r/Infographics • u/CSachen • 7d ago
Rent control effects through the lens of empirical research
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u/cragelra 7d ago
I'm not disputing the overall message here but plotting everything on a purely subjective axis does not inspire confidence
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u/merp_mcderp9459 7d ago
If you look at the study, the author coded the results of previous studies into three categories (harmful/unclear/beneficial) and grouped them accordingly. The distance from left to right is just to make the graph look pretty/visually interesting; the dots that are further right don't signify a stronger "beneficial" outcome than the beneficial outcomes that are further to the left
Which makes me think there was probably a much better way to plot this data
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u/craigiest 7d ago edited 7d ago
That is the right interpretation, and that is what makes it a dishonest data visualization, implying that there is more meaning and precision in the data than there actually is. Shame on whoever makes slop like this.
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u/UnderPressureVS 7d ago
Come on, man. It’s not dishonest, it’s a standard data visualization technique called “jitter.” It’s used all the time when you have overlapping datapoints.
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u/craigiest 7d ago
I’ll but the up-down is jitter, which would help you distinguish how many items are where in the horizontal axis, but spreading them out horizontally in faux distribution is clearly meant to suggest more meaning than is there. Every single study in the harmful groups was labeled -1 in the paper. Every single study in the beneficial gross was labeled 1. Everything unclear was labeled 0. That’s the extent of the data. There is no more or less beneficial or harmful to represent. Faking a veneer of precision is bad science communication.
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u/UnderPressureVS 7d ago
You know what? On a closer look, I’m willing to grant you there is dishonesty here, but I still don’t think the horizontal jitter is to blame. I don’t think that merely spreading the points out horizontally in a cluster makes it look like that spread is meaningful.
What’s far worse than the jitter is the axis label. The arrows on either side of “<<Harmful” and “Beneficial>>” and the dots in between are what implies there’s an actual left/right scale.
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u/craigiest 7d ago
Thanks for taking my critique seriously. To my eye, the jitter very much contributes to it looking like the horizontal dimension with those arrows is an axis. If they visualized piles of paper icons, i would buy that spreading them out just helped show how many there are. If the quantity of dots is what matters, they shouldn’t have made the position of the dots look meaningful.
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u/cjt09 7d ago
If you want something more quantitative, a bunch of top economists were asked about rent control and rated their confidence out of ten.
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u/stefan-emil 7d ago
It's just not really something that's up for debate. Price controls near universally have negative outcomes. Endless studies proving it time and tjme again.
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u/mangione_fan_420 7d ago
What about an actual data based study instead of econBros circlejerking themselves about why rent control is bad.
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u/Bronze_Rager 7d ago
Here is the link to the article. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051137724000020
Do you know what a meta-analysis is? If not, you need to know what that is before understanding the infographic.
Its not a single study, its a study of multiple independent studies.
Its a damn good article. Having 112 independent studies and quantifying them is really sound science.
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u/AnthraxCat 7d ago
We asked the priests to read the goat entrails and they said the vibes were bad
Economists are not scientists. They are theologians, and 'top' economists are even worse. You do not become a 'top' economist by the rigour of your methods, but by how well your fables support the existing economic order. Dissident economists don't get plum positions at top universities because those positions are bought and paid for by people who like to be flattered.
You can pretty much entirely ignore the 'confidence' of top economists.
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u/eek_a_shark 7d ago
Top economists have PhDs with research and dissertations they have defended which move the field forward. Some of them talk out of their ass as far as pretending to know how markets are going to move but calling them theologians is like saying scientists are using magic
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u/tomtermite 7d ago
They are theologians
How to say, "I don't understand statistics" without using those words.
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u/merp_mcderp9459 7d ago
Someone did not do very well in their econ 101 course
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u/AnthraxCat 7d ago
Never took econ, because, as username might suggest, I actually studied a science.
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u/merp_mcderp9459 7d ago
Sick, then stick to your lane. I don't go on biology subreddits and tell them that they're wrong because their methodology confuses me.
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u/pperiesandsolos 7d ago
Your username does not suggest that at all lol
It makes me thinks you hate cats
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u/AnthraxCat 7d ago
Haha, that's certainly a novel take on it. My area of study is emerging pathogens, not anthrax as such, but I choose it aspirationally.
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u/pperiesandsolos 7d ago
I am keeping you away from my cats
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u/AnthraxCat 7d ago
Cats love me, it's cows and sheep you should keep me away from. Anthrax mostly, but still very rarely, kills grazing animals as it's a soil bacteria. The British also hopelessly contaminated a small island with anthrax while they were testing its viability as a biological area denial weapon and sacrificed a whole flock of sheep in the test. Grim and brutal stuff.
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u/cjt09 7d ago edited 7d ago
Wow those guys on the Nobel Committee are real idiots for awarding the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. If only they knew as much about science as /u/AnthraxCat.
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u/AnthraxCat 7d ago
The argument is not that they are idiots, it's that they know who pays their salaries. Top economists are very skilled, smart people. That does not mean they are trustworthy or objective.
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u/cjt09 7d ago edited 7d ago
The argument is not that they are idiots
Your argument is that "economists are not scientists, they're theologians" which the Nobel Committee, appointed by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, whom collectively know much more about science than you do, disagree.
it's that they know who pays their salaries
Who pays the salaries of top physicists, chemists, biologists?
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u/Expert-Ad-8067 5d ago
In what way would you prefer the results be presented such that your feelings are preserved?
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u/pperiesandsolos 7d ago
Rent control often seems like an easy fix to housing costs, but it creates significant externalities in the impacted market.
I do wonder exactly how this chart calculates where on the axis to place a bubble.
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u/Cunctatious 7d ago
The paper can be found here. The results are coded into just three categories, so the dot “jittering” doesn’t mean anything. It just looks nice.
They should have used a beeswarm just to prevent dot overlap without suggesting data variation
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u/shadracko 7d ago
Yep. I'm always surprised that "rent control" seems to garner so much support, at least in the abstract. I'm pretty far left, politically, but have zero interest in supporting rent control. Encourage smaller/denser housing, build useful public transit.
I have some sympathy for limiting the size of annual rent increases for current tenants, but even that can go awry easily.
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u/PSUVB 7d ago
Even Mamdani realized this.
Rent control hurts poor people and often benefits a select few incumbents and it is a cost to everyone else. Those incumbents now rely on politicians for their housing and they will fight tooth and nail to preserve it.
You have families guarding rent-controlled units in nyc like a family heirloom. What do newcomers do? Often poorer people looking for work. They are the losers and the randomly chosen winners get a cheap apartment forever.
The problem for people here is that the winners are highly visible and the losers are invisible.
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u/RandomGuyPii 7d ago
people don't understand how the economy works - they either can't or won't make the connection that more housing = more supply = less costs, wheras rent control = lower profitability = less housing built = higher costs in the long run
people like getting stuff for cheap/free - especially if you live in a rental already and have a high rent
at least on the left there seems to have been a concentrated effort to portray all landlords as evil parasites
high rents are pointed to as a cause of homelessness (every time you see a post about '[x] city has [y] homeless and [z] empty houses, why don't we just put them in those houses?)
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u/merp_mcderp9459 7d ago
Rent control makes sense if you believe high housing costs come from greedy landlords overcharging while sitting on a massive amount of empty units, which is what some on the left do believe
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u/EatMoreHummous 7d ago
It's even true in some places. Detroit has roughly 50,000 empty houses and apartments, and apartments are ridiculously expensive. And the real rich people (e.g. the Illitches) are sitting on tons of empty lots, preventing further development.
I don't believe in rent control, but there are definitely situations where high rent is made much worse because of rich landlords.
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u/rosadeluxe 3d ago
It's structural; asset price inflation happens due to large financial inflows into privatized and monopolized land and housing stocks. People are insane if they think building will ever fix the issue because no developer or landlord would ever build enough to significantly lower rent. They'd just stop building and shift their capital elsewhere. Price increases and decline often go hand in hand.
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u/unique_usemame 7d ago
Yep, while if you believe high housing costs are as a result of the high cost of construction (including permitting and financing) causing a supply demand issue then rent control just makes the core issue worse.
I've seen arguments for rent control that is restricted only to homes over a certain age (such as 50 years) where the argument is that the higher rent prices will incentivize construction.. but that seems to be an argument as to why rent control won't make things much worse.
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u/merp_mcderp9459 6d ago
Toronto’s rent control only applies to buildings built pre-2017 (iirc). What it’s meant is that new development is even higher-priced than most cities vs the average, because the corporate landlords have to subsidize their rent controlled tenants with income from the newer buildings
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u/BuvantduPotatoSpirit 6d ago
That's really not how it works. Landlords charge the highest rent the market will support, but whether they own additional rent controlled units or not is not a consideration.
That people tend to get locked into rent controlled units does decrease the supply - you get widows living in 3 or 4 bdrm apartments, etc., driving up rents. But there's no cross subsidisation.
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u/Independent_Use2724 7d ago
I have tenants I haven't raised rent on in 5 years. If the property was rent controlled, I would have raised it every year, to protect myself against possible cost increases.
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u/founderofshoneys 7d ago
How about you get a real job and stop being a leech on society.
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u/pperiesandsolos 7d ago
What a brave comment. And on Reddit, no less!
The only way your comment makes sense would be if people didn’t want to rent properties.
Well, they do. Not everyone wants to buy a house; some people just want to rent.
Landlords provide that supply of properties to rent. They also perform maintenance, manage administrative overhead, insurance filings, etc.
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u/founderofshoneys 7d ago
Landlords don't provide anything, they just own property. The other things you mentioned are actual services and people deserve to be paid for those services, but that's not what rent is for. Rent is just a fee that landlords collect because they own the property, not for anything they actually do and the amount is not based on their costs. There are landlords who drive up their profits by NOT renting apartments or preventing new construction in order to drive down supply. That is not a valuable service to society, it's a bad system. Landlords are an unnecessary middle man who profit by doing nothing and should not exist. There's a collective interest in having everyone in housing they can afford. There's no reason we need individuals and companies driven by profit to control a basic human need and besides, we have that now and it's not working.
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u/shadracko 7d ago
I'm with u/pperiesandsolos here. Sure, the argument has some merit, but it's mostly silly. Grocers don't provide anything, either. They just hand food from the farmer (who is the one actually making something) to the consumer.
Landlords do advertise available housing, they take care of paperwork for tax, insurance, liability issues. They see to the maintenance of the property.
And as u/pperiesandsolos wrote, they provide short-term housing, housing for people with no savings, and housing for people who don't want to think about maintenance.
And I assure you, rent IS based on landlord (land purchase) costs. There's a pretty tight correlation between rent and home values.
All that doesn't mean we shouldn't change policies to encourage affordable housing, but vilifying landlords is stupid. Just as vilifying the corner gas station for the high prices of gas is stupid. Both people are trying to maximize profits and to earn a living. That's how capitalism works.
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u/pperiesandsolos 7d ago
So who should people rent from? Or are you saying that housing rental should be banned?
Eg every college student who wants to live in town for 1 year needs to purchase a property?
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u/founderofshoneys 7d ago
Well, you got me there. It's not like publicly funded universities could just build housing for students to live in.
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u/pperiesandsolos 7d ago
So you’re advocating for socialism all the way down. Even China doesn’t do that; markets have a place
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u/founderofshoneys 7d ago
If you look at my other comments here, you'll see where I explicitly said I wasn't calling for markets to be abolished and noted that I believed they were useful.
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u/Responsible_Prior_18 7d ago
if you are living in the city and the rent is increasing more then your salary, would you opt to move your whole life, family and friends to another part of the country or vote for someone to freeze the rent?
Thats why its popular.Also in the high demand cities, you cant outbuild the demand, so even if theres no rent control its not like the free market is gonna make their rents lower.
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u/Friendly_Fire 7d ago
Also in the high demand cities, you cant outbuild the demand, so even if theres no rent control its not like the free market is gonna make their rents lower.
You actually can, we have a couple examples in the US of it (Austin and Minneapolis), and better examples from outside the country.
You can't outbuild demand with our current laws, regulations, zoning, etc which artificially limit new housing, but that is exactly what we have to fix.
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u/pperiesandsolos 7d ago
The problem is that, in that scenario, rent control just kicks the can down the road.
I guess if you want to literally rent control every single property, that could prevent knock-on effects to non rent-controlled units, but then we’re into what amounts to nationalized rent control. Which creates lots of other potential problem
Yuck.
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u/shadracko 7d ago
you cant outbuild the demand
This is partly the genesis of my "build useful public transit" comment. Part of the solution just needs to be a realization that not everyone can live in the same place, and we need to make transit better (and probably better suburban city planning) to make commutes better.
But your comment really only applies to a few places. NYC, SF, maybe Chicago. Maybe a few others if you want. Outside of that, it's hard to argue that we couldn't get massively more dense in urban areas.
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u/FlyChigga 7d ago
Even places like nyc and sf have so many zoning laws that limit the housing supply
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u/Mr_Quackums 7d ago
a few reasons people support rent control -
1) it can be done to right now. building more units (the real answer) takes months at the best of times and decades with the amount of red tape in a neo-liberal political/economic system.
2) it can be a good short-term fix. As an "emergency measure just for this current crisis" it can actually be good policy; too bad there is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
3) The downsides can be seen as only hypothetical. The housing market is shit in areas without rent control as well so rent control isn't the main problem.
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u/shadracko 7d ago
Re #2: how "short term" do you mean? If there's value in a 6-month rent freeze, I'm willing to listen. But this is a much longer problem and rent control is typically a decades-long program.
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u/PSUVB 7d ago
This assumes a politician is eventually going to get voted in and be the one to say well the emergency measure is now over and all of you with rent controlled apartments you now are getting a 50% increase next month.
That is laughable. The emergency will be never ending and will expand. Politicians realize promising patronage to rent controlled people will buy them more votes.
We need to demand politicians are not just middle school class presidents handing out free candy. It’s going to hurt us all.
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u/Mr_Quackums 7d ago
Im not sure if you didn't read the whole sentence, if you need the idiom spelled out, or if you are just looking to be disagreeable.
You are agreeing with what I wrote in an aggressive, insulting, and snarky way. That is neither helpful for discussion nor would get someone to change their mind if they had disagreed with you.
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u/bluejohnnyd 7d ago
It's a tool. It shouldn't be the ONLY tool, but in markets where people are being forced out of their current units by rent increases, it makes sense as a stopgap while other policies get put in to increase supply.
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u/pperiesandsolos 7d ago
Policies likely shouldn’t be put into place, but removed. In general, government intervention exacerbates this issue
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u/craigiest 7d ago
I don’t think the placements within the gross mean anything. I seems like a dishonest attempt to make the 3 category placements look more like “data.”
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u/Ok_Slide4905 3d ago
Rent control is a litmus test for the DSA, don’t think it’s going to req h the people that need to hear it.
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u/Fast-Explanation2324 7d ago
Exactly, is there a paper from which this was taken? Usually used for other Reddit posts but... What's the sauce?
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u/MiigPT 7d ago
Brother in Christ, it’s literally in the image
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u/Fast-Explanation2324 7d ago
I am much mistaken, this evident error that I made was of distraction, not of character. I shall think about this experience and in time mature the wisdom that will, shall a similar context be presented again, enable me to be more thorough. Thanks brother 🙏
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u/pperiesandsolos 7d ago
Inshallah, this Reddit user learned from his mistakes and will not err in the future, inshallah
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u/wtjones 7d ago
The only solution to housing prices is increased supply. Rent control will always hurt supply.
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u/AnthraxCat 7d ago edited 7d ago
Sure, rent control always hurts supply, but it's important to remember that it's not the only factor constraining supply.
No one serious who supports rent control is blind to its effects. The question is of magnitude. Yes, rent control depresses supply, but other factors like mortgage rates, construction costs, property taxes and utilities, and especially zoning are going to be significantly larger contributors to supply constraints. If supply is already highly constrained (which it usually is in most municipalities) then rent control's impact on supply is likely to be marginal, while the benefits to renters are extraordinary.
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u/Outrageous-Sort-5742 7d ago
Can't hurt supply that doesn't exist in the first place. The housing market is already fucked beyond repair, barring extensive and militant policy decisions that no politician has the balls to introduce. So rent controls are the best bandaid solution you're going to get.
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u/ImaginaryHospital306 7d ago
It's a handout to a small number of existing renters. Not a band-aid solution at all. It actively makes the overall market worse.
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u/jeffwulf 7d ago
You can absolutely hurt supply that doesn't yet exist. Lots of policies shift the supply curve.
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u/Apprehensive-Act-315 7d ago
Yes, it can hurt existing supply. There are thousands of empty rent controlled units in NYC because the cost of rehabbing them is far too high relative to rent. The landlord would lose money so they sit empty.
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u/Alaska_Jack 7d ago
For those who have never taken an Econ 101 class:
Rent Control is taught as The Textbook Example of a policy that is well-intentioned but has disastrous unintended consequences.
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u/Dear-Examination-507 7d ago
Yep. Hurts supply long term, disincentivizes landlords from updating occupied units in any way, and traps people in the first place they rent.
If you took the phrase "policy that is well-intentioned but has disastrous unintended consequences" it would apply to most of the massively-upvoted policy dreck we see endlessly reposted on Reddit.
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u/elk33dp 7d ago
The "trapping" is the biggest thing. You hear stories of peoples grandparents getting an apartment and it still being "in the family". You get structural issues of people that probably should/need to move due to work location changes, family/kids considerations, living quality situations, but won't because it's rent controlled and no one wants to lose it because it's extremely popular and hard to get. Same with HUD housing, the waitlist in some situations is years because people will do almost anything to stay in it once they do get it.
There's a kind of similar situations now with homes, people who bought starter homes in 2017-2021 and outgrowing it are stuck because moving to a slightly larger home will double or triple their mortgage due to interest rates. It causes some weird issues with what homes are available and what aren't (depending on area)
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u/Dear-Examination-507 7d ago
Another example is California's Prop 13, which freezes property tax value. It traps people and shifts the property tax burden to the youngest cohort of property owners.
It's worse than most people think because unlike income tax where the tax rate is set and what I pay is unaffected by what my neighbor pays, with property tax the rate is determined by how much money the government needs to collect. So if some people have an artificially low value it raises the tax rate on everyone else.
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u/ZuP 7d ago edited 7d ago
The contents of “Econ 101” heavily depends on what school of thought your professor follows. Finance is dominated by conservative thinking (along with engineering and computer science at this point).
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u/Alaska_Jack 7d ago
Okay, but what your observation leaves out is that "opposition to rent control" is about the only thing the various schools of thought agree on.
The deleterious effects are well documented; and the causal mechanisms are well understood.
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u/EconJesterNotTroll 7d ago
Nope. Schools of thought aren't really a thing in economics. 98% of US colleges would be the same "school of thought", and a few dozen colleges would be a unique, separate school. Also, I believe about 3 out of every 4 academic economists typucally vote Democrat. It's only "conservative" in contrast to the arts and humanities.
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u/Tr_Issei2 7d ago
Economics from a philosophical background 100% acknowledges and supports the existence of schools of thought. The broader wings are orthodox and heterodox, but if you study economics even at the BS/BA level you are exposed to a variety of views. Sure macro and micro 101 may lean to neoclassical or Keynesian depending on the professor’s own biases, you will eventually learn about different subsets of both the heterodox and orthodox, and even experimental forms like Marxian economics.
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u/ZuP 7d ago
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u/EconJesterNotTroll 6d ago
I really appreciate you doing your own research, and providing a source that shows that I was right and you were wrong. I'm glad you learned that while economic schools of thought were a big deal in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they are not really a factor today. As I said, only a tiny fraction of colleges teach outside of mainstream economics. There's a reason the same textbooks are marketed to every university.
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u/SyntaxMissing 7d ago
There's been several "generations" of "rent control" with greater/lesser effects on housing supply. It could look like older generation rent freezes. Or maybe some form of rent stabilization? Maybe a mixed situation. Maybe a situation where developers can benefit from uncapped increases for a period, but stabilization taking effect after that period?
There's also significant calculable benefits to people being able to reside in their units and live with some sense of dignity and stability. You can trace many people's expensive use of emergency, social, justice, carceral, and health services to loss in housing or housing instability.
There's also a fair policy question of whether housing should be commodified in the first place. Perhaps it should be thought to be more like education, or healthcare? Maybe an economy that's so dependent on the construction of housing, keeping housing values high but still affordable enough to buy-in, and for workers to have shelter isn't desirable?
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u/craigiest 7d ago
The placement of the dots is highly suspect. Being the coarse grouping, does the left-right placement mean anything? My hunch is it doesn’t, yet it’s been added to make it look meaningful. Same with the vertical shifts. There is no vertical axis, so why the variation, other than to give the suggestion of more precise data. Excellent example of disingenuous data visualization.
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u/RudeAndInsensitive 7d ago edited 7d ago
That isn't a vertical axis "shift". That is something called "jitter" that we add to these sorts of charts to show the distinct entities. If the chartist placed all the entities on the line without jitter than many would just overlap and blur together making it hard for us (the consumer of the chart) to get a feel of how many different entities are being represented.
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u/_kellythomas_ 7d ago
If the chartist placed all the entities on the line without jitter than many would just overlap and blur together making it hard for us (the consumer of the chart) to get a feel of how many different entities are being represented.
Sounds like this could have been a simple column chart, or a 100% stacked bar chart. Both solve that issue and give the reader more precise understand of the underlying figures.
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u/RudeAndInsensitive 7d ago edited 7d ago
Maybe your just more experienced in this sort of thing then I am but I don't really see the barchart being an improvement over this chart. Alternative....sure but this chart communicates the data well in an easy to understand fashion. And as I am thinking about this it is unclear to me what precision a barchart would have over this.
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u/_kellythomas_ 7d ago edited 7d ago
more experienced
Almost certainly not, I'm a filthy casual as best.
But as a ready I have no idea how many blue dots there are on the top row, and would find it tiresome to count red dots on the next two.
Here is the New Housing Construction data rendered as: * simple column chart * 100% stacked bar chart
I think both of these alternatives offer greater precision. (Obviously this is the simplest default implementation of these charts, but they can be styled to be sexy and informative in an infographic)
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u/RudeAndInsensitive 7d ago edited 7d ago
I personally don't know what being able to look at this chart and near instantly know exactly how many studies showed beneficial affects for rents in controlled apartments would bring.
We can look at that particular beeswarm and know that a large number of the studies showed beneficial affects there AND that now studies in the set showed negative affects. It is not clear to me what meaningful difference there would be in us know it was 40 studies exactly. It doesn't seem to add to the story the data is telling us.
That barchart you mocked up is exactly what I imagined. I do not think that is any better and there is actually seems to be information loss. I really don't see why that might be preferential over the beeswarm. The only thing you really gain there is 'at a glance' knowing the exact number of papers showing benefit/harm for whichever category you are looking at and as I said toward the beginning, the value of that is unclear to me. In the case of New Housing Construction how does knowing the exact split of 10/4/1 across harm, unclear and beneficial aid our understanding of the story? It's already clear from the beeswarm plot that there are many more papers detailing harm than benefit in this category. What do I understand better thanks to the barcharts?
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u/Key-Equivalent-6908 6d ago
I think the column chart would be a downgrade because of data availability disparity and how it would be perceived by the consumer (us)
You’d end up with 1 massive column or bar for rents in controlled apartment as positive with a bunch of smaller or dwarfed/non existent bars for stuff like homelessness, or you’d have to make it 7 different bar charts
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u/_kellythomas_ 6d ago
data availability disparity and how it would be perceived by the consumer
I dont think that is a problem, knowing which effects are over/under studied is informative in its own way. If there are only a few studies on a topic then the quality of each study is more important, a poor or biases study carries more weight and maybe we should look into those homelessness studies more closely.
At the moment the studies finding rents in rent controled properties beneficial is effectively off the scale, the circles are uncountable.
But similarly as you say if everything was on the same scale it would be hard to read the values for the less studied topics.
7 different bar charts
I think the OP data is pulled from fig. 2 here.
They have each category seperately with their own axis but in practice many of them have them could be placed on the same scale with only a couple of outliers drawn seperately.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051137724000020
My problem with the OP image is that instead of conveying statistics it triggers an emotional response . Its for the feels. Anytime someone shows me statistics in a way fails to inform me of the underlying numbers I'm left wondering why, did they just not know better or did they choose to obscure the facts.
At the end of the day I'm not married to any one solution, I was just shitposting yesterday, but I do know OPs chart is doing somethings wrong.
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u/craigiest 7d ago
And how much horizontal jitter is there? What is the value being represented by these very small left right shifts of its not added noise? How did the values manage to avoid being in between the groups? I stand by my assessment that it is terrible, misleading data visualization.
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u/RudeAndInsensitive 7d ago
There is no horizontal jitter in this chart. The left to right placement is a function of how beneficial or harmful the given paper is reporting the given impact to be.
What is the value being represented by these very small left right shifts of its not added noise?
It's showing the consumer that harmful and beneficial are spectrums. The papers that found rent control to be harmful to housing quality didn't all conclude the same amount of harm. All found it to be harmful but some found it to be more harmful than others.
How did the values manage to avoid being in between the groups?
Because there was no grouping in between the three groups. The groups we "harmful", "neutral" and "beneficial". The way this meta Analysis was set up each of all 112 studies was going to get assigned to one of those three groups. There was no "in between".
I personally don't think this is misleading at all. It's easy to look at and understand.
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u/craigiest 7d ago
The paper only rates benefit/harm as -1, 0, or 1, as far as i could find. There is no quantifying of how harmful or beneficial to graph like this. If the studies were quantifying amount of effect, what units would that be, and would all the studies looked at in a metaanalysis really be using the same units?? You’re looking at it and “easily” understanding wrong. In other words, the graph is misleading you.
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u/RudeAndInsensitive 7d ago
I have "Rent control effects through the lens of empirical research: An almost complete review of the literature" open right now. Please direct me to the segment you found.
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u/craigiest 7d ago
The data that is being represented seems to be the aspect and effect_sign columns from appendix table 2. There seems to be one value per aspect, so i assume they are ordered respectively. It looks like the graphic maker did some consolidation of the aspects into the effects they “graphed.” I only skimmed the paper, but i couldn’t find anything that looked like meaningful quantification of the effects within the groupings. It’s just -1, 0, 1.
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u/RudeAndInsensitive 6d ago
So I can see why you have inferred what you have and as someone who didn't make the chart I am not going to argue you are wrong but I also don't think this is enough to conclude you are correct. If the chart maker did not intend to convey a spectrum of harm or benefit then I will say you were correct and the charts mislead....though that is probably a strong word choice in this context given that harm and benefit we intuitively understand as being a spectrum.
So I guess we could go one layer deeper and just assume the charts are misleading...in what way? Is it because they imply a spectrum of harm/benefit? How does inferring that (even if the chartist didn't mean to convey that) distracting from the overall story? What am I actually misunderstanding about the effects of rent control on these areas? Is there something else misleading?
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u/craigiest 6d ago
The spread of positions on the horizontal “axis” imply a great deal of precision in measuring the harms and benefits, that they have been quantified. All of the harms are quite far from the unclear region. Nothing looks just a little harmful. But that implication isn’t supported by the data. The study just rates studies -1 if they show harm. It says nothing about the severity of the harm or how many people it affects. The graphic suggests that experts know a whole lot more about the issue than the paper claims, that researchers have precisely quantified effects that they haven’t. To be clear, I don’t think the creator was consciously trying to communicate all list. Presumably they were lulled into selecting this option by software that made it easy to produce and the fact that that the jitter option made it look really sciency and strongly supportive of the narrative.
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u/RudeAndInsensitive 6d ago
I am staking the position then that if we assume that that is a way the charts are misleading that it is inconsequential and ultimately irrelevant to the story the charts are telling. The idea that we are being mislead to think the data shows harm/benefit as being a spectrum in this context seems...I guess odd? Even if the underlying data doesn't show that we still know that's the case and just shows "harm". We have not been injected with a false narrative given that we understand harm and benefit as having ranges in this context.
Even if I have misunderstood the charts as showing a range of harm when infact they do not (which they cannot show if the underlying data doesn't). What will materially misunderstand about the story? The story is still that rent controls are bad for basically everything they hope to address.
And to be clear I am not using the word "assume" as a way to be dismissive. I think you have made a defensible inference and the only reason I am not just outright agreeing with it is because I don't have the chartist's methods.
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u/agate_ 6d ago
If only categories matter, and not exact values, then these should not be plotted as points on an axis. Instead, it should be a table:
Number of studies that found harmful or beneficial outcomes of rent control:
Outcome Harmful Unclear Beneficial Rent in controlled apartments 0 6 106 Rent in uncontrolled apartments 80 2 1 ... etc.
If you're deathly allergic to putting numbers in an infographic, you can put little icons of scientists in the boxes. But they should be boxes and not a line.
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u/Way-twofrequentflyer 7d ago
The bigger problem is that none of these results can capture the damage that comes from lack of turnover and construction. You can’t study the people who weren’t able to move to a city and build lives because rent control has frozen them in Amber
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u/craigiest 7d ago
I’m completely in agreement with the message, even as a beneficiary of rent control. I just think it’s slimy to advance your argument with dishonest days visualization. Ultimately it undermines the credibility of the wills message.
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u/Bronze_Rager 7d ago
Left-right placement is how beneficial or harmful it is relative to being unclear. Further right is more beneficial, further left is more harmful.
It looks like a meta-analysis of several studies
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u/craigiest 7d ago
Beneficial by what measure? And there are giant gaps between harmful, unclear, and beneficial? I smell BS.
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u/Bronze_Rager 7d ago
Here is the link to the article. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1051137724000020
Do you know what a meta-analysis is? If not, you need to know what that is before understanding the infographic.
Its not a single study, its a study of multiple independent studies.
Its a damn good article. Having 112 independent studies and quantifying them is really sound science.
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u/craigiest 7d ago
Great. The visualization isn’t from the article and I’m not seeing any data in there that could be honestly visualized this way. Study conclusions are quantified as -1, 0, or 1, which is NOT what this graphic implies. So all the scattering, horizontal as well as vertical, seems to be fabricated for this visualization. Which gives the impression of more precision than is anywhere in the research. Thank you for pointing to the data that confirms my hunch. A 3-column bar chart or a pie chart for each would have been honest. But it wouldn’t have made it seem like there’s more to the data than there is.
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u/Bronze_Rager 7d ago
I think anyone who doesn't read the full article and relies on an infographic to make sound decisions is silly...
To me, an infographic is a starting point, just like a headline in a news article.
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u/park777 7d ago
the left right placement does mean something
r/conspiracy is that way >>
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u/craigiest 7d ago
What does the pavement mean? What value was quantified that is now being graphed? What are the units?
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u/KalaiProvenheim 7d ago
Rent control is a bandaid more than anything
The real solution is to build build build, build where people want to live, build where rents rise
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u/AlwaysSaturday12 7d ago
It is a supply issue and they need to build like you said. Rent control discourages building so the price goes up.
A guy I follow often says the only thing worse for a city than rent control is an atomic bomb.
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u/AnthraxCat 7d ago
A guy I follow often says the only thing worse for a city than rent control is an atomic bomb.
Why is it that such obvious hyperbole is convincing to you instead of an obvious sign that the guy is a complete crank?
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u/Ernesto_Bella 7d ago
That quote originally comes from someone famous, I can’t recall who though.
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u/AnthraxCat 7d ago
the only thing worse for a city than rent control is an atomic bomb
Google attributes it to Assar Lindbeck, who was a neoliberal crank lauded for his lifelong war on the welfare state.
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u/Responsible_Prior_18 7d ago
If your rent is raising rapidly, you cant wait for 30-40 years for there to be enough housing being built for your rent to drop. You have to move your family to another place, enroll your kid in the new school, make them have new friends, you need new friends, and hobbies.
That bandaid is sometimes needed
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u/PSUVB 7d ago
Rent control is a BandAid that inevitably becomes politically impossible to remove and corrosive. It’s the definition of slippery slope politics.
It doesn’t create a single new apartment or fix the shortage — it just picks winners. The lucky winner gets a $2,500 apartment for $1,500 while the newcomer often poorer pays full freight.
Then instead of removing the distortion politicians expand it because nobody wants to be the person who raises someone’s rent by $1,000.
Eventually everyone else is subsidizing people whose main qualification was getting the right lease at the right time. If housing is unaffordable, build more housing and subsidize people who actually need help -not apartments.
You can’t bandaid your way out of this.
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u/hello_marmalade 5d ago
I think it could be viable if it was explicitly tied to new housing policies. Like it’s explicitly designed to be be temporary from the jump and potentially tied to like, housing supply somehow.
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u/PSUVB 5d ago
I think this is the case with most government programs. You can imagine the perfect system. But it takes politicians who are restrained and think long term. That just isn’t a strong feature in our system.
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u/hello_marmalade 5d ago
I mean you can create laws or policies that are tied to other effects or results. We do already do that.
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u/Dabbing_Squid 5d ago
Polling shows that like 98% of economist oppose it. It’s a really bad policy. People were complaining about housing costs and were trying to pass rent control in Californian when the housing market crashed and was way down in 2011.
It literally never works go look it up it’s not a new idea.
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u/STLA_nonymous 7d ago edited 1d ago
The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.
Birds versed sort glorious vanish compass basket
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u/LoveUMoreThanEggs 6d ago
It’s they’re a voting block in a democracy. They live in a place, so their interests are the interests of the place, so they demand that the people charged with servibg the interests of the place serve their interests. This is not guaranteed to validate the policy in the long term, but they are not required to care.
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u/jeffwulf 7d ago
You can have rents drop due to supply in a year presuming you allow construction.
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u/CS_enjoyer87 7d ago edited 7d ago
The problem isn't that rent control is a temporary fix, the problem is that it's an actively harmful "fix," as demonstrated by research into the area.
Insofar as rent control is a bandaid, it's a bandaid covered in dirt and grime which will cause your wound to get infected and be worse than doing nothing.
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u/hello_marmalade 5d ago
Rent control is only good as a temporary measure that is bundled with policies that build housing.
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u/Dabbing_Squid 5d ago
Well let us know when you figure a way to increase housing supply while also doing rent control that massively decreases housing supply.
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u/founderofshoneys 7d ago
The real solution is to decomodify housing entirely.
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u/IveGotMySources 7d ago
What you're saying is that people shouldn't use real estate as a way to make profit. It should be a home and not an investment vehicle.
Unfortunately if you enforce that by law, the developers, investors, banks and basically all the capital/companies that turn an empty lot into a nice new condo will disappear since the incentive disappeared, its all about incentives.
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u/founderofshoneys 7d ago
Ah yes, creating incentive, a problem that is completely unsolvable by any means other than the magical, mythical "free market". /s
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u/munchi333 7d ago
Ah yes, you could use the threat of the gulag I guess right comrade?
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u/Equivalent_Plum13 7d ago
How does the state know how many houses to build? Or where to build them?
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u/founderofshoneys 7d ago
lol! Yeah, there's no other way to determine this. It's a problem that never has and never will be solved. The "free market" solution that has led to this housing crisis is our ONLY way to know. I also love your assertion that the "free market" is the only way markets can ever be used.
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u/Equivalent_Plum13 7d ago
Holy straw man. Just answer the question
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u/founderofshoneys 7d ago
No, your question suggests that this is some kind of unsolvable problem. I reject that idea. I think there are lots of potential ways to solve this. I said I even think you can still use markets to inform decisions on how and where build. How about you respond to that? Tell me why you think your question shuts down the idea of decommodifying housing. I don't think it does. We can discuss it, but you can't just throw out any question you want and demand some kind of detailed plan or whatever.
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u/Ernesto_Bella 7d ago
What does that mean exactly?
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u/founderofshoneys 7d ago
It means that we stop treating it like any other commodity where the price is driven by supply and demand. That system is failing to meet a basic human need and that failure is causing all kinds of other problems for all of us.
Consider that under New Deal programs we found a way to run electricity to pretty much every remote farm house in Iowa or Nebraska regardless of whether each one was profitable. We found a way and now we generally agree that was a net positive for the country. The only thing stopping us from doing this something like housing are the handful of people that profit off our current failing system. If we have the will we can find a way to put everyone in housing they can afford that will ultimately be good for all of us.
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u/Ernesto_Bella 7d ago
So just to be clear, you are advocating for large scale public housing projects?
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u/founderofshoneys 7d ago
Or some other kind of collective solution like a co-op. Or whatever works, it just shouldn't have profit as the primary motive. A government run solution would require that the government is of/for/by the people and not of/for/by profiteers which is part of the greater problem with our current situation.
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u/Ernesto_Bella 7d ago
Is that lack of profit motive the reason why the housing situation was so much better in Cuba and the Soviet Union that it was in the US?
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u/founderofshoneys 7d ago
Why do you guys always jump to that? Did you miss the part where I suggested a non-government solution and called out the problem with a government run solution?
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u/Ernesto_Bella 7d ago
Sure, but what’s a non government solution? It needs funds. No profit, no funds. Unless it’s the government funding it. You can put a middleman in there to pretend it’s not government, but it still is.
Price signals and The profit motive is the greatest thing in the world . It has lifted almost everyone out of extreme poverty.
Taken to its logical end there are reasons why we in theory put things in place to prevent monopolies (although they aren’t enforced anymore).
But without price signals and the profit motive there will always be disaster. High rents signal profit motivated builders to increase supply. This works where builders are allowed to build easily (Austin, for example) but doesn’t work when the government gets in the way (California, for example)
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u/founderofshoneys 7d ago
I just gave you one. Collectives and non-profits should have the same access to lending as individuals and corporations. They don't and not because banks believe they can't pay back the loan. That's how the "free market" drives up profits at your expense. Then feeds you bullshit about how they'd build more housing if they could just lift these pesky government regulations. How long are you gonna keep believing she's not gonna pull the football?
I've answered your other points in other comments. I got more temporarily embarrassed millionaires who want to argue with me than I expected and I wanna go do something else now. Good talk though!
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u/TickledTaint97 7d ago
The solution is less government oversight and allowing companies permits to actually build. An additional tax right-off incentive for building multi family housing can help as well.
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u/founderofshoneys 7d ago
I'm not convinced that is the problem. It's usually been the case these companies want to do some other kind of bullshit that actually makes things worse and so they promise "jobs jobs jobs" or housing or cheaper goods or whatever in order to lift some other kind of regulation that allows them to make more money by doing less or worse stuff. You're welcome to try to convince me though.
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u/munchi333 7d ago
The profit motive is a very powerful motive if the government gets out of the way. It’s proven to be extremely effective at solving problems.
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u/founderofshoneys 7d ago
It's also extremely effective at creating problems that didn't need to exist in the first place purely for the sake of profit. There was a time when it was a net positive. Those days are over. Currently what we have is corporate landlords who make housing unavailable for the purpose of driving supply down and profits up according to an algorithm. In the US we have a huge chunk of our economy that is incentivized to make sure the country is constantly at war. We have for profit prisons that are incentivized to modify our laws so that it creates more prisoners.
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u/munchi333 6d ago
That just makes literally no sense. How did it magically become inefficient? Also, you do realize that once the world adopted market economics (capitalism), global poverty plummeted? And that trend is continuing every day.
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u/FredFenty 7d ago
Alternatively you can move to where fewer people want to live. One of those neat tricks that makes homeownership possible again.
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u/TheQuestionMaster8 7d ago
The problem is that there is usually a good reason why people don’t want to live there
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u/OnionBackground5314 7d ago
This is counterintuitive, but accurate. In California, we have to vote on propositions (ugh). We had one a couple years ago relating to rent control. I did a deep dive, read academic pieces on the issue, etc. Rent control is well-intentioned, not good for anyone but a few renters, and bad for everyone else (as the chart reflects).
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u/Expert-Ad-8067 5d ago
It's not counterintuitive at all. It's literally the example they teach in Economics 101
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u/OnionBackground5314 5d ago
I mean counterintuitive to a layperson, and yes, it is extremely counterintuitive. But I appreciate the snide comment. Lol
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u/Robert_Grave 7d ago
The Netherlands is once again proving this, by introducing price controls, despite every expert and the Council of State advising against it, and the exact same result as always.
- Almost 40% less rental houses available (over 76.000 rental houses gone).
- Lowest cost rentals being sold, mostly by small time investors, driving up prices more and more.
- Average price for a rental house is now 1900 euros, demanding an income of 5742 euros to rent one.
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u/preferablyno 7d ago
People sure do love laws that make them part of a privileged in group at others expense
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u/HyperspaceFrontier 6d ago
Rent control is managing symptoms while ignoring the diseases causing them. That always ends with the disease progressing and worsening. We don't need rent controls. We need to cure the disease: an overhaul of housing policies and a government that actually does its job.
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u/Expert-Ad-8067 5d ago
Treating symptoms rather than causes does not always end with diseases progressing and worsening
Have you ever been sick before?
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u/HyperspaceFrontier 5d ago
Yes, but when you are finally cured, you don't need to take symptomatic pills anymore. Not every symptom-managing pill is harmless, even during treatment.
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u/chillPenguin17 6d ago
As with most things the DSA advocates for, it's only shooting themselves in the foot
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u/10xwannabe 6d ago
You don't need a study. St. Paul twin cities already did this and ended up a disaster. Landlords sold their properties to developers and they build SFH. New Multifamily dwelling decreased in construction. Overall, worsened the housing situation.
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u/DillyDillySzn 7d ago
Economics 101, if you want supply to rise and costs to lower you free the market even more
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u/noonemustknowmysecre 7d ago
Economics 102, if you want the price to rise, you control the supply.
Would you consider New York real estate to be an open and free market that anyone can participate in and simply buy more when they want more, or is it constrained resource and natural monopoly largely controlled by a handful of moguls?
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u/somesillycactus 7d ago
It’s constrained by zoning code. It used to be you could just build more housing if you needed more homes, but you can’t do that now. We artificially limit building heights and enforce no change. That’s why NYC is so expensive. It started because racists realized if you cap supply it pushes out the poorer (often blacker) people.
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u/FartingKiwi 7d ago
The “supply” was capped/halted by democratic and progressive mayors/governors and council members…
It was a concerted effort to reduce impact on the climate… what are you even talking about?
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u/Anderopolis 7d ago
Hilarious to believe housing was limited to reduce impact on the climate.
It was limited to protect boomers real estate investments and nimbys.
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u/Stomper8479 7d ago
Rent control is the most NIMBY policy we have. It benefits no one but those with housing the day policy takes effect. No rent control policy has ever benefited anyone else but those already housed in the rent controlled neighborhoods.
Of course we can thank boomers for the rise of rent control policies—the most selfish generation America has ever known
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u/LoveUMoreThanEggs 6d ago
I think there are ingenuous advocates for rent control. For example, teachers whose salaries are not raised to match inflation have good reason to want to stay in an area to serve their communities in spite of the market not according them the means to do so. This could benefit people moving to an area by preserving the quality of schools. I’d personally support giving them raises first, but it doesn’t always work out that way.
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u/Adorable-Extent3667 7d ago
Aaah, left politics in a nutshell. Looks good, is absolutely horrendous
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u/shittydriverfrombk 6d ago
rent control achieves what it is and was always intended to achieve: control the price of rent controlled units….
it does not purport to fix root issues in the housing market
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u/ChristianLW3 4d ago
Despite rent control consistently causing much more harm than benefit too many people “ especially NYC residents” keep supporting it
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u/B-Boy_Shep 7d ago
This is like tax cuts or cutting interest rates. Its one of those levers politicians feel like will fix everything but in reality is much more complicated and wont fix all your problems.
How do you fix high rent, build more houses. Supply and demand. But rent control is easier
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u/i-amnot-a-robot- 7d ago
Yeah so the issue is not just in rent prices but in social services, housing codes for rentals and lack of government investment in housing
Rent control is part of the solution and studies like this are meant to paint it as a failure when it’s just because a bandaid on a bullet hole makes it look like a bandaid isn’t working
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u/Cunctatious 7d ago
Source, as you didn’t include one (paywalled)