Rent collections are down in New York
politico.com
politico.com
* ~37K affordable housing units (baseline) across ~400 projects * 89% rent collection rate (down from 90.6% in 2023) * That's 600 units that went 'delinquent' in 2024 - assuming a $24K 'base' rent (just a guess) that's $15M in lost rent. * Deeply troubled projects (that can't survive without this rent) are at 11% - seems like the inverse. * Cumulative arrears (unpaid rent) of $500M
Here's the problem: * If no one had to pay, no one would. * We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society. * The projects fall into disrepair, there's no way to bring them back, because they won't be maintained.
Landlords aren't a great solution to the problem to be sure. They can be greedy and heartless.
The bigger problem is the bid up of asset prices - aka private equity and class warfare. As soon as you switch (from renting to owning) your incentives immediately shift.
There doesn't actually seem to be a way around this. Taxing to spend on rent ironically makes the problem worse because you just transfer the money into the cash flows of the owners.
Anyone thinking there's a simple solution to this problem hasn't spent enough time with the problem.
You can plunk $10-$20K and get land and a homestead in dozens of states.
Agree with the other comment that overbuilding is a reasonable strategy, but if you look at Detroit downtown (mid 2010s) having an overbuilt downtown is bad too.
It's a hard problem.
China managed this quite well with the hukou system, which allegedly is going to be loosened over time, but that seems distinctly unlikely to be understood by the powers that be here in the US.
Did I mention the legions of uneducated anti-Christians who would probably kill me for being queer?
Stoke on Trent was selling houses for £1 with improvement grants attached! https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/stoke-shows-why-selling-...
In a place where the only jobs to be had are at below-subsistence minimum wage at the dollar store and you have to drive 2 hours to see a doctor, sure.
Europe has no homelesness, because migrants are housed at hotels at great expense!
Some might call it housing asset based welfare. Even if you don't like that mouthful another simple example is the University of California putting 4 billion into Blackstone's REIT with "a minimum 11.25% annualized net return through January 2028." That REIT is 90% rentals. So probably at least a few people will feel the squeeze from it.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/university-californ...
Whenever there's value in agglomeration (ie, all the time), the value of well placed properties just skyrockets, because growth is only going to make that land better. That's why a common recommendation is to up the tax of land as to make speculation with valuable property a bad investment: It's already price like an auction, so higher taxes cannot increase rent prices. The problem is political, as countries with housing problems have a whole lot of individuals have a big percentage of their net worth in housing. Big tax increases would make their property values drop, and they'd be quite upset. So it solves the problem while losing elections.
Instead, governments are happy providing tax advantages to existing residents, in practice making prices go up even faster.
Social housing in Europe while exists, distribution of it is extremely corrupted process. Applying and waiting will give you something in 5 years or never, you'll know in 5 years. You have to be young couple both employed with perfect portfolio, or whatever the role model in that time and location is. Young couples both employed in desirable city basically don't exist anymore, even if you are after two rounds of waiting suddenly you are not a young couple anymore:) Usually you have to know someone and give a bribe.
There has been massive public investment and popular support to cause a revival of sorts in the city and is a success story.
Go look at some photos from like 2010-2014.
People often point to foreign competition for the downfall of urban Detroit but the writing was on the wall and decay starting well before foreign imports made a big splash. Between 1945 and 1957, GM, Ford, and Chrysler built 25 brand-new auto plants in the Detroit metro area. Not a single one was built inside the city limits. They weren't building these factories overseas (yet), they were building them in cheaper parts of the US. Detroit lost hundreds of thousands of well-paying factory jobs well before Volkswagen and Toyota started selling things in real numbers in the 1960s.
There are lots of factors but broadly characterizing them as globalization is generally fair. Some included: The rise of japanese cars added competition but they were held at bay by import restrictions and the American preference for massive cars until the gas shortages in the 70s, the trend towards efficient capital meant most industrial firms switched to prioritizing their more profitable financing arms, Reagan liberalized international trade that let foreign imports into the US market, NAFTA moving manufacturing to mexico and canada, companies moving manufacturing to non union states in the south, then moving the parts supply chain abroad.
We're still grappling with the consequences. We should've invested in transitioning those workers to comparable or better jobs but the ball got completely dropped on that.
It was just a mistake to allow ourselves to be ruled by the financial sector.
No.
Average Americans are poorer now than they were before they could buy everything at Walmart. As long as housing continues to be a "Line must go up" investment, Americans will continue to become poorer as more and more of their income has to be directed to housing.
The price didn't even fall that much. One look at Temu and friends should disabuse you of the notion that we are actually getting things for "Cheap". Usually it just means product quality was drastically reduced thanks to millions spent on "value engineering", so that your new products don't last long enough to put you out of business.
Sure is great that GE can now reliably predict the lifespan of parts in their washing machines so they never make the mistake of gasp overspeccing a component so it lasts a lifetime!
I'll see if I can find a source i saw recently that showed that thinks like appliances, TVs, computer, toys, clothes etc that were outsourceable have dropped in price a lot but health care, education, insurance, housing and basically every domestic has increased at rates well beyond inflation and incomes.
And part of the problem is systematic under investment in the public sector. We haven't built enough schools, hospitals or required universities to expand in proportion to the population.
If you want a valid example look at Austin Texas or Japan. Housing inventory growth in a robust economy leads to….wait for it….rent decreases.
> Now, Austin is one of the only major U.S. cities where rents are falling.
> Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth.
> The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market.
I know the answer to both of these questions, and so do you.
Anyway, as far what happens when you make renting impossible (or just de facto not financially realistic), in Amsterdam it led to a lot of rentals being sold. The people buying had roughly 2x the income of those renting, on average. So, I guess that's a good thing, if your goal is to evict lower income renters so people can buy a place more cheaply. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05cFv02pzY discusses this at length.
But the thing is, just like elsewhere, much fewer people actually want to live out in the suburbs, which is reflected in the price. Because getting to Paris proper sucks if you don't have a direct rail connection (which most of the outer 'burbs don't), and even then, you're likely to waste hours commuting, between the unreliable service and just sheer distance. Things are improving for "mid-distance" suburbs, but we're not quite there yet.
So, what do you actually want? Do you have to live in NY or SF, or can you live in flyover country? You can buy out there, if you're willing to live out there. If it were me, I'd consider taking 20% less Silicon Valley money for full remote (if I could get that), and live where I could buy something.
This. Also, not everybody wants the same thing, so there's no single universal solution.
I live in the big city because I enjoy going out dancing, having a drink at a bar with a bunch of acquaintances, coming home late at night, etc., all without having to sit in traffic or in transit for more than one hour each way. If I lived where my parents live (which I actually did for a few months at the beginning of the year, so I know), my social life would be dead.
My sister, on the other hand, lives in a big-ass house with a larger yard than her dogs know what to do with, which cost less than my apartment. She doesn't care about going out, neither does her SO; they're full WFH, and the school bus picks up her kids from their front gate. Their setup works great for them.
But you won't live next to people who are similar to you, either. (Though that dirt farmer's land may be worth more than your startup...)
So it is not simple. "Just build more" always comes up in those discussions, and while it does help (and has been proven to help), it is not the definite answer for the housing issues.
Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move. People don't move just because housing is cheap. Actually many people are willing to spend a significant amount of their income to live in specific places. We move to have a job, to build a career, to be close to friends and family, to have better access to entertainment and activities, ...
This is why most developed country experience rural flight. The housing crisis is (mostly) a big city problem. You can usually find extremely cheap housing if you go deep in the countryside. And building is also cheaper (the price of the land is less, there is less permits issues, etc).
And for big cities, "build more" is way more challenging. Ground space is limited, so one solution is to build more vertical, but it is costly and has its own limitation. Spreading may cause issue with water management and require big investment in a public transport infrastructure if you don't want to have a nightmare traffic. Pollution can be a very big issue, etc. And that's for all the non-political issues. The political side of things can get very messy, very quickly.
If there was a simple solution, every big city in the world would have done it by now.
If you build a city full of empty buildings in a place with minimal existing population like the Alaskan wilderness then obviously. But what if you double the housing stock in all the existing cities where people want to live?
> Ground space is limited, so one solution is to build more vertical, but it is costly and has its own limitation.
Extremely tall buildings can get pretty expensive, but moderate height buildings (e.g. five stories) have similar per-unit construction costs to single family homes. Meanwhile now count the number of places you can draw a 100 mile radius where the median height of the existing buildings is even that tall. It might literally be nowhere in the US.
Notice also the extent to which density can thwart the scarcity of land. You put a five story building with four units per story on a plot of land instead of a single family home and the contribution per unit of the cost of land has gone down by 95%.
100 miles? My dude, that is a circle from Poughkeepsie to the tip of Long Island. Forget one-story single-family housing, there is farmland in that circle. There are hundreds of square miles of state parks in that circle.
If people were willing and able to commute that distance you could easily quintuple the housing stock in that area building nothing but one story SFH.
Manhattan itself has a median height of 4-5 stories; the outer boroughs bring that down to 2-3, because commuting from Far Rockaway to midtown is already a schlep.
So imagine the city of Paris, but stretched about 766x. If you want to include the whole metro area, then ~4.3x
Hong Kong is ~431 square miles. So about 73 Hong Kongs. But not really, because only ~25% of that area is actually urban. So more like 291x the urban area of HK.
500 years ago people would have thought any of the cities described were impossible.
I never said anything contrary to that. I'm just saying it would be wild to see a metro area that size with that high of average development.
The above commenter suggested:
> It might literally be nowhere in the US.
It's definitely not a thing in the US. It's almost certainly not a thing in Europe either, but I'm open to being proven wrong there. It might exist in China, I haven't looked. A 100mi radius circle is massive in area. Pies are squared, if you get my point.
Madrid is doing this. Savanah Georgia did this. Manhattan did this. You could also reverse the consolidation of everything. Instead of CVS owning every pharmacy, incentives to prompt the pharmacy being owned by the pharmacist. Or a local butcher. And most jobs that require commutes don't require it now, and if cities were built with the appropriate mix of housing all incomes could live in a section of down further cutting down on commutes.
That's kind of the point. Notice that housing demand is recursive.
The area you're talking about is NYC metro. If you draw a 100 mile radius around Manhattan then Poughkeepsie is inside it. Is someone going to live in Poughkeepsie and commute to Manhattan? Probably not. Is someone going to live in Poughkeepsie and commute in the direction of Manhattan? Absolutely. Which in turn recursively alleviates housing pressure in that direction. More housing in Poughkeepsie frees up existing housing in Peekskill, more availability in Peekskill frees up existing housing in Yonkers, lots of people are willing to commute from Yonkers to Manhattan.
And both "100 miles" and the NYC metro area (the highest population density metro area in the US) are far extremes. The point is that even that would improve affordability if it was the only option. Meanwhile in reality there are single family homes that could be 5 story buildings in Yonkers, if it wasn't prohibited by zoning.
> If people were willing and able to commute that distance you could easily quintuple the housing stock in that area building nothing but one story SFH.
If you actually did that, would housing affordability improve? Yes it would. It's in fact what's slowly happening on its own when the better alternatives are banned; it's why housing in Manhattan isn't twice what it is now. But that's sprawl. Sprawl sucks. People pay less for housing but have 60 minute commutes. Why do that by adding far away single family homes instead of adding medium-height buildings closer to where people work?
It's the people who like density restrictions who keep trying to force people to build high rises next to train stations. But that's the thing that doesn't work, because high rises cost significantly more per unit to build and if you constrain where things can be built like that then the cost of land in the few areas that allow multi-unit housing gets out of control because of the legislated scarcity.
So the availability of housing 100 miles away still affects the price, because there are still people (e.g. retirees who only go into the city once a month) who would choose a longer distance for a lower rent, or who prefer to live in a lower density area even for a similar cost, and giving them a place to get that means they're not bidding up the price in the city.
Free land for internal colonisation was a successful policy that almost every country in the recent past has employed. Even small countries.
If I can work remote for Citadel from a 6 bedroom house in North Dakota it’s a choice to rent a studio apartment in Manhattan.
Not to mention the massive environmental benefits of taking cars off the streets. If you have mobility issues, working remote is a game changer. For those who need to use wheelchairs it’s miles easier to work from home. The nightmare of public transportation while in a wheelchair isn’t something I’d wish on anyone
Not everyone loves the isolation of WFH, so you could replace "jobs" in the old factory sense, now long gone, with co-working spaces which include a social element but are basically still remote work.
The big issue with the US housing market isn't the distribution of housing, it's the distribution of work and support infra of all kinds, including social support.
Because Systems Thinking isn't much of a thing in the US you get these partial solutions when what's needed are integrated solutions that consider all of the moving parts and try to fit them together in a workable way.
The US is very good at extracting and concentrating wealth, but not so good at systems-first distributed investment.
Given a more worker friendly legal system I’d argue forcing anyone who can’t easily travel due to a disability, to work in person for a remote possible job is an undue burden.
I could never ever ever imagine that working currently however.
I don’t need work to make friends. I’d rather be freer to speak my mind when I do socialize.
I had a higher paying full remote job last year. No one there knows what my personal beliefs are, or what music I like. If it wasn’t for the profile picture they wouldn’t even know my appearance.
As it should be. I hate LinkedIn photos since it opens the flood gates to all sorts of discrimination.
it kind of is.
Judging by what I see happening in Texas where the mentality definitely is build, build, build...people definitely do choose to live in the way flung out there suburbs and actively look to move there. Just around DFW places like Prosper, Forney, Weatherford, Burelson, and far more continue to attract tons of people wanting to buy a house even if its way flung out there. People drive from as far out as Kyle and Serenada and consider themselves part of Austin. Houston is about done with its third highway loop, TX SH 99. Tons of people don't blink an eye about having an hour long commute it seems.
I'd argue this isn't a great way to build our cities without also laying the groundwork for decent transit but you can't say people aren't choosing it. I kind of like the multi-polar MSA setup in some ways that we have here in DFW, although it could be a lot better. If you're wanting a more urban lifestyle, you don't have to be directly in Dallas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_State_Highway_99
> Ground space is limited
For a lot of the US this just isn't true. It is true for several notable big cities in the US though, I will agree. Can't really add more land to San Francisco or Manhattan cheaply.
We could also recognize that at certain levels of development single family residences are no longer viable. The government should use eminent domain to take entire blocks back for redevelopment vertically. They should be required to give the home owners triple the value of The property they are taking in the form of replacement square footage or a property in the new development and one or more properties elsewhere. Imagine ing each nimby stood to have a windfall in the form of multiple properties they could rent or sell in exchange for giving up their property. There would be a lot less resistance. Not no resistance but a lot less.
Build the infrastructure, plan the city grid like we used to, incentivize employers to move headquarters there, build new factories, create special economic zones. There are tons of options.
We could increase supply and demand by having a “grow to 1 billion Americans” project. We would create a path to citizenship for people with a requirement that they help build and/or finance the build of homes store fronts etc. create a targeted immigration plan so the new metro is comprised of a broad range of culture, ages, income levels and skills so cultural mixing occurs and assimilation into the shared American experience is facilitated. Make the new metros operate on lower minimum wage, grant 5 year tax abatement for individuals, give the land away for free. Then once the city is established in 20 years do the same thing.
There is no easy fast solution to this. Just build more housing will not solve complex issues. Not saying there should not be more construction, though.
Now, that said: when I lived in the US I (mostly) preferred living in Seattle over NYC for the weather, natural beauty, and more laid-back vibe...subjectively Seattle was better for me, but I still don't have an issue with saying NYC is "objectively" a better city than Seattle.
yes. if you don't like cities, you won't like NYC. but as far as "city" goes, NYC is the clear best and I don't think it's particularly close.
But the same thing happened in every downtown core when the federal highway system carved up neighborhoods and companies like IBM moved their headquarters out of new York and into suburban office parks.
Everything preventing what you want is backed by a law. On the other side of that law is someone making a buck either via business being driven straight to them or business being driven away from someone else and they will fight to preserve it.
Even a simple amendment to the clean water act to exempt residential square footage would have every asshole who makes money off an engineering stamp up in arms. Even some guy who designs bridges would be pissed because he doesn't to compete with all the other labor that would put on the market.
Wash rinse repeat for literally every other issue that's roadblocking the construction of housing.
And this is assuming you want to just develop existing areas further (turn suburbs into cities, exurbs into suburbs, as happened from ~1870 through ~1970). Creating cities from scratch is way harder. Where are those people gonna work?
We tried cramming people from generational poverty into one place and it didn't go super great, therefore public housing as a concept must be the failure, and not our hilariously bad implementation?
Singapore, Austria, Finland, and even a number of mixed income public housing projects in the US have actually done quite well. The narrative that it's all inevitably going to turn into the worst examples is pretty worn out.
> The bigger problem is the bid up of asset prices - aka private equity and class warfare.
This is definitely true: housing can either be affordable or it can be a safe investment, never both. Really private equity moving in on the safe investment is a symptom of the problem: regulatory capture by the landed gentry resulting in strangulation of production which benefits a small group at the expense of the greater public.
89% of these projects are - in fact - doing well. But that number is decreasing. The net result is less supply of public housing in one of the richest states in the entire world.
I'm not sure what your proposal is?
For example mixed income housing is really nice for “us” that have been in generational poverty. For “them” it is just living with signals of alcohol abuse, domestic abuse and more. All while their children get a good front seat into “empowerment”.
With sarcasm over, details matter, complexity matters, social assistance matters, a contingency plan for total failure to rehabilitate some people matters.
Many people would benefit from the Northern European style of institutionalisation where if incarcerated people would need to go to isolated communities and learn to buy groceries, cook a meal take care of personal hygiene (in Sweden they literally have prison islands where inmates have houses and must live as they would in the outside world. Then progressively move to temporary shelters to get their footing and then be released. If need be put those people in the countryside.
As a personal experience: Many German youths get sent to the middle of Portugal when their environment leads them astray. In the countryside there is a publicly funded host family or community to receive them and they have to learn trade jobs like being a painter or a plumber and get pushed into an normalised environment. There is no access to drugs as well in the middle of nowhere. There is alcohol but in the next morning there is work to do and people who are waiting for you. I met some of those youths when I was young and it always struck me that a good solution for failed communities in urban environments was to break them apart and scatter them into other more rural communities in such small units (family at most) that their habits would not impact the locals and that the habits could not be fulfilled as a matter of fact. Where are you going to hang out at night in a village of 1k? There is housing but you likely need to repair it; the locals will lend you a hand but they will exert peer pressure for you to normalise.
There is no need for class warfare. But there needs to be a warfare against antisocial self destruction behaviours.
In SG, they can also plan for decades ahead because of a more stable political climate where people actually respect their government for most and ACCEPT that there is some humans that are considered "superior" and take the lead, it's a huge difference with the west where people favorite sport is to non-stop shit on their government or denigrate without offering solutions, in the west, we seem to not be able to accept that there is even a class system where people have more power/rights than others (while there is, it's inevitable).
Singapore is the third least corrupt country in the world[1]. Another country that has managed to pull off successful public housing, Finland, is the second least corrupt in the world.
The United States meanwhile is in 29th place (and that's being generous, imho) and at its worst ever in the corruption index[2]. It's been falling for a decade. Perhaps that's the real explanation: we can't have nice things because the resources needed to build and operate them are actively siphoned off through embezzlement, bribes, kickbacks, and fraud. Rigid class systems don't do anything to prevent fraud, either, in fact they entrench it deeply.
[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/singapore
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/10/business/corruption-index-tra...
Stick a bunch of people in a tower in a field with no entertainment, no work nearby, building rubble surrounding their environment, no maintenance happening, no follow through on planned facilities, and the consequences are absolutely 100% predictable. Literally last night I watched a pair of bbc documentaries about a new estate, one from when it was new in the mid 60s, one from the late 70s. The residents are there in the 60’s, going “well it’s a pain having to walk all the way up but we trust that the lifts will be installed soon, and we’re looking forwards to the leisure centre” - fast forward 15 years, still no lifts, no leisure centres, and surprise surprise the kids are setting fire to cars to have something to do. If government won’t uphold the social contract, why should citizens?
The implementation is entirely the problem, and unfortunately few seem to realise that it can be done well. You can’t just make containers for humans and expect that to solve everything.
If they stop because they actually can't pay it, then we should pay it for them. Another homeless person on the street makes us all less safe and less healthy, and tax dollars going toward keeping them housed is a good use of that money.
If they stop paying because they just don't feel like it, you evict them.
Well-stated! Yes, defective implementations with negative outcomes should not be used to make overly broad or even grossly incorrect assertions about human nature.
NY is back in the first phase of a realestate cycle. As the wheel turns ...
In Vienna they are still building state of the art for that reason:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...
We could talk about the merits of Georgeism but honestly let's set that aside - conventional property taxes are sufficient here. Most of Manhattan apparently has <1% annual property tax, and the eclectic sometimes regressive way it's calculated in NYC is suggestive of corruption. These asset bubbles can only inflate because the owners make nearly as much money sitting on a vacant property as they make with tenants, so they borrow approximately All The Money to dump it into real estate. Property taxes are not just a necessary evil to keep the schools running and the garbage collected (cough), they're a tiny fractional "decommodification" of property as asset, because the money collected from the owners is spent on the residents. Most of this money passes through directly into higher rents, and we shouldn't care about that, because it's spent on the residents (if the residents don't want good public services, literally hand them a check, direct redistribution). This punishes vacant properties appreciably, and pushes them back into the market.
The ecosystem of debt and bank collateral that has grown around near-zero property taxes has strongly encouraged high vacancy rates, because the banks directly demand that what rents be collected, are high enough to justify the collateral valuation, but don't actually demand that rents be collected.
Set property values to the rate of inflation (depending on your preferences, CPI or local COL or local selling prices or S&P), and you have fully "decommodified" housing without lining the landlords up against the wall and shooting them, an option that is increasingly popular.
While NYC has never lacked for rot and corruption, those really aren't needed - or even particularly useful - for something like this.
As soon as you've got any sort of law / regulation / status quo that benefits a class of well-to-do people, there will be intense pressure to maintain that situation. Vs. the opposition - honest reformers, idealists, the poor, whoever - even if they're far more numerous, just never seem to have the zeal / focus / attention span / whatever to correct the problem.
Mainly because, bluntly, the people who have the most zeal, attention span, talent, and focus... aren't in the group.
Then there's the problem of late-stage capitalism's whole "Those who have the most gold should make most of the rules. Especially rules about who is entitled to how much gold. And double especially if they're obsessed with nothing beyond more-is-better gold hoarding."
Ignoring the morality, that optimization leads to the sort "Rich get richer, poor get poorer, God obviously only loves the rich, desperately poor people resort to desperate measures" instabilities and violence that made Europe an often-horrible place from the Napoleonic Wars through WWII.
The practical rental math in NYC is simple. Buy a $1M coop in a building with near zero costs. HOA will be at least 2k per month with the majority of that being property taxes. Thats your base rent. If you have a loan, add that to the base. You will not get cheaper rent until you drive aggregate taxes or interests rate down. There isn’t a huge profit margin on rents in NYC. I looked at a unit next door, and if we wanted to have rents break even on mortgage we would need to offer 85% cash up front. Im on the board of our coop, so I see how all of our financials function and same for prior buildings.
- Build more, destroy short term value of existing owners
- Lower taxes, hurt short term city functioning
- Lower interest rates, drive up inflation
The only “fun” solution IMO is cut taxes and cut jobs programs that don’t deliver city value. DOE is a welfare scheme at this point.
Either way, vacancy gets punished, landlords can't treat the city's housing like gold boullion, and the price of housing is fractionally more tied to the cost of living than the future economic outlook in potentia.
Picture a conventional Ponzi scheme operating in the Lower East Side, which has scaled to be 30% of the city's economy. Whole industries have risen up around this scheme, it's essentially printing money in a way that seems like it might be legal if you squint, and you're not trying to regulate/tax it. It's growing so fast that it's actually causing problematic inflation for the rest of the city.
Can you afford to let it grow unchecked, indefinitely?
Imagine progressively feeding the goose less, so as to have a greater profit margin on the golden eggs it laid. No particular percentage of feed reduction seemed too harmful, until one day it died unexpectedly.
It feels like you've left some important people out.
The systems that contribute towards A are mutually reinforcing, vicious spirals in a neoliberal capitalist world. Just like in the art world, there is no hard objective value to vacant housing, and many purchases are made on debt. It's worth whatever the last guy paid, and so the banks will loan you 80% (or more) of whatever the last guy paid. This is a form of money creation. We have collectively bid up the housing stock, completely separated from the utility value, at a rate we generally expect to be competitive to loaning real operating businesses money to invest in actual operations.
If you tax ALL of the prospective value, and price sinks down all the way to B, you can still have profitable private housing development in a steady state. Unmet demand is a thing that exists. Yes getting to B overnight probably represents a crash in your overall asset investment picture, but getting 1/10th of the way there, locally, less so. Phasing it in over time, less so. If you're expecting 5% and you get 4.5% that's still a return.
The thing about this type of redistribution is, it's just a way better more functional economy than the idea of conventional price setting with the addition of rent control, or than the status quo. Rent control tears incentive structures and makes willing landlords into unwilling landlords who are instructed to be creative in how miserable they make their tenants; Its supposed goal of affordability simply shifts costs from older tenants to newer tenants. The status quo where property taxes are very low and so A is significantly greater than B simply doesn't establish those incentives of mutually agreeable economic exchange to a great degree in the first place. "I bought a house as an investment. Rent it out? I mean... there are upsides and downsides."
The problem is, as long as the stonk based US pension system keeps flooding dozens of billions of dollars a month into the markets, there will always be enough money to flow into REITs and driving up prices, even for vacancies.
Now, introducing (or adequately hiking) property taxes has the problem it may cost the REITs a bit of their profits - but it will be a nasty issue for individual families and small shops, and the large stores will just pass on the cost to customers because even with that, they will still be cheaper than small stores.
Vacancy taxes sound good on paper, because they - if done well - only hit REITs that hope for value gains and other unproductive uses of rare real estate (like Chinese and Russians parking wealth in Western real estate so it can't be seized by the government). The issue with them is a second order effect. If made painful enough to be worth the effort and actually force landlords to either rent out if need be at a lower price or sell, again if need be at a lower price. That however immediately forces REITs to write off significant chunks of the asset value (if rented out) or, even worse, actually realize a loss on the books (if selling).
Unfortunately, the markets really, really do not like either of these two things happening, we've seen that during Covid and the hard pushback against remote working that followed.
I have said it before, and I will say it again: the US pension system being so laser focused on stock and asset markets is going to fry its host society alive, because what needs to be done for society to survive cannot be done because too much pensioner wealth would be wiped out.
†Modulo accomodations for undocumented immigrants
Here's the actual problem. You've based your argument on a debunked economic theory ie the tragedy of the commons. You may as well argue trickle down economics.
Garrett Hardin wrote an essay called The Tragedy of the Commons in 1968 [1] and it became all the rage in neoliberal circles to justify wealth transfer to private hands (ie privatization) [2]. It never fit experimental data. Ultimately, Elinor Ostrom debunked it entirely using empircal data from the world over, work for which she won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics [3].
Whatever your arguments against free housing might be, the tragedy of the commons ain't it.
[1]: https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy...
[2]: https://socialistproject.ca/2008/08/b133/
[3]: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...
I tried free housing for the first 18 years of my life and it worked out fine
I've spent a lot of time with the problem. and there is a simple solution: relax zoning restrictions and various lot requirements to allow private developers to build more housing. the market incentives are already there, they're just blocked by NIMBY's and stupid city councils, etc.
1) Pass legislation to ban the fed from pulling interest rates below 2%. The unprecedented ZIRP completely fucked up asset values and it will take decades to unwind it.
2) In cities, the government should own all the land and owners of properties should hold only a long-term lease. This will allow the government to control land use and upzone density while ensuring private building owners have skin in the game to actually build and maintain dwellings.
It has nothing to do with Mamdani, for those of who don't want to bother to read. Most of this occurred under Eric Adams's watch.
Anecdotally, I do think covid made people a lot more aware of how deeply backlogged the housing courts are. It seems like a lot of people (like the anonymous one in the article) realized they could not pay rent and avoid being actually evicted for quite some time.
This is a recurring theme in city problems: Backlogged courts. Sometimes that's to the benefit of the less fortunate (here), but it also often results in terrible outcomes (see: Kalief Browder).
It's basically the same argument that says rent caps are bad for the renters in the long run.
I'm originally from the Netherlands, which traditionally had a strong social housing sector: regions and cities would have their own housing corporations ('woningbouwcorporaties') tasked with building affordable housing. Those corporations were given government support after 1950 to help with the post-WW2 housing shortage, but were semi-privatized in the mid-90s, and in 2015 their scope was strongly curtailed.
It would be reductive to say that this privatization was the sole cause of the current housing crisis affecting the Netherlands -- rents and housing prices have also increased a lot in Singapore since Covid -- but it probably didn't help.
>Public housing, also known as social housing, is subsidized or affordable housing provided in buildings that are usually owned and managed by local government, central government, nonprofit organizations or a combination thereof.
You literally just quoted why it’s not public housing. Jesus Christ.
However, HDB still does a lot of the managing. Eg HDB manages the lifts and other common spaces. They organise getting the exterior repainted, or general upgrading works to plumbing etc.
HDB also subsidises the price of a flat when you buy directly from them. There's a reason they have maximum income caps for buying.
My unpopular opinion: HDB should declare victory and go home. They more than solved the original acute housing shortage they were created for.
---
Singapore does a lot of things right. And HDB is, as usually a lot more competent than pretty much any other public housing programme anywhere else in the world. But that doesn't mean everything Singapore does (including HDB) is automatically a good idea forever.
Just like our local recreational drug policy could probably be improved by moving closer to what we do with the casinos. And the ban on vaping is just silly.
By that logic every apartment block is public housing.
The condo management companies are not arms of the government.
What is so hard about this? Is there something I'm not understanding?
That's all.
How about you read the wikipedia article on public housong in Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
It says: "In 2025, close to 80% of Singapore's resident population was reported to be living in public housing,[1] down from a high of 88.0% in 2000."
Let's follow that reference, and take a look at what the Singaporean government says, at https://www.mnd.gov.sg/our-work/housing-a-nation/public-hous... , under the section title "Public Housing":
"Singapore has one of the highest home ownership rate in the world, due to the commitment of our founding fathers since the very beginning of nation building. Today, there are more than 1 million HDB flats across the island, home to close to 80% of Singapore's resident population. The schemes highlighted below help Singaporeans meet their housing needs at different life stages."
So the dictionary says that HBD housing is public housing, wikipedia says that HBD housing is public housing, and the Singaporean government says that HBD housing is public housing.
It's not about whether 'someone' is managing these things. Even an owner-occupier is managing their own lights and exteriors.
A useful criterion is whether the government (or an arm of the government) is managing these things. Like HDB, but unlike your typical condo management organisation. It's far from the only criterion, but it's a useful indicator.
>Jesus Christ.
Sometimes I'm disappointed by the level of contributions here.
You can’t go calling things they are not.
Others will make up their mind. Over and out.
I didn't stay in social housing while I living there but I never once heard people complain about it. They basically just didn't think much about it at all and felt it was a good system and then would ask me why the US only makes it for poor people.
But you are right, that surplus housing is no longer a thing in Berlin.
And while Vienna or Stockholm are often cited as Utopias, the citees often intentionally leave out the negative side effects (ie. Waiting-times of years, housing black markets, etc) that are eventually coming full circle to the thing they were proposed as a solution against. Just with much less transparency.
There have been social housing projects that paint a more nuanced picture, eg Hamburg-Steilshoop, where a giant block (for EU standards) has been erected in the 1970s and was basically divided into three sections: one to be run by existing housing coops, one by owner occupants, and one by the city. Needless to say that those parts run by the city were quickly becoming a prime example of a German „banlieue“ while the other parts became a prime example for those eager to dismiss any criticisms.
Sure, because what existed before was absolutely fine [1][2]...
The truth is that these policies worked so well that pepole completely forgot what existed before. The alternative to housing projects wasn't a country without crime or despair, it was more crime, shanty towns, people displaced by war and unable to get back to normal life, and young workers unable to move to places of employment in the postwar economic boom. That topic was so uncontroversial that every european government, leftwing or rightwing, did it.
I agree that a social housing project alone isn't enough to fix every problem, but that doesn't make it the source of other unsolved problems.
[1]: Nanterre's shanty towns, https://www.defense-92.fr/exposition/la-vie-des-bidonvilles-...
[2]: pre-war shanty town, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2019/jul/04/how-p...
In classics European cities there were shops on street level and dense blocks that generated demand for those.
The post war developments followed the 'high rise in the park' concept, lots of greenery and parking lots between buildings to create a mid density neighborhood.
But there is no life in the streets and you have to walk a lot through repetitive environment but to do anything you still have to go to the 'old city'.
Sadly, a lot of places (Netherlands and Ireland come to mind) _discourage_ you from investing in things like stocks, and _encourage_ you to "invest" in a primary residence, making the problem even worse.
If you want people to be able to live in a place without paying rent, please just outright gift that to them and make that official policy. That may or may not be good policy, but at least it's honest.
But if the deal that people agreed to is to pay rent, then the courts should also enforce that.
You can get from one regime to the other, by eg buying out the landlords or outright expropriating them. But if you want to do that, please just advocate so outright.
Social housing may or may not be a good idea. But it's a completely separate issue from non-enforcement of existing rental contracts.
> In the longer one, you need building and renting out shelter to be reasonably profitable, so that people do it.
On a tangent: along with most economist, I generally prefer giving poor people money that they can spend on goods and services as they please; instead of having some pencil pusher decide what they need and giving that to them in-kind.
Affordable housing is too central to NYC democratic politics for the city/state to simply let a large share of subsidized housing totally collapse. More likely, they keep patching it with public money: arrears assistance, vouchers, preservation funds, regulatory tweaks, etc. That’s already basically the pattern.
The real likely long-term problem is that the city robs Peter to pay Paul: It props up housing operations by reducing funding for other services, creating recurring subsidy obligations, or risking pressure on its fiscal position and bond ratings.
They’re already doing that all the time: Part of how Mamdani plugged the budget gap, for example, was by delaying a classroom size reduction in public schools.
Obviously, I don’t think that’s a great long-term strategy. It turns a blind eye to an enforcement problem in favor of a recurring taxpayer-funded operating subsidy.
They sit on some of the most valuable real estate in the world, surely that should be able to find public infrastructure etc? Especially since the density they have would allow them to provide the infrastructure rather efficiently.
But they are so ham-strung / incompetent, they still have surface level street parking on public roads. Surely, there's more valuable uses of NYC real estate than that, and the market would be more than happy to find them.
(At least they made some inroads recently by introducing some congestion pricing. As neutered as that programme turned out, it's a lot better than nothing, which they had before.)
Still, NYC's municipal budget is already the largest in the world by far. When I last looked, it was roughly double Tokyo's and bigger than many countries: NYC's municipal budget is larger than Singapore's, for example, and obviously NYC's budget gets to exclude things countries pay for like national defense.
It's likely they will need to continue raising taxes, but we also need to take a hard look at how effective each dollar being spent is.
Moreover rents for affordable housing haven't kept up with inflation while benefits have.
Arm chair speculation like what's in the article won't suffice. People need to be surveyed and interviewed to get to the bottom of this.
He had a pretty good "Abundance-style" agenda IMO: City of Yes didn’t go far enough, but passing it at all was a big deal in NYC land-use politics. Various tax policies like 485-x are at least serious long-term attempts to restart housing production, even if the details are debatable.
> He dramatically expanded housing vouchers
This is being extremely charitable to Adams. The big CityFHEPS expansion was vetoed by Adams and the city council overrode him. The Adams administration was clearly skeptical of short-term tenant-side relief.
You can see that in simple things like his rent board appointees: Adams-era boards approved rent increases every single year. I'm not saying that's bad and it's in-line with his general view of housing as a supply-side problem. He inherited a system coming off years of freezes and very low increases under BDB, so some correction was necessary.
But overall when given the choice, he did choose to inflict a bit of short-term pain for a longer-term view.
Because huge swathes of society choose to live in these unstable conditions.
They could move to Detroit or even Salt Lake City, but they prefer the lifestyle of New York City.
These people absolutely exist. To pretend that they don't is willful ignorance. They are, however, indeed a "small[est] subset" to quote the gentleman in the article. In the era of $4 McDoubles and $6 gallons of gas I have trouble believing that one in four people is my burnout college roommate who spends on Fireball shots and Xbox games instead of paying rent. Life is expensive these days.
With some of the stories I've read, you'd have to be positively insane to be a small-time landlord these days, especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone.
Go watch Pacific Heights with Michael Keaton for a fictionalized account but this stuff absolutely happens every day.
I saw one recently where the renter has not paid rent for six years and is unable to be evicted. It made national news.
So where does that leave the industry? You eventually push out the mom and pop landlords by making the regulations so insane it only leaves behind the large corporate property management companies and their army of lawyers. Who will collude and drive rents up. It's a vicious cycle and these cities are not helping one bit.
I don't want to be in a position where I have to pay more to fix damages than I collectected in rent if I accidentally rent to deadbeats. Or in a position where I have to provide services to someone not paying me.
One of those friends has parents that rented out their old house to deadbeats at the top of the housing market instead of selling it. Those deadbeats have been nothing but trouble and yet my friend still wants to be a landlord.
Somehow the idea of owning rental properties became a pervasive notion in the U.S.
Somehow the idea of working for wages became a pervasive notion in the U.S.
https://www.denver7.com/news/national-politics/the-race/wage...
Tacking on optional insurance products on a property that’s already in the red further encourages landlords to push up rents prices.
For that price they will pay you the rent if the tenant is not paying, and take care of the getting paid by the tenant.
If landlords don't want to pay that, then they accept the risk of having to deal with a tenant who doesn't pay.
the goal is for peoppe to own the places they live in
What if we shifted to a different system?
It's puzzling that a system that is supposed to reward creativity and genius like capitalism limits it's inhabitants in their imagination when it comes to how one might structure society.
I don't claim to have the answer, and _no,_ my issues with Liberal Democracy/Capitalism don't mean I'm a communist / socialist / thing-people-don't-like.
The trouble is making a system that can guarantee the "benevolent" part in the longer term.
And on what basis does some dictator get to tell others what to do? OK, I am the dictator and I'm telling you to give me 10% of your income and never post this nonsense in HN again. :)
Plenty of societies happily trade away one or more of those values for other values.
> Plenty of societies happily trade away one or more of those values for other values.
Which ones? Let's hear some evidence.
People around the world strongly embrace and defend their freedom, including self-determination; the idea that it's not universal (in any meaningful sense) has little support. It's embraced wherever people have the opportunity in Europe and N. America, in East Asia, in China (Taiwan, and also Hong Kong until it was taken from them), S. America, SE Asia, South Asia, a variety of places in Africa, ... you can see the mass protests in Iran, the Arab Spring, etc.
And rationally, again, why should you or anyone else tell me what to do? On that basis, why can't I just as well tell you or them what to do?
Human rights' universality is essential - without it, it's just people fighting for power. That's why it's so important, and that's why those who want to control others try to attack the universality.
You'd better start standing up for freedom instead of toying with oppressors. Nobody will do it for you.
Another hidden issue in the USA is many households are dependent on contributing income from a retired/disabled/working past retirement age elderly parent/family member. Those people are going to start passing in mass, and a lot of households will become even less resilient.
There is a middle ground, just need to find that point.
it forced landlords to keep their properties on the market and insured full usage of the severely limited available housing stock
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/technology/realpage-doj-s...
I have a 5 bedroom house that I rent out 2 rooms, but not interested in accepting more people unless they are friends or have a very high income.
At my home’s peak, we had 6 adults living there, now its at 50% capacity.
In SF and Seattle during hiring booms, a lot of young workers move to the city with no social connections, so they start their new life in hacker houses to kickstart their friend group.
In other words: even in a plentiful housing market, there will always be someone who struggles to pay rent (including transiently), because a rational housing market can't offer $0 rents. Tenant protection laws exist to protect that person from a landlord who would otherwise be incentivized to throw them onto the street.
If you only have 1 rental property and your tenant doesn’t pay, that’s a 100% loss of revenue while your family personally bears the cost of supporting this other family.
Whereas corporate landlords can absorb these losses by raising rents on 100 doors to cover the families that refuse to pay
Having 3 empty rooms helps no one except corporate landlords that can navigate and scale (and collude…).
You seem to be assuming that if we, say, just made renting illegal, everyone would a) want to own a home, and b) have the finances necessary to do so. That's not the case.
If grandma bought the the house in 1990 and property values have risen faster than wages and inflation, where is the leverage?
If grandma is under insured, either due to the insurance company not updating coverages with inflation or no insurance bc she isn’t required to, where is the leverage?
I’ve known acquaintances who got de facto evicted without warning just because their landlord decided to make a few extra bucks. Were that to happen to me, I would not be able to rent in my current city at all due to the recent influx of wealthy tech workers. (Read: extremely high rents with ridiculous income requirements.) Fortunately, my city has robust tenant protections and rent control, so I don’t have to live my life in fear of ending up on the curb. Some people see that as a bad thing; I guess they think I should save up a few million dollars to buy a condo or abandon my community and move to the boonies.
This would be less of an issue with more housing stock, but that takes decades to build. As a city resident inconveniently living in the present, that does not help me much.
Obviously, I’d never vote for a politician who would make it easier for a landlord to evict me arbitrarily. And I’d eagerly vote for the same protections for any other renter.
Kicking out good tenants cost landlords money.
The property tax situation in SF is a mess.
SF also requires a lot of expensive regulations (earthquake proofing, renovation permits, rising California insurance costs, etc).
Also… the unfortunate reality is there is only so much space and the capital markets determine who gets to live where. If you’re not able to keep up in a city, then there are better places for you.
They have exactly as much freedom to leave as they would without rent control. They _choose_ to stay because rent control has made it advantageous to stay. The way you phrased it implies you're suggesting this is a bad thing for renters but that is strictly a positive. Without rent control they'd have zero affordable options, with rent control they have 1 affordable option. Woe to the inhabitants of rent controlled apartments with their golden handcuffs.
So yes, if you have rent control in a city, it would create an environment with zero affordable options.
This is disingenuous. In the absence of rent control (or prop 13 for property owners) you famously get a situation where tenants ALSO can't afford to leave... but have to anyway.
Why should anyone be forced to leave just because someone richer wants to move in?
You don't have to support someone being unable to evict people who don't pay to believe that there should be limits on how much landlords (or the state, in the case of prop 13) should be able to force current residents to leave just to make a quick buck.
This triggers my other frustration: empty nesters. They continue to live in great 3-4 bedroom homes that are amazing to raise a family in (near job centers, plenty of bedrooms, tight community, near good schools). This forces people like myself to spend 85+ minutes in a car (away from my family, friends etc) everyday while I drive past all these amazing empty homes.
Yes, if you’re not using the space efficiently, GTFO and let people have the space! Let dad have more time with his kids. Let the tech bro that created 10m jobs and have more time with his wife and kid. Let people burn less fossil fuels to get to work.
Rent-controlled/prop13 grandma needs to find another place to live for the next generation.
Someone living alone in a rent controlled unit paying below market rates is much “richer” than a family of 4 paying 5x more cramped into a 2 bedroom apartment.
If they own their home, many old people made their bag and aren't interested in being landlords in retirement.
Not sure why you're surprised: this sort of thing has been widespread for years in cities (like SF) where demand outstrips supply.
If you can't afford to live in your city, what distinguishes you from the people in the boonies? Why should they be relegated to the boonies while you successfully game the system?
That kind of insurance is usually pretty expensive. Why should you get it for free?
> That kind of insurance is usually pretty expensive. Why should you get it for free?
Protecting its constituents from the whims of out-of-town money seems like an excellent purpose for a local government. Especially if some of that money wants to move in so badly that it can be very profitably taxed!
Why shouldn't local government try to serve its constituents like that?
Two, there are many "free protections" that are taken for granted at our stage of civilizational development. Should fire departments be privatized? Police? I'd argue that housing security is even more important than those. We bear the costs together so that our lives are collectively better.
Three, your entire framing is kind of bananas. Rent control is neither insurance nor expensive, but a cap on landlord profits. If anything, it's unbounded profiteering of basic necessities that's actually "expensive."
But we don't. Everyone who works in the city is paying the costs, while the lucky few who moved in decades ago are the only ones who get the benefit. If everyone got to pay the same level of rent then I'd maybe support it, but there's nothing "collective" about the people who got here quicker protecting themselves while pulling the ladder up behind them.
> Three, your entire framing is kind of bananas. Rent control is neither insurance nor expensive, but a cap on landlord profits. If anything, it's unbounded profiteering of basic necessities that's actually "expensive."
It's got nothing to do with profit; if there are x homes and y>x people who want to live in them, either you give them to the x highest bidders, or you unfairly screw some people over. Rent control is one form of option B (there are others).
None of this seems egregious to me. Yes, existing residents are prioritized over new residents. This feels like an obvious tradeoff if you want to maintain community and QoL. The alternative is prioritizing the rich — landlords and wealthy renters alike. I do not want to live in a city where money has the final say.
> None of this seems egregious to me.
Enough said. I wonder if it would feel egregious if you were the one paying $2000/m more.
The alternative is that half my street gets ousted whenever a tech boom happens. What a horrible way to live.
Or maybe if the pain was more evenly distributed you'd vote to legalise more housing. Not being able to live in a street like yours is just as horrible for those of us who didn't luck into arriving there earlier, we're just out of sight, out of mind.
(But again, I am 100% for building more housing using any incentives available. This is orthogonal to having robust tenant protections.)
Come off it, no-one's talking about kicking people out on the curb instantly. I'm all for processes and reasonable notice periods. But ultimately if you're not willing to pay what it costs to live where you do, yeah you should be pushed out for someone who will, rather than the rest of us subsidising you even as we're forced to cram into shared rooms miles away from our jobs.
> This is orthogonal to having robust tenant protections.
How can it be? How will residents know or care that their city doesn't have enough market-rate housing, that market-rate homes are too expensive, when they're not exposed to that market-rate price? Ever if they support building more housing in theory, they're absolutely going to object to it anywhere near them. It's not a coincidence that cities with rent control consistently build fuck all, that the few cities that have managed to actually build some homes over the past few years are in places like Texas.
Anyway, you can get mad at this policy all you want, but the bottom line is this: renters don't like getting priced out of their homes and far outnumber landowners. They will vote for rent control as the economy starts to squeeze them.
Maybe more effort should be put into thinking of ways to incentivize housing construction rather than getting fruitlessly angry at social policy.
(Also, as a rent-controlled renter, I'd love more housing to be built near me. I don't think I've ever met any renters who feel otherwise. Most of the actual NIMBYs seem to be owners, not renters. As for how would they know that more housing is needed? Um, by reading the news and talking to people? It's a constant topic of conversation in SF.)
A properly functioning housing market is a way to incentivise housing construction.
> Also, as a rent-controlled renter, I'd love more housing to be built near me. I don't think I've ever met any renters who feel otherwise. Most of the actual NIMBYs seem to be owners, not renters. As for how would they know that more housing is needed? Um, by reading the news and talking to people? It's a constant topic of conversation in SF.
Everyone talks a good game about supporting more homebuilding, yet somehow SF never builds any homes.
As for housing, we’re working on it: https://sfyimby.com/2026/06/formal-application-for-bernal-he...
Maybe stories of massive, immediate increase in housing supply in places that scrapped rent control will change their minds. Maybe appeals to fairness will work. It's certainly got no worse chance of working out than trying to build houses in San Francisco, which smart, motivated people have been trying very hard to do for decades to no avail.
I'm very sympathetic to this sort of framing, but I don't think that's happening here. Or if it is, then pulling up the ladder is a pretty reasonable, rational thing to do when you're protecting against other people climbing that ladder and throwing you back down to the ground.
I’ve seen money, place of birth, sexual favours, lottery, length of tenure as options to ration. What do you think the best way is?
(But even then, plenty of Dallas residents have been upset in the past decade by what happens to rental prices when a bunch of higher-income folks move to town!)
One wonders why the people who don't want to have to leave a city like San Fransisco just cause some other people have more money than them and want to raise their rents out of their reach are the ones who should move to Texas. Why shouldn't the would-be newcomers just be the ones go to all those cookie-cutter new developments?
If you jumped back in time 20 years ago and were able to ensure that YCombinator, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, and other high-paper-valuation companies, and they all had imported their from-out-of-town high-income-or-equity-leveraging employees to McKinney, Texas, not much materially would prevent those companies from still doing what they did. But people who already lived in SF or on the peninsula but didn't own much land there would have a materially better standard of living due to their costs not running away from their existing incomes. And the Texas burbs happily would've built a shit-ton of houses and apartments for the startup workers, because of the aforementioned giant quantities of near-empty land. Greenfield businesses for greenfield real-estate. Much better fit than force-transforming cities.
Because my money should be just as good as yours? Why should you get a huge discount just because of where you were lucky to be born? I'm not asking for a better deal than you, just fair competition between equals.
> And the Texas burbs happily would've built a shit-ton of houses and apartments for the startup workers, because of the aforementioned giant quantities of near-empty land.
For first 100, sure. Then they'd complain about the newcomers changing the character of the place and ban new buildings. The same thing happens everywhere, you can't route around it by starting your own new city because as soon as you've built any kind of community you have the same NIMBY problems as every other city.
You have more money than me, so you deserve to take my place? That’s pure entitlement and leads to cities comprised entirely of millionaires.
What mechanism do you propose instead for allocating scarce housing?
> What mechanism do you propose instead for allocating scarce housing?
The one that we’re in the middle of talking about? Rent control.
Requiring a process in order to evict tennants is a good thing. If the process is unsatisfyable or extremely lengthy, I don't think it's a good thing anymore. There should be a way to get destructive and severely disruptive tenants out in a hurry. Ordinary breach of contract things (failure to pay rent, problematic behaviors that violate the lease but aren't an immediate issue, etc) should have something like a 3-7 notice period and then be referred to court and figured out without undue delay.
I'm ok with limiting the reason for the landlord ending a lease, especially where the tenant has stayed there for a long time.
IMHO rent control/rent stabilization can be useful when the cap isn't set too low, and there's reasonable ways to pass through less predictable costs. If the cap is too low, rent gets significantly behind the market rent which causes trouble for landlords but also leads to situations where renters end up stuck where they are; maybe better than being forced out but not if the property deteriorates. If the cap is too high, it doesn't provide meaningful stability or a planning horizon for tenants. If it's in the right place, it gives renters reasonable time to adjust to market changes. Again, IMHO, 3% is probably too low, 10% may be too high, somewhere in the middle is nice to have.
Tenant protections setting deposit limits and process for assessing against the deposit seem reasonable to me. Landlords are going to screw tenants out of deposits if they can, regardless of the market realities, because the relationship is over, the renter is busy with other stuff, and the landlord has the money.
A single asshole can destroy an entire building.
Here's a nearly-strawman-but-definitionally-valid example: a landlord may want to remove a tenant who's being unusually hard on the place and accelerating the wear-and-tear. Could be serious enough that paying the tenant to go away would be cheaper than the cost to remediate the damage accrued over the length of the contract.
[1] https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/hsg-06-01gapp5guid.pdf
At least as long as 'no X' is a reasonably moral thing to restrict. So no pets, no working on cars in the parking lot, no smoking, no loud noises/no more than N police noise complaints, etc. At least my moral code allows one to form a contract that restricts such thing and that when one party refuses to honor a (reasonable) contract, the other party should be able to require the breach be mended or the contract be ended, and that some breaches can't be mended.
Some things that might not be stated in a lease but would also be reasonable to evict for could include no interfering in the quiet enjoyment rights of neighbors, no storing of dangerous goods, no causing dangerous/unsafe situations.
Does programming cause property damage or impact other tenants?
I don't think it's a reasonable restriction, but unreasonableness doesn't make it immoral. At the same time, if you make an agreement not to program in a rental and then you program, shouldn't you need to stop or leave? I might have moral concerns about how one enforces a restriction against programming, it's probably intrusive
Now, if your question is no programmers and/or no overnight guests who are programmers and/or you can have six tenants in the unit, but no more than three who are unmaried programmers... Then my moral compass is pointing towards no. Restricting the practicing of a profession on premesis seems fine, descriminating against the practitioners is ick.
If the tenant does something criminal, sure, that's up to the police.
Which the local landowning population promptly block with NIMBY tactics. Have you wondered if that has any impact? Not everything is some progressive boogeyman.
Yes, good! Then they will sell their bloody housing stock and people can BUY them instead
This idea that ubiquitous rental (which is normally at obscene prices any way) makes cities more accessible to live in is nonsense. Landlords are creating the problem that they state they are fixing
The problem is that there will always be more voting renters than voting landlords. So in a purely democratic system, policies which favor renters at the expense of landlords will always be supported.
And that said, some renter protections are definitely needed, because there is a subset of landlords that engage in flat out illegal behavior.
Deposit withholding, making illegal demands, illegal renter selection practices, etc.
Imho, that tends to be concentrated in the "1-5 unit" landlord range, because those landlords are usually (a) not lawyers & (b) treat their properties like pets instead of a business.
I don’t know about that… the voting landlords (NIMBYs) sure make it a point to reduce development “to preserve their neighborhood character”.
The NIMBY "character of the neighborhood" phenomenon has nothing to do with landlords; that's a homeowner thing.
Landlords might be anti-development because a constrained housing supply means higher rents, but that's something else entirely. And if NIMBY homeowners magically stopped being NIMBYs tomorrow, we wouldn't even bother talking about NIMBYs anymore, because NIMBY landlords wouldn't have enough political power to matter.
These laws become the way they are because landlords brought it upon themselves for the most part - they’re keeping assets that have massively increased in price and want to extract more and more out of the tenant.
If you have a home that’s paid off your expenses are basically just property taxes, maybe they should do what they can to keep good tenants instead of chasing profits.
These laws seem quite unrelated to the problems.
There needs to be laws to protect the renter against bad landlords and there needs to be laws to protect the landlord against bad tenants.
Nowhere there it implies there should be insane laws that make no sense. Such as creating a system where someone can skip paying rent for many years and continue to live there.
Landlords need laws that hold their feet to the fire to maintain the properties to a livable standard (the state/county should define) and fulfill any other obligations of the lease. At the same time there need to be laws that force the renters to pay on time and not destroy the property. It's not a case of one or the other.
The issue is that housing is a necessity, and the relationship isn’t an equal one. A landlord can usually absorb vacancy, repairs, or a bad investment decision; a renter can’t easily absorb losing their home or a sudden 20% rent increase.
Right, so let's pass laws (where not already in place) that prevent sudden eviction (e.g. nobody should be able to be evicted if they are a few days late or even a few weeks) and prevent sudden 20% rent increases.
No need to pass laws that prevent eviction for years. We can solve all these problems without causing other problems.
Additionally, if they are behind on rent, the deposit will not be enough to handle both.
Not sure that's obvious (is it done that way anywhere?), but it is an intriguing idea.
On the positive side it does decrease the inefficiency of places sitting empty while a tenant is found, which is good.
On the downside, it kind of goes back to being a sudden eviction, since the current tenant can't predict when a new one will be found, so whenever it happens they'll have a short-notice to move out.
Also, unfortunately there exist people who will take this time to destroy the place, making it un-rentable, to perpetuate staying there. Need to handle this edge case somehow.
Also, providing housing is a service that should be done at market rates, and as an investment must yield a return to make sense. Or do you expect stock investments to yield nothing and just retain their value too? Should companies not raise their prices for goods? Do you realize that this also means that you would never get a salary increase? Are you never asking for a raise because you'd be "chasing profits" for yourself?
There's a huge lack of financial literacy in some of these comments.
But, I think you are overly harsh and your comparisons misplaced. Homes are quite inelastic and a necessity for everyone. They are very unique category of assets. Financial impacts to a landlord vs a renter is also quite lopsided - a landlord has far more “financial padding” to account for macroeconomic shocks compared to a renter, so you end up with some protections in case of sudden job loss. They have morphed into something worse now, but the intent makes a lot of sense.
> I also never said they shouldn’t make money - they absolutely should, otherwise nobody would want to be a landlord.
Correct, and that is why it is so important that the housing asset class remains competitive with alternative investments. If you force the return of housing to be less than other investments at the same risk level, it reduces investment in housing and in return creates more scarcity and higher rents, exactly what some of the people here seem to want to avoid yet don't understand that the policies they're arguing for is causing.
> Homes are quite inelastic and a necessity for everyone.
Yes, but homes in a particular location are not. If you want to live in Manhattan you have to be able to afford to live there. You don't get to claim living in Manhattan is a necessity for everyone and that therefore prices there must accommodate your financial circumstances.
> a landlord has far more “financial padding” to account for macroeconomic shocks compared to a renter
That is not universally true since smaller landlords typically have a pretty big mortgage to service for a long time. They don't have the flexibility to just not pay just because a tenant decides not to pay. A house is not easy to sell in an economic downturn and may even be underwater.
That's an opinion, not a fact. I don't share that opinion. Societies are healthier when people are housed, and when that housing is well-maintained. "Let the market decide" often doesn't get you that.
> an investment must yield a return to make sense
Agreed, but we can and should cap that return if not doing so leads to housing insecurity.
> There's a huge lack of financial literacy in some of these comments.
From you I'm seeing a huge lack of understanding about what capitalism is good and bad at.
However, to force a private party to provide a service at non-market rates to another private party doesn't seem right to me, and as I mentioned in other comments, causes a decrease in housing (and therefore makes the problem worse rather than better).
> an investment must yield a return to make sense > Agreed, but we can and should cap that return if not doing so leads to housing insecurity.
Again, if you cap the return, you cause a redirection of investment in housing to other asset classes, and effectively reduce housing. Your stated goal is in direct conflict of your desire to cap the return.
> There's a huge lack of financial literacy in some of these comments. > From you I'm seeing a huge lack of understanding about what capitalism is good and bad at.
How so? Feel free to elaborate.
Laws became the way they are because policy created a housing shortage, and renters are a bigger voting block than landlords.
In some cases, anti-discrimination laws don't even apply.
In general as a tenant you can only get away with not paying rent once (until eviction happens, no one will ever rent to you again without federal or state assurances), and as a landlord you will only skip the credit report requirement once (because your first tenant is going to be a deadbeat who screw’s you).
When the problem is lower class people are playing music too loud, the cops will solve it one way or another.
It is corrosive to the social contract when government policy tacitly encourages this behavior.
I’m on phone but if you search “Kim Seattle landlord” you can get more details of various articles on the situation.
> how could I ever present a verifiable citation for it?
There would likely be at least one (1) report of such a wild claim due to how wild it is. We wouldn't need anecdotes!
In Seattle, you can't:
1. Evict people from November to April (it's "winter"). 2. Evict people with schoolchildren during the school year. 3. Run background checks on prospective tenants. 4. You _must_ rent to the first qualifying tenant. 5. You must offer 3 months in rent as compensation if you decline to renew the lease. 6. The maximum rent increase is capped.
Oh, and eviction process takes about 1.5 years now because the courts are overloaded and the tenant can use procedural tricks to drag out the process.
If you want names, this case made newspapers: https://wealthandpoverty.center/2025/02/11/the-bellevue-squa...
For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate?
The giving tenant three month rent thing is for a very small circumstance - for example huge rent increases if the tenant income is low, condo remodeling, etc. The wording is: “landlords who issue a housing cost increase of 10% or more (within a 12-month period) must pay relocation assistance if the affected household earns 80% or less of the Area Median Income and chooses to move.”
Maximum rent increase being capped also makes sense - I’ve been hit with 15-20% rent increases with no choice but to move.
It seems like you don’t like the tenant having any rights, and you want to impose your will upon them.
> For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate?
You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house. If you're a building owner, there are reasons that you might want to be able to have freedom of choice in choosing who you have live in your building. When the government forces you to choose the first applicant who meets your selection criteria, your selection criteria becomes incredibly strict—720+ credit score, makes 4x the rent, etc. Especially when evicting a bad tenant becomes basically impossible, landlords work even harder to vet candidates, meaning there are a lot of false negatives that aren't offered housing. Seriously, you can't evict a tenant just because its winter? You know how many people take advantage of that — read my sibling comment in my thread. I myself in Seattle have dealt with multiple tenants who have done this so they could have free rent as their lease expired. What do you think this does to my tenant selection process? I up the bar.
> Maximum rent increase being capped also makes sense - I’ve been hit with 15-20% rent increases with no choice but to move.
You act like there's an oligopoly that dictates rent prices from their mountaintop that we all have to abide by. We live in a free market, and small landlords compete with large buildings for tenants. Creating these types of caps just makes the system less efficient — focuses efforts on the false pretense of tenants rights rather than the true equalizer like building more housing. And honestly, it just drives small landlords out of the market who can't handle it. This just leaves corporate landlords who are certainly less tenant friendly and will further this tenant vs landlord arms-race. We should be creating incentives and making it easy for individual homeowners to become landlords (at least in Seattle) if we want the paradigm to improve.
That’s basically discrimination? Make a strict selection criteria, that’s fine. The city also has affordable housing for people who don’t qualify. You set what works for you, why do you care if it’s too strict?
I am not acting like there is an oligopoly, but not having tenant protections means tenants are at the mercy of shitty landlords. And there are a TON of them. Am I not supposed to have any rights, and the landlords gets to do whatever they want? Free market doesn’t mean regulation free.
Edit: you said “We should be creating incentives and making it easy for individual homeowners to become landlords (at least in Seattle) if we want the paradigm to improve.” - what do you propose? What about landlords who don’t want housing built because they like owning a scarce asset? What kind of rights do you think tenants should have?
It’s also very different - you’re hiring someone to do a job for you, vs wanting someone who’ll pay rent on time and not destroy the property. A mediocre employee vs an excellent employee can make any huge difference to a business.
That’s not the case with renters - if person A and person B both pay on time and don’t trash the place then they are quite fungible.
The same goes for savings, credit score, and other factors. These are not nearly as fungible as you seem to think.
You also have more capacity to absorb a short vacancy in case this person is to lose their job. Can’t derisk your way out of everything.
It sounds like you never had to deal with shitty landlords, or didn’t really struggle too much in life.
That's exactly my point. If the regulations weren't so insane and burdensome (see other posters' points on not being able to evict promptly for nonpayment, for example) then the person with the brand new job would be able to quickly rent a home because it's not an undue risk for a landlord.
You can't ask landlords on the one hand to open their home to anyone, and on the other hand deny them the right to remove tenants that don't hold up their end of the bargain. Do you not see how that's completely unfair?
> You also have more capacity to absorb a short vacancy in case this person is to lose their job.
That is not a universal truth. Landlords have debt service/mortgage payments, taxes, maintenance, insurance and other payments. Especially smaller landlords actually do not - at all - have the capacity to absorb a vacancy or (even worse) a non-paying tenant.
> Can’t derisk your way out of everything.
Yes, but unduly moving risk from one party (tenant) to the other party (landlord) is certainly not the way to go either. If I just take your car and you don't have any recourse to get it back for 6+ months because the courts are backlogged and everyone else goes "well, you have a car, so you must be wealthy, what are you complaining about?" how would that make you feel?
Based on those two sole criteria, no, they aren't. Person A might call weekly about trivial matters that they should be taking care of themselves (lightbulb burned out, oven needs cleaning, refrigerator water filter needs replacement, etc.), while person B just takes care of things and doesn't bother the landlord.
I had a landlord ask me “you’re not going to call me for basic things right?”. I’m paying you money, I’ll call you whenever I want. Didn’t rent from him. You can tell me do it yourself but why would I put money into someone else’s property?
Landlords should provide well maintained housing and respond to reasonable complaints, and tenants should be swiftly evicted if they don't pay rent or destroy the unit they're living in. That's fair to both sides.
Discrimination is fine, as long as the discrimination is not based on protected classes. If I were a landlord, I'd discriminate against people who act like assholes, for example, regardless of their ability to pay the rent, my rationale being that an asshole will likely be a problem tenant. And that I just don't enjoy dealing with assholes. Not sure "no assholes" is a reasonable thing to list on an official rental advertisement.
We already tried that. It turns out that people are racist, so now we need laws to protect against that. It sucks for all the decent non-racist folks but the alternative of not having those protections was far worse.
1. I can see this being effective against larger landlord that will have many units available every year, ensuring that adequate testing can be performed. But on smaller landlords with only a few units, it seems like it'd be hard to test. (for example, you get rejected from an apartment. The landlord rents it out to someone else. You file a FHIP complaint, but the landlord no longer has any units available so they cannot test.)
2. It seems like this is largely driven by complaints? If I was rejected from an apartment, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to glean whether or not it was based on race.
Why couldn't the same law apply to residential leasing?
I'd also argue the stakes are higher when leasing, so landlords will be less likely to take a chance on a race they don't like. Most jobs in the US are at-will employment so you can be fired at any time for almost any reason, but evicting a tenant can be a long process.
It is possible to prove a company is disproportionally one or the other when making the claim. Of course when an industry has far less applicants or members of a certain group that's to be expected but still. Consequentially I've heard of some pretty blatant race based selection especially in the US. It's just that that selection ends up excluding white people (or east asians) A while ago I even discussed with a hr person here on hn who was defending their hiring of that sort with the most flowery wording about 'just giving priority' or 'reaching out to members of their prefered group specifically' fist if all they get is not the desired group.
Having a large non-white population is not a protection against race-related discrimination.
I do agree that we should focus on other remedies such as building more. However, even in a market with ample housing, I'm not convinced that some Landlords would still just as happily take the 'I bet they'd rather a 10% rent increase than deal with the hassle of moving' gamble.
Most of the people I've met who are anti rent control/stabilization usually don't have the pleasure of a landlord who has decided to engage in such tactics. Almost always they argue from some place of guaranteed housing safety.
this is an issue that applies to people making 30k and also people making 300k.
If you offer to sign a 5 year lease at current prices, then yeah, can see why they might not go for that.
Now, if you have an indefinite lease, the landlord can't increase the rent, unless the basis for the increase is already in the agreement. Typically the rent is tied to a measure of inflation, and the landlord chooses once a year if they should make the increase.
My ex also had a lease that stipulated automatic 5% increases, until they made him sign a new agreement mandating the non-negotiated increase would be 7.5% instead.
NYC has a particularly spectacular brand of hostility towards tenants (the latest trend I've seen is, instead of broker fees, absorbent move in/move out fees paid to property managers).
Is that a bad thing? Presumably that means they liked something about your rental. Happened a ton during COVID.
> Or maybe they can even bail before the credit check is done, if they can see all of their candidate apartments in that time
I highly doubt this happens in practice. It can be like $50 per application easy - renters are in general cost conscious. I certainly only put down the fees on apartments I’m serious about (usually two max). Why waste money?
No. Have you heard the phrase: "justice delayed is justice denied"? I want this rule to apply to _everyone_.
Also I would agree with all those rules with one addition: unpaid rent should not be discharged during bankruptcy.
It sure seems funny that it's only "Injustice" when it hurts the landlord, because apparently landlords aren't allowed to read the history of before we had these kinds of things.
If you are upset that court takes forever now in the US, congratulations, join the rest of us. You are not special in that regard.
This is people's _homes_ we're talking about here, not a baseball card where privileging the owner is without too much consequence. If you lack the empathy to understand why this is a special case, maybe don't be a landlord.
Did you know in Australia it's normal to give your landlord a tour of your house every 3 months to prove you haven't broken it? That's completely ridiculous.
Throwing around general statements like these when you don't actually know about the topic doesn't help the conversation.
Renters insurance primarily covers damage to _their_ property and only some narrow cases of damage to the unit (e.g. fires, flooding, etc.). A deadbeat tenant also will likely not be paying for insurance past the first month.
To give you some perspective, the eviction process costs around $20000 right now in legal fees. And you'll need to pay them, because the commie "housing justice" redistributionists know all the procedural tricks to delay and derail the process. Even in the best case, you're looking at a year of delay, and it can be more than 2 years for people with children. So that can be $100k+ of loss.
No insurance company is going to assume these kinds of risks without sky-high premiums.
Add to that loss of rents for multiple months (while the landlord has to pay mortgage, insurance, taxes) and damages to property, and now you're asking a landlord to pay tens of thousands of dollars of their money.
It's not their home.
They can't walk in, wipe their shoes on the hallway rug, make a pot of coffee, use the bathroom, turn on the TV, and take a nap on the couch. At least not without their tenant's invitation.
When they chose to rent out the house they yielded some of their property rights. The old landlord argument that "it's my house I should be able to XYZ" doesn't hold water.
Even if you don't live in the house it still costs money in taxes, maintenance, and possibly mortgage so renting it would offset that. Having someone living in the house would also reduce maintenance costs. However, if renting can cost you more money at the end due to tenant protections, it would be wise to take a fixed loss of keeping the house empty than try your luck on rental market. Landlords with multiple units can price the risk into the rent so they can come ahead but with just one unit your risk-adjusted rent will be way out of the market.
The unintended consequence is that there are closed rental networks that never advertise and only rent to vetted people with reputation on the line. These often have cheaper rents than publicly advertised rental properties because the risk of bad tenants has been reduced.
It turns the public rental market into an adverse selection phenomenon. Over time, the best tenants have access to cheaper better rentals that are never even visible to the average rental tenant.
To be fair, _some_ anti-landlord laws are relaxed in this case, but not enough to make the worst-case scenario reasonable.
One news article mentioned he worked in the medical field and when he was approved to move in, his income was $300k+).
The state actually ended up helping cover the lost rent and paid for the tenant’s legal bills for fighting the eviction.
https://www.discovery.org/a/nightmare-tenant-in-bellevue-con...
When the political class or the cultural zeitgeist tells you over and over that landlords are leeches and that "any attempt to profit off of housing is unethical"—people are going to take that to heart and have a hatred for even well-meaning small landlords. If you don't believe this is the attitude, go visit r/Seattle. The inflammatory language of politicians and cultural leaders sets the tone which plays out as legal battles and fights in properties across the city.
This obviously creates an adverse selection problem where small landlords illegally apply their own prejudices and biases in tenant selection. Honestly—could you expect them not to—when the repercussions of picking a bad tenant are so great? And when there are other demographic groups—like immigrants—who are absolutely, verifiably and consistently reliable as tenants. It used to be that it was the section 8 or low income type that were a huge problem but now there's an educated leftish fringe that landlords are also avoiding. Honestly with good reason, IMO.
Some homeowners just decide to not list extra rooms in their house outright. I remember hearing something like that Seattle has the highest number of unrented empty rooms in the country (though someone should fact check that). With the political climate the way it is here, it's obvious as to why this is the case.
That's slumlord territory and not any morally better than corporate landlords unless your average unit size is a 4 bed/2 bath.
Also there is zero world where you have 6 houses, 50+ people and can call yourself a small time landlord. That's being able to live entirely off of your rental income and a full time landlord. You could maybe, _maybe_ get away with describing yourself as a medium time landlord.
Small time is living in a 3 floor house and renting the other 2 floors, or owning 1 other home to rent.
This is a small time landlord. Large landlords have easily over 10000 units, and he is one half of a percent of that.
I hope he is able to live off the rental income. It's a big job to manage 55 units and keep everything in shape and administratively going, deal with turnover and so on.
I did say that they are a small landlord, and I stand by it given that a large landlord is several orders of magnitude larger than them. If in your world that's only a label you want to give someone renting out a single spare unit, then so be it. I disagree.
> small landlord
Those are effectively synonymous to me. The line in the sand that definitively makes you not a small time landlord is if you earn enough from rental income after expenses to make as much as the average job's income.
If you disagree I will need you to define what "small time landlord" means to you then so we can figure out the gap in our understanding.
According to [1] (Doorloop, 2026), Greystar manages 823,581 units as the largest landlord. The 10th largest landlord is WinnCompanies with 120,855 units. These are "very large" to me. If we make a generous curve then a large landlord has 10% of those units, so somewhere in the 10,000 unit range, a medium landlord 10% of that or 1,000 units, a small landlord 10% of that or 100 units, and a very small landlord has the last interval of 1-10 units. Hence, 55 units is somewhere between very small and small.
[1] https://www.doorloop.com/blog/largest-property-management-co...
You can disagree with that definition but don’t pretend like I didn’t give one and then explain to me what my beliefs should be.
there is a large gap between "can live off of"(my words) and "a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE"(your words). If you're making more than the median household income which based on the fed numbers is ~84k/yr[1] you've crossed the line past small time landlord. You may be making less than that, but I am going to be surprised if you are with ~55 tenants.
That being said, I do think a system that tenant rights to be as abusive of legal process as we have in some states ends up hurting tenants themselves. I think our courts should move much faster so nonpayment is resolved faster. But I also think all landlords should be required to pay 20% of rent to a home building fund so that new housing actually gets built.
Really better would be just to bump something like income tax and use money from there for same purpose.
At the end of the day most economic activity is really an exercise in ratios. Some states don’t charge sales taxes. Some change double digits. Yet retailers are able to function in both environments.
What is clear is that rental and purchase housing is increasing beyond inflation since 2008 and COVID and that’s not good for tenants or landlords.
Two landlords, one with a mortgage, one without, will charge the same amount for the same property.
Or the one without mortgage goes like I only get 800. Maybe instead I just throw this money in government bonds for better gains and save money...
Other option for same outcome could be just to charge any renter 20% on top of their rent. Which they directly pay to this fund. That would push rents down as they are able to pay less. Achieving exactly same effect.
No.
Nobody is forced to charge anything. The market forces limit what can be charged, as an upper bound.
And I'm saying this with experience as an actual landlord.
Because someone else could undercut them. If everyone is being levied the same toll, and everyone knows that, it’s not that risky to just pass along the tax.
This is rarely true. Only universally true for large corporate landlords where there is an entire corporate structure maximizing every dollar due to personal incentives put in place by executives/ownership.
Small landlords (yes, even those with 6 buildings) are almost never min/maxing rent like this. They are optimizing for other things like time investment and hassle factor. And even doing the right thing.
I've both rented and landlorded. In neither side of those transactions over decades was I either paying maximal rent or charging it. When property taxes went up as a renter, my small time landlord would show me the tax bill and I'd pay exactly the increase. Same went for when I had tenants.
I'd go as far as to say the majority of mom and pop landlords are not looking to charge maximum rent. They only start doing so when they have a problematic tenant they are trying to "manage out" of the unit.
Yup. Have a single residential in a otherwise commercial building in NYC. They pay ~50% market for a spacious 3 BR for a number of reasons; mainly because we have known them for a long time and they struggle with health issues so we never really raised them. Charging them market would put them on the street. They can afford the 50%, live nicely, and the commercial tenants pay market which pays for the building with a little leftover. If they ever move we will certainly charge more but I see no reason to gouge like others.
In what way are you well meaning? You're only doing it for money.
The people not paying you rent are also only doing it for money.
Sucks when people behave like you, huh.
Right, so not well meaning. You said well meaning. You're taking that back. Correct?
You're upset at someone maximizing money at your expense. You like it when you maximize money at someone else's expense just fine. Correct?
The world's smallest violin is playing.
Please no 'I'm providing a valuable service' argument. We've already established your only interest is money.
The critics here are trying to make the argument that no you can't. Any such motivation is completely pretend, and everybody is 100% always dedicated to only their own benefit, not taking any of these squishier benefits into account ever, and you're fooling yourself if you think otherwise and you're conning other people on purpose if you PRETEND otherwise. There is nothing but paperclip maximizing, and we're all robots but some of us are lying robots.
These critics exist, and I'm sure they live their beliefs. Sucks to be them, even when they include the literal wealthiest people in the world, because they live those beliefs. They're inflicting them on the rest of us, but it doesn't make them correct, it just means the rest of us have to deal with the harm they inflict. Cheers nikkwong, thanks for being more of a gray area, like a lot of us are :)
But I treat my slaves better than everyone I know and I only have half a dozen! I don't only have slaves for profit!
Slave owners in the south were actually far more likely to be better people than today's landlords because they had far less choice but to compete with other people who engaged in slavery than landlords of today.
The 'only' strawman and the projections, oh my. 'Every accusation is a confession' remains true. 'Sucks to be them', 'inflicting them on the rest of us'. Gee, the person on the internet you know nothing about is 'inflicting harm' on society. Think of the landlord's feelings, they appear to be hurt! Look, he accused someone with an already high paying job who landlords in his free time of only caring about money! Only he said, does he not know that there can be multiple motivating factors? He said only fellas, only! I rest my case, only.
Alex, how do you interact with AI? I don't, 'cos I don't use it. Are you one of the people who eke out performance gains by threatening to shoot the AI's dog if it makes a mistake? Or are you one of the people who are prepared to accuse those people of doing literally the same thing as extorting living humans?
I stand by, sucks to be the critics to whom everything is dominance and profit and nothing else merits the slightest consideration.
And yikes whoo boy does it suck to be a person who argues 'back in the day the slave owners were nicer than landlords of today because they had to compete with other slave owners'. WOW. what?
I will say you're doing an excellent job of backing up OPs post. There absolutely are people with an unhinged view of reality who will aggressively try to screw over people they think are in the "wrong" group.
Arguing that poor people never try to abuse the system is some serious ivory tower BS.
I'm genuinely glad you're trying, and helping your tenants when you can; but I think you've drunk a bit too much of your own kool-aid.
From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.
I live in a managed building that is completely soulless. I needed to extend my lease by one month before moving out. They wanted me to sign a new 12 month lease at a higher rate, break it, and pay a two month penalty for terminating early. This took over a month to get to something remotely human.
There is absolutely a difference between someone treating people like people and bad landlords.
Also, they aren’t throwing their money into a void. They’re literally getting housing.
Also, the money doesn't go into a void: Tenants receive housing in return.
“Money into a void” is the phrasing _they_ used!
That (rather judge-y) part negates the "nice" part your started out with. I don't think OP "drank too much of his own kool-aid", he simply listed all the nice things he does for his tenants, which are great and well beyond what you could expect from an unrelated party in a contract for a service.
The idea that landlords don’t provide a valuable service is a kind of willful denial of reality.
In someplaces like Kansas where people actually mixed their labor with the land (homesteading) to claim it and then improved it and the title transferred in capitalistic exchange, landlords are basically 100% providing a service. But in New York very little of the "value" provided has anything to do with services and labor mixed with the land as someone like Adam Smith envisioned as value generation. It's largely just some proprietor being handed land in the 1600s with the wand of a King, taking the shit by violence, then making regulations out the ass with violence (to make their shithole house pretend to provide a more valuable 'service') and then exempting themselves via grandfathering and then people exchanging title for same. Their service is a legacy of beating the shit out of Indians with weapons and then the populace with government and then allocating the value to themselves.
You had an option if it was for sale.
Surely that's the case for all sorts of services we pay for. Renting a house is paying for a service. The money disappears and in return you get the service. A nice landlord (and by nice I mean - responsive to problems, following laws, empathetic to the tenant, trusting of the tenant etc) provides a better service than a bad one. Unfortunately you rarely know which kind of landlord you have until you move in.
I think it's fair to say that there are bad landlords, and that there are circumstances where landlords are exploitative. But that doesn't change the fact there are also circumstances where landlords provide a useful service to people. Buying a house isn't always practical - landlords should exist to provide a service to people who don't want long term financial commitments.
Not true for everyone. I was quite happy to pay my previous small time landlord. We had a very productive business relationship, at least from my perspective.
He fixed the large things and I didn't have to worry about it. In return I did basic maintenance and bothered him maybe once a year on average when something larger needed fixing.
I felt I got plenty of value from that relationship and my money certainly did not o into a void. My current mortgage though? Most of that goes off into the void of the market and I miss my previous living situation quite a bit most days.
That being said there are “professional” tenants that try to scam the system to the detriment of landlords and other tenants. I would fully applaud resistance to their efforts to take advantage of the system.
People on the fair ends of political spectrums tend to change their plumage to show their affiliation.
I know someone with something like 120 units. Unassuming nice old lady that makes over a million a year. She tries to rent to immigrants as much as possible since they don't cause issues.
This kind of non-payment of rent abuse exploded during COVID.
I’m curious how they’re managing to do this. I don’t give any outward signals of being a “leftie type” but I absolutely am. Conversely, I know lots of people who have a very punk look but are super conservative.
Last time I did it I signed a lease for a year, with 2 months of advance notice if I decided to leave (in the UK). I told them 2 months before the end of my lease, and they told me I had to wait for the end of my lease, then wait 2 months, and then I could be out.
I just stopped paying rent, and left them a horrible one star review on gmaps.
One day he showed up at my place (with soup who was coming to fix something) and tried to enter. I told him to stay out. And then he started crying and telling me how I could not just stop paying rent. I could tell how hard it was to be a small landlord.
I told him that I would resume paying if they signed smthg to agree to let me break the lease at the year end AND reimburse me the fees that appeared at the least minute, a year ago, right as I was signing the lease in front of them.
They agreed, reimbursed me my caution/deposit at the end, easy.
Would recommend just stop paying your rent if anything ever happens. I would do it again.
In most municipalities, this is OK so long as the thing that needs to be fixed is a habitability issue. Heat, water, etc
> One day he showed up at my place (with soup who was coming to fix something) and tried to enter. I told him to stay out.
??? You wouldn't let him solve the issue you stopped paying for? How do you justify that?
Also you are saying you are also working as a senior SWE. How are you so involved with 55 tenants and balance a full-time job at the same time? I've known people with 1 tenant who needed days off to deal with their issues, I find it hard to imagine personally dealing with 55.
Honestly curious here
Yes, my family also asks me how I do it. I am just working constantly, from sunup to sundown; pretty much 7 days a week. I don't always do a perfect job juggling the responsibilities but I do my best and I think 99-100% of my tenants would say they're enjoying the accommodations; and I think my manager would say my performance is good. Hoping I can get married and start a family soon and at that point I think hiring a property manager would be the correct move. But I have a very high amount of resilience to stress and being upset so being consistently under pressure isn't too much of a problem for me personally.
Also keep in mind there are certain types of tenants that are lower maintenance than others, so proper tenant selection is important.
What we see is iterated prisoner's dilemma. Enough people have had their landlords play "defect" against them (rent rises in excess of wage inflation, evictions, failure to do maintenance, intrusion) that the public have started playing "defect" against the landlords.
Same as in a lot of American public life.
Most places have a pretty clean eviction process: You provide a very short notice, 14 days for non-payment, and then get a court hearing.
If landlords are upset that it takes a long time to get to a court date, sorry, get in line with the rest of us who can't get basic Justice because the US doesn't fund public services, which the court is.
Like what do you expect, that we just throw people out onto the street on your word? Do you not see how obviously that will get abused?
The numbers don't have to stay small because this behavior is not generated independently in a population. Multiple people may become aware of it by talking to each other, social media, forums, some crazy news event that refers to it, etc. All of the sudden a lot more people decide they can do it as well and tell their friends.
I am not defending it or saying one side is right or wrong just that when it comes to things like this there may be a different model at play on how this behavior is generated.
on one hand i feel for some of the landlords who have to deal with some of the very real slacks who go out of their way to be difficult tenants.
on the other we’re talking about homes, by this i mean to stress home over investment. i think we’ve made a terrible mistake in incentivizing people to use homes as an investment. it should be difficult to evict someone from their home, and it should be risky and a pain in the ass to use someone else’s home as an investment.
i feel bad for _some_ of the landlords but from a larger societal perspective we’re going to look back at incentivizing so many people to invest as a landlord as a massive mistake.
The more likely it is for landlords to lose money on the housing provided, the more rents will go up to account for that risk premium. It's no different than risk-return calculations for any other investments such as stocks.
People living in these situations now live from crisis to crisis. Not paying rent/dealing with the consequences is just another on the list. At some point people just become numb. Modern society at the peripherals is not sustainable. There will always be people in the peripherals, but society is now structured to require middle class type stability as the bottom baseline for an individual to survive.
And yes, it's inflation adjusted
I wonder how record numbers of adults living with parents impacts household income as now addition income earners.
> Many [landlords] say they don’t actually intend to evict anyone, but that filing these cases is the most expedient way to get emergency rental aid from the city.
Economics in one easy lesson: incentives matter.
>...plenty of economic indicators suggest worsening financial duress for people already struggling. Costs are going up faster than wages, and inflation that took hold after the pandemic has proven painfully persistent.
> — and no one's sure why
Now that i saw the framing, i am looking differently on the discussion here. The smalles troublemakers are more news worthy than broad economic factors behind us all, so you dumb down your headline...
At the same time, expectations keep rising for everyone (myself included): not wanting to spend one or two hours commuting to work, not wanting to live 45 minutes away from a large supermarket and not wanting to spend three hours or more just to meet friends or family among others. The problem is that it simply doesn't scale, and every country/city faces different challenges so there is no single universal solution.
I'm afraid the real discussion can't happen outside of small circles at this time because it'd involve highly controversial topics that much of the population in Western democracies (can only talk about what I know) isn't ready to confront. We have deeply ingrained ideas that are difficult to challenge so instead we'll probably watch cities fully collapse before anything.
Also perhaps there should be a new field for startups (yes i'm aware of 'proptech' but there has to be more than that), that will collect dirt on tenants to threaten them with legal consequences unless they pay.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners has an excellent scene where something like this happens to a kid down on his luck.
1) Because screw you, that's horrible and you shouldn't do it.
2) Because all these digital key systems are horrendously insecure and much more open to thieves and crackers than than a plain old door key anyway.
(2) is negated very simply - have both old door key AND digital security key which auto closes if there are unpaid bills for say more than 5 business days.
https://www.macrotrends.net/4694/new-york-city-area-unemploy...
NYC even before covid was renter friendly and difficult to evict, so things must have taken quite the turn.
Which sucks because—and the essay doesn’t specify—rent stabilized apartments remain one of the few ways for lower income to make it into the middle class.
It’s not all pleasant (mice and cockroaches measured in inches) but it’s what allowed me to save, invest, and get out.
And frankly, more and more people are willing to stuff their landlord if they feel their landlord isn't holding up their end of the deal.
Why this happens? That's because, the housing problem give the opposition a weapon to use against the ruling party, constantly hitting out and winning the sympathy of people. The incumbent administration has no other choice except pouring money into social housing and show that they are doing something to address the issue. No one cares about the actual fall out of this philosophy.
Just one of the evils of vote bank politics.