So who should foot the bill when a tenant isn’t paying rent? Isn’t fulfilling their lease requirements like not paying for utilities?
Landlords often retreat at this point and just say "well we are charging what the market rate is" and leave behind any pretense that this is a fair economic transaction. In that case, landlords can get fucked, in my opinion. A system that buys up a scarce and necessary resource and then sells it back at prices disconnected from the actual value provided by landlords is unethical.
My point is that complaining about rare cases where landlords lose money because they cannot evict a tenant who isn't paying at the drop of a hat is simply ridiculous. It is like complaining that an insurance company occasionally has to pay out for their policies.
The truth is that the price of rent is utterly disconnected from the value of a landlord's labor plus the various premiums you'd pay for risk smoothing, lower transaction overhead, and opportunity cost. Landlords simply charge whatever they can get away with and we should all laugh at attempts by landlords to justify their rent through any argument other than "fuck you, pay me." After all, I've never heard of a landlord reducing the rent when they finish paying off their mortgage.
Once we at least have this shared understanding we can start having a real conversation about the merits and costs of the system we have today, rather than this fake conversation about how landlords are so nice for paying for that new roof.
Is your pay based on market rate for your services? Do you voluntarily make less money than you can?
I don't believe that rents would actually go down meaningfully if states adopted laws enabling evictions within two weeks. As you say, rent is actually based on market rate and is entirely disconnected from the expenses landlords pay. All of these discussions about landlord expenses are non sequiturs that just hide the real discussion.
> Is your pay based on market rate for your services? Do you voluntarily make less money than you can?
I am performing labor rather than gating access to a scarce and necessary resource. The social damage of charging for labor is not the same as the social damage of charging for housing.
Your pay is also more than likely built on the back of the less privileged.
How much “social damage” is being caused by a company investing money to build new housing as is the case with JPM?
What’s the alternative?
That's true. The founders of my employer are mega-billionaires though. I'm not worried about them.
> Your pay is also more than likely built on the back of the less privileged.
That's also true. Capitalism is fundamentally unjust. I donate a huge amount of money to anti-poverty charities annually to help mitigate this.
> What’s the alternative?
I am not certain. But we can't even have this conversation until people stop talking about landlords like they are engaged in some essential charity for renters.
It's not to allow a subset of renters to explicitly screw the owners by deciding they don't need to pay rent.
"I'll totally be able to get my landlord to pay for mold treatment" is a good joke, though.
If I know that there is more risk involved in being a landlord, why wouldn’t I increase the rent to compensate?
If you could increase the rent and still find tenants you'd do it right now. No reason to wait for any legislation
If the regulations change, all landlords that have any business acumen are going to address that by raising rent. The entire market is going to change.
People don't want a landlord, they want a home. For many people the landlord is currently a necessary evil they'd rather get rid of.
It’s going to increase prices and/or reduce supply as not as much capital flows in.
People may not want landlords. But everyone doesn’t want to own a home. By definition, they want to rent from someone else - ie have a landlord.
If you can really do it then why don't you simply increase rent right now?
Maybe we can agree that the price-to-rent ratio will decrease?
The current setup hasn't exactly been great at generating new housing. Juicing speculation increases nimbyism just as much as it increases developer interest.
There is also plenty of affordable land in the US in flyover country.
Huh? Save for a small number of cities most of the nation is sprawling suburbia. 70% of Americans live in single family homes.
Most of what you pay for here is the land. And this is becoming ever more important because of agglomeration effects in the modern world.
> Build up
Ok you're switching gears a bit here but I'll entertain anyway. If you want to build up the right solution is a Land Value Tax. Landlords of course hate this idea.
That is not true.
https://www.statista.com/topics/5144/single-family-homes-in-...
> Most of what you pay for here is the land. And this is becoming ever more important because of agglomeration effects in the modern world
This is also not true. With an investment property you can depreciate the value of the building. But not land. It would reduce the tax incentives greatly if that were true.
I’ve owned five properties in my life and the house “improvements” is always more valuable.
Out of those five, two were new builds I had built from the ground up as primary residence. You can see the value of the unimproved land and compare it to the values of the houses built on top of it.
The other three were investment properties where I could only depreciate “the improvements” - the amount attributed to the house
In “sprawling suburbia”, builders can buy land cheaply and build hundreds of homes.
> Ok you're switching gears a bit here but I'll entertain anyway. If you want to build up the right solution is a Land Value Tax. Landlords of course hate this idea.
You realize any increase in cost is passed on to the tenants. How does that help affordable housing?
> You realize any increase in cost is passed on to the tenants. How does that help affordable housing?
This is 100% totally wrong. The concept you're reaching for is called tax incidence. In the case of Land Value Tax it's fully the burden of the landowner.
Here is a mountain of data backing me up: https://gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-tenan...