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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

This is a weird position: it sounds like you’re saying the problem is enforcing laws irrespective of the merits of those laws. I would respectfully suggest that people reporting code violations their landlord is abetting is not the same as authoritiarian military rule.

Note the kind of conditions here:

> Tenants living among empty apartments have described trash, mold, open windows, leaky gas pipes and rodents as scourges in their buildings.

All this bill does is increase the odds of that neglect having consequences for the landlord, and it seems especially fair when there’s been a noted trend of units being left empty during a housing crisis hoping to jack the rent up in the future. This kind of thing has a real impacts on people because the rent controlled apartments they’re talking about are the only option for a lot of working poor.

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> I would respectfully suggest that people reporting code violations their landlord is abetting is not the same as authoritiarian military rule.

There are two orthogonal concerns:

authoritarian vs. democratic: whether ordinary citizens have a say in which laws are passed

Centralized vs decentralized reporting: whether primary responsibility for discovering whether the law has been broken lies with the police (e.g. conducting patrols), or with citizens making reports (e.g. 911 calls).

To be fair, neither extreme is desirable - 911 is a life-saving measure in the case of violent crime. But turning everyone into their neighbor's spy is deeply detrimental to social cohesion. We see that deep social divide here, turning tenants against landlords, the continuation of American class warfare. Of course, enabling tenants to report on their landlords is not the cause of that social divide - it is simply a step in the wrong direction.

Tenants are already against landlords, that's how it works.

"Allowing workers to report their employers for labor violations is only deepening the social divide between labor and management."

> Tenants are already against landlords, that's how it works.

I'm sorry you feel that's an inevitability. There's the economic agreement, where it's mutually beneficial for the tenant to receive housing and the landlord to receive a rent check, and then there's civil relations. Better civil relations improve the economic agreements.

"Allowing workers to report their employers for labor violations is only deepening the social divide between labor and management."

Again, the social divide is not inevitable. There isn't even a clear line where someone switches from labor into management, and your sarcasm left out the divide between management and ownership/capital. The CEO of a Fortune 500 is not in the same position as the CEO of a struggling one-office startup who basically answers to her investors. Should early employees overlook small offenses committed by founders? With the emphasis on the caveat "small", absolutely yes. What matters more, true in general but especially in early stages, is trust.

If you cannot trust your leaders, start planning an exit. You are not doomed to spend your life working for only one employer in whom you have lost faith, and thus require the assistance of the law to protect you. Life is too short to force yourself to work for people like that.

> Again, the social divide is not inevitable.

Not inevitable, just the default and probably(?) the majority, in both the landlord case and the employer case.

> There isn't even a clear line where someone switches from labor into management, and your sarcasm left out the divide between management and ownership/capital.

I mean labor vs management in the union/labor-relations sense of the words, where the management is representing the interests of the owners.

> Should early employees overlook small offenses committed by founders? With the emphasis on the caveat "small", absolutely yes. What matters more, true in general but especially in early stages, is trust.

In the early stages of a company, I might be inclined to overlook things if I had equity, as is common in the industry. And there's a reason for that: my labor is creating profit partly for my own gain — so I'm not being exploited.

If a small-time landlords want their tenants to overlook issues that they can't reasonably fix, maybe they should be offering their tenants equity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

> just the default and probably(?) the majority

One can decide whether to respond optimistically or pessimistically to that reality.

> union/labor-relations sense of the words

I disagree that unionization fundamentally sets interests of labor against their employer. Sure, sometimes they diverge, but happier labor is more productive. Having a channel to communicate common grievances, so they can be addressed, is a key ingredient for also making labor happier and improving profits.

> my labor is creating profit partly for my own gain — so I'm not being exploited

You're rationalizing. Without equity, you're still gaining - it's called your salary. You don't actually get equity in early stage companies; you get options on equity, and even if you decide to pay money to exercise those options, you have no vote in board elections, dividends are highly unlikely to ever be issued, and you cannot sell your shares unless a highly unlikely exit (which you have no control over) occurs.

> If a small-time landlords want their tenants to overlook issues that they can't reasonably fix, maybe they should be offering their tenants equity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

A, not all landlords suck; it is possible to find a small-time landlord who cares about the property and finding a good tenant (my mother, who owns a studio apartment she inherited, happens to be one of them). If you don't like your landlord, you should consider moving. B, splitting equity in real estate amongst several / dozens of people is a really bad idea; since everyone gets a veto, the more people who get a say, the more unlikely it is to achieve consensus on anything from repairs to renovations to selling to a developer so that land which has a few housing units on it can have dozens or hundreds of housing units on it.

> I disagree that unionization fundamentally sets interests of labor against their employer.

lol I didn't say anything close to that.

> You don't actually get equity in early stage companies; you get options on equity

Depends on the company, but it's the same alignment of incentives either way.

> not all landlords suck

Only the sucky landlords should have an issue with this legislation.

40 years of pressure-cooker zoning: not class warfare.

Blatant tax advantages for capital: not class warfare.

Reporting tax cheats: class warfare. Oh no! (Clutches heart dramatically.) How detramental to social cohesion! We must do something!

> continuation of American class warfare

> continuation /kən-tĭn″yoo͞-ā′shən/: The act or fact of going on or persisting; the state of continuing in the same condition, capacity, or place; an extension by which something is carried to a further point.

"I spent 1 word giving lip service to side A and the rest of my post scolding side B. I am very fair and balanced."

I admit, I could be wrong. Maybe if I go through your history I'll see attention paid to the prior rounds of class warfare in proportion to their severity rather than in proportion to your opinions. But I doubt it and it's getting late.

To pick favorites, selective attention is all you need.

>> continuation /kən-tĭn″yoo͞-ā′shən/

/kənˌtɪn.juˈeɪ.ʃən/

Abusing the market is also deeply detrimental to social cohesion.

Many market actors have an expectation of fairness with the parties they transact with, but this expectation can only be realized if parties maintain some degree of honesty with each other.

One set of actors (some landlords) is not being honest by withholding a very constrained resource (housing) from the marketplace. Their dishonesty is causing a direct impact to many tenants by artificially raising rents.

The increasing cost of rent is very noticeable and only encourages a growing adversarial relationship between tenants and landlords.

> 911 is a life-saving measure in the case of violent crime

Is it really though? Where I live (major US metro area with 4-5m population, middle of the city), response time from 911 if you're actively being murdered is like... 6-7 minutes on average. If it's not a tier 1 call, response time is slower than that.

6-7 minutes is an eternity during the act of a violent crime. Police don't have the capacity to save your life from violence.

That's a fair point, and I'm not arguing people should rely solely on police for their personal security. I'm more pointing out that it's clearly correct and appropriate to report crime when your safety is in danger; that I'm not trying to argue for some extreme where crime is never reported to the police.

> But turning everyone into their neighbor's spy is deeply detrimental to social cohesion. We see that deep social divide here, turning tenants against landlords, the continuation of American class warfare.

I just want to second all of the other people pointing out the logical flaws here. It’s rare for people to be neighbors with their landlords and almost non-existent for the large multi family buildings this is targeted at: if your grandmother is renting out a room, she’s probably not leaving the rest of the house empty hoping to creatively renovate out of rent-control laws. This is going to be used against landlords who’ve already broken the “neighbor” contract by letting their buildings decay to the point where it’s affecting other people, and refusing to rent rooms to people who need them because they don’t make as much profit as they want. Those are wealthy people looking for tax shelters, not your neighbors!

As to the class war claim, I believe it’s been noted how the right-wing only deploys that particular distraction when it’s something which helps poor people. I would suggest that starting point for any skirmish in that war might be when a landlord lets their property decay to the point where it no longer meets the minimum legal standard but still expects people to pay full price to live there. Having to clean up the mess they created seems like an impressively mild form of warfare.

It's really amazing that we've gone full 180 on "see something, say something" being good and not a horribly dystopian reaction to 9/11. These kinds of laws are the human equivalent of recruiting every Amazon Ring to detect and report crimes. The intent might be noble and it might even be in response to a epidemic of break-ins but turning all eyes into a tool of the state is not a can of worms we should be opening.

Even worse is this, making everyone not just the eyes but the prosecutors themselves.

> The new bill also empowers tenants to sue landlords to force owners to open up vacant apartments for inspection.

Literally using citizens to do something the state is legally not allowed to do. It was bad when the abortion law did it and it's bad here. Throwing away our principles as long as the right people get hurt makes us no better than those far-right nutjobs.

> Literally using citizens to do something the state is legally not allowed to do.

This is also the engine that powers every piece of the Civil Rights Act.

> These kinds of laws are the human equivalent of recruiting every Amazon Ring to detect and report crimes.

Well, let’s step back and look at impact. If we used Ring cameras to have 100% enforcement of jaywalking laws, that’d be widely recognized as extreme because there’s no damage to everyone else. If we used the same cameras to have 100% enforcement of mugging, the reverse would be true because the only consequences are on people who everyone agrees deserve punishment. This seems to be in the latter camp: buildings whose owners have neglected them to the point that there are actual hazards to the residents. It isn’t some vague hypothetical future risk but a very clear question: the citizens of New York have decided that nobody should have to live in a building with rats or mold, should landlords be required to follow that law?

The other concern with Ring cameras is that they could be misused for other purposes. That’s real there but not applicable here because this isn’t general data collection and everything funnels through a city office with a neutral third-party. The government can only get data when someone is bothered enough to report it, and if a report is specious the city inspector is going to quickly realize this.

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