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Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037

"corporate landlording" -- I like this term. I haven't heard it before. It sounds like it will go well on a rag newspaper for a front page headline.

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?

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You are confusing the initial construction with the long-term ownership. Most of the time, the corporation that builds the apartment block will sell the apartments, not continue to own them and rent them out.

I disagree with the second sentence. This is quite location specific. Where I live, many large high-rise apartment blocks are rental-only.

The developer and property owner are (usually) still different people in this case. Owning and constructing a rental property have very different risk profiles so the same people don't want to be in that business.

    > The developer and property owner are (usually) still different people in this case.

I would say the general contractor might be different, but the developer and property owner and always the same where I live for tall apartment blocks with 100% rentals.

Even if this is true, this is a distinction without a difference. If a developer can't sell their property to someone else, there's a good chance they wouldn't build it in the first place. If they do decide to never sell their apartment complex, they won't have the liquidity required to build another.

High-rises aren't generally more efficient in terms of space than low-rises. Urban centers should be primarily large numbers of low-rise multi-housing complexes, which don't necessarily need to be owned by corporations. Ideally they'd be co-ops, and those co-ops would allow subletting.

That doesn't make sense to me. If you stack 30 floors of apartments or offices, surely that takes roughly 10x less land (except extra space for elevators) than stacking them to 3 floors.

A relatively large percentage of the space in a high rise is wasted: https://westnorth.com/2015/04/27/high-rises-land-efficient-b... They also tend to be more expensive and use considerably more resources to build and maintain.

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.

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