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Comment by Beaver117 | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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)

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