Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/24/santa-monica-expands-highly-su.html
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This is how you do it. Unlike rent control, it doesn’t give landlords incentives to kick tenants out.
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This is great for the people it’s helping, but rent subsidies = welfare for landlords. We need rent control and decent public housing otherwise this is just padding the bottom line of the rentier class to take a few of the harsher edges off of a brutal and unsustainable housing policy.
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It’s great that none of the seniors receiving the subsidy became homeless, but… kind of a weak dataset from which to draw conclusions, no? Presumably the program currently supports 25-40 seniors, none of whom are homeless. A 3% increase in in the control group (seniors not receiving the subsidy) would mean at most one individual/family in the study group was protected. What was the margin of error, again?
Would be nice to at least mention what the overall rate of senior homelessness is, LAist. Right now I can’t even tell whether they mean it went from (for example) 10% to 13% or to 10.3%.
Great! More socialism…
[note sarcasm]
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The cheapest rent according to Zillow is $1150 for a small studio as far from the beach as possible.
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This is another method to use in addition to rent control.
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instead it gives landlords an incentive to raise everybody’s rent by $660
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Only if you believe these people could afford their apartments without subsidies, which is essentially saying they are gaming the system.
Rent control incentives landlords to make up the lost income in other ways, some much more harmful than rent increases.
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High land prices make housing unaffordable. They aren’t making any more land. There is a solution, though. Shift the taxes away from other things onto land. Everyone will get a tax cut except landowners, who will see the value of their land plummet, as they effectively become renters of the land because the tax on land rises to a level similiar to what renting the land would cost. You have effectively made all land cheap to buy, but with the revenues you collect, you can subsidize peoples’ housing costs. The more expensive land is in an area, the more money will be available to provide everyone with a subsidy to afford apartment/house rent. You could even do a kind of local Universal Basic Income with the money.
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If they were living in the apartments and paying their rent they were “affording” their apartments by definition. That doesn’t mean the rent was reasonable but it means they were somehow able to pay it. And indeed the bulk of any subsidies is likely to be captured by landlords, making their rental properties more valuable and raising housing prices in Santa Monica overall. An inconvenient and unfortunate truth.
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Rent protections are available in San Francisco but what ends up happening is that landlords work around them by tearing their whole building down, replacing it with luxury apartments, and pricing out the former tenants. There are some calls for public housing, but then the NIMBY outcries tend to put a halt to most of the effort since would-be neighbors worry about increased crime and a loss of property value.
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