Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

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I think many of these ideas are sound but IMO your hostility towards “landlords” is misplaced. This isn’t the right forum to get into all the nuance, but the fact is we have an extremely non-competitive “landlord” and “developer” market, and almost all the perversions that we deal with originate in how much corruption, graft, ring-kissing, and (consequently) capital it takes to build anything.

The main issue I disagree with you on: rent control has been shown repeatedly to help existing renters at the expense of all future renters, which increases income inequality, in the long run is a wealth transfer from the young to the old, and lastly disincentivizes property maintenance leading to substandard living conditions. It also decreases economic mobility and incentivizes people who get rent control to do things like not have kids even though they would like to have kids, because they have an amazing deal on a 1bd apartment and needing more space would basically force them to start life over in a far off place.

If we had a robust free market for housing, like we do for cars, there would be lots of cheap “used housing” available and landlords would not have pricing power, they would have to make an effort to be a good landlord to have a tenant. You can see this with hotels (in areas where they aren’t over-restricted), where poorly run hotels are driven out of business by well-run hotels, including plenty of low cost hotels.

> I think many of these ideas are sound but IMO your hostility towards “landlords” is misplaced.

I see landlords like ticket scalpers -- they have the money up front to buy a product, and provide 'liquidity' and 'free markets' by selling that product at the market rate.

For some reason, we generally view ticket scalpers as negative, and landlords as "just what you do when you get wealthy enough".

And, to be clear, I have been a landlord. I know the challenges in maintaining a unit, finding tenants, chasing down rent, dealing with legal challenges, wondering if I would need to evict someone because they were destructive/loud/etc.

(Ultimately, I paid back all the rent I had collected that contributed to my principals on the unit, keeping only the money I used to pay for maintenance. My feelings about landlords come partially from being a landlord and realizing that I was profiting off of people only because I was rich enough to afford a house in the first place.)

That’s an extreme take, don’t you think?

We have issues with housing availability and we have issues with wealth concentration but renting a property to tenants is often a service to to people. And services are generally provided for money.

I’ve owned homes and I’ve rented homes. Owning can be burdensome in many ways: geographic and capacity friction, unpredictable capital risk, etc. Whether or not I have wealth, I may prefer to rent than by for valid reasons. It’s okay (and good) when someone in my community can provide the service of selling me shelter that suits my current needs for a reliable price. I’m willing to lay some premium for that.

Now, I don’t know what your relationship with your tenants were and if you have other reasons to feel like you were being exploitative, but please don’t toss out the valuable market role of landlords because there are some (and perhaps increasingly too many) that might be playing an unfair game. And certainly think carefully before you include yourself among them! You seem like a thoughtful and well-intentioned person — landlords like you are the kind that do good for communities!

I think there are fundamental differences between landlords and ticket scalpers that must be taken into account despite the similarities in other ways.

In addition to the obvious duties of maintenance, landlords Supply the capital for the house a tenant occupies. In this way they are more similar a company providing a car lease, fixed duration business loan, or home mortgage. They generally do so with fewer financial protections in my opinion.

A tennant pays a monthly fee instead of a large Capital investment and debt obligation. The landlord takes on substantial costs ( opportunity and real) as well as substantial risks when renting, which warrant some profit margin at a debatable rate.

I appreciate you expanding your thoughts. You are certainly free to feel how you feel, but I want to offer you one different angle:

For the sake of my career, I have moved a lot, six times as an adult. The first time I moved, I was able to buy a house in a cheap city. When I needed to move again it was a nightmare, the market was down, and it was very difficult for me to get that financial obligation off my back. Subsequently I have rented. I am very grateful that there are landlords who have housing units available for people who have reasons not to buy, and I have the opportunity to live in a place temporarily.

This is a complicated topic, and I fully acknowledge that there are bad landlords out there. But I do believe there is such a thing as a good landlord, providing a valuable service. I also believe that if we had a much more abundant housing supply, it would be much harder to make any money without being a very good landlord, and that would drive prices down, as well as driving the grifters out.

Just food for thought.

> rent control has been shown repeatedly to help existing renters at the expense of all future renters, which increases income inequality

I'd love a link to some sources showing this.

Basically any paper on rent control. Here's one on berlin's implementation. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4047633 People who were already there get a deal, everyone else pays much more.

Are all forms of rent control like this? Including rent stabilization or whatever else they're called? Because my impression was that at least some forms of it keep the rent low even if the tenant changes, in exchange for lower taxes or such.

The issue is that rent control leads to supply shortages since it disincentivizes building new units so you end up with a waitlist to get an apartment. Similar issue that prop 13 creates. No one moves because it is either impossible, or would require paying much more.

Thanks but I feel like that didn't answer my question? I was asking if all forms of rent control allow increases when a tenant moves out, which seemed to be the claim and the reason cited in the comment.

As I was trying to say the end result is the same. If the law allows rents to increase when people move then no one will ever move since it will cost them money. If the law doesn't allow rents to increase when people move then no one will move because there will be a shortage and whenever a unit does open it will go to landlords family member or friend.

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