6 ms·

certainly its also dysfunctional that we legislate that random property owners must provide the safety net for the poor & elderly.

forapurpose 8y ago
> random property owners must provide the safety net ... Whenever someone says 'it's unfair that I must provide these social benefits', let's recall the enormous amount of social benefits that each of us receives, especially in developed countries: Security, safety, a system of laws, roads, education, food supply, healthcare, sanitation, infrastructure built by generations, rights, research on everything from health to history to gas fracking to something once called APRAnet, etc etc. And then there are the benefits each industry and many private companies obtain from government, licitly and otherwise. We all benefit more than we ever can repay. So yes, optimally the costs should be distributed in a very systematic, fair way. But at the same time my general response is: stop whining when asked to pull your weight a little.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  Presumably the point is that the government should be providing the safety net and leveraging economies of scale to do so, and have commensurate taxes, rather than requiring individual landlords to handle the details themselves.
- darawk 8y ago
  > We all benefit more than we ever can repay. So yes, optimally the costs should be distributed in a very systematic, fair way. But at the same time my general response is: stop whining when asked to pull your weight a little. That's not really how this works. You don't arbitrarily force property owners to bear the full cost of supporting these people. If society deems them worthy of support, then society should support them. If we collectively think these people shouldn't be forced from their homes, then great. Let's pay the delta between what we think their rent ought to be and what the market price for that rent is. Let's all pay it together. Randomly and capriciously forcing whoever happens to own that property at the time to foot the bill is short sighted and silly.
  - chii 8y ago
    And what if majority of society believes that those who own property are more capable of the burden of the poor, and thus, they should shoulder it instead of the entirety of society?
    - darawk 8y ago
      There are plenty of people who can shoulder that burden. Why not doctors and lawyers? A-list actors? What possible justification is there for putting that burden on property owners? And not, mind you, all property owners. Just the ones who happen to have been housing low-income people at the wrong time.
      - chii 8y ago
        > Why not doctors and lawyers? A-list actors? they already do - presumably they aren't dodging taxes, and is in a progressive tax system. This is about housing, and property owners might not reach an income level where the progressive system taxed them enough to produce a surplus to cater for the poor, and if so, making property specific taxes is one such way to force the burden on to them.
        darawk 8y ago
        > they already do - presumably they aren't dodging taxes, and is in a progressive tax system. You mean the same progressive tax system inhabited by those property owners? > This is about housing, and property owners might not reach an income level where the progressive system taxed them enough to produce a surplus to cater for the poor and if so, making property specific taxes is one such way to force the burden on to them. ...seriously? My point is that it's arbitrary and unfair, and you respond by saying, well, it might be that by chance some of these people escaped paying their fair share? How is that a response?
      - forapurpose 8y ago
        > Why not doctors and lawyers? A-list actors? They do, in their own fields. Lawyers provide pro bono representation to the indigent, help charities and others who couldn't afford them, develop law to address problems, etc. Doctors do similar things, helping the ill regardless of their ability to pay. A-list actors use their status to draw attention to issues. Etc.
- lr4444lr 8y ago
  > We all benefit more than we ever can repay. Clearly, that is not possible.
  - throwaway2048 8y ago
    Only if you beleive the exchange to somehow be zero or negative sum, which is of course absurd because there would be no point in civlization existing in the first place if that was the case.
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    Why not? It's accumulated benefits of millennia. Consider only the capital accumulated by prior taxpayers. Or consider all the science and technology that was developed - how much would it cost to rediscover Newton, Galileo, the space program, the Manhattan Project, written language, plumbing, all of mathematics, information theory, transistors, the wheel ...? You can't afford it.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Why do a seemingly random 2% of people in NYC get cheap apartments for life? Greatly subsidizing 2% of people's rents with payments from the other 98% seems a little arbitrary. Why not mildly subsidize 50% of peoples rents instead?
  - nicwolff 8y ago
    You'll be happy to hear that almost half of the rental units in NYC are rent-regulated, and that the stabilized rents are not that much lower than the market rents. http://furmancenter.org/files/publications/HVS_Rent_Stabilization_fact_sheet_FINAL_4.pdf http://furmancenter.org/files/publications/HVS_Rent_Stabiliz...
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - oh_sigh 8y ago
      I was referring specifically to rent controlled units, not rent stabilized units.
vkou 8y ago
Those 'random property owners' bought the properties with a crystal-clear understanding that many of the units in them were rent-controlled, and of the laws that govern such units. They then proceeded to harass their tenants, and to break the law, in an incredibly blatant and disproportionate manner. If you don't want to follow tenancy laws, don't be a landlord. You have a choice in the matter, your tenants don't.
- ng12 8y ago
  That's exactly the problem. "Outsourcing" affordable housing is always going to lead to abuse. Slumlords are going to be slumlords as long as it's profitable. You can't legislate that away.
  - vkou 8y ago
    You can't legislate murder away, but that doesn't mean we should throw our hands up in the air, sigh, and let predators run loose among us (After all, killing is in their nature!) We need to make tenant abuse as ruinous to the landlord as it is to their tenants.
    - orangecat 8y ago
      What we need is to consider the incentives that laws create. If you're a landlord with rent-controlled units, there is no benefit in doing anything beyond the legally required minimum, and a large benefit in getting the tenants to leave. You can say they shouldn't do that, and you'd even be right, but that's about as useful as saying "people shouldn't sell drugs".
      - vkou 8y ago
        The problem isn't that the landlord is doing the legally required minimum. The problem is that the landlord isn't even meeting the legally required minimum. When we catch people selling drugs, we take their drugs, and their money, and throw them into prison. When we catch landlords doing this, we should take their properties. They aren't operating some secret underground criminal enterprise here - many of these abuses are well-documented. I assure you, if you make an example out of a few landlords, the rest will stop with the frivolous evictions. The reason they are playing these games is that they have a lot less to lose then their tenants.
romwell 8y ago
>random property owners must provide the safety net Doing business (which renting out property is) is not a given right. The cost of doing business (taxes and regulations) is what makes possible the existence of the state at all - far from being a 'dysfunctional' concept.
- jakelarkin 8y ago
  progressive taxation for a safety net is great. let's just apply it equally across income/wealth bands. why should our laws give a few lucky poor people hugely valuable rental subsidies and give many other equally poor people nothing. why should some capital owners (property) pay for the above and while other types of capital (large financial and corporate assets) can pay nothing. narrow rent control law is a capricious policy in general, not just for property owners. a bunch of semi-corrupt political lotteries don't make a good government or just society.
- mobilefriendly 8y ago
  Doing business -- freely associating and voluntarily contracting with other people to exchange goods and services -- is in fact a natural right. The state is largely a parasite on top of this activity.
  - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
    That’s sometimes true, but I don’t think it must be. The state provides an incredibly valuable service to those exercise that natural right: enforcement and conflict resolution. It makes sense to fund the state to perform this functions, and possibly others.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Replace "property owners" with "all people, including property owners and non-rent-controlled renters".
- cryptonector 8y ago
  Actually, it kinda is. To have property rights means to have the right to use it. That means the right to sell it (and, correspondingly, to buy property so you can enjoy owning it). It means the right to loan it. It means the right to rent it. The same goes for your own time and labor. You can't be a free person (as opposed to a slave) if you can't own your own time and labor -- if you can't sell your labor. As with much else, the state gets to impose taxes and regulations. No argument there. But if those taxes or regulations prevent you from enjoying your ownership of property or self, then they are confiscatory and make you un-free. At the very least unreasonable tax/regulatory burdens make for a dysfunctional / distorted market, though as long as you can freely vote with your feet you're not so un-free as to be a slave. Still, just because you can move to some freer locality doesn't mean it's a good thing that the locality your leaving has high tax/regulatory burdens.

forapurpose 8y ago

> random property owners must provide the safety net ... Whenever someone says 'it's unfair that I must provide these social benefits', let's recall the enormous amount of social benefits that each of us receives, especially in developed countries: Security, safety, a system of laws, roads, education, food supply, healthcare, sanitation, infrastructure built by generations, rights, research on everything from health to history to gas fracking to something once called APRAnet, etc etc. And then there are the benefits each industry and many private companies obtain from government, licitly and otherwise. We all benefit more than we ever can repay. So yes, optimally the costs should be distributed in a very systematic, fair way. But at the same time my general response is: stop whining when asked to pull your weight a little.

crooked-v 8y ago
Presumably the point is that the government should be providing the safety net and leveraging economies of scale to do so, and have commensurate taxes, rather than requiring individual landlords to handle the details themselves.
darawk 8y ago
> We all benefit more than we ever can repay. So yes, optimally the costs should be distributed in a very systematic, fair way. But at the same time my general response is: stop whining when asked to pull your weight a little. That's not really how this works. You don't arbitrarily force property owners to bear the full cost of supporting these people. If society deems them worthy of support, then society should support them. If we collectively think these people shouldn't be forced from their homes, then great. Let's pay the delta between what we think their rent ought to be and what the market price for that rent is. Let's all pay it together. Randomly and capriciously forcing whoever happens to own that property at the time to foot the bill is short sighted and silly.
- chii 8y ago
  And what if majority of society believes that those who own property are more capable of the burden of the poor, and thus, they should shoulder it instead of the entirety of society?
  - darawk 8y ago
    There are plenty of people who can shoulder that burden. Why not doctors and lawyers? A-list actors? What possible justification is there for putting that burden on property owners? And not, mind you, all property owners. Just the ones who happen to have been housing low-income people at the wrong time.
    - chii 8y ago
      > Why not doctors and lawyers? A-list actors? they already do - presumably they aren't dodging taxes, and is in a progressive tax system. This is about housing, and property owners might not reach an income level where the progressive system taxed them enough to produce a surplus to cater for the poor, and if so, making property specific taxes is one such way to force the burden on to them.
      - darawk 8y ago
        > they already do - presumably they aren't dodging taxes, and is in a progressive tax system. You mean the same progressive tax system inhabited by those property owners? > This is about housing, and property owners might not reach an income level where the progressive system taxed them enough to produce a surplus to cater for the poor and if so, making property specific taxes is one such way to force the burden on to them. ...seriously? My point is that it's arbitrary and unfair, and you respond by saying, well, it might be that by chance some of these people escaped paying their fair share? How is that a response?
    - forapurpose 8y ago
      > Why not doctors and lawyers? A-list actors? They do, in their own fields. Lawyers provide pro bono representation to the indigent, help charities and others who couldn't afford them, develop law to address problems, etc. Doctors do similar things, helping the ill regardless of their ability to pay. A-list actors use their status to draw attention to issues. Etc.
lr4444lr 8y ago
> We all benefit more than we ever can repay. Clearly, that is not possible.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  Only if you beleive the exchange to somehow be zero or negative sum, which is of course absurd because there would be no point in civlization existing in the first place if that was the case.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  Why not? It's accumulated benefits of millennia. Consider only the capital accumulated by prior taxpayers. Or consider all the science and technology that was developed - how much would it cost to rediscover Newton, Galileo, the space program, the Manhattan Project, written language, plumbing, all of mathematics, information theory, transistors, the wheel ...? You can't afford it.
oh_sigh 8y ago
Why do a seemingly random 2% of people in NYC get cheap apartments for life? Greatly subsidizing 2% of people's rents with payments from the other 98% seems a little arbitrary. Why not mildly subsidize 50% of peoples rents instead?
- nicwolff 8y ago
  You'll be happy to hear that almost half of the rental units in NYC are rent-regulated, and that the stabilized rents are not that much lower than the market rents. http://furmancenter.org/files/publications/HVS_Rent_Stabilization_fact_sheet_FINAL_4.pdf http://furmancenter.org/files/publications/HVS_Rent_Stabiliz...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    I was referring specifically to rent controlled units, not rent stabilized units.

vkou 8y ago

Those 'random property owners' bought the properties with a crystal-clear understanding that many of the units in them were rent-controlled, and of the laws that govern such units. They then proceeded to harass their tenants, and to break the law, in an incredibly blatant and disproportionate manner. If you don't want to follow tenancy laws, don't be a landlord. You have a choice in the matter, your tenants don't.

ng12 8y ago
That's exactly the problem. "Outsourcing" affordable housing is always going to lead to abuse. Slumlords are going to be slumlords as long as it's profitable. You can't legislate that away.
- vkou 8y ago
  You can't legislate murder away, but that doesn't mean we should throw our hands up in the air, sigh, and let predators run loose among us (After all, killing is in their nature!) We need to make tenant abuse as ruinous to the landlord as it is to their tenants.
  - orangecat 8y ago
    What we need is to consider the incentives that laws create. If you're a landlord with rent-controlled units, there is no benefit in doing anything beyond the legally required minimum, and a large benefit in getting the tenants to leave. You can say they shouldn't do that, and you'd even be right, but that's about as useful as saying "people shouldn't sell drugs".
    - vkou 8y ago
      The problem isn't that the landlord is doing the legally required minimum. The problem is that the landlord isn't even meeting the legally required minimum. When we catch people selling drugs, we take their drugs, and their money, and throw them into prison. When we catch landlords doing this, we should take their properties. They aren't operating some secret underground criminal enterprise here - many of these abuses are well-documented. I assure you, if you make an example out of a few landlords, the rest will stop with the frivolous evictions. The reason they are playing these games is that they have a lot less to lose then their tenants.

romwell 8y ago

>random property owners must provide the safety net Doing business (which renting out property is) is not a given right. The cost of doing business (taxes and regulations) is what makes possible the existence of the state at all - far from being a 'dysfunctional' concept.

jakelarkin 8y ago
progressive taxation for a safety net is great. let's just apply it equally across income/wealth bands. why should our laws give a few lucky poor people hugely valuable rental subsidies and give many other equally poor people nothing. why should some capital owners (property) pay for the above and while other types of capital (large financial and corporate assets) can pay nothing. narrow rent control law is a capricious policy in general, not just for property owners. a bunch of semi-corrupt political lotteries don't make a good government or just society.
mobilefriendly 8y ago
Doing business -- freely associating and voluntarily contracting with other people to exchange goods and services -- is in fact a natural right. The state is largely a parasite on top of this activity.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  That’s sometimes true, but I don’t think it must be. The state provides an incredibly valuable service to those exercise that natural right: enforcement and conflict resolution. It makes sense to fund the state to perform this functions, and possibly others.
oh_sigh 8y ago
Replace "property owners" with "all people, including property owners and non-rent-controlled renters".
cryptonector 8y ago
Actually, it kinda is. To have property rights means to have the right to use it. That means the right to sell it (and, correspondingly, to buy property so you can enjoy owning it). It means the right to loan it. It means the right to rent it. The same goes for your own time and labor. You can't be a free person (as opposed to a slave) if you can't own your own time and labor -- if you can't sell your labor. As with much else, the state gets to impose taxes and regulations. No argument there. But if those taxes or regulations prevent you from enjoying your ownership of property or self, then they are confiscatory and make you un-free. At the very least unreasonable tax/regulatory burdens make for a dysfunctional / distorted market, though as long as you can freely vote with your feet you're not so un-free as to be a slave. Still, just because you can move to some freer locality doesn't mean it's a good thing that the locality your leaving has high tax/regulatory burdens.