Oakland landlord who owns 3,600 properties raises $1080 rent to $3870/month | Hacker News Reader

Oakland landlord who owns 3,600 properties raises $1080 rent to $3870/month

blog.oaklandxings.com

18 pointsdoctorshady30 comments

The title of this submission is extremely misleading.

The landlord, Russell Flynn, is raising the rent of 10 units from $1,080 to $3,870 per month, ostensibly because they are located near the site of a new luxury high-rise tower which will generate more demand for those 10 units.

He is not raising the rents 3-fold for all of his 3,600 properties in one go as the title suggests.

The article is also very light on details - it mentions that the landlord gave his tenants 1 year notice, and it's doubtful that these were rent controlled units.

Developers and landlords are going to jack up prices whenever they can, so this is a pretty common occurrence and shouldn't come as a large surprise. Cities are apt to go along with these plans because it brings in higher income families/individuals which means more tax revenue. As long as the landlord follows standard procedures, the best that these tenants can hope to do is to raise enough hell so that they get a decently sized settlement, and then relocate further outside of the city.

Or plan their lives better so they own property instead of renting it.

Buying property in Oakland six years ago was a great idea. Buying it now is probably still a good one. Renting in Oakland and hoping your rent won't go up in the next decade is a terrible plan.

Is it just me or... it being his property he should be able to charge whatever the hell he feels like? If the market can support the rate so be it, if not it'll be what it is.

SO SIMPLE .

And if someone disagrees with his ability to do this, does that person disagree with tech companies charging huge margins on their products?

I could just as easily argue that Google keeps too much of their ad revenue. Should we as a society force them to share with the website owners?

We regulate all kinds of things that the free market does not deal with well.

I would argue that Google does keep too much of their ad revenue and the government should tighten tax rules so that they can't just sequester money away overseas without paying any meaningful taxes on it.

Or they need to have more competitors.

We don't regulate "things the free market doesn't deal with well", we regulate "things the politicians can get votes and/or fat donations out of regulating.

So are you arguing that regulations do not exist to address market failures?

It it impossible to consider the possibility that a free market can fail.

If you define "market failure" as "failure of the market to be sufficiently biased in favour of politically important constituencies", perhaps.

You are correct and at $3000/month the tenants would be better off getting a mortgage and buying own property

Here in Ireland there is now calls to cap rent increases which is stupid, the reason for recent rent price rises is the lack of building after the Great Recession from which the country is only now emerging, making property investment pointless by putting a cap on rent rises at inflation levels would mean even less homes being build. And of course the state and counties dont have any money for Social housing, the only way they can get more money is by raising taxes to even more absurd levels or cutting public services even more, neither is an attractive option for politicians of course.

The problem is that there is a finite supply of real property, and real estate is one of the more corrupt/nonfunctional markets that makes misbehavior by landowners a very one-sided process.

So unless you are a person in favor of cartel pricing behavior, than no, he shouldn't be able to farm more money just because he can.

He should because there are no rules against it.

If you think it's unfair it is useless to flag this guy. Your representatives are the one that needs to hear your discontent.

I would take issue with the view of somebody's home as a commodity or an investment. Yes, it gets treated that way legally, but this is where people live, where people raise their families. There is a huge amount of emotional investment that isn't reflected in the rent, especially when the people living there can't afford to pay more. "Oh, you can't afford to live here any more? Then get wealthier or move some place cheaper" is a pretty cold and calculating view of how people should live, especially given that in many cases they've lived here their whole lives, or their families for many generations. That they should be forced to leave because a bunch of wealthy developers like the culture they and their families have built and are willing to pay more for it strikes me as capitalism for the sake of capitalism with no real concern for the people most affected by it.

If housing stability is essential, you should own your housing. As a renter, the tradeoff you're making is more flexibility for the potential that you might have to move.

Lots of people "should" own their housing. Turns out what one should do and what is economically capable of doing are rather divergent ideas! As a renter, the tradeoff is you can have a roof over your head because buying is absolutely beyond the reach of an alarming number of Americans.

The problem is that the side effects of rent caps and hard development limits have produced so many poor results.

Rent control in New York has worked poorly. The result is a few select people pay a fraction of what everyone else pays. Development difficulties have created San Francisco's crazy, crazy prices.

In Australia restrictive planning has contributed substantially to making the Sydney median price 1M AUD for a free standing house with 10km of the CBD.

In London restrictive planning has contributed to crazy, crazy prices.

Meanwhile in Houston, with vastly fewer rules, houses are affordable for low income families.

He should, but government should figure out whether there are any barriers to building new housing and remove them, which might be the case if market prices are somehow tripling (i.e. demand is spiking but supply somehow isn't rising as well).

Everyone in the Bay Area lobbying against high-density housing is to blame. Don't blame one guy who happens to taken advantage of this vast collective "conspiracy" to keep property prices inflated by reducing the inventory of housing. And no...i dont think low-density has to do with earthquakes, Engineering has progressed far past that point.

It's really funny when somebody claims that "you cannot build multi story building in Bay Area due to earthquakes".

One only needs to look at SF downtown -- high rises as far as the eye can see.

If I'm reading this correctly, the increase applies to 10 units impacting 16 people. I suppose the 3,600 properties mentioned in the title are to help us hate him more, since he's wealthy, but they are otherwise unrelated.

This is great for the 'city', if you define the city as land and property, and not the people that live there.

The people who live in the Bay Area could certainly change the zoning laws to allow higher-density/lower-cost housing, leaving this guy (and others like him) to twist slowly in the wind, but so far they haven't.

There seems to be some movement in that direction of late, but it's going to take years.

Twist slowly in the wind? More like make a shitload more money by selling his thousands of properties to developers to put in skyscrapers for gazillions more than he paid.

Not that spite or envy should be a part of planning calculations either way.

Maybe the first few guys to jump in would, but once there was enough housing the demand would fall and the landlords with the (now) overpriced rents and their (now) unsustainable mortgages would be in trouble.

I've seen the opposite. Anti-tech liberals lobby hard against new construction, thereby ensuring the very housing affordability crisis they supposedly hate.

Ain't Capitalism great.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com