Quote:
Originally Posted by mcgrath618
The former is what San Fran did and unfortunately it just seemed to make things worse. Because we live in a free market, landlords just took the opportunity to not renew leases with tenants in trendier neighborhoods so that the rent would reset to market value. Rinse and repeat yearly.
It also has been proven to shrink the supply of existing rental housing, which in turn drives up rents even further. Supply/demand means that as more landlords convert their properties to types that aren't subject to rent control, the pool of existing stock shrinks and market value rises.
There's a fantastic paper done by Stanford students on the topic.
Property Tax freezes work though, and were essentially what the 10 year abatement was doing (except only for new homebuyers). I agree that a new system where people who have lived in a certain neighborhood for 5+ years (arbitrary number, could be anything) can't have their property taxes increase if they make below a certain threshold of income.
Unfortunately, the best way to curb gentrification is to zone dense around public transit and draw people to those areas, and then zone single family everywhere else. Which is antithetical to Clarke's admin.
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Ultimately I agree with your last paragraph. No matter how many protections are in place, nothing will have a long term positive effect if housing supplies are constrained.
But while rent control has been shown to have negative consequences, these tend to be further down the line. In the near term it is generally a benefit to those who are already renting when the policy is enacted. Property tax freezes are a bit more clear cut and are obviously very effective, but also are not without their downsides.
My basic argument is we're never going to be able to enact the policies that you detail in your final paragraph if people like Darrel Clarke are running City Council. Rent Controls and property tax freezes are not so much solutions for gentrification and growing unaffordability in Philadelphia as they are solutions for Darrell Clarke and the anti-development streak that runs through City government.