Path: utzoo!dciem!mmt
From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: can.politics
Subject: Re: rent review
Message-ID: <2684@dciem.UUCP>
Date: 5 Mar 88 20:04:45 GMT
Article-I.D.: dciem.2684
Posted: Sat Mar  5 15:04:45 1988
References: <1988Feb24.140628.28040@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> <1433@looking.UUCP> <1988Feb26.225840.21116@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> <1437@look5 Mar 88 20:04:45 GMT
Reply-To: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Distribution: ont
Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada
Lines: 42
Summary: 


Dogma repeated does not become fact.  Brad Templeton says:
>The .1% vacancy rate is *caused* by the rent control.  You think there would
>be such a low rate in a free market?  Of course not.  A free market would not
>have two distinct classes of appartments for places that are otherwise the same
>in quality.  Instead prices would move together.  The rent controlled places,
>which are artificially low for the few who can get them, would go up.  The
>currently non-controlled places would go down.

and

>I've never lived in a co-op housing project, but I've talked to people who
>have.  Usually these co-op projects produce substandard housing, because
>there's nobody in charge that has their livelyhood at stake.  There's either
>a committee or a bureaucrat.  One hears regularly of non-profit housing with
>higher rents than similar privately owned housing.

Since the remakably low vacancy rates *preceded* rent control, according
to the Globa and mail article I previously mentioned, Brad has a strange
kind of causality (Prigogine would be quite interested).

As for the second point, one reason that coops tend to have higher than
normal standards is that the tenants are required to take part in
committees for the different functions, and thus have a stake in the
place.  I don't know where Brad's information comes from, but I am
sure we can come up with examples of good coop places and bad, and
well we know the horror stories of apartments controlled by landlords
with a profit motive.

The free market isn't all-powerful, and I have more than a suspicion
that it can work at all only in a resource-rich country that can
afford the inevitable inefficiencies and chicanery that the free
market involves.  An optimum system surely must embody both freedom
and responsibility or control.
-- 

Martin Taylor
...uunet!{mnetor|utzoo}!dciem!mmt
mmt@zorac.arpa
Magic is just advanced technology ... so is intelligence.  Before computers,
the ability to do arithmetic was proof of intelligence.  What proves
intelligence now?  Obviously, it is what we can do that computers can't.