Across the street from my home is a vacant house. It's been vacant since at least mid-2019. In the middle of a housing crisis, the house remains vacant. Various people in the neighbourhood have wondered why the owner doesn't rent the property out. It made one of our neighbours incredibly angry. They wanted to buy a house (in 2019), but they couldn't find that was affordable. And yet, the house next to their rented home was vacant.
Why is the house vacant? Why won't the owner rent just it out? If you look at it, you realise that there are a lot of impediments to becoming a landlord. On 1 July 2019 (around about the time that the house was vacated by its owner), the government introduced new 'healthy homes' standards, that all rental properties would eventually need to meet. The house would need to be insulated, and meet heating and ventilation standards, along with some other conditions. If that would require expensive upgrading of the house (and that seems entirely plausible), then the landlord might have decided it would not be worth the hassle, and has since kept the property vacant. [*]
The healthy homes standards are not the worst policy the government could have enacted that would have led to vacant houses. Thankfully they have never followed through on early indications that they were considering rent controls. It is well known (to economists, at least) that rent controls lead to a worsening of the quality of rental housing (to the extent that rent controlled housing is literally killing people in Mumbai). But rent controls also increase the number of vacant houses.
A good examination of why vacancy rates are higher when rent controls are in place was provided by this recent article, by Sahil Gandhi (University of Manchester), Richard Green (University of Southern California), and Shaonlee Patranabis (London School of Economics), published in the Journal of Urban Economics (open access). Gandhi hypothesise that rent controls and lack of state capacity for legal enforcement of contracts both reduce the security of property rights, and that leads landlords to leave their properties vacant:
Two phenomena could create uncertainty in this allocation of rights of ownership between the landlord and the tenant. First, rent control, whose aim is to protect tenants from rent increases and evictions, alters the allocation of ownership in favor of the tenant. Second, if courts take long to resolve disputes, the ownership of the property could de-facto belong to the tenant for this duration and thus increase the risks for the landlord... The presence of either of these two conditions reduces ex-ante incentives for the landlord to engage in a rental contract. High vacancy rates are a natural consequence of reducing the benefits and raising the costs to a landlord of renting.
The problem of vacancies is particularly acute in India, where:
...the vacant stock of 11.1 million units could house almost 50 million people or around 13% of the urban Indian population.
Gandhi et al. use district-level data from the 2001 and 2011 Indian Censuses, essentially comparing the proportion of vacant properties between districts with and without rent controls. They also look at the relationship between vacant properties and state capacity for contract enforcement, measured as the number of judges per 1000 people. They have panel data for 456 districts across 24 states (for rent control) and cross-sectional data for 580 districts across 29 states (for state capacity). In their analyses, they find that:
...a pro-landlord policy move that relaxes rent revisions could potentially reduce housing vacancy by 2.8 to 3.1 percentage points and lead to a net welfare gain...
...a one to two standard deviation increase in judges per 1000 persons (urban) could reduce vacancy by 0.43 to 0.86 percentage points...
In other words, both rent controls and a lack of state capacity for contract enforcement lead landlords to leave properties vacant rather than renting them out. Gandhi et al. conclude that:
...rent control reform and judicial capacity are two areas in need of urgent attention from policymakers. The Model Tenancy Act, approved in June 2021 by the Government of India, aims to address both issues. It allows for setting rents at market rates and requires separate fast track courts to resolve disputes between tenants and landlords. If states adopt this Act then our findings suggest that vacant housing will decline.
Note that introducing rent control, and making it more difficult for landlords to evict bad tenants, would tend to shift things in the opposite direction. Both are policies that the current New Zealand government has actively considered. The consequences are clear.
[HT: Eric Crampton at Offsetting Behaviour]
*****
[*] In the last two years, things have gotten even worse for the house. A pipe burst in 2020 and flooded underneath the house. The owner didn't do anything. A large silk tree in the front yard rotted, then finally collapsed. Still no sign of the owner. The house is virtually abandoned at this point. I suspect it is not only un-rentable (given the healthy homes standards), but is probably unsaleable as well.
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