Quote:
Originally Posted by mhays
Seattle has been piling on the renter-rights stuff. Yes it will make the city more expensive.
People aren't bright, generally speaking. They want to help specific cases, but don't think about the system being generally worse for more people. And any logic tends to get pushed off as coming from non-believers.
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No, people
are savvy when landlords start explaining why for the sake of the good of most people they can't wait til spring to throw a family out on the streets. We've heard these kind of 'cold market logic' arguments before to explain why workers shouldn't have unions, or why we shouldn't raise the minimum wage, or why welfare spending depresses economic growth. There's no empirical data to back them up. Plenty of countries have very strong renter protections, whereas America's are virtually nonexistent. Those countries (Germany, Italy, France, Scandinavia) are by and large doing better on affordability, not worse.
The economic health of cities depends on ordinary working people, not on non-productive landlords. And political support for expanding the housing supply and investing in urban neighborhoods will depend on what level of security we guarantee to those people and families. At the moment in the US, that's virtually zero. Upzoning and development almost always mean gentrification and large-scale displacement of longstanding members of the community, while we're building almost no affordable housing.
So folks will continue electing people like Kshama Sawant to City Council. But go ahead, call them stupid.