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Comment by gigel82 | Hacker News Reader

That's not an accurate comparison. Risk is risk of course, the rental market could crash but what I find weird is the government stepping in like this.

Imagine you wanted to sell your Facebook stock once it starts crashing (to buy another stock that maybe performs better) but the government says no you can't because Facebook employees will be affected so not only are you obligated to hold the stock, but you'll also need to pay out of pocket to keep it.

Just to be clear, I have no sympathy for the slumlords and rental corporations, I'm talking about regular folks that chose the rental market as more risk-adverse investors and maybe put all their savings into a single property that they fixed up and are maintaining themselves.

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I can certainly understand your view despite my almost pathological hatred of landlordism. I just think a once in a century pandemic is the type of event where it's useful for the government to step in and safeguard essentials for the population.

And asking landlords not to throw people on the street at no additional cost (let's say they do evict, who is going to be doing viewings at the height of the pandemic?) to them is a very low impact ask.

Edit: I think the root cause disagreement is how we categorise housing, as an essential or an investment. I can see why you'd be squeamish about such heavy-handed intervention with investments but my view is that's a category error. This is like wartime rationing, people need to eat and they need to live.

I understand your point of view, but I'm not aware of any society in which housing is not considered an investment; unless we're talking about utopic scenarios or communist economies where the state owns all property, or ex-communist countries where the vast majority are home-owners and tenants/landlords are a minority.

Agree that for most home-owners, it'd be a mistake to regard their own home they live in as an investment. FWIW, I have no dog in this race, I'm neither a landlord nor a tenant (I -and my mortgage provider- own the home I'm living it).

What would stop you from selling the property? You can't evict the renters, but you can absolutely sell.

> Just to be clear, I have no sympathy for the slumlords and rental corporations, I'm talking about regular folks that chose the rental market as more risk-adverse investors and maybe put all their savings into a single property that they fixed up and are maintaining themselves.

A core problem is that so many of us have never met one of these people. 100% of my landlords have either been large corporations or slumlords. So when people say "think of the small landlord trying to be nice" we wonder where that person is.

> A core problem is that so many of us have never met one of these people.

Back when I rented, the corporate apartments were the worst experience since there was zero flexibility to anything, all was managed with zero tolerance based on the company playbook.

Renting from individual owners was a delight though since I was dealing with an actual human. Very flexible about everything, always open to discuss options.

In my experience, corporate landlords are inflexible as you mention. They also raise prices consistently.

But at least they repair stuff. Whenever I had a system break my corporate landlords sent somebody over that day without question. With individuals I’ve had to pull teeth to get even critical maintenance done.

>> I'm talking about regular folks that chose the rental market as more risk-adverse investors and maybe put all their savings into a single property that they fixed up and are maintaining themselves.

I think more risk-averse people would avoid a single property as their entire investment portfolio.

Everyone says "diversify" your investments. if you are more-risk averse, you should not be putting all your money into 1 bet or 1 property.

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