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Comment by sparkling | Hacker News Reader

> Or, being a little less trusting, pay some portion of their rent directly.

Look at the raise in college tuition prices ever since goverment got involved in student loans. That is precisely what will happen when goverment starts sending landlords paychecks.

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This already happens in cities with a large military presence thanks to their housing allotment and it does seem to drive prices up for renters.

Section 8 is basically direct payments to landlords to subsidize low-income tenants. The rent on these places isn't in the same ballpark as "market rate" regarding price increases. Instead what these landlords do is the same thing as we (collectively, as a society) do: treat their low-income tenants like sub-human garbage; a nuisance to be avoided or ridiculed when that isn't an option. They cut corners on maintenance and take liberties with timeliness of repairs and so on, because what are their tenants going to do? Move? Hardly. The government oversight body has to do a lot of work to keep these landlords honest (they can lose their subsidy and suffer other punishments if they don't comply with regulations and minimum standards).

Sufficiently harsh and prompt punishments would likely solve that problem.

But we don't like the idea that the government might seize properties or the like as a punishment. So...

Perhaps section 8 tenants are treated as "subhuman garbage" (quite an exaggeration, I'd say) because they are more likely to miss payments and destroy property?

These evil landlords are not running charities. Maintnence is probably sub par because, as you mentioned, the rent is generally far below market.

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