I decided to write a diary that has nothing to do with Barack Obama, although bear with me for a minute as I mention him briefly.
For my entire adult life I have been wholly unsatisfied with my career, or lack there of. Despite my dissatisfaction I had slipped into complacency and convinced myself that this was part of my destiny. A family curse, of sorts.
After getting involved with the Obama campaign I found myself increasingly less willing to accept my situation. I finally decided to go back to school, at the age of 32, and pursue a career in humanitarian law (although not necessary a career as an attorney).
Yes, this is going somewhere...below the fold.
I am now in my second semester of my freshman year. I am absolutely obsessed with getting perfect grades. Last semester I got an A- in French and was totally devastated. My GPA is 3.9 and I am not willing to have it get any lower than that. But then along comes Introduction to Microeconomics.
Of the five classes I am taking this semester, this is the only one I am struggling with. I current have a score of 115/130 or 88%. What is that? Like a B or something? That is totally unacceptable.
The problem is, it is not a matter of me not "getting" it, it is a matter of me not agreeing with it. This idea of boiling everything down to maximizing revenues without consideration of the human cost is really everything that I am against.
The closest we have come to dealing with human factors is one paragraph on externalities that explained the concept with an analogy about pissing off your neighbor by burning garbage in your backyard. I'm thinking that there is probably more to externalities than that. In fact, I'm thinking that externalities might interest the heck out of me; they may even be worthy of an entire chapter, rather than a short paragraph.
But I'm disgressing, because this isn't about externalities it is about rent control. Actually, this may be about externalities now that I think about it. Anyway, here is the issue that has me writing a diary at 1 am.
Last week we had an assignment that required reading this NYT article about rent control and answering questions. The problem is that I absolutely disagree with this article, yet I have been asked to answer a series of questions as if this article were fact.
Mind you, my only experience with rent control was getting an awesome deal, when I lived in LA, that allowed me to move from South Central to the Beverly Hills Adjacent area for only $100 more a month. It was a pretty sweet deal, especially considering that only a few weeks earlier a guy got shot in the face on our front lawn (it was a co-op). So, going from a place where people get shot in the face on your lawn to the Beverly Hills Adjacent area for just an extra $100/mo totally rocked.
My real issue, however, isn't even based on ideology or personal experience. What really bothers me is that from a critical thinking stand-point, this article is garbage.
First of all, I have no idea who this guy is or what his qualifications are on this subject, but I'll let that slide, for now. Let's look at his claims and how he supports them.
Supporters of rent regulation have their hearts in the right place, and they make an impassioned plea:
There may be inefficiencies in rent regulations, but what about the inefficiency of lifting them and forcing hundreds of thousands of poor and middle-income families out of the city? Kids will be forced to change schools, adults will be forced to look for new jobs or face long commutes, and the entire character of the city will change. Artists, musicians and starving actors cannot afford the $10,000 a month that an unregulated Manhattan apartment can rent for, so the city will become a dull dormitory for pasty-white investment bankers.
This kind of argument rests on two false assumptions.
First, it's not true that the beneficiaries of rent control are disproportionately poor. The winners are not the poor but those who have rented the same apartment for decades; the biggest losers are those starving actors who move to New York and try to find a place to live, because vacancy rates of under 3 percent are far below the national average of 9.4 percent.
This claim is also made in the textbook, yet neither the textbook nor this article offers any proof that it is true.
Second, if all rents were freed, they would not rise to the $10,000-a-month level. On the contrary, research suggests that currently unregulated rents would actually drop.
This is the one that bugs me the most because it is slight of hand. He is telling us what would happen to the unregulated rents, not the regulated rents. People who oppose lifting regulations are concerned with what will happen to the people living in regulated housing. How does this proove or answer a false assumption?
Because of regulations, the average rent in New York City is only $706, and that would rise, but the real rents that people actually pay when they find new apartments would fall.
How much would it rise? What is "real rents"?
''Detailed research and analysis,'' says Peter Salins's study for the Manhattan Institute, reveals ''the extent to which these interventions harm, rather than protect, New Yorkers.''
What detailed research and analysis? What extent does it harm rather than protect? "The extent to which" could mean anything. For all we know, what is actually revealed is that the "extent to which it harms" is negligible.
So New York is roughly in the position of China a decade ago: everyone knows the socialist housing model is lousy, but people worry about the transition to a market economy.
Everyone knows? Really?
But that concern, while legitimate, may be overblown. I used to live in Cambridge, Mass., which lifted rent controls in 1994 amid dire warnings of hardship. In fact, Cambridge enjoyed a housing boom that improved the quality and availability of housing. Henry Pollakowski, a housing economist at M.I.T. and editor of The Journal of Housing Economics (soon to be a major motion picture), found that freeing rents led to a 20 percent increase in housing investment.
Is this a fair comparison? According to the article 66% of rents in NYC are regulated. In order to know if lifting rent controls in NYC would have the same benefits as in Cambridge don't we need to know what percentage of Cambridge rents were regulated, among other things. Also, how much did rents in Cambridge go up? What was the effect on people in service jobs?
Now, don't get me wrong here. I'm not advocating for or against rent controls. I live on the other side of the country and have absolutely no understanding of the NYC rental market. From an outsiders perspective, I imagine total deregulation would probably be devastating. It would force people in the service industries to move out of the city. Then those people would likely take jobs wherever they happened to move rather than commute. Who would be left to run the city? But as I said, I don't really know.
The real issue here is that this article is an opinion piece, and not a very good one at that. Expecting someone to take this poorly supported argument, treat it like fact, and then answer questions that have only one "right" answer seems like... well... a little like brainwashing.
So this is what it has come to. I know the formulas. I understand the graphs. I can do the calculations. It is assignments like this that have me sitting here at 1:55 am (wow, it has taken me nearly an hour to write this) stressing about an 88%.