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I live in an equity lifestyles mobile home park near denver. My job pays me income in the 87th percentile of all workers in america. Not a sex offender park here.

The article does not mention it of course but the reason parks and apartment landlords are able to rip off the poor is because the zoning laws all over america have closed off the opportunity to build more mobile home parks and cheap apartments. The fact that over 50% of all voters live in their own homes means that the politicians are able to sell themselves out to landlords and create zoning laws that prevent developing land that would allow placement of mobile homes. It's all about driving up property values and exploiting those who are at the bottom.

America is not really about the american dream of capitalism and entrepreneurship. The american dream of about using the government to put the squeeze on the unprotected ones.

I would go further and comment on trailer park demographics, but I don't want to get downvoted.

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Same deal in the UK.

Consider that zoning laws in the UK make agricultural land incredibly cheap. This means people with means can basically wander around buying the countryside.

So even if the laws are ever repealed or changed, it doesn't matter - you've just given a windfall to those with wealth.

I have kind of always had this thought that the real world has to eventually turn into a late stage game of Monopoly in which some people just own everything. If you have the resources to buy a large portion of e.g. all property in London, you can basically set the market rental rate because it's inelastic. The only option people have is to move away and try to jump start another city.

I actually think that a reasonable way to think of inequality is that it is bad because it produces negative feedback loops.

Firstly, it's a lower competition environment; those with less money are generally not able to become landlords or business owners etc, so the original owners win more and more.

Secondly, the fact that this happens results in more inequality and results in... even less competition.

Hence there is no need to invoke moral arguments; inequality, at least beyond some reasonable level, is simply inefficient. It prevents markets from operating well and allows economic rent.

I don't get why would there by less business owners. Sure, monopolistic landlords can raise prices, but if there are (say) 200k places to set up small businesses in -shops, factories, offices, etc- presumably those still get rented, only at an higher price, so there should be the same amount of new small business being created, no? Or are you saying that there are many such places left not rented?

It's improved now, but after the financial crisis most high streets had a lot of empty shops. A lot of businesses went bust and the landlords raised the prices of the remaining tenants which forced more out. In poorer parts of the country it's still the case. Even the Starbucks in my hometown shut down!

I don't really get why landlords are raising the prices if it's leaving their shopfronts empty.

One possible motivation for this is indeed monopoly or collusion - if I own a significant percentage of the shopfronts, I can charge an unfairly high premium (and then I won't care if some remain empty).

If I own just a few shopfronts, and compete with other landlords, I should care a lot if my shop remains empty.

It may be different in the UK, but here in the US the landlords of shopping centers make mortgage payments only on the space actually rented. Lose a tenant, and their monthly bill shrinks.

Yeah, it amazed me, too. However, the guy who explained it to me makes part of his living as a commercial landlord. I assume he knows the game.

In Australia, commercial property owners frequently leave properties empty for long periods to ensure they maintain the high asking price and avoid drops in the expected pricing.

I have feared this would happen, and it's pretty much here.

The "this" is the wealthy buying up all rentable property, and raising rents until disposable income is close to 0% for many people.

In the past, I had a jobs that entailed collecting rent from tenants--and I hated the job. This is what bother me the most; I hated going to the door, or unit(mini-storages), and asking for that huge chunk of money each month. In every case, the family, or person was at the complete mercy of the Landord. I never met a Landord who didn't look for a reason to raise rents.

These Landlords knew the pain their rate increases would cause, and would hire guys like me(poor and needed a job) to do their dirty work. I think what bother me the most is when market rates went down--so many Landlords let their property sit idle until the market picked up.

I don't know the answer other than Landlords should get morality implants? I didn't mean to high jack stegosaurus' comment--I just don't like to see this imprisionment taking place so nonshalonant, like it's just business? It's not just business. Your business is affecting people lives on a very personal level.

It comes down to I don't want to live in a society that's so bifurcated. I see it happening and I don't like it. The disparity of income is here; I just can't keep acting like making money off the struggling, and dependent is copacetic!

(I used the word copacetic because when I was in school, I worked at a mini-storage. My manager who lived on the premises, with his wife, was the nicest guy. I saw how he struggled financially. Copacetic was my manager's favorite word. Whenever, I use it I hope he is doing well. I remember the look on his face when he had to tell people being close homeless, the owner is raising rents again. I'm even in denial. There were many people living out of their cars, and putting their few possessions in the units--they were homeless. Anyway, stay out of mini-storages if you can. I saw so many people put their stuff in and never get it out. They couldn't part with their stuff, and became perpetual tenants. Those were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones were already homeless.)

Good night people!

Most of what people put in mini-storage isn't worth even one month's rent on the unit. You're better off taking the stuff to the dump, and then re-buying it in the unlikely event you'll ever need it again.

Yeah, while I generally support the freemarket, something as finite and important as property to live in shouldn't be at the mercy of it.

Near London we're living in a world where middle earners just 20-30 years older than us were able to get property at resonable prices, sit on them, and now someone earning in the top 1% will struggle to buy anything decent.

Further to that, the only property taxes we have here are council tax. Remove all the funiture from your property and leave it empty and you don't need to pay this. I'd argue that's backwards and what we should really be doing is taxing on levels based on empty, rented and living in, with taxes being prohibitly expensive to sit leaving a house empty.

Of course, being 40 and above has had left you with ample oppertunity to milk the status quo, so you're not voting for this and neither are those who inherit from it.

This is something I don't fully understand.

How can bailiffs live with themselves? 99.9% of the time their job involves taking from the poor to give to the rich. The justification is some shaky concept of 'legal ownership' which is often just codified exploitation.

I would rather end myself and my family than do that sort of job. You are a direct agent of evil. Your actions cause massive anguish towards the poor and barely even move the needle for the owners.

What led to you taking the job in the first place? Had to feed the family? (Another reason we need to institute a basic income - a system that can force people into doing bad things just to eat is broken...)

People tend to have a hard time, when faced with a decision that contains two bad choices. Making the least bad choice, even when necessary, causes a lot of mental anguish and there's a strong desire to concoct a fictional third choice that magically absolves everyone from guilt.

We know from varying urban policy around the world that not raising rents is in many ways worse than raising rents. If the rent becomes too disconnected from market pricing, the shock of any dislocation is life ruining. Dislocation is always going to happen, buildings get sold, they need to get torn down, accidents render it uninhabitable etc. Better to have the rent raised gradually so people can proactively make decisions to alter their circumstances than for it to happen all at once.

Those landlords weren't suffering from a morality deficiency, they simply recognized that you're often confronted with hard choices in life and it's best to remain unsentimental about making the least bad one.

> the resources to buy a large portion of e.g. all property in London

Won't work in a free market. People will figure out what you're doing, and the remaining property owners will raise their prices until the buyer can no longer pay. This is why Eminent Domain exists, otherwise one homeowner can block a freeway project. It's also why the Hunt Bros failed to corner the silver market.

Yes, but there doesn't need to be a single buyer.

The group of people that can afford to do this can do it. Prices are fairly inelastic so there's not that much competition.

You can't just double the rent one year, but rents across the board can move in lockstep (and are sort of forced to as people decide x% yield is normal).

Treat London as a series of interconnected towns, and you can monopolise any one of those (normally via inheritance). If there's a free market, the people don't have a chance to figure that out: it's already over.

http://www.standard.co.uk/home/who-owns-london-6308427.html

Large landowners have sufficient economic and political power to fight back against eminent domain - and likely even with the support of their local people - so that's not a done deal either.

The Duke of Westminster owns a large chunk of Mayfair and Belgravia, and is the third richest man in the UK because of it. I do wonder whether he plays Monopoly, and if he starts with Mayfair...

The thing is that there is actually an awful lot of land, and in the UK it is very expensive - the capital cost to buy it all up would be enormous, and thanks to the market only get higher as supply reduces. You're then vulnerable to other market forces and competing with other cities or areas. Canary Wharf is a good example of the established rules being upended and a brand new corporate part of London being created.

The value of all London property is currently estimated in the £1.35tn range.

Sam Zell’s Equity LifeStyle Properties (ELS) is the largest mobile home park owner in America, with controlling interests in nearly 140,000 parks. In 2014, ELS made $777m in revenue, helping boost Zell’s near-$5bn fortune.

I first read up on Zell when EQR took over my low-income housing in East Palo Alto a few years ago. It's clear that his investment strategy is so unethical it borders on despicable. Zell's entire fortune is built on exploiting the REIT tax loophole:

Equity Residential, a real estate investment trust (REIT), engages in the acquisition, development, and management of multifamily properties in the United States. As of December 31, 2007, it owned and invested in 579 properties in 24 states and the District of Columbia consisting of 152,821 units. The company qualifies as a REIT for federal income tax purposes. As a REIT, it would not be subject to federal income tax to the extent that it distributes at least 90% of its taxable income to its shareholders. Equity Residential was founded in 1966 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. (sources: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=EQR, http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=ELS)

So what happens to a community when all of its wealth is getting funneled out tax-free? To just a handful of ridiculously overpaid executives who get tax-free compensation?

Unless there is something I'm not understanding here, the income isn't tax free. It's just taxed at the individual rather than corporate level.

IANAAmerican, but would that change where the tax goes? Would that mean the city receives less tax that would help the poor that are the ones at the centre of it? I'm honestly curious, I don't know enough about how US tax works.

No, probably not. There are both corporate and individual taxes at both the federal and state level.

As someone else pointed out, property tax is entirely different and does not fall under the category of "federal tax" (it's actually at the county level with city level additions). EPA is getting property tax.

If they were a normal real estate company (not an REIT) and they were based in Palo Alto with properties in East Palo Alto, East Palo Alto still wouldn't see a dime of any non-property tax.

It's tax free for the REIT. If it were a C corp, it'd have to pay tax on earnings, and the shareholders would also have to pay tax on dividends. So for the REIT there's a meaningful sense in which "tax-free" applies.

tax-free compensation

IANATaxLawyer, but this seems like a misrepresentation. Those who own REITs do pay taxes on any income they receive from those. It's just that the REIT itself is not paying tax first. Are you actually objecting that REIT income is not subject to "double" corporate taxation about which tax reformers occasionally complain? This seems silly, in light of how many corporations arrange to pay "zero" income tax.

An REIT in Chicago, Illinois which is able to come in and quite literally leech the low-income wealth of a community in East Palo Alto ...yes, that REIT should have to pay the city of EPA or the state of California for that "opportunity".

Should it be paid for in the form of another tax? Maybe, but that is not always efficient, as you pointed out. So how else could it pay? How about in direct shares given to residents of takeover properties in exchange for their rent or rent increases? I like that idea better. Because whether it's rent or shares... they're both going into the REIT's bankroll; this might actually make renting an appealing opportunity (and create the good kind of competition among landlords) if renters could (or had to be) paid a refund or rebate based on REIT dividends.

Maybe this is what Eisenhower originally envisioned.. it was the 1960's and the Interstate highway system was still being developed.

Let the wealth and assets of a city/community stay in the city. Residents with more disposable income (especially low-income) tend to spend it locally -- or let them save to be able to buy their way out of the slavery of renting.

The REIT is making an investment in the housing; they're due a return, otherwise no one will invest in this type of housing, and thus there will be no housing. Pretty simple economics. No return on investment, no investment.

And the REIT does pay taxes to EPA, property taxes. If they have employees based in CA, they pay payroll taxes as well. It's not as if some faceless Borg is siphoning out the good people of EPA's money without contributing anything.

> he REIT is making an investment in the housing; they're due a return

That is not how investments work. No one is "due" anything. You seem to be saying strong-arm tactics are OK on vulnerable populations because profit is at stake.

That sounds rubbish.

An investor expects to make a profit; barring a strong turn towards marxism in the west, this will continue.

Sure, an investor expects a profit. He's due exactly nothing, however.

You are entitled to nothing!

Well, the BI/minimum income people will now start to tell you that society owes everyone...

The argument as I've seen it is that society will be better off in terms of various measures: equality, innovation, opportunity, peace, etc. That seems easier to sell than anyone "owing" anything.

"this might actually make renting an appealing opportunity (and create the good kind of competition among landlords) if renters could (or had to be) paid a refund or rebate based on REIT dividends."

So basically renting would be more appealing if....the rent was less? Well sure. Nearly all purchasers off goods would enjoy lower prices!

You get to watch Sam Zell screw over the employees of the Tribune Corporation, use their pension money and assets to service the debt, then run the corporation into the ground while Mr. Zell plays publisher and CEO?

Using city governments to tighten the supply of accommodation via zoning laws is only half the story. Using the national government to boost the demand for it via increased immigration is the other half. Countries like Australia and Canada have mastered this, and the parts of the US that didn't experience falls in the price of residential accommodation after 2008 were the places popular with immigrants, particularly those from Asia, like from Seattle down to San Jose. One city currently with high rental costs and property prices is Auckland New Zealand, where the city and the country are almost the same entity, if you get what I mean. Because of onerous zoning laws and a high influx of immigrants and international students, the supply is restricted and the demand is boosted, resulting in skyrocketing rental and sale prices for residential property.

yes, the overclass is hitting us with a one-two punch--restrict supply and increase demand....

the key is that we cannot control our own government...

I am at my core anti-libertarian because I realize that man is a social animal. But if libertarianism were to truly be applied at the national level, then the fed govt would have little power, and the local govt is more amenable to control by the people. Which might make things a little better.

Another problem however is propaganda control of the masses via the educational curriculum, which has warped the worldviews of young americans. That problem will not go away for a long time. I speak here of fake leftism.

    > The article does not mention it of course but the reason parks 
    > and apartment landlords are able to rip off the poor is 
    > because the zoning laws all over america have closed off the 
    > opportunity to build more mobile home parks

The article does in fact mention this, but it probably should have dwelled on it some more.

    > ... tells his students they can easily increase the rent even at
    > parks that are already charging market rates, because there is 
    > so much demand for affordable housing and local authorities 
    > are very reluctant to grant permission for new parks.

good point--I missed those few words buried in the article, which successfully hides that crucial idea by using the idea that trailer parks are for sex offenders. The "trailer parks are for sex offenders" idea will hide the real truth.

The media never busts a money scam of the overclass until there is no money left in it. After all, it is the money scams of the overclass that provide much of the media ad revenue.

> "I would go further and comment on trailer park demographics, but I don't want to get downvoted."

Who cares if you get downvoted? Please share your insight.

Interesting points, anti-shill. In this vast country which even today is mostly empty land especially in the great Southwest, the West, and many parts of the interior, surely it's possible to do something about this terrible housing problem we have, where tens of millions can't even dream of owning their own homes.

I would think that investors could make a reasonable profit building a gleaming new city with thousands of affordable homes, not fancy or luxury but stand-alone structures with garage and yard, what used to be considered the American dream of home ownership, with retail and industrial zones to provide employment.

Inexpensive cost of living allows for modest salaries and wages, which allows for lower cost basis for manufacturers and other industries.

If I had the money, heck, I'd do it. Driving across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, I saw millions of square miles of vast, untapped potential. A hundred new cities housing 100,000 each and providing ample employment would go a long way to solving these difficult housing problems, not to mention adding millions of net tax payers to the rolls, providing vast new opportunities for construction and trades, box stores, small retailers, manufacturers, service providers, etc.

We need to think a bit outside the box, or in this case outside the fossilized cities that have become poverty traps for so many.

> Driving across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, I saw millions of square miles of vast, untapped potential.

Water?

I'd upvote this twice if I could. Human settlements require water more than anything else. No water; no city.

If you want to develop more or larger cities in the southwest, that requires a megaproject--several, actually. You burrow a tunnel canal from the Gulf of California into Laguna Salada. From there, you burrow on to the Salton Trough. And you create a similar tunnel canal from the Pacific into Death Valley. That's part A.

For part B, you build some new nuclear plants whose energy output goes entirely into creating artificial clouds on the shores of those artificial inland seas, along with Mono Lake, Lake Crowley, Lake Tahoe, Goose Lake, Pyramid Lake, Great Salt Lake, Utah Lake, Sevier Lake--anywhere that has enough volume that the cloud generators won't dry it up between rains. For the rains needed to keep the freshwater lakes filled, you will have also build evaporators on the ocean coast.

The point is to "bounce" that rainwater over the Rocky Mountains, so that the vast rain shadow east of them gets more precipitation. Though it sounds like an insanely expensive project (it would be), by far the cheapest way to move large amounts of water over long distances is to build a cloud upwind of where you want the water to be, and then collect it from the river for that watershed.

The second cheapest way would be to move your water very slowly through an existing aquifer. So for part C, you also pierce the caliche in several places over the Ogallalla aquifer. The rain "bounced" over the mountains can then partially drain into one end of the aquifer.

I'm thinking the energy to boil the amount of water which falls naturally on California is about 500 times what the electrical grid currently delivers (300,000 Gwh). Estimating avg rain fall over the state at 15 in = 38.1 cm, so 1.62 x 10^14 liters.

    http://ponce.sdsu.edu/california_average_annual_precipitation.html
    http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/electricity/total_system_power.html

You don't need to boil water to create an artificial cloud. Or at least you don't need to heat it to vapor pressure of one whole atmosphere.

The freshwater sources wouldn't necessarily need to deal with the phase change energy, but the saltwater sources would have to be desalinated. It would still be a huge, huge amount of energy. And it would have to be added to the water multiple times, for each time it rains out before crossing the mountains.

Much easier to just build the cities closer to where the water falls naturally.

> with retail and industrial zones to provide employment.

That's the real trick. Building a new community is a two sided market: you either have to convince companies to go there without a local labor supply or people to go there without jobs.

Historically it's been both simultaneously. People decide to settle somewhere, open up a farm or retail business or perhaps a manufacturing operation to service others who have moved there, and it snowballs.

But as others point out, water may be the limiting factor. I have to believe, though, that there are vast swatches of the country that are close by to rivers or other water supplies, that are economically feasible to settle, and there should be a way to get these going, perhaps by unlocking federal land, selling it cheaply to low income folks (many of whom will turn around and sell it to real estate sharks for a quick buck, but perhaps enough will actually want to live there).

The real problem with most of the American southwest, including and especially Colorado, is that the watershed can't support any more people. What we need out here is less people, not more. Just because the land is "empty" doesn't mean we can or should attempt to move people there.

I guess that's a valid point, that I hadn't considered. But surely there's a way to provide water. We're talking about a population shift, not a population increase so the country's net water usage should not increase. Maybe giant water collectors that obtain moisture from the atmosphere?

You could have a lot more people in those places if their water use were more efficient.

This is the kind of thing that markets can actually solve pretty well, as they allow people to adjust their usage to prices. Naturally, prices must be in tune with actual costs.

Agriculture, particularly meat and dairy, account for half of water usage in California. Texas usage is trending toward oil and gas using a dangerously large amount of water (fracking requires billions of gallons of water at the scale it happens in persistently drought stricken Texas). I am not familiar with New Mexico or Arizona or Nevada, but it would not be surprising to find that one or more industries dominate water usage, and in ways that are not sustainable or responsible.

Water usage by individuals, for cleaning and cooking and drinking, is often miniscule, in comparison to industrial usage.

How are we going to have a city (and food and jobs) without that industrial usage?

Stop fracking. It's the most expensive way to get oil out of the ground, and wouldn't be cost-comparable to renewable energy sources if the industry wasn't empowered to use dangerous amounts of water in drought-stricken areas, use eminent domain to steal land for pipelines, and generally externalize every cost, making everyone who doesn't have lobbyists foot the bill for their reckless behavior. At this point, the only reason fracking is profitable is because government is propping it up. Solar and wind (particularly in places like Texas, California and the southwest) is cost-competitive (or even cheaper, if you calculate long-term, because solar panels and wind farms have a very long productive lifetime and quite low ongoing costs, unlike oil and gas), if you take away the crutches that our government provides oil.

As for food, meat and dairy doesn't need to be produced in water-starved environments (and probably doesn't need to be consumed at the rate that Americans consume meat and dairy). Again, industry gets a pass and gets to socialize environmental costs that they simply shouldn't be able to externalize. But, he who has the money and the lobbyists makes the laws.

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