plummbob t1_j9jv4zd wrote on February 22, 2023 at 2:23 PM

>Before the city council changed the rules, Mission Playground was a public good open to all. After the rules changed, it became in part a privately held commodity, open only to those with the knowledge and means to pay for it.

This is where the analysis starts to fall apart.

Lets recap how the land was previously allocated by residents:

>If there wasn’t enough space for everyone, some played while others watched from the sidelines. Once one team scored, the losing team would trade places with those who’d been on the sidelines. Sooner or later, everyone got a chance to play.

So we have some scarce resource and we need a way to allocate it amongst consumers. Not everybody can use it at once, its limited in scope, and people will want to make sure its use is maximized during peak times.

Imagine a simple player model:

You have some time budget on how long you can just be out there, T, some time on the field K, and a likelihood that you'll be picked to play, S. And utility gained from playing U(K/T).

So your condition is ensuring that U(K/T) = S(K/T), that the benefit to you from playing always at least has to be equal to the likelihood and time of you actually playing the game. If U(K/T) < S(K/T), then you'll leave and do something else. If U(K/T) >S(K/T), then you'll wait till its your turn.

The problem with this is if demand for the field increases, there are more people on the sidelines, so the likelihood of getting picked falls, and the time spent on the sideline rises. S shrinks, T grows. So you'd have to somehow magically get way more utility from playing a smaller amount.

That isn't sustainable.

A permit simplifies things. Imagine permit costs C, you have some friends F to split the cost with, and so your spending, P, is P = C/F. Since its just you and your friends, there is no waiting on the sidelines, S is 100%, and you spend all the time on the field, so K= T, so now we have

U(K) = C/F. As long as the utility gained from playing soccer at least equals the individual share of the permit costs, you'll get the permit.

The author is heading in the wrong direction. It was never really a "public" good, it functioned as a private good where its both excludable and rivalrous --, and its allocation was fragile, dependent on some really circumstantial rules that people tacitly agreed to because demand for the field was relatively low, and the cost of abiding by the time was also low. But as demand grows, these rules would break down and we would need a different way to allocate it to people -- a way that is more visible and clear to all.

>then it seems that what the protestors were fundamentally objecting to was the practice of treating housing as just a commodity. For when housing is treated as just a commodity, residential landlords have a right to exclude tenants from their homes whenever they can no longer afford whatever rent the landlord demands. Writ large, this right of exclusion produces displacement and housing insecurity

The rest of the article is basically not-answering the basic question:

How do landlords retain price setting power? Do all landlords have this power? Does a landlord in no-where Wisconsin have the same market power as a landlord in The Mission? Why, why not? If landlord surplus is rising, how come other landlords are entering to capture that excess profit?

Why don't the people who are renting buy a home to protect themselves from cost inflation? Can they? Why or why not? Why did that lady rent for years after watching her rent rise? etc.

You gotta answer those questions before trying to your hand a policy proposal. Because if you get those answers wrong, the solution derived from it would also be wrong.