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> It’s getting clear in cities like Ithaca that landlords pass high property taxes onto tenants quite directly.

Most landlords are interested in making a profit from renting. Therefore the rent the landlord demands will be set to a monthly amount such that they can pay the costs of maintaining the property, which includes paying real-estate taxes to the local government, and still make some profit.

So yes, renters are "paying the property tax", and always have been, they just do not see "property tax" as an itemized line item in their monthly rent amount.

To be specific in NY, local governments whether they are run by Democrats and Republicans are all concerned that much of their budget is mandated by Albany, particularly there was the decision to pay for Medicaid (health care for the poor) through local property taxes which are frequently inequitable as opposed to income taxes which are targeted at people who have large amounts of income. Thus if you rent, the cost of health insurance for the poor is baked into your rent.

> Thus if you rent, the cost of health insurance for the poor is baked into your rent.

Isn't it then also baked into the cost of owning your own home?

Sure is. And it causes the same problems for homeowners. One difference in NY is that homeowners get a significant STAR exemption. I get that despite the unusual situation of having one property the house I live in, two rental units, plus a riding academy (which isn't legally treated as agriculture unless I get in some silly boondoggle such as raising foals.)

In the city of Ithaca there are rather large tax bills for the City of Ithaca, plus the County of Tompkins, plus the City of Ithaca school district. It adds up to a few hundred a month on the rent for the typical rental unit. Insofar as the local government thinks that "the rent is too damn high" there is a definite chunk of it they are responsible for.

I'm finding info that the maximum STAR exemption is good for $650 annually.

A.) That sounds like a very reasonable price for health insurance.

B.) How does this increase rent on residential units by hundreds of dollars a month? Are you saying that if rental properties in Ithaca were instead primary residences, the city and county would collect what equals several hundred dollars per month lesss (let's call it $1200/yr) in taxes than they do for rental properties?

Is this unique to Ithaca, which is a college town?

It's an issue being talked out a lot in Ithaca, which is about a 20 minute drive from my farm

https://www.ithaca.com/news/ithaca/cornell-s-tax-exempt-stat...

In particular that article asserts

   “according to the rental real estate listing service Dwellsy, Ithaca has the highest rent of any small city in the U.S. The study shows the average price for a one-bedroom was $1908 per month in 2022, up 4.5% over 2021. Only eight cities had higher average rents…New York, Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, Washington DC, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and San Diego.”

and that article claims the tax burden in Ithaca is particularly pernicious because so much land is owned by not-for-profit organizations such as Cornell.

> They should order a property tax reduction. It’s getting clear in cities like Ithaca that landlords pass high property taxes onto tenants quite directly.

I don't believe a property tax reduction gets passed on to tenants. The goal of landlords is to make money, so the incentive is to keep rents as high as possible without having long vacancies; the only reason to reduce rents is if your property is empty.

The hope of a market system is that with lowered expenses, some landlords would reduce their rent, which then allows renters to potentially move to those properties forcing other landlords to reduce rents in turn. This could theoretically happen in a cycle to a new equilibrium where rents have gone down by ~ the reduction in expenses.

But there's a lot of forces in play that interrupt this and allow high rents to continue even with a drop in expenses:

* The vacancy rate is very low, so there are very few landlords that would take advantage of the opportunity to lower their rent to get tenant.

* Landlords know renters can be long term, so often prefer a longer period of vacancy over reducing rent.

* Current renters are captive as moving costs are high, so their landlords are insulated from market pressure.

* The rental market is very coordinated by a) companies that own many properties, b) property management agents that manage many properties and c) rent information companies like RealPage. The result is similar to a cartel, where property owners will allow vacancies directly in order to keep the market rate from falling.

* Many current owners see the property value as a source of growth, and so care less about actual rental income.

All of these mean that a property tax reduction is more of a windfall to landlords than a way to bring down rents.

Investments have risks. I don't see why we should make landlords' lives any easier.

Landlord incentives should be aligned with local and renter incentives. You want landlords who aren’t slumlords, but who also aren’t going to extract as much as possible from tenants. End state desired is clean, safe, affordable housing for people who can’t or don’t want to buy and a reasonable return for the asset owner for providing housing.

Everything to arrive at that is essentially tweaking an Excel formula of public policy.

(I’d also put forth community land trusts that enable non market housing solutions, keeping housing out of the market and at the whims of investors, but that’s a larger conversation)

In the end the landlord passes expenses on to the other tenants so if one tenant screws up the other tenants pay more. For that matter I just paid a big insurance bill that my deadbeat tenant was supposed to help pay for, but at least if he trashes the place on the way out I will get paid to fix it and the insurance will sic lawyers on his ass instead of me.

I worked at a mediation center and learned that it’s wrong to view a dispute through “social justice” or “conservative” viewpoints, race, gender, class and other things have nothing to do with who is right or wrong in a dispute. That said I think there are a lot of people in NY who wrongly think about landlords the way Mao Zhedong thought about them.

Why was your "deadbeat" tenant supposed to pay your insurance bill?

It’s very common to have leases where the tenant pays taxes and insurance. I think much of commercial leases are “triple net” [0].

It all ends up being a wash in that not triple net leases just have higher payments. It’s a way to reduce management expenses.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/triple-net-lease-nnn.as...

I live in Massachusetts which might explain why I've never heard of this. Residential landlords may not, by law, charge tenants for water usage here so the idea of a tenant paying the insurance bill is strange.

I'm basically reading most of the comments on this article while I grease my antifa mechsuit, but to a certain extent I think I support this general concept. Lots of landlords in Mass will also have yard care included in the lease, and look at that they also own a landscaping company. If I could pay less AND not have an exploited minimum wage worker toss herbicide all over the tomato plants in pots on my patio, that'd be sweet.

He pays the rent, I use the money he pays me to pay the insurance. If he's not paying the rent I have a reason to feel resentful about it.

That's valid. Strange way to phrase "owes me rent" though.

Because without landlords there's no place to rent. People don't seem to comprehend the fact that if it's not profitable to run an apartment, then those units are going to be taken off the market.

And do what? Just sit on it? No, it'll be sold for a lower price to someone who needs a home.

In practice it will be rented short-term on AirBnB and its ilk. That is more profitable than long-term rental, apparently. (I don't know the details, I've just heard that asserted; but AirBnB et al. decreasing the supply of housing is a real thing.)

Are you implying that housing just disappears if there aren’t landlord to monopolize it? That’s hilarious. Remove landlords and now you have housing that can be purchased by residents through a bank loan. Can’t afford the down payment? No problem, a government program can fund that just like PPP loans. At the end of the day landlords are just parasites who exploit the poor and middle class by monopolizing housing. There is no need for them, anyone who can rent can, by definition, buy the property they are renting. Otherwise the landlord wouldn’t be renting to them.

If it is a large building then you run into the terrible governance problems of condominiums where pensioners will never vote to pay for repairs that will prevent the building from collapsing, killing them. See also

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932022_Chinese_prop...

If anything, condominiums are a scam right up there with Amway, Bitcoin, and FTX and ought to be banned.

God can you imagine if every rental property suddenly went on the market to buy and there were rules where you can only own property you actually live in full time. Would be amazing. The housing supply in my area would legitimately triple.

> Are you implying that housing just disappears if there aren’t landlord to monopolize it? That’s hilarious. Remove landlords and now you have housing that can be purchased by residents through a bank loan.

And then do what? The usual answer is to convert it to condos. Most people aren't interested in personally occupying an entire apartment building. And if you decide to rent out the units, congratulations now you're a landlord!

> No problem, a government program can fund that just like PPP loans.

You realize this is having the government subsidize landlords to take rental units off the market and convert units to condos? For all the ire you seem to harbor towards landlords you're awfully eager to give them government money.