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Comment by psd1 | Hacker News Reader

Then you should be able to rebut it. I cannot conceive of your rebuttal, so please lay it out for me.

Evidence is presented suggesting landlords don't lower rent when costs go down, and a hand-wavy claim is made by-symmetry that they won't raise rents when costs go up. It's nonsense, there's nothing to rebut.

Theres also like an entire previous article linked which discusses the published literature which you are free to read if you like

Freely choose to pass.

I think i see the error in your thinking. You believe that rent is low-margin and cannot be sustained at a given level if costs rise.

That's never been true anywhere I've lived. Landlords generally charge the maximum the market will bear. In high-demand areas, letting is highly profitable. A London flat, say, will generally net five figures above the mortgage.

LVT is, definitionally, only high in those places.

Does this help you understand?

No I don't. I believe landlords grab any excuse to price gouge. You're tilting at a strawman.

Edit 1: We agree rent is a problem, we disagree that your LVT "one weird trick" is effective, and I'm hostile to the trojan-horse-end-of-income-tax which gets this stuff on HN in the first place.

Edit 2: you'll win more hearts without the patronizing/smug rhetoric.

Apologies for the condescension. The position you've outlined makes no logical sense to me, so i discounted it. Let me ask in a spirit of enquiry: Why are they waiting for LVT?

They hike the rent ten percent and say it's because of LVT - if LVT didn't exist, they'd say it was because of the war on Iran, or interest rates, or mercury in retrograde.

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