Talk:Rent control in the United States

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Copied from User talk:193.52.24.13[edit]

Help[edit]

I would like to take a minute to ask the wikipedia community for help in reviewing an issue that I feel deserves special attention. I will try to be as schematic and objective as possible:

1. Topic: Two Wikipedia articles, namely "Rent control in the United States" [1] and "Rent regulation" [2], contain a statement that reads as follows: "There is a consensus among economists that rent control reduces the quality and quantity of housing".

2. This statement was added to the article (without any consensus and without any discussion on the talk page) by Snooganssnoogans on 24 December 2020 at 14:5 (see [3]).

3. I have extensively argued the lack of neutrality of these articles on the Neutral Point of View Noticeboard [4]. As can be seen, many users (e.g. SPECIFICO, TFD, Dennis Bratland, Qzekrom,Charles Stewart) seem to agree that the statement is false (their arguments and weight in the conversation are being ignored by the users who act as the custodians of these pages). Only vague references that are not specific (general economics textbooks), opinion articles, and an article published by a think tank are used by these users as references to substantiate the claim. But the fact is that there is not a single study that can verify the veracity of this claim. Not to mention the obvious interest that these users have in this claim appearing in the second entry of the article, at the top, so that it reads well, even before technically explaining what exactly rent control is. Arguments and counter-arguments can be found on the NPOV Noticeboard.

4. In any case, what is serious is that although it is a manifest fact that there is no agreement among the users who discuss there, the article maintains the statement without any consensus and furthermore the article is not labelled as lacking neutrality.

5. And what is more dangerous: when I argued and reversed the claim that was added without consensus, I was persecuted and blocked. Isn't this outrageous? Users who debate and reverse changes that are added without consensus are blocked, while those who introduce statements without being debated and agreed with the wikipedia community are favoured with blocking those who argue against them.

In conclusion, I would simply like to draw attention to something fundamental at stake, which is the neutrality of our encyclopaedia. With this message, I would like to draw more eyes to what is going on there. And if anyone, bureaucrat, administrator or user considers that some action should be taken to help the neutrality of the encyclopaedia, I would be very grateful. If there is one clear rule on wikipedia it is that the content of the pages must be neutral and consensual among users. The statement we are talking about is not backed by consensus within the community, and users who fight for neutrality are being blocked.

At this point, given that I am not sure where to turn for help within the wikipedia community, I've decided to make a call here to some bureaucrats who seem to have an interest in issues of neutrality: e.g. SilkTork,Cecropia,UninvitedCompany,Dweller (sincere apologies if you are not interested in this issue)... but if anybody knows of other users that might be interested in this problem, let me know.

Many thanks, 193.52.24.13 (talk) 14:20, 29 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The place to have this discussion is the talkpage of the relevant article, and I will copy this there.
I have had a quick look at the article and a very quick look at the issue. The sentence you object to is correct, and is well supported by cites to reliable sources. It is not something to argue over. However, the lead (I haven't studied the whole article) positions itself as an argument against rent control, and it doesn't explain the benefits. So, yes, the lead (and possibly the article itself) is biased. However, while Wikipedia aims to be neutral and balanced, many articles (possibly the majority) are biased in one way or another. It is a constant struggle to identify and correct bias. When we introduce bias ourselves, we rarely see it. Such is the nature of bias. The way to fix bias is to discuss and edit and discuss and edit. It can take a long time. And a fair balance is not always achieved even after years of polite, collegial discussion and working toward neutral consensus edits. Neutrality and fair balance is rarely achieved over-night, and pinging others rarely helps, as we each have our own areas of concern. Here are some articles that others have flagged up as needing attention for being biased: Category:Articles needing POV-check and Category:NPOV_disputes. As you see, there are thousands of articles which have been tagged as of concern going back over ten years.
To edit without conflict on Wikipedia people need to be able to put things in perspective, and to work together with others in a friendly supportive manner. This may appear to be a big issue to you, but in reality it is simply an everyday thing on Wikipedia.
My suggestion is to find reliable sources which discuss both the benefits and the drawbacks, and then to propose on the talkpage edits which put rent control into proper context, explaining both benefits and drawbacks. I hope this helps. SilkTork (talk) 16:54, 29 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is that 1. the claim is false (not a single reliable study to substantiate the specific claim --instead, we have studies putting forward arguments in favour and also against, which is not the same as being able to say there is a consensus on the specific issue--), and 2. there is not consensus among wikipedia users. Then, why do we keep the claim in the article?193.52.24.13 (talk) 17:33, 29 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
SilkTork speaks a lot of sense. Especially what he says about working in a friendly manner. I also recommend Wikipedia:How to put up a straight pole by pushing it at an angle. --Dweller (talk) Old fashioned is the new thing! 19:23, 29 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The IP editor has been harping on this issue for months now, getting blocked as Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Pedrote112 while participating in the discussion at Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard#Rent control: "on consensus among economists". The IP editor has been violating WP:Tendentious editing by persistently beating this dead horse. Personally, I'm sympathetic to the idea that rent control has some real world benefits that are not properly valued by economists, but in multiple high quality sources, most economists agree that rent control is not beneficial to those who need it most. The tendentious part is the IP's continued assertion that there is no consensus. Binksternet (talk) 20:08, 29 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Binksternet. I was not blocked as Sockpuppet, I was blocked because some users didn't like my arguments and they consider they have the right to add this sentence in the article without any consensus with the rest of the users. I am persistent because the arguments of the users against this statement are being permanently ignored. There is not a consensus on whether this claim is true (see [5]). Seriously, am I the only one here who is violating the rules? When did this statement first appear? Was there agreement among users to introduce it? What are the credible studies that analyse the percentage of economists for and against this statement? Do those of us who argue against it (not just me) have the right to insist because we see it as a clear case of non-neutrality? Cheers, 193.52.24.13 (talk) 20:35, 29 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Some references counter-arguing:
A 2007 study by David Sims [6] and a 2014 study by Autor, Palmer, and Pathak [7] both look at the effects of the end of rent control in Massachusetts, after the passage of Question 9 by Massachusetts ballot referendum in 1994. Sims found that the end of rent control had little effect on the construction of new housing. He did however find evidence that rent control decreased the number of available rental units, by encouraging condo conversions. In other words, rent control seemed to affect the quantity of rental housing, but not the total quantity of the housing stock. Unsurprisingly, Sims also found significant increases in rent charged after decontrol, suggesting that rent control was effective in limiting rent increases.
A 2007 study [8] by Gilderbloom and Ye of more recent rent control laws here in New Jersey finds evidence that rent controls actually increase the supply of rental housing, by incentivizing landlords to subdivide larger rental units.
A 2015 study [9] by Ambrosius, Glderbloom, and coauthors also looks at changes in New Jersey rent regulations. As with the previous study, they find that rent control in New Jersey has not produced any detectable reduction in new housing supply.
The most recent major study of rent control, by Diamond McQuade, and Qian in 2018 [10], uses detailed data on San Francisco housing market to look at the effect of the mid-1990s change in rent control rules there. They suggest that while the law did effectively limit rent increases, and had no effect on new housing construction, it did have a negative effect on the supply of rental housing by encouraging condo conversions.193.52.24.13 (talk) 20:43, 29 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
God, I hate arguing on the side of rent control opponents, I really do. But here is a sampling of the literature regarding what economists think of rent control:
  • Professor Moshe Adler, economist at Columbia University writes, "Yet for modern economists rent control is the quintessential example of a policy that is not Pareto efficient." Page 36 of Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science that Makes Life Dismal. The New Press, 2009. ISBN 9781595585271
  • Alain Bertaud, Senior Research Scholar at New York University's Marron Institute of Urban Management, wrote about common mistakes in urban planning: "For instance, policies like rent control, greenbelts, new light rail transports, among others, are constantly repeated in spite of a near consensus on their failure to achieve their objectives." Page 364 of Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. MIT Press, 2018. ISBN 9780262349222
  • Peter Navarro wrote in 1985 that, "On the subject of rent control, the economics profession has reached a rare consensus: Rent control creates many more problems than it solves." The Public Interest, 1985. Also quoted in David W. Conklin's 1991 Comparative Economic Systems: Objectives, Decision Modes, and the Process of Choice.
What we should be doing here is telling the reader about the findings of economists who are in disagreement with the "near consensus" of their chosen profession, while at the same time continuing to tell the reader that the mainstream view is fairly well established against rent control. We should be giving more credence to the minority view so that the reader can see why rent control has been implemented in so many places. Binksternet (talk) 22:54, 29 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Bink -- Peter Navarro??? 🤦‍♂️🤷‍♂️ SPECIFICO talk 12:24, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Binksternet, the cite from Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science that Makes Life Dismal is quoting a section that's entirely facetious. Not sure where you found that quote, but it appears to be deliberately taken out of context. The entire chapter is dedicated to debunking Pareto efficiency, and continues: "Rent control is not Pareto efficient, we shall see, because it lets middle-class families live in apartments they otherwise could not afford, and because it therefore does not maximize the sum of consumer surpluses." I don't believe the chapter supports the idea that rent control reduces the quality and quantity of available housing, and find this use of the source disingenuous. I concur with those against the inclusion of the statement in the article; I find a lot of these sources suspect at best and think they're worth further review. I'll see if I can spend some time finding contrary sources, but understand the frustration that this was ever included in the article in the first place. Ewwwphoria (talk) 22:38, 2 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Anyway, I think there are two problems. 1. There's a lot of Reagan/Milton Friedman era economic "wisdom" that all regulation is very very bad. This kind of POV was rationalized in hundreds of articles that flooded the academic journals, and it creates inertia when we use WEIGHT to assess current best thinking and more critical neutral expert analysis of the issues. We could similarly find weight of the references to support all sorts of now-discarded theories in many academic disciplines. 2- Rent control to my knowledge was generally applied to an existing stock of old housing while new housing was not controlled. So, for example, in New York City, housing build after a certain date was exempt with the result that older buildings were sold to the tenants as co-ops or condos while a lot of new buildings were erected at market rate rents. That's quite the opposite of the Peter Navarro view. But then again, he's Peter Navarro, so... At any rate, the only way to improve any of these articles is to go through all the WP channels and site-wide noticeboards. Given the low level of interest in this topic, the articles may be very slow to change regardless of their flaws. I agree however that a constructive step would be to add the most respected and most recent opposing views supported by academic studies. SPECIFICO talk 12:24, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed SPECIFICO. What can be done to bring this discussion to a serious review of the issue after months of arguments ignored by the people who introduced the sentence without consensus and prevent a fair debate or changes they don't like.197.230.198.10 (talk) 12:33, 28 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Three problems with the statement[edit]

I think there are three problems with the statement:

  1. The sources don't actually justify the claim as it will be understood in context. The actual survey question posed by Alston, Kearl, and Vaughan in 1992 was "A ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available." However, the claimed consensus statement has "rent control", not a "ceiling on rents", and this follows several paragraphs showing the diversity of rent controls that have been proposed. In context, the statement will be taken that a consensus exists against any form of rent control, and that, I think can be refuted. Hypothetically, the consensus claim could be justified by another reliable source, but no more recent, high quality survey of economists has been performed, as far as I know; certainly the overview article by Jenkins and the think tank pieces do not mention any.
  2. The sources given are mostly an ad-hoc selection: they are a sampling of sources arguing that there is agreement on rent control without recognition of the existence of a substantial contrary literature. This is not how we write articles if we respect WP:N.
  3. A claim in wiki-voice that there is a consensus on a matter is a big claim to make. I just do not think the evidence is there to say one way or another. It's worth contrasting the situation here with that regarding the minimum wage: there is a wealth of varied, high quality surveys of economists on that matter that would allow a consensus to be demonstarated if there was one, but here we have to look back nearly 30 years to find a single quality survey.

If 193.52.24.13 is right that there are some editors who are asserting ownership of certain economics pages, that is not too hard to remedy. Putting together a decent RfC on the matter would be a place to start. — Charles Stewart [[SPECIFICO|(talk)]] 06:50, 30 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, SPECIFICO, TFD, Dennis Bratland, Qzekrom,Charles Stewart. Should we put this issue back to discussion or vote in [11]? No hard evidence was ever left that there is a consensus among economists, nor that there is a consensus among wikipedia users. The statement was introduced by Snooganssnoogans on 24 December 2020 at 14:54. The one who should get a consensus to introduce such a statement is the one who is in favour of it. 2A02:C7E:143A:6000:A0A7:505F:394B:FF6F (talk) 11:29, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Your 'hard evidence' is the six citations attached to the statement. MrOllie (talk) 11:30, 15 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Can you share with the community the specific pages where the works of those "six citations" provide evidence to validate the claim? Walden03 (talk) 19:05, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Page numbers are already in the citations. MrOllie (talk) 19:38, 5 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Page numbers do not match specific information supporting the claim. They seem trivial citations. 197.230.198.10 (talk) 22:48, 23 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
What is a 'trivial citation'? MrOllie (talk) 23:15, 23 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
A citation that does not have sufficient value to support an argument. None of the citations in these books are of any value to argue that there is a scholarly consensus on this point of contention. Most of them are general economics books with no explicit mention of the problem.197.230.122.194 (talk) 18:34, 26 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, who is Snooganssnoogans, and why didn't he/she get consensus before writing the sentence?197.230.122.194 (talk) 18:36, 26 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
All of the citations are directly on point, reliable as Wikipedia defines it, and clearly address the claim in question specifically. That you disagree with them does not mean they are of no value. MrOllie (talk) 23:05, 27 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
False. You are not answering the questions. Show how the citations address each point. Who is Snooganssnoogans, and why didn't he/she get consensus before writing the sentence. And what is this bullying behaviour [12]197.230.198.10 (talk) 12:27, 28 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
If you keep trying to delete properly sourced content with obviously false edit summaries, you will probably get blocked. The standard warning messages you received are simply making you aware of that fact. No one is under any obligation to answer your questions, and they are irrelevant to the article as it stands today. MrOllie (talk) 12:29, 28 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
False again. Not properly sourced content. 197.230.198.10 (talk) 12:35, 28 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
You know very well that waiting a bit after making a non responsive reply does not justify removing this sentence again. MrOllie (talk) 21:59, 2 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I've been trying to follow both discussions, and I'd like to try to weight in but for a start I would need a direct quote, or a Google Books/Internet Archive link to the page or chapter for context, of each given refs. Binksternet, with whom I agree to "hate arguing on the side of rent control opponents", provided three refs with quotes, and that's good. I don't doubt that there's a consensus, but I'm not sure the current wording is the best way to do that; it'd be better to have maybe a slightly longer sentence but that it's closer to those quotes. We also really only need the three best refs of the 21st century to avoid WP:REFBOMB, or at least to better distribute them, such as that three refs are given in support of consensus among economists, and three others to support their arguments, in particular making clear which type of rent control or regulation they are discussing, whether any form of rent control, only a certain type, if implemented in a certain way, specific examples, or case studies. Finally, I do share and agree with SPECIFICO's comment. In summary, I'm not opposed to say that there's some consensus among economists, but I believe the sentence can be improved to better reflect the consensus and use of the WP:BESTSOURCES (21st-century academic books and peer-reviewed journals rather than 1980s–1990s refs), and rather than have a bunch of refs to just say "consensus", let's better distribute them so as to better contextualize, clarify, and explain their arguments, what they say, and in which context. Davide King (talk) 10:22, 26 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I do share Chalst's concerns, and I forgot to say this but I also agree with Binksternet that "[w]e should be giving more credence to the minority view so that the reader can see why rent control has been implemented in so many places." Of course, if there is any other significant minority view as I and Binksternet believe to be, we should also give it some weight, and explain and clarify this, in particular why it remains popular among a certain constituency and is still applied in certain specific cases, and so on; e.g. supporters say the main goal of rent control is, say, lowering housing costs, rather than quality (if I remember correctly, at least a user also higlighted this or said something similar to this effect that the current sentence is missing) and they claim to have been successful at this, or things like these. Davide King (talk) 10:41, 26 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you very much Davide King for your comments and for bringing some common sense to a forum that is totally biased and controlled by a handful of people. Still, even though your suggestion is on the right track, I only partially agree with what you say. In no case can those three references be taken as anything close to a consensus among economists. And even less so when even today, in many cities around the world, economists who are part of government teams are still implementing rent control measures, and fine-tuning rent control to make it more effective. There are also counter-arguments that are being ignored:
  • A 2007 study by David Sims [13] and a 2014 study by Autor, Palmer, and Pathak [14] both look at the effects of the end of rent control in Massachusetts, after the passage of Question 9 by Massachusetts ballot referendum in 1994. Sims found that the end of rent control had little effect on the construction of new housing. He did however find evidence that rent control decreased the number of available rental units, by encouraging condo conversions. In other words, rent control seemed to affect the quantity of rental housing, but not the total quantity of the housing stock. Unsurprisingly, Sims also found significant increases in rent charged after decontrol, suggesting that rent control was effective in limiting rent increases.
  • A 2007 study [15] by Gilderbloom and Ye of more recent rent control laws here in New Jersey finds evidence that rent controls actually increase the supply of rental housing, by incentivizing landlords to subdivide larger rental units.
  • A 2015 study [16] by Ambrosius, Glderbloom, and coauthors also looks at changes in New Jersey rent regulations. As with the previous study, they find that rent control in New Jersey has not produced any detectable reduction in new housing supply.
  • The most recent major study of rent control, by Diamond McQuade, and Qian in 2018 [17], uses detailed data on San Francisco housing market to look at the effect of the mid-1990s change in rent control rules there. They suggest that while the law did effectively limit rent increases, and had no effect on new housing construction, it did have a negative effect on the supply of rental housing by encouraging condo conversions.193.52.24.13 (talk) 20:43, 29 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Other violations are:
  • This statement was added to the article (without any consensus and without any discussion on the talk page) by Snooganssnoogans on 24 December 2020 at 14:5 (see [18]).
  • No validation-type consideration is even halfway acceptable in the lead paragraph, even before summarising the main ideas on rent control. The fact that this assessment of the supposed existing consensus appears in the lead paragraph is an appalling manifestation of how biased this article is.197.230.198.10 (talk) 17:39, 9 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • The sticking point here is the question of what sourcing is required to validate the claim of consensus, my third point. I look at the sources and do not conclude the existence of a consensus for the more general statement, since the evidence in the sources is not evidence that anyone has done a competent job of assessing the opinion of economists. However, there certainly is plenty of evidence that plenty of well-regarded economists feel confident enough in the claim to assert a consensus, and there are Wikipedia guidelines such as WP:MEDSCI that suggest this is good enough for us to report the existence of consensus in wikivoice.
I think these guidelines are bad guidelines: the existence of cliques of well-regarded scholars who believe their opinions are consensus in the absence of quality evidence regarding what the aggregate opinions of the population of scholars in that discipline is, I think, fairly common and not just in economics; I seem to recall that there was such a clique that held there is a strong link between minimum-wage rules and unemployment, who were shown to be wrong when the high degree of controversy on that question was finally documented in high quality polls.
I suggested before having an RfC. I still think that might be the right step, but I don't like the principle that we settle what we can say in wikivoice about consensus statements by a simple vote, since that invites vote-stacking, and holding a Wikipedia !vote seems problematic since what little we have in the way of guidelines seems transparently bad to me and so closers are not in a good position to separate the wheat from the chaff if there are problems with the RfC. Thoughts? — Charles Stewart (talk) 16:37, 11 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your suggestion Charles Stewart. Would it be possible to initiate the process for this Rfc that you propose? What would it consist of and how do you envision the process? There is another page with the same problem [19].139.47.67.203 (talk) 19:53, 25 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
More cases of areas where rent control reduces prices and increases supply: [20]139.47.67.203 (talk) 19:53, 25 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I have edited the page slightly, from previous discussion that exhibits a lack of consensus, and my comment has been reverted by one of the page custodians because he considers it vandalism. Does the community consider my edit to be vandalism? I recall that the comment was introduced without prior discussion on the talk page [21]. Here is my edit censored by this user. [22]. 139.47.67.203 (talk) 23:14, 29 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Your long term, slow motion edit war against the word consensus simply is not going to work. If we must hold an RFC to get you to stop, so be it - this is one of the best cited sentences on Wikipedia and I am sure that the community will not be in favor of deletion. MrOllie (talk) 23:19, 29 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I was not the one that added such comment without prior discussion or consensus. The lack of consensus on the current sentence is obvious and outrageous. Happy to have a fair revision of the sentence (provided it is fair and not led by a few ideologically biased custodians, as has been the case so far). 139.47.67.203 (talk) 23:27, 29 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, of course. Everyone who disagrees with you is obviously biased. MrOllie (talk) 23:33, 29 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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