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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Landlords are part of the problem though; due to landlords, property managers, investors, etc, the cost of housing / rent / owning a house has gone up, meaning that a job that would get you a decent apartment 20, 30 years ago is no longer enough.

I'll accept that inflation is a fact of modern economies, but rent and the cost of housing has gone up faster than inflation, and income has not kept pace with inflation: the US minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, while inflation never stopped. And minimum wage itself as it is today is broken; on the one side, it seems to be more of a suggestion anyway, given that the service industry does not need to conform to it (because the assumption is that wage is stipended by tips).

And the other thing to consider is that if an employer pays you minimum wage, they would pay you less if they were legally allowed to.

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Are you saying that there is massive numbers of empty housing stock in areas in high demand?

Because when there are 15 people wanting to live somewhere and only 10 places, then the lowest the price will go is higher than 5 people are able/willing to pay.

If not, then you need to ration the housing in some other means. What would you prefer? Nepotism? Lottery? Sexual Favours?

I think there’s an interesting question of why housing has outpaced inflation, but I’m not sure you can just pin it on “landlords.”

A small, individual landlord has no pricing power. They’re competing in a market against all others. You’d have to control a substantial fraction of a local market to be able to raise prices above the going rates and still rent your units.

I think the most likely answer is a combination of several factors.

1) Not enough new housing being built in desirable areas (supply), cause by some combination of drastic increase in cost of labor and materials, and NIMBY regulations.

2) Actual collusion to fix prices. There have been a few recent court cases about collusion mediated by price setting software (RealPage Yield Star).

3) The appearance of “mega landlords” that control a meaningful share of supply in a metro.

At the end of the day, having the option to rent instead of own is one I think we want to have in our society, for reasons of mobility, risk aversion, etc. That necessitates the existence of either public housing, or landlords.

We can argue about the lesser of two evils, but in my mind it’s probably landlords, hopefully with some substantial regulation reform to eliminate opportunities for price fixing.

>A small, individual landlord has no pricing power. They’re competing in a market against all others.

Unless there is a deficit of housing, then they don't have to compete because you pay their price or you live on the street.

With a housing crisis as in the UK the cost of housing rises to soak up everyone's income after other essentials (food, water, energy). Rents are higher than mortgages because you pay the landlord's mortgage, then pay the costs of leasing (such as the landlord's insurance and their property managers fees) and the landlord's profits. Very few want to rent, but most can't afford a mortgage (because 'I'm paying way more than that in rent' isn't proof you can pay a mortgage, apparently).

> the cost of housing / rent / owning a house has gone up

Not due to landlords, it's because the amount that people can pay for housing has increased -- higher wages, more multiple-earner households, easier credit, secondary income sources, investment gains. Plus there are more "households" competing for the limited number of available housing units.

If there weren't land lords, where would renters live? Would they build shacks in the forest and fields? Would they build custom homes on lots in the desert? Im not sure if most are capable nor well funded enough. Do we give them houses?

In a perfect world…wait, we’re clearly not in a perfect world…

“Wouldn’t it be nice” is no way to live a life…FWIW…

> Landlords are part of the problem though; due to landlords, property managers, investors, etc, the cost of housing / rent / owning a house has gone up, meaning that a job that would get you a decent apartment 20, 30 years ago is no longer enough.

I mean this is one of the few spaces that every economist agrees on the biggest factors in causing housing to become unaffordable are rent control and construction bureaucracy (zoning, environmental reviews, etc).

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