I just want to point out that, in the US, it is illegal to not rent to families. More specifically, it is illegal to discriminate based on familial status. Whether anyone is actually enforcing that in a particular area may be a different matter.
I think the point was why you can't find 4 bedroom apartments for rent.
People don't want to rent to families, they don't buy 4 bedroom apartments and they don't rent them. It's not that they actively discriminate against families, they just don't buy properties that would cater to families.
Worst case you drop to $1,500 for a month or so instead of losing all $3,000 income while you wait for a new tenant to appear.
Each apartment has 1 bedroom, 1 living room, 1 entryway.
And whether or not it actually is enforceable is yet another. Who would know if a small landlord passed over an applicant because they had a family? Maybe big landlords could be monitored, but I’ve Had a single rental house for 5 years and I’ve been through 2 tenants in that time, no one could detect any trends in that small sample.
What you call "weird" others call discrimination. Many racist folks didn't want to rent to black people or other minorities bc they "didn't want them". Others didn't want to rent to see senior citizens or people with disabilities.
Protected classes exist for a reason! It is socially optimal to not allow businesses to discriminate against many groups of people.
The "no discrimination allowed" is often just "no discrimination allowed that we don't approve of".
So, given that personal observation, I really ask myself: What good does it do to force people to cooperate with humans they dont like?
I don’t care if the pharmacy clerk likes me or approves of my lifestyle, but I do expect them to fill my prescription even if it’s against their feelings or religious beliefs. I don’t see how a fair society can exist without anti-discrimination laws.
Maybe you should try to put yourself in the position of someone with lower priviledges before blindly insisting that anti-discrimination laws are all we need to fix things.
Just give them money?
You can see charity as a form of (possibly conspicuous) consumption, if you will.
The default assumption is that shareholders want to maximize profit, but shareholders can also want different things.
In any case, even the most ruthless capitalist society imaginable is not made out of corporations alone. Corporations are just a legal shell. People work for them, people own them, people buy their products, etc.
In a true profit maximizing meritocracy some disabled people might not get a job (though they still might, at lower pay commensurable with their productivity). [0]
But there's nothing stopping people from (a) charitable giving, or (b) enacting laws to give tax payer funded assistance to disabled people.
(You might argue with (b), but you can't really argue with (a).)
[0] Compared to eg someone like John von Neumann, I'm an idiot, but I can still find work even with my comparatively weak intellect. I just can't expect as much pay as John von Neumann would warrant. Of course, that pay might in principle be low enough that people can't survive on it. That's where charity and/or public assistance comes in.
People work for them because generally they don't have a choice. Not everyone has decision making power and 95% of workers need to follow what their boss says. Most Americans can't lose their job because they don't have savings, they barely make enough to survive
So, maybe you should stop assuming that you are the only person in the conversation who knows what they are talking about.
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/2152/religious-...
I know this would happen because I moved from a country without anti-discrimination laws to a country with. I encountered more people on wheelchairs in the public during my first month in the latter than the previous 20-something years in the former. In the absence of anti-discrimination laws, all avenues for participation of people with disabilities in the society, even things as simple as going grocery shopping, was all but non-existent. As far as I know it still is like that in the old country. Not because people hate everyone needing a wheelchair: people are reasonably nice and thoughtful in the old country too. But in the absence of laws forcing accommodations, no accommodations are made, with obvious results.
Maybe the country you moved to was also rich and with a functioning free-market economy?
Capitalism naturally incentivizes entrepreneurs to seek and serve niche markets while doing everything to accept and accommodate potential customers.
In contrast, planned, state-run economies don't care in the slightest and just do the bare minimum required by law. Here is your job to jump through the hoops and manage to give them your money.
Yes, but the economy of the old country, while poorer, was not exactly state-run. All grocery stores were private businesses created by entrepreneurs. Same with taxis. Yet neither accommodated people with disabilities. It was not like grocery stores were owned by the government and those who ran them were disinterested government employees. They were private businesses who made their own decisions and still they did not accommodate people with disabilities.
Regulation is important, regulation literally creates and shapes the markets and allows people to participate in society where they would otherwise be unable to
Regulation is not free and doesn't magically make our wishes come true. It just moves costs around, hiding them and often preventing the free market from minimizing them.
The difference between rich countries, the government forces the businesses to accommodate people with disabilities at the cost to the business. In poor countries, at least the one I came from, they leave it to the businesses to make that decision themselves. The result is that in rich countries are much more accessible than poor countries.
I don't know if your model (where "the society", which I guess means the government pays for this stuff) is tested in any jurisdiction. If it has, I would appreciate a link to an article about the results. But the model where businesses are forced by regulations to cover the costs works very well, as evidenced by how accessible US is thanks to ADA.
My point still stands—unless the society via regulations forces businesses to accommodate groups like people with disabilities, those groups will be excluded from society, as they are in my old country.
I'm fine with children, but they need to have adults that reign them in. That's a coin flip, so I wouldn't ever move anywhere again, knowing that families with children live above/below/next to me.
What do you have to say about the fact that apartments are the only option?
It feels to me that you're trying to depict not living in a nice suburban villa as subjecting children to abuse, as if this was a whimsical decision of egotistical parents.
Meanwhile, moving to the suburbs is a luxury that's way out of the reach of working class families, not to mention the fact that outside of the US it's outright unthinkable.
And all the time wasted commuting is not considered abuse why?
To me it reads you're claiming "let them eat cake", followed up by "not letting children eat cake is anti-children."
OP is not the exception. I have at least two playgrounds in a 300m radius. Perhaps I'm lucky but I don't recall ever living in a place that didn't had at least a playground in walking distance.
Muslims as well
Overall point still seems valid - which is there is little financial advantage to renting out a 4-bedroom property and thus a limited supply.
The second part is the illegal discrimination.