The city used to be called “The People’s Republic of Santa Monica” because of its supposed progressivism but now it’s a more bitter kind of joke. Listen to the city council meetings on KCRW and you’ll hear a bunch of wealthy white older people struggling to hide their Nimbyism behind a scrim of progressive jargon and appeals to 60s nostalgia. That this decision was made despite that culture is quite extraordinary.
They’re owed the security of a roof over their heads. Home ownership isn’t the only way to accomplish that, and it’s nearly as easy for a mortgage payer to find himself out on the street as it is for a rent payer.
There aren’t any “poor neighbourhoods” in Santa Monica. Maybe a run-down residential block here and there, but the town was rendered unaffordable to all but the most wealthy decades ago.
Fixed. We’ve seen what American housing has become in the years since Reagan took office: a speculative asset class for individual households rather than places to live in within a larger community. Ownership of something --especially absent regulation – does not automatically confer respect for those around one; American car culture alone should serve as proof of that.
In what way? When I lived in NYC people who got into rent-controlled apartments before the landlords significantly hobbled the system were envied by everyone. The landlords weren’t really suffering under the controls either, despite their complaints.
New York, and Manhattan in particular, has been in a declared or undeclared “housing emergency” since WWII, meaning that it’s always in short supply and therefore expensive and consequently lucrative to landlords and developers whether or not controls are in place.
Rent control is definitely a bandage solution to stanch an ever-bleeding injury. I’d rather see developers get incentivised for building more affordable multi-family housing units and landlords penalised more aggressively for not keeping their properties well maintained. But both those approaches also involve the bad ol’ state interfering in the “free” market and that’s not how it’s done in the Greatest Country on Earth.
