On the West Coast Price Control Obsession Continues
A long, long time ago in an empire far away, an emperor decreed that prices were going up too fast and too high and he imposed a regime of price controls on everything from wheat to labor. The penalty for violating the controls was death. The emperor was Dioclectian, and in spite of his track […]
Perverse Sentimentalism Part 3: How We Might Get Rent Control
You’ll hear a lot of people hand wave the notion that Seattle will get rent control anytime soon. Even the legislative proponent, Representative Nicole Macri, says she thinks it will be a struggle. But here’s how it might play out. My job is to worry about the worst case scenario. Here’s the worst scenario I […]
Perverse Sentimentalism Part 2: Rent Control Effort On the Move
I wrote about how the Seattle Weekly reported the story of a candidate for the City Council of Issaquah being “priced out” of his own community; a candidate and a city council that believes that building more housing makes it more expensive. The story of rent control is essentially the same, a movement that supports a policy […]
