horrifying fun fact of the day: so greenwich village, which is the neighborhood in nyc where the stonewall riots took place and which was a v important gay center from like the 50s-80s, is now super swanky and full of touristy boutiques and expensive apartments and stuff. st vincent’s, the local hospital which had the first aids ward on the east coast, closed a couple years ago and is being replaced with luxury condos. all of this is sad enough, BUT i just found out that one of the reasons it’s so gentrified now is that the aids crisis was really awesome for real estate. ppl were dying in thousands and leaving empty apartments behind, which their landlords would then rent at higher prices until only rich ppl could afford to live there :)
elaphaia said: also during the aids crisis landlords would shut their heat off in the winter knowing it would kill ppl so they could then rent 4 higher :-)
Reminder that the cishet dominated government didn’t just ignore the effects of HIV/AIDS because of how concentrated the deaths were in other communities because they hate us, but also because they materially benefited from it - because they owned most of the buildings, because our partners and other kin had no legal right to our possessions, and because they commodified and monopolized antiretrovirals to bilk us.
In “rent control leads to weird results” …
(Obviously, if people are purposely messing with the heat system, that’s horrible, but “people pay lots of money to rent apartments in nice regions” doesn’t seem like a giant problem.)
Like, I don’t think areas magically become gentrified as soon as you get rid of rent control. There almost certainly isn’t rent control in, say, Alison’s hometown, and yet it has not been gentrified. All gentrification seems to mean in areas that used to have more rent control is that space goes to whoever has the most money instead of whoever showed up first and has the most bureaucracymancy?
This. Rent control doesn’t prevent gentrification, it just sucks. Stockholm has total rent control, meaning that pensioners who can wait 20 years to get an apartment can have 60 m² in the most prestigious areas for 700€/month, and businesses move out and economic growth fails to happen because high-skilled workers can’t live anywhere. Helsinki has market rate rents so the equivalent might cost 1500€/mo but at least it’s available.
My favorite solution would be to recognize that existing rent control has de facto created property for the tenants, and formalize it as a bostadsrätt entitlement lasting, say, 10 years. Bostadsrätt basically means “whoever owns this may rent the apartment for the below-market rate specified here” and most importantly, it can be bought and sold. Now evicting BMR tenants without compensation is theft, but they can be bought out for a fair price and don’t need to desperately stick to the one place they found for really cheap.
For example, if someone is renting an apartment for $1000 but the market would pay $2000, their 10-year bostadsrätt is worth roughly $100 000. The landlord could buy it from them, effectively destroying it, and rent the place to someone paying the market rate, resulting in a fair transaction for all, instead of trying to find a sneaky way to evict them. This would be a huge windfall from landlords to rent-controlled tenats but landlords can easily take it because they themselves have reaped huge windfalls from the rise in rents. Plus opening the markets for new development would benefit the property owners as well, so basically the only ones who would really lose are those who can’t do the sneaky eviction tricks any more (it’s one thing to fight a court case against a poor family, and completely another thing to fight a court case against a poor family you’ve obviously stolen six digits of currency from).
In a twisted logic, assuming basic economic rationality, this might be enough to break the political coalition of property owners and rent-controlled tenants, eliminating the latter’s incentives to be hostile towards new development, and aligning them with the market rate tenants and tech industry instead. Result: rent markets become healthy, new development becomes possible, and instead of suffering unfair sneaky evictions rent controlled tenants get a lot of money and can choose between living in pricey areas or moving to less expensive ones and using the difference for something else.
(via ilzolende)
3 months ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower · 49,768 notes · source: frettful · .permalink
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