Rental properties should not cost an arm and a leg. We need affordable housing!!! We need fair pricing.
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Entirely agree. I am making the most money I ever have, but I am also the brokest I have ever been!
2300/month for a 2 bed in Colorado. I want a family, but I can’t afford it.
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Rent control is a socialist policy that drives rental prices UP. Why? it limits the supply of housing because property owners can’t afford to maintain their properties, evict non paying tenants, etc, and then they respond by pulling properties off of the market, and reducing the supply of housing. When there’s more demand than supply, prices go up. Price controls are what caused Venezuela to experience famine – farmers couldn’t sell their crops at a profit and stopped producing crops.
Rents are high for a number of reasons: 10’s of millions of illegal immigrants flooding the nation, which are given government and NGO subsidized housing. Excessive building code and zoning restrictions. Monopolistic behavior of companies like Blackrock buying up entire neighborhoods. Foreign absentee ownership of property as “land banking”. Create a fair market that uses proper incentives to distribute a good for the correct group of people, and we’ll have ample affordable housing.
Historically, price controls in any form do not work and lead to more damaging economic consequences. The issues surrounding affordable housing can be handled through states by enacting policies that require a larger percentage of affordable units to be made available in any new developments. Also, reducing the red tape around zoning so more properties can be built would also help.
I mostly agree with you – except for the part about mandated affordable housing units. California is doing this right now. It is just another form of sneaky taxation; force the rest of the people in the development to subsidize those buying the affordable housing unit. Thus, driving up the price of housing for everybody else, and expanding the group of people that need affordable housing. The health insurance market is doing the same thing, and that’s why healthcare costs have gone up so much. You’ve got healthy people subsidizing the unhealthy ones.
Developers need to be able to build housing units which may be profitably sold at a price that those needing affordable housing can pay. Various market dislocations that i described previously create a building cost floor for developers that force them to sell at a higher price than people can pay, combined with market participants that shouldn’t be there – foreign buyers, major corporations, and illegal immigrants.