4.6 • 32K Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2020
⏱️ 47 minutes
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0:00.0 | Hey there podcast listeners and special welcome to all the new listeners who heard me on the Joe Rogan experience and on the Bill Simmons podcast and thanks to Joe and Bill for having me on. |
0:11.0 | This week's Freakonomics Radio episode is one from the archive and gets more and more current every day. It's called Why Rent Control Doesn't Work. |
0:20.0 | We're appropriate facts and figures have been updated also in honor of all you new listeners we've added a bunch of older episodes to our feed to make it easy to catch up. |
0:30.0 | If you want to hear every episode we've ever made in our 10 year history go to Freakonomics.com where we also publish transcripts and show notes. |
0:38.0 | You can also sign up there for our newsletter. Thanks for listening. I'm sure you know this already but let me say it anyway. |
0:53.0 | Cities have become really popular all over the world. An ever larger share of the US and global population lives in cities and that large shares expected to get even larger. |
1:04.0 | As demand for city living grows the supply of housing often can't keep up which results in and you know this too arise in prices. |
1:15.0 | In the US median rent is doubled since the 1990s outpacing inflation by quite a bit. In many cities this makes it hard for people who already live there to stay and hard for people who'd like to move there. |
1:28.0 | I'm sure you've heard the horror stories about rents in cities like London and Hong Kong, Seattle and San Francisco where the median one bedroom apartment costs about $3,700 a month. |
1:40.0 | The problem is so bad in New York City that it inspired a new political party. |
1:45.0 | I represent the rent is too damn high party. People working eight hours a day and 40 hours a week or so I'm a third job. |
1:52.0 | New York like many cities has over time put in place various affordable housing policies. One time honored tradition is some form of rent control. |
2:01.0 | That might mean setting a price cap on what a landlord can charge or limiting the amount the rent can be raised. Here's the Stanford economist Rebecca Diamond. |
2:10.0 | For an economics point of view it provides insurance against getting priced out of your neighborhood. |
2:17.0 | And rent control seems to be having a moment. It already exists in a number of places. |
2:23.0 | The most expensive cities in the US they almost all have rent control. |
2:29.0 | And the appetite is spreading. You see rent control popping up politically when housing prices and rents are going up. |
2:38.0 | Among the cities currently considering some form of rent control are Chicago, Philadelphia, Providence and Orlando. In 2019 Oregon became the first state to pass a rent control bill. |
2:50.0 | California followed up with their own statewide bill which recently went into effect. |
2:54.0 | A report last year by a consortium of affordable housing advocates says that if all the proposed rent control legislation were to pass nearly one in three American tenants would have some kind of rent protection. |
3:07.0 | Today on Freakinomics Radio, how well does rent control work? As with many complicated issues that have multiple actors and crossed incentives, the answer depends on whom you ask. |
3:22.0 | Well I'm in favor of residential rent control and rent regulations. |
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