Perhaps if the new land lord were able to kick out tenants and raise rents, then the neighborhood quality would increase given that most of the gangsters would have to actual work to afford the rent?

Many people would argue that the very thing you're bitching about--bad neighborhoods--is the direct result of rent control. So getting rid of rent control would likely result in better neighborhoods.

The fact of the matter is there are millions of people who desire to live in this "wonderful" city of Los Angeles. Strong demand results in increasing prices.

Imagine if the majority of available residences were under rent control. There would be an immediate shortage of available units and the non-rent control units would be much higher priced than before. This system would result in many people going without a home so that a lucky few can enjoy cheap rent.

It doesn't sound like you understand the economics of the situation.

Also, the thought that everyone should own their own home is a uniquely American concept. Only in America does the government cut so many breaks to homeowners. You are not entitled to home ownership.

Do you think everyone should be able to afford to live in California? Ok, well if everyone did move here, what would ensure there were enough homes to go around? Right now, that natural mechanism is price, allocating homes to the person that pays the most for them. This ensures natural efficiency so that if you really want the home, you can get it, you just have to earn it.

Do you want to earn your place to live or do you expect the government to give it to you under the short-sighted scheme of rent control? Rent control is great, for the winners, not so much for the losers since there will never be enough homes to go around. Ask yourself, who doesn't want to live in a rent controlled home in Southern California?

Thanks for the compliment, torrmoz.

What's your answer?

RF:

First of all, home ownership has nothing to do with this issue. You are building a Wicker Man.

Secondly, according to a standard family budget, rent is supposed to total 25 percent of your net income. For most people in LA, rent is already more than half, if not two-thirds of their income.

It is not only "gang-bangers" who have trouble paying 1500 a month for rent (or the free-thinkers). It is the backbone of the community. If only rich people can afford to live in Los Angeles, who is going to perform the lower-wage jobs in the community? This is a sprawling megalopolis. We can't just bus them in like Bel Air can.

Or did you want to start paying the people who clean your toilets and cook your Big Macs a living wage?

Forget Mexico, can we put a border fence up seperating California from the rest of the country?!

This post has been what I have been saying to everyone I know for the past 10 years. This is why LAist.com rocks.

Oh my god those comments are awesome! But yes, he's a moron. Rent control is for people like me and my mother who don't own homes. My mom moved here in 1971. I was born here in WONDERFUL L.A. in 1980. Live in echo park/silverklake areas. Had to move 3 times in 4 years recently. Saw my rent go from $625(my share of rent) per month for a giant 3 story 3 bedroom apartment to a 2 bedroom that is a 1/5 the size for $787(my share) a month. Its fucked up. The problem ARE the people who move here who dont understand that it is not only comepletely unreasonable to pay $1,200 for a studio in Silverlake but it was unthinkable just 5 years ago.

Rent control is a must for L.A. It keeps greedy landlords in check. Most people who are really benefitting from extreme low rents are the elderly or migrant families who have lived in L.A. for over 10 years anyway.

You think I, personally, want everyone to pay 75% of their income for rent?

Rent isn't supposed to be any % of your budget. That's an ideal to help you decide what kind of place you can afford. Under a free market, rent has nothing to do with your budget, instead it has to do with how many people want to rent a place, which is why LA has such high prices: everyone wants to live here.

The best idea was from caliking01 (but clearly, I'm a moron who has millions of dollars and isn't affected by high rent prices): put a fence around California to keep people from moving here. It would reduce demand and reduce prices. But I think it's pretty easy to see that no one would support that idea since it doesn't fit the American dream.

I'd like to have my cake and eat it too, but the reality is that with so many people wanting to live in LA, there isn't enough space for them all. Therefore, prices increase to ensure that those that want to live here the most can pay for it. How else would you decide who can come and who can't?

Remember: there is no free lunch. Someone is paying for the real cost of my rent controlled home. Part is paid by the government through subsidies to developers, which is in turn paid by you and me through taxes, the rest is implicitly paid by those who didn't win the cheap-rent lottery.

By the way, most of the artistic communities were cheap areas to live because no one wanted to live there. Thanks to the transformation given by those artists, people desire those communities more, which increases prices, no matter how much we hate it.

You've all done a great job of mentioning how great rent control can be, but you haven't even answered the one question I asked throughout my discussion: how do you decide who gets to rent a place when price isn't the deciding factor?

Responding to RERational, first, I guess I can say I know the answer to my parenthetical aside. That said, I'd like to clarify a couple of things.

First, it sounds like you're not actually familiar with Echo Park, or with what rents in LA are actually like. I don't want to sound deliberatley insulting, but only total ignorance about the reality of rent in LA could lead you to believe that Echo park is a cheap neighborhood.
the apartment in Echo park wasn't cheap by any standards. When she (my girlf) moved there, it was consistent with standard city rents, which is to say, already huge.

An LA Times article from 2006 has this to say:

*Average rents in the city have jumped 82% in the last 10 years, to $1,750 a month, according to surveys of large properties by RealFacts, a Bay Area real estate consulting firm. In pockets like Echo Park, they've more than doubled*

Note that increase is greater than inflation, and greater than any increase in wages (which are largely stagnant).

Also, my point, and I'm sorry if I wasn't clearer, is that despite the fact that Echo Park remains a shady, dangerous, run down place, neighborhood rental prices have skyrocketed and have now priced poor and even some middle class people out of the neighborhood. In other words, Gentrification isn't transforming the neighborhood, it's making it even worse. That's not reasonable by any standard.

Word.

Not to be a dick, but still, no one answers the question of how to allocate rent controlled places fairly.

I get it: it sucks rent is going up, and it sucks that your neighborhood is still ghetto (it must be easier to pay rent hustling than it is creating art). But what do you want to do about it? The status quo works but barely (even with rent control), so what's your long term solution?

By the way, please stop attacking me personally and instead please attack my points. I live in LA, so it's not that I don't experience rent increases. I'm not a republican, so stop trying to categorize me and write off my argument. Grow up already and argue the matter at hand.

Since you asked, my Long Term(tm) solution would include:

1) A tremendous reform of the way property taxes are collected. I'm a LEFT LEFT liberal but even I have some serious problems with property taxes. (NOTE - I don't own property.) Currently, it's a nightmare, essentially a massive regressive tax that rewards old money and punishes new property owners. Old, large, extremely valuable places that have not changed owners in many long years pay tiny amounts, while new homeowners pay ridiculous tax rates on tiny properties. I obviously think properties generating income for owners should be taxed, but they should be taxed based on the income being generated.

2) This would be far less popular with homeowners but f' em, I would regulate property ownership the way we used to regulate the ownership of media entities, and I'd work especially hard to end the practice of flipping. Property shouldn't be treated like baseball cards or diamonds. It's a damned neccesity and ought to be regulated like one.

A) I'd place severe limits on how property is exchanged between owners.

B) I would limit the number of properties any one person can own, and also any business entitiy could own.

C) I would mandate a minimum period of ownership before property could be sold again, say, 3 years.

Reigning in the METOO!!! impulse would do a lot to prevent future bubbles from wrecking the economy, and I think would protect not only renters, but property owners as well.

I don't think you get it. Landlords, property owners, run a business. They engage in exchange (money for shelter) in order to stay in business and ideally make a profit. Thus, they are allowed to set whatever prices they like. How would you like the government setting the price of your business?

You use the example, "Proposal Aims to replace your sweet Graphic Design Job with minimum wage position at Wal*Mart" to drive your point home.

What if the government dictated what prices you sold your sweet graphic designs for? What if it was less than you wanted in order to keep making sweet graphic designs? Would you continue to make the best possible graphic designs? Would you bother making them at all?

The fact is, I've lived in Los Angeles for 4.5 years, never in a rent-controlled apartment, and I've never faced more than a 4% increase in rent. I've also never paid more than $700 a month for a place to live. And I haven't live in squalor. In fact, I currently live in a sweet loft in the rapidly gentrifying Downtown and have yet to face a rent increase although I've been here for almost 2 years. And to clarify, it is not rent controlled.

So why is my greedy landlord not driving me out or raising my rent 200% even though since I've moved here we've gained a super nice Ralphs right down the street, a multiplicity of restaurants and bars have opened up, and Johnny Depp has bought two condos across the street? I'm sure a price increase will come eventually, but I knew that coming in, it's one of the risks of renting!

I find it ironic in your spiel about property tax reform that you say, "Old, large, extremely valuable places that have not changed owners in many long years pay tiny amounts, while new homeowners pay ridiculous tax rates on tiny properties."

Which is essentially what rent control is. People site on very valuable places and pay a tiny amount of what it's worth, which effs up the market and makes people renting new places have to pay ridiculous rents on tiny apartments.

Ross, I think you're on the right approach in attempting to limit the liquidity of property, which prevents people from making a quick buck on potentially over valued property.

As one who respects the natural way of things, I think those kind of guidelines would help guide a free market to a better solution for all.

You know as well as I do, you can't resist nature, including the invisible hand of the free market.

Which is essentially what rent control is. People site on very valuable places and pay a tiny amount of what it's worth, which effs up the market and makes people renting new places have to pay ridiculous rents on tiny apartments.

Property prices don't reflect actual "worth" any more than the price of one of those stupid Death of Superman comics reflects the "worth" of that horrible storyline. The housing bubble should have taught us that. What "effs" up the market is people trading homes like baseball cards and artifically inflating the cost of real estate beyond what anyone who isn't rich can afford.

If wages aren't going up, if jobs are stagnant, if people are paying more for gas, food and so forth, then why should they be royally F'd in the A because their landlord can suddenly get a million dollars to kick them out on their ass? Especially if we know that, as soon as the market is saturated, prices are gonna crash and take the economy with it?

It's beyond ridiculous that a house in the middle of a gang turf battle should sell for 700,000 dollars. No matter what your opinion of Gentrification is, that's the cart leading the horse. The skyrocketing prices are supposed to happen AFTER then neighborhood gets cleaned up, not before. What's happened in LA reflects nothing more than an obscene get rich quick scam and the millions of people upended by it.

So yes, I'd absolutely place some limits on how property is owned and under what circumstances property can be sold. I'm not talking about nationalizing the real estate industry, but allowing something as blisteringly important as home and living space to be dictated by the hysterical caprice of the (increasingly tiny) trading market is economically suicidal. And once again, has nothing whatsoever to do with actual so-called "worth."

And I don't see a contradiction between that, supporting rent control, and supporting a review of how property taxes are collected. Though I admit I have many contradictions. I collect and trade them. It's fun!

Does everyone deserve a place to live?

Maybe it makes me a commie pinko, but yes. In a society as rich as ours, working families deserve a roof over their heads, not to end up homeless.

If that is too altruistic for you, poor people with rent due and a hungry family can get desperate. Desperation = crime. Monies going to rent instead of medical help = contagious diseases that can be spread to you.

You asked how we should dole out the limited rent-controlled apartments. By the same laws of fairness that anyone in a deli or waiting for an elevator knows: first come, first serve.

My problem with rent-control (and I realize this is personal and cannot be extrapolated to the general population of LA) is that my landlord has no desire to retain me as a tenant for longer than my original one-year lease. If every unit in my complex had a new tenant every year, the benefit of rent control would be completely inapplicable because you can raise rents higher between tenants.

I think that's true. In my case I was in a non rent controlled apartment in Hollywood, but kept low rent, with no more than a 3% increase per year (came about to about $25 more a year) for 3 years. What was amazing is that when I did eventually move (much do the dismay of my landlord), the apartment went on the market for about $400 more than I was paying. The landlord had chosen to keep my rent "artificially" low in order to keep me as a tenant, because I paid rent on time, didn't bother anyone, and was generally just a good tenant. Each new tenant represents a new risk for a landlord, so there are market incentives for them to keep good tenants around.

The landlord had chosen to keep my rent "artificially" low in order to keep me as a tenant, because I paid rent on time, didn't bother anyone, and was generally just a good tenant. Each new tenant represents a new risk for a landlord, so there are market incentives for them to keep good tenants around.

I agree that with rent control, the incentive for keeping a tenant is lowered because the value of the rent-increase from getting a new one is so high. Finding a good tenant is an undesirable process and expensive process, most landlords would rather keep good tenants forever and let the money just come in.

Thats why there are laws against bullying tenants out of rent-controlled units, but I'm discovering that they don't really work - the bullying still happens and makes life miserable if you stay. But I'm not moving. I barely survived the last apartment hunt and move with my sanity - the housing glut that seems to be affecting the rest of the country seems to have skipped LA.

I'd Like to introduce you to my good friend John Maynard Keynes. I think he might have a tad disagreement with that point.

LOL. Clearly I don't subscribe to Keynesian economics. I'm more of a Milton Friedman guy.