Rent control benefits people with friends or connections who hand off apartments until the chain is broken.

Please correct your headline. "Developer lobbyist" should read "pimp for slumlords." Thank you.

@2 Traditionally, slumlords are a product of rent control. It does not generally benefit a landowner to let their property degrade through ignoring maintenance - the rent you can charge will go down. However, if your city has rent control and you are not allowed to evict low-rent tenants, one strategy for doing this is to let the property degrade until they leave, then they can refurbish the units at once and increase the rent for new tenants.

Has she accomplished anything being on the council beyond being involved in the minimum wage increase? It seems like she's full of venom an outrage but doesn't really produce any tangible results.

@3: Traditionally, at present, and going forward, you are full of shit. Slumlords exist where the is no rent control at all, like here in Seattle. Maybe if you took your pointy little head out of your constricted urbanist ass and took a look around, you might learn something.

@3 and you're probably a sexist racist too! Kidding...but if you're a white man with a penis some on here would rather you kill yourself

We live in a supply-demand economy. Landlords can only charge what the market allows, just like the price of cars, hamburgers, and iphones are set by the market. If we think the price of iphones is too high, you don't hear people hollering for iphone control. Now, I totally understand that food and housing are basic needs, so perhaps we should look at those things differently. But, actually, we do. There are things like food stamps for people who cannot afford their food, and there is this thing called section 8 housing for people who cannot afford housing. But rent control is quite different from food stamps and section 8 housing. Tax payers (society) covers the cost of food stamps and section 8 housing (we all bear the burden of these costs). By contrast, rent control shifts all of the burden onto a very small segment of society-the landlords. Why should landlords be asked to bear a societal burden? The answer is this: because most people aren't landlords-it's easier for politicians to blame them without facing blowback, and cheaper for everyone but the landlords to cover the costs of this societal burden. Will rent control be effective? Ask the folks in SF.

The only thing I see missing is a pink hat.

@5: @3 is right that slumlording is incentivized by rent control.

Rent control is absolutely a bad idea. There is room for government to help though, by forcing more housing supply. Because although rent control leads to bad things (among other reasons, less supply means less people living in Seattle and more in currently treed areas, which is bad for the world), just waiting for housing supply to catch up to demand doesn't work either because it takes a couple years to build a housing unit, and during a boom time it can take a decade or more for supply to catch up to demand -- meanwhile people lose homes, are forced to move, and are kept in poverty simply due to a housing shortage. Our city council and mayor(s) know this, and have made efforts to increase housing more quickly (most notably through HALA), but we need to do more. We need to incentivize development NOW while there is a shortage, and incentivize developers and homeowners to not wait and see how the market looks in a year or two. We can do this by 1) taxing empty lots, surface parking lots, and other under-developed sites that should be housing (especially in areas with good transit) and putting that revenue into buying some of those lots to build affordable housing; 2) create a temporary "emergency" zoning rule allowing duplexes and cottages on single family lots (expiring after a couple years, because nothing motivates people to do something now like knowing this is their only chance); 3) In all mid-rise and high-rise zones, allow temporary additional height limits, also expiring soon for the same reason, and 4) temporarily make all single family zones SF2400, so any lot 4800sf or bigger can be split into two -- this will let more people become homeowners (temporary for the same reason as #2 and #3), I chose 2400sf because currently many single family zones are 7200sf, and that way they could be split into three lots. Each of these approaches tell developers and homeowners that their property is only temporarily qualified to make them lots more money, and this will get them to act right now and get our city tons of housing.

@10 -- I would add liberalizing the ADU laws to that list as well. There are very few basement apartments or backyard cottages because the zoning rules are extremely strict. There is potential for a lot of very affordable units if they just change the rules, like so: https://www.citylab.com/design/2017/11/h…

Stanford economists Rebecca Diamond and Tim McQuade in a October 2017 working paper presented at the a National Bureau of Economic Research conference. Backed the argument that Rent control in San Francisco increased overall rent by 7%, benefits long term renters over short term, reduced available housing by 15%, and may have quickened gentrification.

Is there any problem that can't be magically solved by Kshama's pixie dust? Her answer is always: "Revolution." And the subtext is always: "My Revolution." For Kshama's motivation is not the greater good, but the greater Kshama, right down to those "Socialist Alternative" red posters with Her name prominently displayed (thanks, taxpaying stooges!).

How is is that a person with a PhD from the #55 ranked economics department (read: diploma mill) knows so much more than everyone else about absolutely everything? How can a woman with no substantial accomplishments (being elected to the SCC is not a substantial accomplishment; see: the SCC) insist Her prescriptions are unarguably the best? And how is it that Her solution to every problem boils down to a dictatorship of the Kshamatariat? That's Her fix, folks. Let Her Run Things.

It would be laughable if it wasn't so pathetic.

My favorite Sawant arguement in the debate when asked why most economists don't support rent control. She said most economists don't know the science or the data and they pull answers "out of their hats". The verifiable truth is Sawant and the committees she sits on misrepresent data all the time to support legislation.