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Comment by bananaface | Hacker News Reader

If a landlord tried to charge me $50 a month for a meth detector, I'd move. A very small fraction of this is going to be passed on to tenants.

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It’ll be added to your lease. They don’t break out your rent payment into “sidewalks, hallways, carpet, walls, sink, faucet, fixtures...” but those costs are there. They’ll bury meth detection in the rent payment, and that’s that.

Then their apartment would be $50/month over the competition, so I wouldn't move there. If they could charge that, they'd already be doing it. You can't just "offload costs," it's not how pricing works.

This is correct. If some given set of landlords can get away with charging $50 more per month, they'd already be doing it. Some individual landlords might be irrational, but as a whole property isn't a market where people leave money on the table.

if this thing works and the meth epidemic is that severe for this being a serious issue and not security theater, you'll pay the 50$ just to live in the meth free area, because the 50$ cheaper neighborhood will pool all the meatheads

not overnight of course, but there will be a zoning effect at some point, as there always is, where some neighborhoods pool similarly minded people, as neither offer nor demand is really elastic.

Sure, but it's not that severe. Meth detectors are rare, and frankly so is meth usage.

Correct according to your model. You are talking theory and imagine you talk about truth.

Sort of, while prices converge to a slowly moving average, some people are indeed paying a bit more and other s bit less. Maybe people who end up getting properties with meth alarms will be the ones paying a bit more. With time, if having meth detectors is an effective way to keep out tenants who will devalue the property in some way, it will be incorporated and the tenants will be paying the price of it.

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