How to make rent cheaper
This is a story that was developed by twitter about supply and demand and ultimately how to make rental housing cheaper.
Dan Bertolet from Sightline started the story by sharing a study which indicates that rent control policy contributed to gentrification in San Francisco.
I replied with a tweet that the San Francisco Bay Area needs to regulate its housing market better.
I was rightly criticised with this funny South Park video indicating that my tweet lacked an explanatory middle section.
The next day on twitter Dan Bertolet provided an excellent explanation of how costs affect housing development decisions and therefore prices and rents, thus providing a proper ‘middle’ for the story.
In a conversation I once had with a politician, they explained the inequality of land owners capturing the benefit of public works, such as motorway expansion out from a city, in untaxed capital gains. They wanted some mechanism to capture this gain back for the public. I cautioned the politician, that as a policy maker who wanted more of something, in this case, affordable housing, then they couldn’t expect to get more of this, if they were making it harder and more expensive to do it.
Dan Bertolet explanation fleshes out this dilemma and thus helps tell an important part of the larger housing and urbanisation story.
