Because without ethics or meaningful enforcement there is nothing to stop them.
You have single family zoning and height limits like everywhere else in the US. Allowing sprawl development works for a while but eventually you just run out of sprawl.
Rents are down in Austin, Berkeley and LA lately because of construction though. Funny enough, the LA one was an accident and they're trying to undo it.
Rents in my politically purple region 900+ miles from any coast have increased 100% over the past decade. What I pay now for a 1bd exceeds what I paid for a 2bd in a nicer part of the city when I originally moved here. Rental applications no longer require 3x income, only 2x now; it's just expected that people devote half their gross income on housing.
How anyone not making six digits lives in NYC is beyond me.
As people get richer, they have smaller households - ie, they stop living with their parents. If you don't allow smaller housing units to be built to match this, they will compete for existing ones and drive prices up.
This huge price-fixing case might give a clue to the seeming upset in your puritanical conception of "supply and demand"
> Restrictions from government are supposed to be reflections of the voters will.
Yes, those voters are called NIMBYs.
Whether and to what extent the sellers in the market have decided to be evil is, in fact, an aspect of "supply", which is simply the function mapping the terms of sale (in simplest terms, price) to the number of units sellers are willing to sell on those terms.
This is true even under perfect rationality, since deciding to be evil is just a way of describing someone whose utility function gives high positive value to something that the person making the description sees as a source of strongly negative value.
Also, corporate landlords can actually afford to maintain their buildings, which is a nice improvement over small ones.
"A month's rent less HOA fees may not translate to not less than 1/360th of an ownership share of the rented space" would be the 1 liner policy statement.
(All of these are real issues.)
on paper, corporate landlords should have better-maintained housing stock. in practice, i've never personally experienced it.
This definitely isn't true - there are markets where apartments aren't allowed/desirable, and in which corporate actors 'build to rent' entire subdivisions.s
Apartments have the opposite situation for weird legal reasons; there are almost no condos built in California anymore because the laws allow the original developer to get sued over quality issues, whereas for apartments the landlord has to deal with it.
> Apartments have the opposite situation for weird legal reasons; there are almost no condos built in California anymore because the laws allow the original developer to get sued over quality issues, whereas for apartments the landlord has to deal with it.
This feels like it confuses a couple of issues - one really needs to know the recourse a homeowner has against a home builder and how long this lasts (and to compare that recourse to what is available to condo owners)
Question about this so-called "corporate landlording": Tall apartment blocks in urban centers are exclusively build by corporations, as they require many millions in financing to build. What is your proposal for these urban centers?
Obviously any form of multi-tenant space is more efficient than single-family housing, but there's a sweet spot somewhere between single-family and high rise that's the most space efficient.
> The developer and property owner are (usually) still different people in this case.
Having served on an HOA board for years, I can mostly verify this. There isn't a lot of overlap between wise, community minded people and the people who strongly desire to be on a board.
The boards that have lost their way are dominated by people who really want to be there.
On the other hand with HOA, having another entity to tell you what to do with your large purchase doesn't sit right with me. On paper they're not so bad. My experiences with them(three times) have been completely incident free, plus got access to a nice pool and garbage collection. But you'll read a lot of no doubt true horror stories that show how things can go awry.
I've personally had my city pick up tires from a green space (also recorded the company that dumped 'em), cut overgrown yards and sidewalks, and they consistently collect my trash.
Why would someone with a functional local government ever entertain the straightjacket that an HOA enforces on its residents? It's not their business what color I paint my house, where I put my basketball hoop, or what size and style hedge I grow around my front yard.
I remember calling the police about the rifle firing(this was not on acreage), and they acted like I was annoying them!
From what one developer in Florida told me, the local government doesn't want to pay for roads, services, or amenities for any new developments, so requires they set up an HOA to cover it. Seeing as over 80% of new build homes are in an HOA, I tend to believe that.
Not very true for municipalities with above minimal population. It is true that some local govs are less funded, ergo less effective. But the trend is to do well with the resources available.
> I remember calling the police
Police are not code enforcement.
> Florida told me, the local government doesn't want to pay for roads, services, or amenities for any new developments,
I'm FL for 30 years. Local govs don't tax for neighborhood road improvements. They do tax for code enforcement. Residents get what they pay for and code enforcement is pretty good - responsive but not onerous.
source: volunteered for code enforcement for 4 years
They don't generally do any of those but the first on private property, except maybe (for the cleanup tasks) after citing and fining the property owner for failing to do it in addition to charging them the cost of having it done, and they often do the first only under a contract with the property owner, so that with a shared structure with a common set of bins, the contract would need to be with an association responsible for the shared bins.
While cities may do the things you describe, its usually going to long after the problem emerged.
At least with HOAs, they will fine you and possibly take your house. For these extreme cases it's a great way to keep people in shape. I guess the problem is when they get abusive and try to do the above for yard weed, paint, or other benign violations.
HOA's whose charters allow them to, and who actually do, act to regulate things like the aesthetics or worse specifically negating functional utility of non-shared parts of the property when there are no structural or safety impacts to the share infrastructure are awful.
There's obviously something wrong with that.
> But corporate landlording, where an organization owns multiple buildings and runs it as a profit-maximizing enterprise, is a cancer on modern society and needs to be phased out.
It's literally the same but on a larger scale?
And actually I found little landlords to be the most "profit maximizing", petty, cruel and stupid. At least big organizations have some sort of reputation to protect, unlike anonymous landlords.
My sort of conspiracy theory is that it's individuals expecting big returns driving up a lot of rent prices, rather than big rental corps that understand the value of slow consistent returns and don't feel the need to drive people out to resell. I have no proof of this though.