Why’s my rent gotta go up every year, in spite of no actual improvements to my home or the facilities? Why is there a convenience fee for paying my rent online?
They continue to take advantage of demand beyond what’s considered fair, whether the demand is due to govt policy or not. That’s why landlords get so much hate.
Not itemized, made clear to tenants, or asked for. Lack of transparency hurts all those valid points, and we’ve all, all, had bad landlords at some point.
Only quality legislation has protected me the few times I’ve had to tangle, anecdotally.
Not itemized, made clear to tenants, or asked for. Lack of transparency hurts all those valid points,
Why does that matter? Is your local grocery store transparent about the cost of chicken? No, because nobody is forcing you to pay for it. You pay for a service at an agreed upon price, if you don’t want it don’t buy it.
all, had bad landlords at some point.
I personally haven’t, the worse landlords I’ve had were at an upscale apartment complex that got mad because I hung an American flag. Once again, it’s up to you if you want to pay for the service provided by said landlord. Just like if you pay a plumber and they’re mean to you, you probably won’t go to them next time.
I agree zoning sucks but so does my landlord. He inherited 17 houses and has never worked, every time I ask for something to be fixed he hires someone else out to do it, at one point he was saving up all my checks so I had to switch to money orders, he tried hitting on my wife, and he talks to me like I am not his fucking customer who pays for his mother fucking stable.
So fuck him and everyone like him. Inherited everything while the rest of us have to work.
every time I ask for something to be fixed he hires someone else out to do it
So he sucks because he gets a professional to help fix problems you have? That’s what a landlord is supposed to do…
at one point he was saving up all my checks so I had to switch to money orders
You still paid rent with checks?
everyone like him
I agree, he sounds sleezy, but just because you have a bad landlord doesn’t make all landlords bad.
Inherited everything while the rest of us have to work.
See, this is somewhere you and I differ completely. You hate someone because they have something you don’t, I put 0 weight on it. Why should I hate someone for getting a gift from a relative or friend? Why should I hate someone because they’re blessed differently than I?
If you don’t see any issue with someone being a sleezy piece of shit who inherited more wealth than the average person makes in a lifetime I am not sure what to tell you. Except to remind you that: The corporate overloads are going to sell you down the river the moment you are no longer useful to them.
If you don’t see any issue with someone being a sleezy piece of shit who inherited more wealth than the average person makes in a lifetime I am not sure what to tell you.
Well you’ve already shown your bias against anyone who has inherited anything.
The corporate overloads are going to sell you down the river the moment you are no longer useful to them.
Okay? How am i useful to them at all? What’s that have to do with not hating an individual because he got a gift from a relative?
Point is, you only have so long to live. Why do we all have to hustle, day in and day out? That’s not the point of existence, at least I refuse to believe so.
I once read that empires spreading their religion and culture through force was a not the most effective or common method. The way it usually worked was that once conquering foreigners became the elites in society, people in proximity to the elite would adopt the culture of their superiors, to fit in. Once a critical mass of elites and their subordinates adopting a foreign culture/religion was reached, it spread throughout society like a trend.
Anyway the point I’m trying to make is the power of proximity to the elite is enough to overrule a person’s whole identity. Anybody who’s close to a a social climber will recognize how this works.
My wife’s maternal side of her family is all from Mississippi. I was blown away the first time I traveled up there to meet them all. They all seemed like the nicest, warmest people you could meet. Welcomed me into their family with open arms. We had a big meal, and afterwards we were all gathered around just shooting the breeze and the subject of conversation moved to how they all used to torment black people back in the good ol’ days. N-words as far as the ear could hear, and uproarious laughter filled the room. This was about the time I started spending all my time outside smoking. I couldn’t wait to GTFO of there…
My understanding is that rent control backfired pretty spectacularly in the long term.
The better plan here would be to stop companies from buying residential properties, to incentivized the conversion of commercial properties into apartments, to penalize banks and individuals who are sitting on unused residential properties.
Oh, and wipe out all student loan debt so that younger generations have a prayer of buying a house someday.
Who told you rent control backfired? Cause that's a lie. It was just never adopted as widely as it should have been, and rich owners always have the ear of lawmakers ... the same can't be said of poor/working poor people.
Rent control works just fine in a more socialist model, especially when the government is a prime builder of housing without seeking profit, as almost every European country was during the 50s-70s. It’s only when government gets out of house building and everything gets privatisated and for-profit that rent control fails.
Semi. It’s got bits and pieces of all systems, which is a hint that the “-ism” powering any country’s economy doesn’t have as big an impact as its leaders.
Unfortunately, capitalism tends to reward corruption, it’s much easier and profitable to be corrupt than to do the right thing™.
Libraries are socialist. Otherwise every person in a fully capitalist system would be expected to buy their personal copy of a book.
And you’re right - there are scales with capitalism and socialism weighing against each other in basically every economy. Finland, Norway, France are examples where it’s tipped a bit more in favour of the “socialism” side. But the US has plenty of elements of socialism, from housing coops in the Bronx, to utility coops in the midwest (that helped pave the way for the electrification of rural America), to credit unions, to welfare policies, to the Alaska social wealth fund, and I could keep going.
Finland and Norway have among the highest percentage of private investment in the world, to the extent that investment is the leading economic driver in Nordic countries.
It truly depends on the definition of socialism. Is it socialist anytime a service is provided by the govt? Or solely when public policy limits the abilities of capital?
You and I disagree, and that’s ok cuz I don’t care.
The US has lots of socialized losses but privatized profits. To call it a capitalist economy is a gross oversimplification which glosses over the fact that no corporation is actually competing in a free market at this point.
I unfortunately can’t read that article as it’s paywalled, but looking at the link, it’s an Opinion piece, so not factual reporting. It’s also from Bloomberg, one of the most pro-capitalist publications out there, second only to The Economist in its championing of all things pro globalist and pro capitalist.
The main stream media which is all very pro capitalist (as they’re all owned by billionaire oligarchs) has been shitting on rent control for decades.
Rent didn’t shoot up, how could it, the whole point of the law was it was frozen.
I think you’re missing the forest for the trees in this entire conversation: rent has been skyrocketing everywhere, in every G8 country, for the last 20 years. Especially in places like London, NYC, LA, Seattle, Paris, Toronto, Bay Area, etc. Hell, even in Salt Lake City where I used to live my rent went from £1816/mon to £2600/mon for the same flat, in just 2 years. And none of those cities have classic rent control (NYC has a few places which have it, but overall it doesn’t). So clearly with a free market, pure capitalist approach, rents have only been skyrocketing. Same thing for housing to buy, have you tried buying a house lately?
So to claim that rent control or rent freezes lead to higher rentals or less supply is wrong, because rents are going up in a free market too, and supply is already at an all time low (hence the prices shooting up).
So you’re fucked in either situation. The real problem is there just isn’t enough supply of shelter for people, and that’s because if you leave it to the free market, there’s no incentive to build affordable housing with no profit. Hence, because shelter is something required by citizens, government should be building it even at a huge loss. Just like government provides fire brigade and military at a financial loss, because people need these things. You don’t leave essential services to the private market because it may not be profitable to do them, for example, rural communities have shite internet, why? because it’s not profitable to dig and lay fibre optic cable into some rural hinterland for just a few hundred customers. So in Norway, the government steps in lays that fiber optic at a financial loss because it wants its citizens to have a better life. Same for housing. If the private sector isn’t doing it, the government should be. Just like in the 60s.
Rent goes up because we have insufficient housing construction, and we have insufficient going construction becuause zoning laws prevent housing construction. Literally none of the places you bring up have anything approaching a free market wrt housing construction.
I am aware that the government can encourage building and it should do so. Vote locally to repeal zoning laws.
If government says the private sector cannot do something, then yeah you’ll see few or no businesses doing that thing.
Zoning is only a small part of the problem. Even if you zoned a bunch of new land today, if you let the private, free market have its course, then what do you think will be built on that land? Highly unaffordable luxury flats/houses, because that is what leads to the highest profit margins for the private sectors builders. And those flats will be bought up by investors or wealthy individuals to create more unaffordable rent.
That’s the core issue, individual private sector interests are not aligned to be altruistic interests for the good of society. They want to maximise profit, nothing more. Hence, you need someone willing to build houses and sell them at a loss, so average people can afford housing again. Only the government can sell for a loss and remain in business.
Ergo, you can zone all the land you want, but if you only let private sector builders have it, then you’ll just get more and more unaffordable properties built, chasing rich foreign investors, tech millionaires, or pension funds.
This is the core issue with Thatcherism/deregulation/privatisation. An individual company’s profit margins don’t always align with the good of society, but society needs essential services (water, sewage, electricity, food, housing, defense). These things need to be provided to all citizens, urban and rural, but doing so doesn’t always guarantee a profit, so you can’t just leave it to the private sector only.
You’re so close! Once you figure out those luxury flats will go for quite a lot, then free up downchannel housing you’ll understand how this all actually shakes out when people can build.
But that’s not what actually happens!! It’s like the Laffer Curve, we don’t actually see any of these benefits of letting the free market try to create all these supposed benefits and efficiencies. The textbooks say they should happen but in practice they never do. Even when the UK government releases state owned brownfield land, developers build overpriced flats no one in the local area can actually afford. So it doesn’t actually create any net new living space because 1) the local populace can’t afford it, 2) it gets bought by investors.
How does having investors scoop up luxury flats release downchannel housing at all? I have never seen that happen. Even in places where land is cheap and zoned for residential, like in areas of Utah, they never actually build affordable housing on it. People end up locked into renting.
It’s not a metaphor, it’s as you say, an economic theory for the optimal rate of taxation, which exists somewhere between 0% and 100%. However, in the USA it has been put into practice over the past 30 years, where taxes on the extremely wealthy have fallen drastically over that time, with the thinking being that this would raise government revenue and also all that trickle down hogwash. Only it hasn’t, and it has only served to weaken revenues at the local community and state level, and caused wealth inequality worse than the gilded age.
In terms of housing, you are correct in principle, if the supply of housing was to drastically increase such that it outpaced demand, then sure, prices would fall. But this is a specious argument for a number of reasons. First, even if zoning was abolished tomorrow, it’s impossible to actually build new housing in most of the world’s most expensive cities, such as NYC, London, and LA, because there’s simply no space to build anywhere, except on the extreme periphery. London still has some brownfield land, but LA is boxed in by mountains, and Manhattan literally has no more space because it’s an island. So where do you actually build? Vertically, okay, but then you have destroy existing structures.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, even if you allowed easy zoning, and cleared out lots for mega towers, who is going to actually build so much supply so as to flood the market in order to crater prices and make housing affordable? That’s the dumbest thing ever, no builder wants to see prices come down, that would be like DeBeers flooding the market with diamonds, massively increasing supply and dropping the price, and killing their own profits/margins. Builders want high prices, not low, they have no incentive go on a building boom like in 2007 such that prices drop.
So you’re left with my original argument: you can’t leave housing solely to the for-profit, private sector. They have no incentive to build affordable housing, or flood the market with over supply in order to drop prices.
Yeah but by whom? What’s the incentive for private sector builders to do that at scale if it means lower prices and lower margins by dramatically increasing supply?
Why do you think this will significantly impact margins? If a builder builds a house for $300k right now, the cost of the lot is eating a shitload of that $300k. If my home doubles in value (which it has), the land itself is more valuable.
By the same token, if I build a 4 story apartment building on my same lot, I make significantly more money over time than I would selling it once to a homeowner.
Your own answer from earlier said so: increase supply massively whilst demand stays constant, means prices come down. Fair enough.
Well, if prices come down, margins by definition decrease, because building materials and labour aren’t decreasing too.
Ergo, even if zoning restrictions were relaxed massively, and permits handed out quickly and easily, there’s no incentive to flood the market like in 2007. This is especially true of big high rise, high density properties, as there usually are only a few companies who can build such buildings (in central London there’s like 4), so it makes collusion to keep supply low much easier. Sort of like how OPEC works.
This is not how the housing bubble popped. It was demand-side, due to (absurdly) loose credit. Home prices were still rising dramatically in 07 - supply was not keeping up with demand.
Why is it not accurate? House prices come down but cost of materials and labour stay constant or go up, what am I missing?
Also, I feel like we have gotten so far off track so as to forget what exactly we are arguing about.
The original discussion was how to fix the housing market so as to create way more affordable housing. My original argument was the government has to do that, by building houses at a loss, which only the government can do.
Your argument seems to have originally been that the true problem is the zoning and government red tape, but I feel like we have both come to the conclusion that neither of those is true. Firstly, even if zoning isn’t a problem, in places like LA and NYC there’s no physical space left to build, except vertically. In London, the only new land to build is way outside Zone 5. Furthermore, what incentive is there for private sector builders to flood the market with new supply, either horizontally or vertically? No industry likes it when the price of their product goes down, not a single one, and no industry is going to help that happen.
Finally, building vertically requires way bigger companies to get involved, meaning there are fewer of them, meaning it’s easier for them to collude to keep prices high. Building a ranch house out in Wyoming can be done by some local two-bit builder, but a skyscraper in Manhattan would need to be some big multinational. Ergo, even if the only solution is Shanghai style vertical flats, the prices are even more suspectible to collusion by the few big companies able and willing to build them.
Or, like I said, bypass all this bollocks and have the government build loads of houses and sell them at a loss, flood the supply and bring prices down for the altruistic, non-profit motive of getting more people into housing. Done and done.
Materials and labor are relatively static compared to home costs. A 10% rise in housing costs was like another 15-20 grand in most cases, before housing costs exploded, factoring in inflation.
Compare that to the doubling (or more - my home is over 250% of what I paid) of home prices (tied to lot value) and the difference is stark.
Even assuming a dramatic increase in parts/labor of like 50% of those costs and you’re barely hitting on the final value, all things considered.
Space is the problem and building vertically (even just 2-4 stories) is the answer.
If it helps, consider that parts and labor are generally 30-50% of home costs (assuming “normal” values) and even a doubling of that cost is less than the growth of home prices.
By far, the biggest cost increase has been lot value.
Depends on your definition of “success.” Countries such as Holland, France, Canada, Germany, and China all have caps on the amount by which a landlord can increase rent in any given year, usually by law it’s less than 5%, or indexed to inflation (but with 5% as the max). These laws are incredibly popular with renters and have been around for decades.
Berlin implemented a hard rent freeze in 2020 which was extremely popular with renters, but not with landlords, naturally.
Putting all your faith in economists whose sole purpose is to back the current capitalist shitshow that rapes the land and kills the poor is a strange take.
The author of that article is Megan McArdle. A quick look at her other articles:
An article that attempts to shift blame away from media execs and onto consumers, in response to the writers/actors’ protests
"Higher minimum wages may increase homelessness" (literal article title)
Says we shouldn’t expect to keep taxing wealthy people more
Wants to reduce medicaid but conveniently doesn’t mention the amount of death poor people will experience as a result of that, using the same austerity justifications we’ve heard in Europe already (that turned out to be bullshit)
There’s also an underlying layer to this problem with a specific type of home owner: the foreign investor. These individuals use American properties to hide their wealth from their home countries. Tax evasion, high ROI, and increased scarcity in every purchase. Homes often go months and years without occupancy, sometimes with minimal furnishings so as not to appear vacant.
I’m not saying foreigners shouldn’t buy homes in America. However, if they do buy a home they should be required to occupy each individual property for a minimum of 6-9 months every year. Otherwise, a heavy tax that exceeds the property’s/ies annual appreciation to encourage occupancy or selling would be ideal.
So they’re buying a new house every few years and selling the old one? If they have only one house at a time, I don’t really care much. The issue is when billion dollar corporations buy up single family homes to rent out, not an individual buying a house to live in and sell it in a few years
True I guess I was reading more into the original comment on taxing more than appreciation and such. I know there are tax benefits to primary residence already, which maybe covers their original idea, but I figured it would be even higher taxes for foreigners for non-primary residence or something was what they were suggesting.
Georgia had this problem decades ago and fixed it by lowering adverse possession requirements down to 13 months of occupation. It’s back to over a decade now but I liked that approach.
I’m not really worried about commercial landlords. Most of them are okay. A few are great, a few are slumlords.
What I’d really like to see is more and denser housing being built, period. And investment in infrastructure like public transit so that places are more accessible, more livable.
My understanding is that rent control backfired pretty spectacularly in the long term.
There are critiques against rent control that have persisted for decades that are now seeing a growing body of counter-evidence that it maybe isn’t that bad after all. Hence the resurgence of rent control being suggested as a policy tool. It makes sense that the myth that rent control is bad has persisted for so long - high earning economists (yes, they’re very high earners) who are thus more likely to own rental units have an incentive to publish research showing that policies that harm their rental income are bad, and have less incentive to publish research that shows policies like these benefit the renter over the landlord.
Here’s a great article by J. W. Mason, who has a PhD in economics, who goes over more recent research around rent control. He shows that it’s far more nuanced and less clearly “bad” than right wing economists have been trying to push us to believe.
This better matches my understanding than OP’s take. It’s not necessarily that certain folks were being disingenuous (though of course with financial matters that’s also common), but more so that rent control is designed to help people closer to the bottom of the financial ladder, and those people are also disenfranchised in other ways, including their results bring unreported or thrown under the rug.
The difference now is that the housing system is so screwed and skewed overall, rent control would likely benefit far more folks than those at the absolute bottom of the financial ladder – that, or the wealth gap is just so large that there’s a huge number of people at the bottom, all roughly equivalent to each other given how rich the rich have become.
My understanding is that rent control backfired pretty spectacularly in the long term.
Yeah, the basic problem with rent control is that it creates the opposite long-term incentive from what you want.
Rentable housing is like any other good -- it costs more when the supply is constrained relative to demand, costs less when supply is abundant relative to demand.
If rent is high, what you want is to see more housing built.
What rent control does is to cut the return on rents, which makes it less desirable to buy property to rent, which makes it less desirable to build property, which constrains the supply of housing, which exacerbates the original problem of not having as much housing as one would want in the market.
I would not advocate for it myself, but if someone is a big fan of subsidizing housing the poor, what they realistically want is to subsidize housing for the poor out of taxes or something. They don't want to disincentivize purchase of housing for rent, which is what rent control does.
If you subsidize housing you create increased demand for housing, ultimately leading to rent going up for all.
So, as I said, I'm not an advocate of subsidizing housing out of taxes. I'm just saying that people who are arguing for rent control are arguing for a policy that tends to exacerbate the problem in the long run.
Subsidizing housing doesn't normally run into that, because it's normally possible to build more housing.
It is true that that's not always the case, and one very real way in which that can not be the case is where there have been restrictions placed on constructing more housing. If housing prices are high, the first thing I would look at is "why can't developers build more housing, and are there regulatory restrictions preventing them from doing so". It is quite common to place height restrictions on new constructions, which prevents developers from building property to meet that demand, which drives up housing prices (and rents). In London, there are restrictions placed that disallow building upwards such that a building would be in line-of-sight between several landmarks. That restricts construction in London and makes housing prices artificially rise. Getting planning permission may also be a bottleneck. I agree with you that that sort of thing is the thing that I would tend to look at first as well: removing restrictions on housing construction is the preferable way to solve a housing problem.
I remember an article from Edward Glaeser some time back talking about how much restrictions on construction -- he particularly objected to the expanding number of protected older, short buildings -- have led to cost of housing going up.
How Skyscrapers Can Save the City
Besides making cities more affordable and architecturally interesting, tall buildings are greener than sprawl, and they foster social capital and creativity. Yet some urban planners and preservationists seem to have a misplaced fear of heights that yields damaging restrictions on how tall a building can be. From New York to Paris to Mumbai, there’s a powerful case for building up, not out.
Part of the problem with rent control is that it doesn’t subsidize the building of new housing. The times in which housing prices dropped in the USA were typically when a government either opened up land to development, subsidized the building of housing, or built the housing themselves.
Where’s all this housing being built as a result of sky-high rents? If they are being built, they’re being snatched up immediately by “investor” parasites.
What are you referring to? I don’t see all this new housing being built. I only know about three active sites in my city. I also know that our local zoning board has been rejecting applications because of neighborhood character.
I would run to serve but it’s an appointed position. Which yeah not great.
While that may be, companies should not be able to have a stronghold on what should be considered a basic human need. Housing is already in pretty short supply, and it’s worsened by the fact that these companies buy a considerable chunk of this short supply and then turn the purchased properties into rentals.
“Buying one home and charging 4x as much for it” is the actual problem, but I suppose you have your head in the sand by default when the large boot of capitalism is on your neck.
The idea being proposed here doesn’t outlaw renting, only corporate ownership of residential property. It means that the people you’re renting from are human beings who will eventually die and either be estate taxed or the house will be sold, rather than a corporation who owns your property until they go bankrupt or until the sun explodes.
A) 100% death tax on all money over 100,000,000.00 at time of death.
B) Closing loopholes that allow hiding that kind of money in unnecessary corporate assets or non-charitable trusts.
C) Cracking down on what qualifies as a charitable trust. Want to leave that money to trust that makes the world better, better have numbers to prove it or it gets disolved automatically into other more effective charities.
D) Automatically splitting every corpportation the moment it crosses a reasonable value threshold.
As a US citizen living in another country and trying to buy a house, you want me to have to change my citizenship to do this? 0.o I've lived in Japan for the better part of a decade and am trying to buy a property where, hopefully, my wife and I can live for the rest of our lives. Having to become a citizen in Japan (which does not allow other citizenships except in some very specific cases) is a non-starter for me. I need to be able to freely enter and leave the US in case my family have any issues. Why should I be fucked like this?
And you could make that non-local residents and it would still work out well. Stop letting foreign and domestic “investors” buy up all the housing in cities they don’t live in.
I just happen to live in Japan, but you can reverse the countries in my example if it helps. If I were a Japanese citizen living in the US almost 10 years and wanting to just buy a home for my family, I think it's unreasonable to have to give up Japanese citizenship just to get a house in the US. Using my example, I would not give up JP citizenship because I have aging family I need to have unlimited access to in Japan.
I’ll be honest, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to need to go through some form of certification to purchase residential housing.
To use US terms, as those are what I’m familiar with, a greencard would be sufficient, since it would allow you to legally live and work in the country.
I would say "valid status of residence/visa" (greencard/permanent residence can be super long processes of over a decade), but yeah that makes sense to me.
So if that process takes a decade or more the person can just... go fuck themselves despite any intention of permanently living somewhere? This is especially rough on people who move mid-life. I also don't know if the US has an upper age on mortgages which could basically keep people out of home ownership which can also keep them in a position of less stability.
Young people can’t own homes now because we have a lot of corporations and foreign ownership buying them to either rent at exorbitant costs or leave vacant as investments. I don’t really care about the hypothetical person who might come over here at some point maybe pinkee swear when folks here are having issues now.
Also, I confirmed with someone who does mortgages that there isn’t an upper age limit on getting a mortgage in the US, so that’s not a concern.
I mean, this is just dodging the situation. I'm a hardworking, tax-paying person, but fuck me because some other people are doing bad things? That's not good policy. Stopping people living in the country on valid status paying taxes from buying a place to live is asinine.
According to your comments, you’re living and buying property in Japan in order to reside there for the rest of your life, so you’re arguing about policies that aren’t effecting you and that you’re not even a party to.
I guess you can find someone more in tune with Japan’s housing market and issues there to discuss the best practices for Japanese laws.
I have known people who have gone through the same thing in the US. I also have family in the US still who very much are impacted by the housing situation there.
This just reeks of "foreigners bad" and possibly racism.
There are many things that can be done other than banning foreigners who haven't yet achieved greencard status but just want to have a place for themselves and their families to live to still achieve that. I don't think you'll find foreigners are the big issue here, and you already mentioned corporations which are a big issue. Attacking foreigners wanting to buy a house is not OK; that's approaching apartheid-level bullshit.
Who’s going to make apartment buildings? Isn’t that the best solution towards making more housing, to have compact apartment structures? How do you think those get built?
You could make every one an HOA and have it be condos.
Honestly I don’t think outright prohibition of companies owning buildings is good, but there needs to be a better mix of ownable housing units to rentable ones. There also needs to be better anti-trust enforcement so that three companies don’t own and price control nearly all of the housing in a city (I think there’s maybe six companies in my city that own almost all of the apartment complexes).
They should mandate that a certain subsection of newly zoned housing be owned by people instead of corporations. It would be a much better, much more competitive market for housing if it were possible to own apartments because you could get small time landlords in those buildings as well as people that own their places outright.
I guess my question is, what’s the point in arguing about this? Are you saying the only housing corporations should own are apartment buildings, the biggest most efficient source of housing for individuals in large cities?
My bad I thought residential prop meant single family homes.
But I didn’t say anything about who should own apparements. My only point was when people refer to residential property that refers typically to single family homes and is likely what op is referring to as well.
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