7 ms·

Particularly if the tenant is in arrears. The faux socialist anti-landlord outrage on HN is hilarious.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
Is the purpose of housing to provide an income for a landlord, or to provide somewhere for someone to live? If it's socialist to think that houses are for living in, not for speculatin on, then yeah I'm a socialist. And so should everyone be.
- georgespencer 6y ago
  I'm sure you don't mean to but you're simplifying this massively, in a way which makes it hard for me to think that we can have a productive conversation. I guess a starting point would be to look at the axioms in your logic -- particularly the use of the word "purpose". You're framing the two potential purposes of a house as: 1. Providing income for a landlord OR 2. Providing somewhere for people to live This is a false dichotomy. A rental property explicitly fulfils both of those purposes. An owner-occupied property likely fulfils a different version of the same purpose: 1. Providing an income for a bank, 2. Providing a place for someone to live. If you're saying that houses should provide a place for someone to live even over providing an income for landlords, that's an argument we can get into. It amounts to: the first priority with housing is the sheltering of inhabitants. If it's possible for economic utility to be derived from that process then that's fine, but whatever happens people must have a roof over their heads. That logic is also flawed, but I'd appreciate you offering a bit more context before we go further -- I'd love to be able to really clearly play your argument back to you in a way you agree with, so that I know I understand it properly. Edit: Sorry to see you being downvoted for asking honest questions and disagreeing with the status quo.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    Where I'm coming from is experiencing the housing market in the UK, Australia (which share a perspective on housing similar to the US) and Berlin (which does not). I have owned my own home in the UK, and rented in all three places. In the "anglo" perspective, a house is an investment. Owning your own home is something most people reasonably expect to do during their working life. Having a "property portfolio" is something that most people aspire to. Renting out a second property has been a common way of investing. In the "euro" perspective, a house (actually usually an apartment, even in rural towns) is a place to live. Most people rent all their lives. Owning your own home is seen as optional, kinda nice maybe, but not really something you need to do. Renting a property to someone else is a bureaucratic nightmare that almost no-one does (however subletting for short periods is extremely common). Most renting is done from companies who specialise in owning and renting housing (similar to commercial property companies in the anglo world). Regulation in the anglo world is stringly tilted towards the owner. Tenants can be easily evicted (compared to the bureaucratic nightmare of trying to evict a Berlin tenant). Tenants have very few rights over the property (getting refused permission to do even minor things like put up picture hooks is common). Subletting is usually not allowed. Rent inspections are commonly every 3-6 months. Rent is not controlled, and landlords can charge whatever the market will bear. Tenancies are usually a year at most, and being evicted so the landlord can sell the property is a common experience. In contrast, Berlin prioritises the tenant. Tenants can, for instance, repaint the property, make cosmetic adjustments (even knocking down and moving interior walls without permission). Kitchens are usually owned by the tenant not the landlord, and installed by the tenant. Subletting is common. There are no inspections. Rent is heavily controlled, price changes are limited and have to be justified. Tenancies usually go on for many years, sometimes decades, without interruption. If the property is sold the new owner must respect the existing tenancy agreements. So, yes. This is a dichotomy. A house is either an investment, that incidentally someone lives in, with no rights and no ability to control their tenancy. Or it's a place for someone to live, providing a secure home for the tenant and a controlled, extremely regulated, income for the owner. That's where I'm coming from. I hope you understand my perspective better now :)
    - georgespencer 6y ago
      Thank you! I'm really grateful that you helped me to understand better. Let me just play this back to you to make sure that I understand the thrust of your position. The reference points you have from living in different countries are really fascinating and broadly tally with my own experience, but if I try to zero in on the broad point: Housing is something approaching a human right. The needs of tenants should be paramount, and where their interests are placed at odds with those of their landlords, regulation should protect tenants' interests. Renting is not usury in and of itself, but society's first priority is to ensure everyone has a roof over their heads. Is that fair?
      - marcus_holmes 6y ago
        yes, that's a great summary of where I've got to with this :)
        georgespencer 6y ago
        Got it! Sorry for misunderstanding earlier. Now that I understand, it's clear that your position is both nuanced and subjective (I had previously thought you held a different view which would have been falsifiable). I also think that the way you've framed this with the concept of two opposed purposes -- the purpose of deriving economic utility from a house as an asset, and the purpose of people having a place to live -- is actually a usefully simplistic way of considering the tension in the housing market. It helps to make it clear that there could be instances where a landlord's incentives are misaligned with society's incentives. If you grant me for a second that society is better served by having no homelessness and that homelessness can often be the trigger which leads to other awful events, I think the question becomes one of how policymakers should intercede on behalf of tenants, not if. Germany and the UK are two very interesting comparisons. You rightly point out that Germany is not just tenant-centric in its "worst case" scenarios (evictions and other life-deranging events), but also in the day-to-day of altering the interior of a property, rent caps (but not control!), longer leases, etc. The UK's approach has been somewhat different (and very muddled). Before the 1980s in the UK mom & pop landlords didn't really exist, and then buy-to-let mortgages began popping up as products, sparking a wave of amateur landlords which culminated in the late eighties with the creation of ASTs to recognise the need for a more sophisticated set of arrangements between increasingly amateur landlords and tenants. But in my view beyond creating a legal framework for the private sector which ensures tenants are not preyed upon somehow (e.g. a landlord being able to set a substantially below-market rent and then create their own unfair punitive measures for noise or something, resulting in tenants being locked into a cycle of debt), the obligation of the state is to ensure that there are alternatives to this market because, as I think we agree, it's something approaching a human right. So if I look at the UK's approach in the aggregate (rather than just the meddling I see happening in the private sector), I like some of what I see! The state provides housing if you're unable to access it either through renting in the private sector or ownership. The state I believe is increasingly moving towards building its own stock of new dwellings rather than trying to incentivise the private sector to do something it isn't equipped to. And the legal framework to protect tenants is fairly robust: Section 8 and Section 21 are pretty tenant-centric IMO, and if you fall out of the private rental sector there is immediate and ~adequate help. I think the area in which we differ is that I believe that instead of augmenting and limiting and fannying about with a free market, the state is best served by creating a compelling alternative. In many ways I equate the state's obligations to intervene in curbing out-and-out capitalism for pursuit of the greater good to its own kind of monopolistic power. (E.g. bank bailouts served society more than the invisible hand turning into an invisible fist.) I believe the state should be buying land and building housing in sufficient quantities at a neutral or negative margin, and providing a genuine alternative to the private rental sector, because it's clear that whilst the moral obligation towards housing people is broadly considered to be paramount, wholesale tinkering with the private sector status quo is yielding inefficient improvements to the lives of those who need help the most. So I think I totally agree with you about the high level priorities here, but I think the approach should be radically different.

Is the purpose of housing to provide an income for a landlord, or to provide somewhere for someone to live? If it's socialist to think that houses are for living in, not for speculatin on, then yeah I'm a socialist. And so should everyone be.

georgespencer 6y ago
I'm sure you don't mean to but you're simplifying this massively, in a way which makes it hard for me to think that we can have a productive conversation. I guess a starting point would be to look at the axioms in your logic -- particularly the use of the word "purpose". You're framing the two potential purposes of a house as: 1. Providing income for a landlord OR 2. Providing somewhere for people to live This is a false dichotomy. A rental property explicitly fulfils both of those purposes. An owner-occupied property likely fulfils a different version of the same purpose: 1. Providing an income for a bank, 2. Providing a place for someone to live. If you're saying that houses should provide a place for someone to live even over providing an income for landlords, that's an argument we can get into. It amounts to: the first priority with housing is the sheltering of inhabitants. If it's possible for economic utility to be derived from that process then that's fine, but whatever happens people must have a roof over their heads. That logic is also flawed, but I'd appreciate you offering a bit more context before we go further -- I'd love to be able to really clearly play your argument back to you in a way you agree with, so that I know I understand it properly. Edit: Sorry to see you being downvoted for asking honest questions and disagreeing with the status quo.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  Where I'm coming from is experiencing the housing market in the UK, Australia (which share a perspective on housing similar to the US) and Berlin (which does not). I have owned my own home in the UK, and rented in all three places. In the "anglo" perspective, a house is an investment. Owning your own home is something most people reasonably expect to do during their working life. Having a "property portfolio" is something that most people aspire to. Renting out a second property has been a common way of investing. In the "euro" perspective, a house (actually usually an apartment, even in rural towns) is a place to live. Most people rent all their lives. Owning your own home is seen as optional, kinda nice maybe, but not really something you need to do. Renting a property to someone else is a bureaucratic nightmare that almost no-one does (however subletting for short periods is extremely common). Most renting is done from companies who specialise in owning and renting housing (similar to commercial property companies in the anglo world). Regulation in the anglo world is stringly tilted towards the owner. Tenants can be easily evicted (compared to the bureaucratic nightmare of trying to evict a Berlin tenant). Tenants have very few rights over the property (getting refused permission to do even minor things like put up picture hooks is common). Subletting is usually not allowed. Rent inspections are commonly every 3-6 months. Rent is not controlled, and landlords can charge whatever the market will bear. Tenancies are usually a year at most, and being evicted so the landlord can sell the property is a common experience. In contrast, Berlin prioritises the tenant. Tenants can, for instance, repaint the property, make cosmetic adjustments (even knocking down and moving interior walls without permission). Kitchens are usually owned by the tenant not the landlord, and installed by the tenant. Subletting is common. There are no inspections. Rent is heavily controlled, price changes are limited and have to be justified. Tenancies usually go on for many years, sometimes decades, without interruption. If the property is sold the new owner must respect the existing tenancy agreements. So, yes. This is a dichotomy. A house is either an investment, that incidentally someone lives in, with no rights and no ability to control their tenancy. Or it's a place for someone to live, providing a secure home for the tenant and a controlled, extremely regulated, income for the owner. That's where I'm coming from. I hope you understand my perspective better now :)
  - georgespencer 6y ago
    Thank you! I'm really grateful that you helped me to understand better. Let me just play this back to you to make sure that I understand the thrust of your position. The reference points you have from living in different countries are really fascinating and broadly tally with my own experience, but if I try to zero in on the broad point: Housing is something approaching a human right. The needs of tenants should be paramount, and where their interests are placed at odds with those of their landlords, regulation should protect tenants' interests. Renting is not usury in and of itself, but society's first priority is to ensure everyone has a roof over their heads. Is that fair?
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      yes, that's a great summary of where I've got to with this :)
      - georgespencer 6y ago
        Got it! Sorry for misunderstanding earlier. Now that I understand, it's clear that your position is both nuanced and subjective (I had previously thought you held a different view which would have been falsifiable). I also think that the way you've framed this with the concept of two opposed purposes -- the purpose of deriving economic utility from a house as an asset, and the purpose of people having a place to live -- is actually a usefully simplistic way of considering the tension in the housing market. It helps to make it clear that there could be instances where a landlord's incentives are misaligned with society's incentives. If you grant me for a second that society is better served by having no homelessness and that homelessness can often be the trigger which leads to other awful events, I think the question becomes one of how policymakers should intercede on behalf of tenants, not if. Germany and the UK are two very interesting comparisons. You rightly point out that Germany is not just tenant-centric in its "worst case" scenarios (evictions and other life-deranging events), but also in the day-to-day of altering the interior of a property, rent caps (but not control!), longer leases, etc. The UK's approach has been somewhat different (and very muddled). Before the 1980s in the UK mom & pop landlords didn't really exist, and then buy-to-let mortgages began popping up as products, sparking a wave of amateur landlords which culminated in the late eighties with the creation of ASTs to recognise the need for a more sophisticated set of arrangements between increasingly amateur landlords and tenants. But in my view beyond creating a legal framework for the private sector which ensures tenants are not preyed upon somehow (e.g. a landlord being able to set a substantially below-market rent and then create their own unfair punitive measures for noise or something, resulting in tenants being locked into a cycle of debt), the obligation of the state is to ensure that there are alternatives to this market because, as I think we agree, it's something approaching a human right. So if I look at the UK's approach in the aggregate (rather than just the meddling I see happening in the private sector), I like some of what I see! The state provides housing if you're unable to access it either through renting in the private sector or ownership. The state I believe is increasingly moving towards building its own stock of new dwellings rather than trying to incentivise the private sector to do something it isn't equipped to. And the legal framework to protect tenants is fairly robust: Section 8 and Section 21 are pretty tenant-centric IMO, and if you fall out of the private rental sector there is immediate and ~adequate help. I think the area in which we differ is that I believe that instead of augmenting and limiting and fannying about with a free market, the state is best served by creating a compelling alternative. In many ways I equate the state's obligations to intervene in curbing out-and-out capitalism for pursuit of the greater good to its own kind of monopolistic power. (E.g. bank bailouts served society more than the invisible hand turning into an invisible fist.) I believe the state should be buying land and building housing in sufficient quantities at a neutral or negative margin, and providing a genuine alternative to the private rental sector, because it's clear that whilst the moral obligation towards housing people is broadly considered to be paramount, wholesale tinkering with the private sector status quo is yielding inefficient improvements to the lives of those who need help the most. So I think I totally agree with you about the high level priorities here, but I think the approach should be radically different.