RI.I

u/Trevors_Pet_Swans here complains about people disagreeing with a couple of completely agreeable points.

The housing market is not perfectly competitive, it's monoplostically competitive, there is heterogeneity in the quality of houses and in their locations.

This is absolutely true. There is heterogeneity in the housing market.

In a Monopolistcally competitive market the equilibrium quantity traded is less than efficient, and in a Monopolistcally competitive market a price ceiling can reduce DWL.

Say a new builder sees prices rise and decides to build a new development (suburb or apartment it really makes no difference here). Given the attributes of the land they own, or buy, and the fact that once they own it and build, no-one can perfectly compete with that location it certainly could be that elasticity of demand for units on that location is such that they realize that instead of building 100 units (at a constant MC) and renting them for $1,000 each they can instead build 90 units and rent for an amount greater than $1,000 such that their profit increases.

a Monopolistcally competitive market a price ceiling can reduce DWL

But, so what. Can doesn't mean will. And it is highly likely that it won't precisely for the reason that we call it monopolistically competitive, heterogeneity. For me to even start to expect that a price ceiling is going to "fix" a monopolistically competitive market it needs to respond to all those same sources of heterogeneity that the "free market" is responding to. Show me a rent control policy that takes into consideration spatial, quality, temporal, and demand variables and we can start talking. Instead what we get is jurisdiction wide blanket rules on rent can't be more than $XXX or appreciate faster than XX%. I have no faith that any rent control proposal I have ever seen will lead us to an equilibrium that is actually closer to the "optimal equilibrium" than the "free market".

This is even before we take into consideration that the fundamental problem is that current policy (that sure maybe it was responding to other perceived market failures and thus could theoretically have moved us to an "optimal equilibrium" if the policies themselves were optimal) makes even building up to the monopolistically competitive equilibrium of 90 units illegal.

RI.II

I recently posited a best way to troll this sub one thing that I left out is that it often is also the troll trolling themselves. One can note that in this thread, that presumably led Trevors_Pet_Swans to come to the brutalist housing block in a tizy, linked in RI.I , to complain that "no one understands what I really mean", they never once mentioned market power or monopolistic competition, and only in an after the fact edit asserted "fun fact not all markets are perfectly competitive". So, on to what Trevors_Pet_Swans actually said.

I'm not really convinced by the whole free market "rent goes up-> more aparentments built" argument, since it doesn't seem to be happening all that much in some places.

because that is generally illegal without significant payments to the appropriate politicians and planning board members.

To me higher rents seem to encourage NIMBYism and rent seeking by landowners.

You have the causality wrong. NIMBYism and rent seeking by property owners leads to the restrictions on buildings that then lead to higher rents as demand grows and can not be met by new quantity supplied.

RI.III

Now we get to the bad (not merely insufficient) RI by u/derleth that spurred all of this nonsense

The initial comment being RI'd was

Plus when demand goes up, everyone's rent goes up, through no fault of their own; and the landlord takes the increase as profit. If rental property was owned by the tenants and they hired a property manager with a set salary, rent wouldn't be subject to market forces. Rent should be construction costs maintenance management taxes.

The fundamental problem with this proposal is that, on its face, it is merely a transfer of returns and economic rents from the current property owner to the new property owner and, on its face, addresses approximately nothing to do with any fundamental problem. As an obvious secondary effect it would destroy the market for rental properties, so fuck the credit constrained I guess.

It really doesn't, on its face, have the direct effects that either derleth or u/RanDomino5 seem to expect and RanDomino5's proposal certainly needs to be fleshed out and thought through a bit more.

bonus RI.IV

The lack of a true market for RIs leads me to stop here instead of moving on to the comments to derleth's post, both in agreement and disagreement, a significant majority of which are completely RIable. The mere joy of a Sufficient is Insufficient to wade through all of that.