Fwd: Re: Rent Contol: Open-and-Shut Case?

[Brad De Long]

>By the late 1960s (around the same time as
>People's Park, etc.) many people in Berkeley were fed up with the
>destruction of Berkeley's architectural heritage, and they revolted.  In
>1970, an ordinance was passed that effectively banned demolition of
>residential property and set off a move to downzone (that is, reduce the
>allowable densities on residential lots) great swaths of Berkeley.
>
>The consequence?  from a peak of over a thousand new units a year in the
>1960s, Berkeley's housing unit production virtually fell off a cliff:  a
>handful of new units each year on average throughout the 1970s.  Small
>wonder then that rent control was passed by the voters in 1979 or 1980.
>
>So Krugman's article is easily found annoying and wrong by virtue of being
>ahistorical.  High rents are usually a pre-existing condition for rent
>control....

Meaning that if you are going to control quantities, you might as 
well control prices too? Perhaps, but surely the theory of the 
second-best is more complicated than that...


>
>And, as economist/planner  David Dowall of UC Berkeley has shown in a 1984
>book on the Bay Area, land use controls restricting residential densities
>REGIONALLY compound the housing shortage here as well as exacerbate our
>legendary traffic commutes.  The commutes ruin our air quality (which is
>still lovely, but the Bay Area has been a nonattainment area under the Clean
>Air Act since 1998 -- during the recession in the early 1990s, our region
>actually became an attainment area, but lost it when the boom took off)...

They're not *his* legendary traffic commutes. They are the legendary 
traffic commutes by the people who live in Antioch or Vallejo because 
Berkeley local government insists on remaining a low-density area...

Brad DeLong
-- 

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
"Now 'in the long run' this [way of summarizing the quantity theory 
of money] is probably true.... But this long run is a misleading 
guide to current affairs. **In the long run** we are all dead. 
Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in 
tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long 
past the ocean is flat again."

 
--J.M. Keynes
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
J. Bradford De Long; Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley;
Co-Editor, Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Dept. of Economics, U.C. Berkeley, #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
(510) 643-4027; (925) 283-2709 phones
(510) 642-6615; (925) 283-3897 faxes
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/
<delong at econ.berkeley.edu>