Organizations owning multiple buildings and renting them out probably goes back beyond written history. It is not the boogeyman you think it is.
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)
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.