price ceiling

Home price targeting

pnrj inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 29 JDN 2459973

One of the largest divides in opinion between economists and the general population concerns the question of rent control. While the general public mostly supports rent control (and often votes for it in referenda), economists almost universally oppose it. It’s hard to get a consensus among economists on almost anything, and yet here we have one; but people don’t seem to care.

Why? I think it’s because high rents are a genuine and serious problem, which economists have invested remarkably little effort in trying to solve. Housing prices are one of the chief drivers of long-term inflation, and with most people spending over a third of their income on housing, even relatively small increases in housing prices can cause a lot of suffering.

One thing we do know is that rent control does not work as a long-term solution. Maybe in response to some short-term shock it would make sense. Maybe you do it for awhile as you wait for better long-term solutions to take effect. But simply putting an arbitrary cap on prices will create shortages in the long run—and it is not a coincidence that cities with strict rent control have the worst housing shortages and the greatest rates of homelessness. Rent control doesn’t even do a good job of helping the people who need it most.

Price ceilings in general are just… not a good idea. If people are selling something at a price that you think is too high and you just insist that they aren’t allowed to, they don’t generally sell at a lower price—they just don’t sell at all. There are a few exceptions; in a very monopolistic market, a well-targeted price ceiling might actually work. And short-run housing supply is inelastic enough that rent control isn’t the worst kind of price ceiling. But as a general strategy, price ceilings just aren’t an effective way of making things cheaper.

This is why we so rarely use them as a policy intervention. When the Federal Reserve wants to achieve a certain interest rate on bonds, do they simply demand that people buy the bonds at that price? No. They adjust the supply of bonds in the market until the market price goes to what they want it to be.

Prices aren’t set in a vacuum by the fiat of evil corporations. They are an equilibrium outcome of a market system. There are things you can do to intervene and shift that equilibrium, but if you just outlaw certain prices, it will result in a new equilibrium—it won’t simply be the same amount sold at the new price you wanted.

Maybe some graphs would help explain this. In each graph, the red line is the demand and the blue line is the supply.

Here is what the market looks like before intervention: The price is $6. We’ll say that’s too high; people can’t afford it.

[no_intervention.png]

Now suppose we impose a price ceiling at $4 (the green line). You aren’t allowed to charge more than $4. What will happen? Companies will charge $4. But they will also produce and sell a smaller quantity than before.

Far better would be to increase the supply of the good, shifting to a new supply curve (the purple line). Then you would reduce the price and increase the amount of the good available.

[supply_intervention.png]

This is precisely what we do with government bonds when we want to raise interest rates. (A greater supply of bonds makes their prices lower, which makes their yields higher.) And when we want to lower interest rates, we do the opposite.

Of course, with bonds, it’s easy to control the supply; it’s all just numbers in a network. Increasing the supply of housing is a much greater undertaking; you actually need to build new housing. But ultimately, the only way to ensure that housing is available and affordable for everyone is in fact to build more housing.

There are various ways we might accomplish that; one of the simplest would be to simply relax zoning restrictions that make it difficult to build high-density housing in cities. Those are bad laws anyway; they only benefit a small number of people a little bit while harming a large number of people a lot. (The problem is that the people they benefit are the local homeowners who show up to city council meetings.)

But we could do much more. I propose that we really use interest-rate targeting as our model and introduce home price targeting. I want the federal government to exercise eminent domain and order the construction of new high-density housing in any city that has rents above a certain threshold—if you like, the same threshold you were thinking of setting the rent control at.

Is this an extreme solution? Perhaps. But housing affordability is an extreme problem. And I keep hearing from the left wing that economists aren’t willing to consider “radical enough” solutions to housing (by which they always seem to mean the tried-and-failed strategy of rent control). So here’s a radical solution for you. If cities refuse to build enough housing for their people, make them do it. Buy up and bulldoze their “lovely” “historic” suburban neighborhoods that are ludicrous wastes of land (and also environmentally damaging), and replace them with high-rise apartments. (Get rid of the golf courses while you’re at it.)

This would be expensive, of course; we have to pay to build all those new apartments. But hardly so expensive as living in a society where people can’t afford to live where they want.

In fact, estimates suggest that we are losing over one trillion dollars per year in unrealized productivity because people can’t afford to live in the highest-rent cities. Average income per worker in the US has been reduced by nearly $7000 per year because of high housing prices. So that’s the budget you should be comparing against. Keeping things as they are is like taxing our whole population about 9%. (And it’s probably regressive, so more than that for poor people.)

Would this destroy the “charm” of the city? I dunno, maybe a little. But if the only thing your city had going for it was some old houses that are clearly not an efficient use of space, that’s pretty sad. And it is quite possible to build a city at high density and have it still be beautiful and a major draw for tourists; Paris is a lot denser than far-less-picturesque Houston. (Though I’ll admit, Houston is far more affordable than Paris. It’s not just about density.) And is the “charm” of your city really worth making it so unaffordable that people can’t move there without risking becoming homeless?

There are a lot of details to be worked out: How serious must things get before the federal government steps in? (Wherever we draw the line, San Francisco is surely well past it.) It takes a long time to build houses and let prices adjust, so how do we account for that time-lag? Where does the money come from, actually? Debt? Taxes? But these could all be resolved.

Of course, it’s a pipe dream; we’re never going to implement this policy, because homeowners dread the idea of their home values going down (even though it would actually make their property taxes cheaper!). I’d even be willing to consider some kind of program that would let people refinance underwater mortgages to write off the lost equity, if that’s what it takes to actually build enough housing.

Because there is really only one thing that’s ever going to solve the (global!) housing crises:

Build more homes.

Why will no one listen to economists on rent control?

pnrj current events, inequality, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , ,

Sep 22 JDN 2458750

I am on the verge of planting my face into my desk, because California just implemented a statewide program of rent control. I understand the good intentions here; it is absolutely the case that housing in California is too expensive. There are castles in Spain cheaper than condos in California. But this is not the right solution. Indeed, it will almost certainly make the problem worse. Maybe housing prices won’t be too high; instead there simply won’t be enough homes and more people will live on the street. (It’s not a coincidence that the Bay Area has both some of the world’s tightest housing regulations and one of the highest rates of homelessness.)

There is some evidence that rent control can help keep tenants in their homes—but at the cost of reducing the overall housing supply. Most of the benefits of rent control actually fall upon the upper-middle-class, not the poor.

Price controls are in general a terrible way of intervening in the economy. Price controls are basically what destroyed Venezuela. In this case the ECON 101 argument is right: Put a cap on the price of something, and you will create a shortage of that thing. Always.

California makes this worse by including all sorts of additional regulations on housing construction. Some regulations are necessary—homes need to be safe to live in—but did we really need a “right to sunlight”? How important is “the feel of the city” compared to homelessness? Not every building needs its own parking! (That, at least, the state government seems to be beginning to understand.) And yes, we should be investing heavily in solar power, and rooftops are a decent place to put those solar panels; but you should be subsidizing solar panels, not mandating them and thereby adding the cost of solar panels to the price of every new building.

Of course, we can’t simply do nothing; we need to fix this housing crisis. But there are much better ways of doing so. Again the answer is to subsidize rather than regulate.

Here are some policy options for making housing more affordable:

  1. Give every person below a certain income threshold a one-time cash payment to help them pay for a down payment or first month’s rent. Gradually phase out the payment as their income increases in the same way as the Earned Income Tax Credit.
  2. Provide a subsidy for new housing construction, with larger subsidies for buildings with smaller, more affordable apartments.
  3. Directly pay for the construction of new public housing.
  4. Relax zoning regulations to make construction less expensive.
  5. Redistribute income from the rich to the poor using progressive taxes and transfer payments. Housing crises are always and everywhere a problem of inequality.

Some of these would cost money, yes; we would probably need to raise taxes to pay for them. But rent control has costs too. We are already paying these costs, but instead of paying them in the form of taxes that can be concentrated on the rich, we pay them in the form of a housing crisis that hurts the poor most of all.

The weirdest thing about all this is that any economist would agree.

Economists can be a contentious bunch: It has been said that if you ask five economists a question, you’ll get five answers—six if one is from Harvard. Yet the consensus among economists against rent control is absolutely overwhelming. Analyses of journal articles and polls of eminent economists suggest that over 90% of economists, regardless of their other views or their political leanings, agree that rent control is a bad idea.

This is a staggering result: There are economists who think that almost all taxes and regulations are fundamentally evil and should all be removed, and economists who think that we need radical, immediate government intervention to prevent a global climate catastrophe. But they all agree that rent control is a bad idea.

Economists differ in their views about legacy college admissions, corporate antitrust, wealth taxes, corporate social responsibility, equal pay for women, income taxes, ranked-choice voting, the distributional effects of monetary policy, the relation between health and economic growth, minimum wage, and healthcare spending. They disagree about whether Christmas is a good thing! But they all agree that rent control is a bad idea.

We’re not likely to ever get a consensus much better than this in any social science. The economic case against rent control is absolutely overwhelming. Why aren’t policymakers listening to us?

I really would like to know. It’s not that economists have ignored the problem of housing affordability. We have suggested a variety of other solutions that would obviously be better than rent control—in fact, I just did, earlier in this post. Many of them would require tax money, yes—do you want to fix this problem, or not?

Maybe that’s it: Maybe policymakers don’t really care about making housing affordable. If they did, they’d be willing to bear the cost of raising taxes on millionaires in order to build more apartments and keep people from being homeless. But they want to seem like they care about making housing affordable, because they know their constituents care. So they use a policy that seems to make housing more affordable, even though it doesn’t actually work, because that policy also doesn’t affect the government budget (at least not obviously or directly—of course it still does indirectly). They want the political support of the poor, who think this will help them; and they also want the political support of the rich, who refuse to pay a cent more in taxes.

But it really makes me wonder what we as economists are even really doing: If the evidence is this clear and the consensus is this overwhelming, and policymakers still ignore us—then why even bother?

Downsides of rent control

pnrj market failure, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , ,

May 13 JDN 2458252

One of the largest ideological divides between economists and the rest of the population concerns rent control.

Tent control is very popular among the general population, especially in California—with support hovering around 60% in Orange County, San Diego County, and across California in general. About 60% of people in the UK and over 50% in Ontario, Canada also support rent control.

Meanwhile, economists overwhelmingly oppose rent control: When evaluating the statement “A ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”, over 76% of economists agreed, and 16% agreed with qualifications. For the record, I would be an “agree with qualifications” as well (as they say, there are few one-handed economists).

There is evidence of some benefits of rent control, at least for the small number of people who can actually manage to stay in rent-controlled units. People who live in rent-controlled units are about 15% more likely to stay where they are, even in places as expensive as San Francisco, which could be considered a good thing (though I’m not convinced it always is; mobility is one of the key forces driving the dynamism of the US economy).

But there are winners and losers. Landlords whose properties are rent-controlled decreased their supply of housing by an average of 15%, via a combination of converting them to condos, removing them from the market, or demolishing the buildings outright. As a result, rent control increases average rent in a city by an average of 5%. One of the most effective ways to get out of rent control is to remove a building from the market entirely; this allows you to evict all of your tenants with very little notice, and is responsible for thousands of tenants being evicted every year in Los Angeles.

Rent control disincentivizes both new housing construction and the proper maintenance of existing housing. The quality of rent-controlled homes is systematically lower than the quality of other homes.

The benefits of rent control mainly fall upon the upper-middle class, not the poor. Rent control can make an area more racially diverse—but it benefits middle-class members of racial minorities, not poor members. Most of the benefits of rent control go to older families who have lived in a city for a long time—which makes them a transfer of wealth away from young people.

Cities such as Chicago without rent control systematically have lower rents, not higher; partly this is a cause, rather than an effect, as tenants are less likely to panic and demand rent control when rents are not high. But it’s also an effect, as rent control holds down the price in part of the market but ends up driving it up in the rest. Over 40% of San Francisco’s apartments are rent-controlled, and they have the highest rents in the world.

Rent control also contributes to the tendency toward building high-end luxury apartments; if you know that you will never be able to raise the rent on your existing buildings, and may end up being stuck with whatever rent you charge the first year on your new buildings, you have a strong reason to want to charge as much as possible the first year you build new apartments. Rent control also creates subtler distortions in the size and location of apartment construction. The effects of rent control even spill over into other housing markets, such as owner-occupied homes and mobile homes.
Because it locks people into place and reduces the construction of new homes near city centers, rent control increases commute times and carbon emissions. This is probably something we should especially point out to people in California, as the two things Californians hate most are environmental degradation and traffic congestion. (Then again, the third is high rent.) California is good at avoiding the first one—our GDP/carbon emission ratio is near the best in the US. The other two? Not so much.

Of course, simply removing rent control would not immediately solve the housing shortage; while it would probably have benefits in the long run, during the transition period a lot of people currently protected by rent control would lose their homes. Even in the long run, it would probably not be enough to actually make rent affordable in the largest coastal cities.

But it’s vital not to confuse “lower rent” with “rent control”; there are much, much better ways to reduce rent prices than simply enforcing arbitrary caps on them.

We have learned not to use price controls in other markets, but not housing for some reason. Think about the gasoline market, for example. High gas prices are very politically unpopular (though frankly I never quite understood why; it’s a tiny fraction of consumption expenditure, and if we ever want to make a dent in our carbon emissions we need to make our gas prices much higher), but imagine how ridiculous it would seem for a politician to propose simply making an arbitrary cap that says you aren’t allowed to sell gasoline for more than $2.50 per gallon in a particular city. The obvious outcome would be for most gas stations in that city to immediately close, and everyone to end up buying their gas at the new gas stations that spring up just outside the city limits charging $4.00 per gallon. This is basically what happens in the housing market: Rent-controlled apartments apartments are taken off the market, and the new housing that is built ends up even more expensive.

In a future post, I’ll discuss things we can do instead of rent control that would reliably make housing more affordable. Most of these would involve additional government spending; but there are two things I’d like to say about that. First, we are already spending this money, we just don’t see it, because it comes in the form of inefficiencies and market distortions instead of a direct expenditure. Second, do we really care about making housing affordable, or not? If we really care, we should be willing to spend money on it. If we aren’t willing to spend money on it, then we must not really care.