The political cost of an army of voters worried about housing insecurity is incomparably higher.
Can't you make them stop worrying by building enough housing that they believe the free market will give them affordable rents even without rent control?
This is different from a factory shutdown because there's much less of a natural cap on housing supply than on job supply. You can build four-story apartment buildings basically everywhere, modulo government interference (zoning, permits, etc.), and they'll work, so you can just build enough to pull down the supply/demand intersection to where people want it, that is, in a free market you can just build residential buildings and expect them to turn into housing. You can't just build a physical factory and expect it to turn into jobs.
There's a time asymmetry at play. I think it's inevitable specifically in those cities where costs are rising quickly and feelings of housing insecurity are acute--the same cities we normally discuss in the context of rent control. In that case you couldn't possibly build quickly enough to address the issue. And let's not ignore one of the primary reasons communities often find themselves in that situation--zoning and regulatory hurdles that limit supply, demanded by the very same electorate suffering from lack of supply, yet which isn't nearly as keen, if at all, at removing those hurdles.
Rent control is even on the table in cities like Chicago, which relatively speaking has been pro development. But for a state law prohibiting it, Chicago would now have rent control; and it seems likely that exceptions to that prohibition will pass the legislature. That goes to show that time asymmetry is problematic even without the scourge of single-family home NIMBYs.
Regarding the free trade analogy, the alternative I had in mind wasn't building factories, but moving to new locales and finding new jobs. Which is the de facto existing alternative for housing supply-constrained cities, which have been free all along to promote greater densification, but simply incapable of doing so to the extent necessary.
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Can't you make them stop worrying by building enough housing that they believe the free market will give them affordable rents even without rent control?
This is different from a factory shutdown because there's much less of a natural cap on housing supply than on job supply. You can build four-story apartment buildings basically everywhere, modulo government interference (zoning, permits, etc.), and they'll work, so you can just build enough to pull down the supply/demand intersection to where people want it, that is, in a free market you can just build residential buildings and expect them to turn into housing. You can't just build a physical factory and expect it to turn into jobs.
There's a time asymmetry at play. I think it's inevitable specifically in those cities where costs are rising quickly and feelings of housing insecurity are acute--the same cities we normally discuss in the context of rent control. In that case you couldn't possibly build quickly enough to address the issue. And let's not ignore one of the primary reasons communities often find themselves in that situation--zoning and regulatory hurdles that limit supply, demanded by the very same electorate suffering from lack of supply, yet which isn't nearly as keen, if at all, at removing those hurdles.
Rent control is even on the table in cities like Chicago, which relatively speaking has been pro development. But for a state law prohibiting it, Chicago would now have rent control; and it seems likely that exceptions to that prohibition will pass the legislature. That goes to show that time asymmetry is problematic even without the scourge of single-family home NIMBYs.
Regarding the free trade analogy, the alternative I had in mind wasn't building factories, but moving to new locales and finding new jobs. Which is the de facto existing alternative for housing supply-constrained cities, which have been free all along to promote greater densification, but simply incapable of doing so to the extent necessary.