7 ms·
Why should I care about the woes of landlords as opposed to renters?
by toastal 7y ago
Why should I care about the woes of landlords as opposed to renters?
- aaronblohowiak 7y agoBecause shrinking the number of landlords shrinks the number of units available, raising rents, _hurting renters_.
- falsedan 7y agoare these vanishing landlord eating their properties or just throwing them into the sea
- macspoofing 7y agoNo. They let population growth take care of that while they decide not to invest in rental properties. Your flippant argument can be flipped around too. If there is a housing shortage, by what mechanism does rent control conjure new housing units?
- falsedan 7y agowho the what now my point is, vanishing landlord or no, the units remain
- macspoofing 7y ago>my point is, vanishing landlord or no, the units remain Still wrong: 1) Apartments get converted to condos, or re-purposed because the property has value, but renting doesn't. 2) The population keeps growing meaning that your same number of units don't meet the needs. 3) Rental supply also drops as people opt not to move and sit on their rent-controlled apartments, limiting the supply for those looking. This is why rent-control has the effect of making housing worse, even if the rental supply is maintained.
- falsedan 7y ago> Still wrong: ah, ok, they eat them. thanks for clearing that up
- macspoofing 7y agoYou do realize there is a second, third, and even a fourth line (and more) after this first line.
- falsedan 7y agooh yeah, I see them. thanks for clearing that up
- icebraining 7y agoNo, just leaving them vacant while the value increases.
- bakuninsbart 7y agoSF Metro vacancy rate is below the national average for large metro areas.[0] [0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/An-estimated-100-000-homes-are-sitting-empty-in-13692007.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/An-estimated-...
- icebraining 7y agoAnd if those markets were the same except for the rent control rules, we could conclude that rent control doesn't increase the vacancy rate. But they aren't.
- tibbon 7y agoCool- next up, a tax on vacant properties. Maybe they will have to sell. Perhaps the people can again seize the means of production (part of that being stable housing). I’d far rather know another 100,000 units are owned by the people that live in them than 100 landlords owning and profiteering from those units. If this “disrupts” the entire rental industry, that’s fine with me. Didn’t bring much value anyway
- rayiner 7y agoThat’s worked great everywhere it’s been tried!
- icebraining 7y ago> I’d far rather know another 100,000 units are owned by the people that live in them than 100 landlords owning and profiteering from those units. I'd rather have that too! But it's not the result of these patchwork rules. Fix it properly instead.
- Double_a_92 7y agoAlso it lowers incentive to build new units if renting them out becomes too much of a hassle.
- eru 7y agoThat reasoning works on land. (Hence a land value tax can't be passed on to tenants.) But it doesn't work on the houses on top of the land. Because we can build more or less of them. Or higher.
- icebraining 7y agoBecause landlords start being unable to afford repairs, and you get a bunch of decrepit buildings falling apart all over the city (with all the dangers that implies, not just to occupants, but to nearby buildings as well). It happened in my home town, and it wasn't pretty. Landlords are not social security. It's probably better for the city to forcefully buy them out and create a new management model of the buildings than to impose strangling limits on prices.
- Jweb_Guru 7y agoRents are growing insanely fast in SF compare to anything else. The idea that landlords can't afford to make repairs because they aren't extracting maximum rent from the property is completely ludicrous on the face of it. Do you actually believe these arguments?
- icebraining 7y agoAre you talking about all rents, or controlled ones? The post above wrote that rent control rules in SF limit increases to "60% of CPI, so it can’t even match inflation". If that's false, then my post doesn't apply, sure.
- Jweb_Guru 7y agoRent is far above its CPI-inflated average right now, so saying that rent increases must match inflation makes no sense. The time to do that would've been long ago. But in any case I'm pretty sure rent increases are capped at much higher than inflation.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoOne possible scenario is if a landlord purchased property at a price factoring in assuming certain increases in rent, then they’re constrained by the debt payments.
- Jweb_Guru 7y ago
- cm2187 7y agoBecause if it is uneconomical to rent out, there are few units available to rent and the few that are are super expensive. And the property won't be maintained properly. These unintended consequences ultimately hit tenants. In Paris there is a similar impact of bad regulation. It has become so hard to expel a tenant that has stopped paying that landlords will demand extraordinary guaranties: bank credit lines, guaranties from relatives, sometimes even medical exam, etc and will be super picky. I knew of a foreign investment banker, high salary, not allowed to get in financial dispute because of his profession, who just couldn't find a place to rent in Paris because he couldn't provide some of those.
- jjav 7y agoBecause it is hurting the would-be renter group even more? I personally know two people who are renting rent-controlled apartments in SF and don't live in them. Their lives have moved elsewhere and they don't need the place anymore. One uses it as a weekend getaway and the other one visits rarely. Thanks to rent control their rent is so cheap that it's worth hanging on to it even though they don't live there. So these two units are off the rental market effectively forever, sitting empty most of the time.
- vixen99 7y agoBecause landlords supply housing and renters don't.
- mruts 7y agoWhy should I care about the woes of you opposed to me? Why should I care about the woes of the poor opposed to the rich?
- macspoofing 7y agoOk. Then care about the tenants. Do you have one shred of evidence that rent control, broadly, helps tenants? Because every economist I ever heard on this topic, left or right, argues rent control is bad for tenants.
- dfilppi 7y agoRent control is good for politicians getting elected. No point in analyzing farther than that.
- lr4444lr 7y agoBecause the result is that small landlords who can't deal with the fixed costs hassles simply sell out and consolidate into larger ones with more clout with politicians to weaken renter rights and legal resources to fight pesky tenants whom they simply don't want, or create shared blacklist databases like has been done in New York. If you're going to gird up for class warfare, realize that tenants are probably going to lose as long as zoning restricts your options
- amyjess 7y agoMy experience has always been that dealing with a large PMC like IMT or Greystar is far preferable to dealing with some guy who's renting his property out.
- 34679 7y agoWow, I literally belly laughed. If a renter can't find a landlord to rent from, then what? "Why should I care about the woes of water treatment plants as opposed to water drinkers?" Do you want drinkable water, or not?
- rayiner 7y agoUnless you have the capital to build your own house or apartment, you need landlords to put up their own capital to do that. It’s not like landlords are just assigned houses for free from the government to then lord over renter peons.