We are working on a brand new version of the game! If you want to stay informed, read our blog and register for our mailing list.
Bill: Freeing the Housing Industry Act
Details
Submitted by[?]: Kadima Beiteynu
Status[?]: passed
Votes: This is an ordinary bill. It requires more yes votes than no votes. This bill will not pass any sooner than the deadline.
Voting deadline: December 4415
Description[?]:
| Price caps never have, and never will work. Everywhere that has rent control, has insanely high rents. The classic rent-control lease lasts indefinitely, so once someone is in, they can stay for the rest of their life. (It's commonplace inside rent-controlled apartments to see cookers, radiators, and kitchen fittings that date back many decades because landlords just won't replace them, and tenants won't move out.) People can even sub-let their apartments or pass them on to next-of-kin which is why personal connections in the market are so important. That removes a huge chunk of available housing from the market. Demand for new housing remains the same, but now the supply of new housing is reduced. So prices everywhere else go up. Under rent control, landlords and property owners know not to create any new housing units that fall under rent control, because they won't be able to maximise their investment. So they build as few units as possible in that category. None of this stops the luxury real-estate developers, however. Luxury real estate developers love social housing policies because their developers are able to either fake the paperwork necessary to get around it or make one-off cash payments to the local council in lieu of building social units. The result is that developers build only high-end units for the luxury market, because there is no money in creating affordable housing if landlords can never raise the rent. Developers get rich. And rich people get all the best new housing. In turn, this magnifies an already bad situation for the not-rich: By definition, every luxury unit built is a more modest unit not being built. The problem was that it's rent control, not ownership control. Tenants aren't guaranteed their units forever and eventually all units age out of the rent control system, sometimes when buildings are sold or when the tenant on the lease moves out. At that point, these tenants are ejected back onto the free market — where rents are now hundreds or thousands of dollars higher than they're used to paying. They're totally unequipped to deal with "normal" housing prices, and they have zero equity in the housing they were living in. Rent control is a dangerous plague. It ruins lives and makes city life harder for everyone; except, that is, the rich. |
Proposals
Article 1
Proposal[?] to change Government policy on rent regulation
Old value:: The government sets a cap on housing rents.
Current: The government sets a cap on housing rents.
Proposed: The government does not regulate rents.
Debate
These messages have been posted to debate on this bill:
subscribe to this discussion - unsubscribeVoting
| Vote | Seats | ||
| yes |
Total Seats: 87 | ||
| no |
Total Seats: 33 | ||
| abstain | Total Seats: 0 |
| Random fact: Before choosing a nation, you may wish to research it first. For more information on the cultural backgrounds of the nations, please see the Cultural Protocols Index: http://forum.particracy.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=6365 |
| Random quote: "The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." - Ayn Rand |