lol
How this will be perceived? Very positively, at least by me. Good for them. We're not talking about a slumlord here.
And the cherry on top is that they use their new found wealth to deny others the opportunity they had.
And sure, any wealth story has some piece that involves luck and/or timing. Nothing wrong with that.
Yes. The number of affordable fixer uppers in a place like Madison is effectively fixed. The two houses they bought means two fewer young people can climb onto the property ladder.
>And sure, any wealth story has some piece that involves luck and/or timing. Nothing wrong with that.
The wrong part is not having the self awareness to realize that they were lucky.
“We are renting to willing tenants at the fair market price.”
Landlord’s cant “drive up the rent” any more than employees can be unfairly paid too much.
In the UK we have a lot of private landlords - some have borrowed heavilly and are merely expoloiting their ability to obtain a mortgage where their tenants can not and are making marginal amounts of money in the process (often much less than if they simply invested what cash they have in a tracker fund). Some have inherited a property or are renting out buildings they bought twenty years ago where the amount of rent they charge is multiple times out of sync with their actual costs.
So long as all of these people can say they are only charging 'fair market' prices then the problem persists.
I choose to move to SF knowing that rents were absurd compared to other cities I could have moved to. But I choose to roll the dice on SF being the better choice.
I get it that people who grew up in SF face a different choice - leave or not. But it’s still a choice for them.
The real problem is elsewhere - by constraining supply landowners are inhibiting economic development. Newcomers have a choice, if accommodation is too high they'll go elsewhere, so economic growth in productive industries will take place elsewhere.
Man, not too long ago I shitcanned a new job 4 days in over the insane housing prices. A good number of my colleagues had a sideline in Airbnb, that asset inflation machine.
There's far too much capital sunk in real estate, where it could not be more unproductive.
I feel this distinction is important because it could guide whether the solution is based on encouraging more capital investment to do things like increase density, or whether the solution is essentially to ban outside investment.