All Intensive Purposes

I wasn't the only one who disagreed with the thrust of Carol Lloyd's column last week about tenant protections in the Bay Area. Today's column gives more of a landlord's perspective, but from a fairness perspective, rather than thinking about how rent-control regulation makes housing more expensive for everyone. As New York’s Citizens Budget Commission put it, “The most fundamental criticism of rent regulation is that it perpetuates the very problem it was designed to address: a housing shortage.”

Lloyd writes:

If we could really generate enough money to support all the needy tenants in the city through collective taxes, that would be amazing. But how many people would that cover? How much money would that cost?

Two issues are confused here. Landlords are "taxed" right now, by being required to forego market rents. Setting fairness aside, the housing market should serve everyone better if the tenants were subsidized in an equal amount through some other form of support. But if you want housing to be cheaper, you need more of it. If still more subsidies are needed "to support all the needy tenants in the city," that's a separate question.

History shows that people don't pass taxes on themselves so easily.

Hey, if public policy is going to be about legislating goodies that someone else pays for, then I want a pony.