Your original claim:

Rent control does NOT control prices

Your source:

rent control appears to be very effective in achieving lower rents for families in controlled units

You are very smart

Cry me a river, landlord bootlicker

Source: Dude, trust me

I literally provided a source lmfao

I know that you just linked the very first link on google

I did not, I’ve read the whole exchange between Nitzan and Bichler and Cockshott, he has many videos on his YouTube channel talking about LVT and empirical demonstrations, and you can go through the references of the paper I sent such as the Zacchariah multi-country study.

Third of all, nobody ever responds to response papers

That would be a good point if LVT wasn’t an extremely politically important point. If neoliberal economists had any sort of empirical proof showing otherwise, they’d be more than happy to share it, but there are no studies in the academia providing this. Please search them for me if you will.

As for references for why you’re wrong, you can go through Albert Szymanski’s “human rights in the Soviet Union”, Robert B Allen’s “Farm to Factory”, Pat Sloan’s “Soviet Democracy” or Alec Nove’s “economic history of the USSR” (paraphrasing the title of the last one because I read it long ago). You can go through my comment history and find references to all of those books if you want, but I have nothing to prove to you.

you’re not able to provide sources

I gave you a summary paper collecting references several studies on labour theory of value, that’s already more evidence than you have provided. When you actually bring up sources to the conversation you may change my mind and make me do the effort, but you won’t do that I bet.

You can do both, I don’t see the problem with doing anticapitalist propaganda on the internet, it’s probably what pushed me most towards organizing

I don’t know why you keep bringing up the word “ideal”. Marxists are opposed to idealism, we’re staunch materialists. Saying that “things change over time and place” doesn’t automatically negate historical examples , and following those historical examples doesn’t imply not achieving progressive victories over time.

You claim to follow the path that works, but that’s what the western left has been following for the past 50 years and look where that led us.

You’re describing the Soviet model of housing. Flats were often assigned by the union of the worker, and the rent dues were about 3% of the monthly income, which paid for basic maintenance. Homelessness was eliminated and housing was constantly improved through the construction of literal millions of housing units per year, more than any country at the time.

Urban planning was also cool, organized in so-called “Mikroraion” (microdistricts) with accessibility on-foot to basic services being the core of planning. Green spaces, health centres, childcare and social activities were all within a 15-minute walk (the neighborhoods in most Eastern Block countries retain these features with whatever services haven’t been dismantled in capitalism). Quality affordable public transit (e.g. Moscow metro) also ensured mobility.

The landlord is casting the grenade and knife rain spell on the child

I’m glad you’re a human with empathy and good intentions, but tenants shouldn’t be in a position that their housing (one of the most fundamental rights of people) relies on the good will of whatever landlord they happen to be stuck with.

Why not though? The experiments done in housing nationalization have been extremely successful in abolishing homelessness and guaranteeing access to affordable housing. In Cuba, if you study in (completely free) public university, the state assigns you a flat at no cost. In the Soviet Union, housing used to cost 3% of monthly incomes back in the 1970s.

Imagine the possibilities that we could get with 50+ years of technological and industrial development if we nationalized housing in the west…

It’s not a utopia, housing has been nationalized successfully in several countries, with the result of the abolition of homelessness, extremely affordable rent (think 3% of monthly incomes), and evictions essentially not existing.

I’m all for revising zoning laws, enacting rent caps, and other transitional measures, but the end goal should be the collectivization of housing, which would eliminate the parasitism altogether.

I’m genuinely happy for you getting a good landlord, but access to housing shouldn’t be conditioned by being lucky to get a decent and altruistic landlord (a minority in people’s experience, hence the massive upvotes of the post).

I can think of a myriad of other reasons than sheer cost why I might not want to buy a home straight away

Me too and you make a great point. The problem isn’t with renting homes as a concept, it’s with renting from a private owner at market prices. Publicly owned housing for rent at maintenance cost-prices would eliminate the exploitative relationship and still allow people to rent for as long as they want.

Vienna isn’t a bad model but it’s progressively becoming less significant because in capitalism you have to be constantly fighting to maintain the little progresses you make.

We’ve had better, such as the Soviet Union, where housing was a guaranteed right, rent costed 3% of the average income, and homelessness was abolished.

Ok, thanks for the correction. I just remember Scotland not wanting to privatize their water supply

There’s mountains of studies, cases studies, and reports spanning over decades from cities all over the world, that show the same exact thing. Rent control does NOT control prices or fixing housing issues

Rent control obviously reduces prices. By setting up a maximum price, prices can’t raise further, it’s not rocket science. This policy was literally implemented in my homeland, Spain, when a few years ago an inflation-cap was implemented so that rents can’t rise above CPI. This has saved millions and millions of euros of tenants, again, because it’s not rocket science: if you correctly implement a rent cap (not difficult), prices don’t go above the cap.

The same happened with the Berlin rent freeze that passed through referendum and was applied to some areas of the city. The comparative economic studies that analyzed the evolution of prices in rent-capped areas proved empirically that prices had gone up slower in rent-capped areas than in free market regime. I don’t know what kind of bullshit neoliberal YouTuber you’re watching, but they’re lying to you about empirical evidence.

As for housing supply, I agree, rent cap affects supply, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. When Milei removed rent caps from Buenos Aires, it became easier to find listed flats for rent in the city: because the people formerly living there were evicted since they couldn’t afford to pay fucking rent! What a great solution neoliberals offer us: just fucking evict the poors!! I’ve already brought up evidence you can look up, can you do the same to prove your point? Spoiler alert: no you can’t because neoliberalism is anti-scientific.

Regardless, rent cap is only meant to be a temporary measure and I agree that it won’t solve fundamentally the underlying issue behind housing: treating as a commodity instead of as a human right. Build millions of public housing units, force businesses to move to smaller cities to fight overcentralization, do good urban planning, and establish socially owned housing. It’s the only model that has abolished homelessness in history, and you can keep denying reality, but Soviets enjoyed rents of 3% of average income throughout their lives while people in the modern capitalist world can choose between spending 40% of their wage in housing or literally dying in the streets.

The same happens to British public utilities purchased by local capital. Wasn’t the England water supply privatized to a British firm and now it runs like shit? Just going off my memory here

Ok, agreed, but then the problem is with disgusting urban planning, people living in cars is just a dirty band-aid

Thanks for your insightful responses to the replies of my comment, I won’t respond to them because you already perfectly explained it. Good work, comrade

Imagine dropping 8 comments on a thread to bootlick landlords lmfao. “But haven’t you thought of poor landlords having to call a plumber every 6 months and paying them with the money of their tenants?”

Marxism is also famously well known for falsely believing that labor is the only source of value in an economy when that’s just not true

But it is true, and it has been empirically proven time and time again. Just for reference, you can check Paul Cockshott’s 2014 paper. There has been no serious reply to this paper, or any followup by neoliberal economists finding any other variable explaining the creation of value to the extent that labour does. It is empirically true that labour is the only source of value, and you would need empirical evidence to argue otherwise, which you don’t have because it doesn’t exist.

Everything you said about the Soviet Union is simply false. I’ll come up with the references later, busy now, but you’re just making stuff up.

Edit: I’m actually not gonna bother giving you references because you’re just a blatant anticommunist making stuff up. Your talk of workers and doctors getting paid the same is absurd (highly trained specialists like doctors and university professors were the highest earning members of society), your explanation for the lack of housing in the USSR is absurd (they built more housing than any country in the world and allocated it efficiently, it’s just that half the housing stock of the country was destroyed in WW2 and the rapid collectivization of agriculture and the industrialisation led to 2 million houses per year not being enough), and I’m not going to change the mind of someone who doesn’t listen to facts.

Go on licking your landlord’s boots (or leeching off your tenants if you’re lucky).