being homeless, leading to crime/violence/mass death/the breakdown of all services and commerce would be disrupted, but at some point after tens of thousand die it would work itself out because...."
  Plenty of "libertarian paradises" out there man, only some of them over run by bears. Hows that track record of unfettered capitalism going?
  
  That's a myth, that hypothetical never happens in pratice. Why should I trust you over reality?
- but why control the prices in a capitalist society?
  Yeah, why would we want to regulate prices on a necessity to live that requires capital to be able to own, thereby meaning that ownership will only ever be in the hands of a small amount of lords that the peasants are 100% at the whims of the owning class. Add in that it's better for landlords to collude and drive up prices (to the point that the rental price increases can be entirely automated to better extract money from renters) it's not difficult at all to see why it needs to be regulated.

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