Since 2000, the population of renters in San Jose has grown by 26%. The stock of rental units grew by 16%. I do not pin that shortfall solely on rent control: California and its municipalities have generally made every bad decision possible when it comes to housing, from Prop 13 to rent control to very restrictive zoning. Of course there are terrible housing problems that are getting worse.
It’s like if someone is addicted to alcohol, meth, crack, and heroin. Which one is the cause of the woes? If someone says, “Yeahbut medically speaking, heroin addiction ain’t that bad” you’d get laughed at. Rent control is the heroin in this situation, and of course it’s making things worse, even if it isn’t the sole cause of the troubles.
None of that shortfall is due to rent control, if you knew anything about San Jose rent control laws, you’d know that. Rent control is not making things any worse in San Jose.
The Landlords on the Rent Control board and the Tri county Association both favor San Jose rent control laws. Yes, some advocates on the tenant side think it isnt enough, but it’s better than nothing.
The rent control board is in favor of rent control? That’s not surprising. Landlords and apartment owners seem to be opposed - also not surprising since those are the ones that would be subsidizing these policies.
The Landlords on the board. But the TriCounty apartment owners associate also likes San Jose Rent control , but they dont want it expanded, that’s a different subject entirely. You cite is about Frisco mainly.
And I am talking about San Jose particular type of mild rent control. Not SF, Not Oakland, not Berkeley, etc.
Rezone and build up. It doesn’t need to be all apartment buildings, but allow duplexes and triplexes, at least. Tons of single-family homes on land (and a population and an economy) that could easily handle multi-family homes.
So, you’d allow the government to use Eminent Domain to kick a thousand people out of their $Million dollar homes, then bulldoze them to build condos? You’d be out of office so fast, it’d be a record.
And you can’t just plop down a 20 story apt building in the middle of the suburbs. Not enough infrastructure.
No, I’d just advocate that homeowners have the option of selling their homes to builders or modifying them to be multi-family homes. These are problems the market can solve – restrictive zoning prevents market action from solving them.
The Federal government, or the State government, has an interest in seeing high density. So everyone in Silicon valley and a few other areas might vote against the new rules, but other people wouldn’t care, and many would vote for it from the higher level. This has already happened, with the State government deciding that local municipalities can can it. Perfectly legal. Each level of government does trump the one below it and they will not get anywhere if they protest it in court, with a few exceptions.
As for a sane development policy, it would look like the following:
a. No more property tax exclusions. This gives people sitting on valuable land an incentive to move.
b. Property tax needs a density surcharge. That 20 story building is going to require a lot of infrastructure upgrades to support - it is perfectly fair to add on an additional tax, times the number of stories or the number of times over that residential space covers the lot it’s on, or some other reasonable measure.
(so if the 20 story building covers a 1 acre lot, and has 10 acres of total rentable space, there is a 10 times multiplier times some kind of tax. Perhaps 10 times 0.1% the building’s value, or 1% of the value of the lot annual or something)
c. Limited exemptions for historic buildings - you can’t just declare whole districts historic
d. Density taxes should eventually apply to nearby buildings to discourage squatting. So if your house is surrounded on 4 sides by skyscrapers paying a density surcharge, after a certain number of years, your house is also subject to the same tax they are paying. Pay it or sell.
Maybe my formula needs some adjustment. Point is, that if a developer wants to put a skyscraper in the middle of a low rise area, they should be able to do so, they should just have to pay the taxes required to upgrade the streets and utilities leading to it and pay for all the extra residents they are bringing in.
No, it can’t. The “market” is made up of a lot of evil greedy people out to make a quick cheap buck at the expense of others, leaving behind a stinking mess they no longer care about.
Somehow this system produces widely available, affordable housing in one of the most advanced and wealthiest cities on the planet. I’m pretty far from a die-hard capitalist, but market action really is the most successful solution for some problems (but certainly not all) – dining options, vacation options, entertainment options, and housing options being notable. The Bay Area is very clearly failing at ensuring affordable housing is available for all its workers, and it’s failing by preventing market action from solving these problems like it’s solved and prevented them in Tokyo.
Because, as I said, it’s an utterly uncontroversial that rent control makes housing shortages worse.
I already cited officials in San Jose saying that they have concerns that their rent control laws as they pertain to new construction are making the housing shortage worse. That directly contradicts your “Everyone thinks rent control is awesome in San Jose!” opinion.
Huge swaths of land being single-family-only helps no one but those homeowners who want their neighborhoods to be prevented by law from changing. It hurts everyone else, including everyone’s property values. A piece of land is worth a lot more if it can eventually be used to rent to 8 families rather than 1 family. Opening up zoning to allow multi-family housing helps everyone but the NIMBYs (and it even helps their property values, in the long term).
where it says “A significant portion of the apartments currently under way is in the
city of San Jose, particularly in the
downtown area, where demand is
bolstered by revitalization efforts currently in progress…”
Because you see- Rent Control in San Jose does not pertain in the slightest to new construction. Nothing built after 1979 is under rent control.
https://psmag.com/economics/in-defense-of-rent-control
*But a comprehensive review of literature by New York housing lawyer Timothy Collins found that the received wisdom regarding rent regulations is overly simplistic—partially because hard ceilings on rents are often imagined, while the reality is more often (as in New York’s case) a more measured approach meant to discourage landlords from dramatically raising rents and displacing tenants.
Collins argues that New York’s two largest building booms took place during times of strict rent controls: the 1920s and the post-war period between 1947 and 1965. …
“New York’s moderate rent regulations have had few, if any, of the negative side effects so confidently predicted by industry advocates,” Collins writes. “More important, rent regulations have been the single greatest source of affordable housing for middle‐ and low‐income households. I should note that many of these findings came as a surprise to me. When I first joined the Rent Guidelines Board staff in 1987, I believed that rent regulations in New York City probably did have some long‐term harmful effects. I was proven wrong.”
Outside the city, one economist found that housing construction in New Jersey fell by 52 percent in cities that enacted rent control regulations in the early 1970s—but fell 88 percent in those that didn’t. …
Collins also found that all the apartments that experts expected to open up with the introduction of rent regulations did not materialize after rent control was removed from Boston. In 1994, real estate interests in Massachusetts organized a statewide referendum to end rent control—which only existed in Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline—and just barely won. But Census data shows that Boston’s vacancy rate was four percent before the regulations were phased out and 2.9 percent four years after they were done away with—scrapping rent control had, at the very least, not generated a measurable effect on apartment availability. The median price for a two-bedroom apartment doubled in the meantime.*