@AndrewLittleMP all but admits rents to go up after Healthy Homes Bill?
08 May 2016 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, economics of regulation, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: economics of housing, economics of mandates, expressive voting, fatal conceit, rent controls, The pretense to knowledge
Opposition Leader Andrew Little accepts that mandating insulation and heat pumps into rental properties will increase their value. But he denies that this will affect rents!
Source: Healthy Homes Bill won’t up rents Little | Politics | Newshub.
An upgrade increases the value of a rental property if the improvements that increase its rental value. You cannot have the increase in the value of the asset without the increase in rent.
I will contract out the rest of my answer to David Friedman’s superb book Laws Order:
For an application of economics to a different part of the law, consider the nonwaivable warranty of habitability, a legal doctrine under which some courts hold that apartments must meet court-defined standards with regard to features such as heating, hot water, sometimes even air conditioning, whether or not such terms are provided in the lease—indeed, even if the lease specifically denies that it includes them.
The immediate effect is that certain tenants get services that their landlords might not otherwise have provided. Some landlords are worse off as a result; some tenants are better off. It seems as though supporting or opposing the rule should depend mainly on whose side you are on.
In the longer run, the effect is quite different. Every lease now automatically includes a quality guarantee. This makes rentals more attractive to tenants and more costly to landlords. The supply curve, the demand curve, and the price, the rent on an apartment, all shift up. The question, from the standpoint of a tenant, is not whether the features mandated by the court are worth anything but whether they are worth what they will cost.
The answer may well be no. If those features were worth more to the tenants than they cost landlords to provide, landlords should already be including them in their leases—and charging for them. If they cost the landlord more than they are worth to the tenant, then requiring them and letting rents adjust accordingly is likely to make both landlord and tenant worse off. It is particularly likely to make poorer tenants worse off, since they are the ones least likely to value the additional features at more than their cost.
A cynical observer might conclude that the real function of the doctrine is to squeeze poor people out of jurisdictions that adopt it by making it illegal, in those jurisdictions, to provide housing of the quality they can afford to rent.
If my analysis of the effect of this legal doctrine seems implausible, consider the analogous case of a law requiring that all cars be equipped with sunroofs and CD changers. Some customers—those who would have purchased those features anyway—are unaffected. Others find that they are getting features worth less to them than they cost and paying for them in the increased price of the car.
Rent controls never work – they force up rents and destroy investment in housing
24 May 2015 Leave a comment
in economics of regulation, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, urban economics Tags: British general election, expressive voting, offsetting behaviour, rational irrationality, rent controls, The fatal conceit, UK politics, unintended consequences
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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