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Probably one of the biggest non-medical failings for handing the CoViD-19 aspect of this crisis is that no layer of (at least the US) governemnt at all has dict

Probably one of the biggest non-medical failings for handing the CoViD-19 aspect of this crisis is that no layer of (at least the US) governemnt at all has dictated where the buck stops; who must eat the losses. My personal view is that the natural birth rights in a social contract for a functioning society must include basic needs being met. People have to exist, they need shelter, food, medicine, etc. If these are denied they are not part of society, and thus the more brutal laws of nature apply. I don't like those outcomes, I vote accordingly. If someone is rich enough to rent things to others, by definition, they have more than they need. This includes landlords, banks, anyone that holds a legal title to something someone else is physically using to live. Losses and deferments should be taken by banks, land/property-owners, and generally the 1%. You know, the people that bribe politicians with campaign funding.

thebradbain 6y ago
I agree. I often hear "landlords need to make an income too" as an argument against rent relief / freezes. However: a) Many landlords have financing at their disposal that renters don't: loan forbearance, mortgage freezes (and yet rent freezes are unfair?), etc. b) In good times, the defense for landlords raising rents is "they're taking a financial risk by renting out their property others" -- if that's the case, then why is it the government's priority to protect them more than the tenants these landlords are evicting? You invested in the opportunity to generate income. Not the guarantee. If you lose your shirt, that's on you -- nothing prevented you from putting the money in savings or less risky account. This may be my own subjective view and politics coming through, but I firmly believe that if you're wealthy enough to afford a property to rent out to the less wealthy, the needs of the tenants trump the needs of the landlords; similarly, the needs of the landlords should trump the needs of the banks. The economy is hurting, everyone is hurting, yes. But why is it the people at the bottom have to hurt the most?
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  >why is it the people at the bottom have to hurt the most? The people above them would have it that way. In a functioning democracy, the will of the people would naturally prevent that, but many of the people have been convinced that those in low places "deserve it".
- toast0 6y ago
  > In good times, the defense for landlords raising rents is "they're taking a financial risk by renting out their property others" -- if that's the case, then why is it the government's priority to protect them more than the tenants these landlords are evicting? It's one thing if the risk is tenants don't pay, and the landlord won't get the rent, plus they'll have to pay legal fees and what not to evict, plus they may need to fix damages that they will be unlikely to recoup from the departing tenant and then have the uncertainty of finding a new tenant. That's the risk they signed up for in becoming a landlord. It's another thing if the government says hey, we know people can't/aren't paying rent, but you can't evict them cause it's a bad situation for everyone. If the landlords then have trouble paying the mortgage and employees/contractors and what not, if there's no consessions that's going to be a problem. Maybe you tell the banks not to forclose and the banks have to eat it, because they're banks and universally reviled. It seems easier to drop helicopter money and keep most bills paid, and maybe just slow down the courts rather than prohibit evictions and foreclosure. But helicopter money has to be federal, and states can block evictions and foreclosures, so that's what we get without agreement at the federal level.
- fierarul 6y ago
  > You invested in the opportunity to generate income. Not the guarantee. They may still have the opportunity to get income from another tennant but you want them to be responsible for the tenant that can't/won't pay. The state would effectively offload any social responsibility it has. Also, who says the living conditions have to be the same under crisis? The state could sub-rent out some places but double the density. After all, if you are staying for free a shared bathroom is not the end of the world. > But why is it the people at the bottom have to hurt the most? The $1200 stimulus was probably the most generous in the world. Seems to me everybody is pretending it didn't happen.
  - seized 6y ago
    $1200 one time was laughable. CERB in Canada was $2000 a month for months on end.
    - smnrchrds 6y ago
      CERB was a temporary alternative to EI (what unemployment benefits are called in Canada) for people who did not qualify for EI. It was not given to everyone, just to people who lost their jobs due to COVID.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      The US also had a $2400/mo unemployment benefit, like CERB but more money (and in USD not lower value CAD). Of course Canada has other benefits like socialized medicine.
  - thebradbain 6y ago
    As a one time payment, maybe (though as noted above Canada is offering the equivalent of $1400 USD every month). Yet most other wealthy countries opted for a recurring payment or subsidy of some sort -- on top of an expanded social safety net, which, by and large in Europe, were already much more robust than the US's to begin with.
    - fierarul 6y ago
- cwhiz 6y ago
  >If you lose your shirt, that's on you -- nothing prevented you from putting the money in savings or less risky account. ...except you are preventing the landlord from making money. Presumably there is another potential tenant that would pay rent. It is pretty interesting for you to argue that landlords shouldn't be able to evict people and also if landlords "lose their shirt" it is their own fault. >the needs of the tenants trump the needs of the landlords Which tenant? The one that is currently in the building, or the one that could move in and pay rent? >But why is it the people at the bottom have to hurt the most? The US gave everyone a $1,200 check and an additional $600 PER WEEK in unemployment benefits. People were making $60,000+ annualized during the peak of covid. There is also an eviction moratorium. How much more do you think people need?
  - mjevans 6y ago
    A supply side correction rather than a market one. The market is relatively inelastic in it's needs. More money in goes right through to the other side. Those extra 600 per week did not get banked, it got spent. Granted, I didn't see any of it because I'm thankfully still working; but I'm under zero illusions that it didn't pay for things like TV, cable, maybe a computer; and most probably some touchless delivery meals.
  - thebradbain 6y ago
    How much do I think people need? I think all people deserve a place to call home; food; water; electricity; education; healthcare; a reliable means of transportation; a guaranteed retirement plan or pension. Even with an above-minimum-wage job, or even two, this is no longer feasible for so many citizens of the US: you either end up compromising or forgoing some options entirely. I don't believe having access to these things should be a standard to aspire to that many struggle to achieve -- rather, this should be the bare minimum that, were you to lose your job tomorrow and have almost no savings (as is the situation for so many people in the US), you would have no fear of losing. But if you want to attach a number to it (which I think is the wrong way to put it into terms, as money focuses the conversation on short term cost, when really it's a long term investment), let's start at $5000/mo. $60,000 per year, annualized, all the time, in perpetuity. Per adult. Afraid someone who is otherwise able to work is abusing the system? Start up a large national public works program: I think we can all agree there's SO much to rebuild, fix, and improve in the US and in our communities. FDR envisioned something close to this when he signed minimum wage into law: "No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By ‘business’ I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level — I mean the wages of decent living"
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> If someone is rich enough to rent things to others, by definition, they have more than they need. This is not the case. There are a significant number of landlords for which renting out properties is their occupation. You have someone who owns a small apartment complex, lives in one of the units, rents out the others, and their primary job is to be the superintendent and caretaker of the property. The rents pay their salary and the property tax and insurance on the building. Without them they can't pay their taxes or expenses and have nothing with which to buy food. Meanwhile the tenants are still living there and expecting the property to be maintained. In many cases the rent includes utilities, which the landlord can't pay if they don't receive rent to pay it with. And they're not the 1%, they're just a regular person whose full-time occupation is property maintenance. There is no reason in putting the cost on such people, but also no fairness in waiving the rents of only those people who live in housing that really is owned by the 1%. Which is why things like rent forgiveness and student loan forgiveness are intrinsically unfair and the better way to deal with those sorts of problems is stimulus checks. Anyone who needs the money gets it, meanwhile people who don't need it as much aren't punished for being more responsible and have the money to stimulate demand at a time when unemployment is higher than normal, and the money can come from taxes paid disproportionately by the people who actually do have more than they need rather than people we're only assuming do (and some of them don't).
- rland 6y ago
  If a landlord who lives as you say puts their entire 'salary' into Tesla stock, rather than using it to pay down the equity on the property, we would say that it's fair that they would lose their investment if their Tesla bet doesn't pan out. But if they put it into their home equity instead, any loss is unacceptable to us. Why?
  - fierarul 6y ago
    The stock rules weren't changed out of the blue. But, no worries, once people figure out the risk involved in home equity this will be derisked and have surprising outcomes.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
umvi 6y ago
How does self-reliance fit into your worldview? Wouldn't you agree that it's generally a bad thing to be reliant on an entity you can't control for survival?
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  Observation by one of my dads friends. If people truly understood how little control they have over things they'd go mad.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  As long as you're OK with being self-reliant when the hungry homeless come to move into your home and loot your local grocery store and raid your local hospital, sure, self-reliance sound great. Or did you mean self-reliance for the poor, but not for the rich?
- hunterloftis 6y ago
  I believe this is why OP brought up the birthright social contract. Given an absence of society, it’s fair to argue self-reliance, and that no one should have to carry another. However, being born into a society strips you of certain natural rights. You can’t just choose a nice place to build shelter for yourself - that’s “property” and it’s owned by someone already. You can’t hunt or farm your own food for similar reasons. Society demands, from birth, that you follow social laws that limit your own ability to be self-reliant. I believe it’s reasonable then when OP proposes that the balance of that social contract might mean that society should also provide a safety net for the basic necessities of life.
  - umvi 6y ago
    Sure, I agree with that. However, I guess my point is: - If someone is reliant on the government for basic necessities of life, should they ideally work to reach a state where they can provide for themselves using their own income/skills/etc. and wean themselves off of government aid? - If the answer to the previous question is 'yes', how can we subsidize/incentive getting off of government aid? It seems to me that it's easy to get stuck in an inter-generational trench where the government provides your food, shelter, etc. I'm interested in how to help people help themselves.
dbcurtis 6y ago
Please take an economics course at the earliest opportunity. Rental housing is a business. If the marginal return to capital of providing rental housing goes up relative to other investments, then more capital will be invested in providing rental house, until equilibrium. Likewise, if the marginal return to capital of providing rental housing goes down, capital will be moved out of rental housing. If the risk of being a landlord is increased, then a small landlord has a bit of problem in that it will be hard to diversify their portfolio. They will need to enter into some kind of risk-transfer transaction. The simplest would be to purchase some kind of insurance that pays out in case of government-mandated rent moratorium. Insurance company actuaries would work out a reasonable premium, and that premium would be added to the rent required of tenants. All-in-all, that would be a reasonably orderly solution -- with the net effect of raising rents to cover the insurance premium. Of course, we can all imagine a world in which we have both rent control and government-mandated rent moratoriums. In which case, the return to capital in rental house goes down and the supply dries up. Which means instead of an orderly market, rental units are transferred based on non-monetary consideration. I don't see how this world is better for anybody.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  In theory, yes. In practice, rising real estate prices even in the absence of rent or price controls has not seen corresponding increases in construction, the effect of which would be constant housing costs, adjusted forbinflation. The business of real estate is not to increase housing supply but to increase housing value as an asset class. And, given an inherently inelastic supply and rising demand, the best way to do this is by artificially constraining supply: keepin unnits off-market, limiting construction, density limmits, setbacks and separations, height limits, restrictions on multuple tenancies, and some aspects of building codes. This isn't new: When recently the mechanized industries, particularly in metal, entered the housing field with the production of “prefabricated houses”, they were met by the resistance of property holders, especially of the banks, who hold mortgages on about 58 percent of all 1933 value of all urban real estate, and who fear that an influx of cheap modern dwellings would subtract substantially from the market value of existing structures. These banks and loan companies have been unwilling to finance prefabricated houses except in rare exceptions and then on a limited basis. -- Bernhard J. Stern, "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", 1937 https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/page/39 https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...
roenxi 6y ago
So some parts of your argument make a lot of sense. Nobody should be starving on the streets. But there are some issues with the perspective I want to challenge on the principle that the person who takes the risk should get the reward: 1) If owning a rental property makes me responsible for my tenant's failures and misfortune beyond a rental contract: - Why am I not also entitled to a cut of their successes beyond the rental contract? - If they are making decisions that affect my financial prosperity, when will I get a say? Can I demand they go into IT rather than going for a communications degree? - What do you think of the incentives that puts on me not to ever rent my property out to poor people? 2) People have to exist, they need ... medicine ... That word "medicine" is much more flexible than the others (fed & shelter are binary things), it changes over time. What standard are we applying here? Does the landlord get to object if they give themselves a lifestyle disease, eg, smoker gets lung cancer or tenant refuses to wear a mask for political reasons and then gets COVID? Where is the line for rare conditions that cost a large fortune to treat, verging on untreatable?
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  > Why am I not also entitled to a cut of their successes beyond the rental contract? Leave it to the landlord to miss whom property appreciation comes from. It ain’t you! It’s the people living there that make your property more valuable over time. If your renters do well your property value rises. I don’t know. I mean you might be coming from a place culturally that simply diminishes how you benefit from the system. It’s a narrow minded, ill conceived, jingoist, reductionist culture that attributes all personal good to multi-generational hard work and independence or whatever and belittles the losers for being stupid or lazy or having inadequate families or whatever. But a professional landlord must certainly understand the basic economics of why their renters doing well is also good for them. It boggles the mind to make an error like that, which is why I’m suspecting it would take years of conditioning to be skeptical of your customer’s success.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    Special bonus questions for you: * Can I force my tenant to make up the difference if I sell into a down market? * If I support policies that keep house prices steady, do I get any brownie points in this conversation? I'm something of a Georgist btw, That appreciation ain't worth much to an owner forced to sell cheaply after losing their rental stream. You're talking about trading very real value right now for reasonable but ultimately speculative returns.
deleted 6y ago
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cwhiz 6y ago
Basically... You don't like people who own property. You don't think people should be able to own property that they don't live in. You don't think banks should be able to foreclose. And when push comes to shove, you want property owners and banks to lose money first. And you falsely believe that owning property puts you into the top 1%. I think that about sums it up? ------------- Nearly half of landlords are what is called "mom and pop" landlords. Just normal people who happen to own rental property, a duplex, or a small apartment complex. These aren't rich people. They aren't 1%ers. I genuinely think you need to venture out into the world more and meet some different people. Meet some of these evil people that need to pay. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-frm-asst-sec-061118.html https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-frm-asst-sec...
- thatcat 6y ago
  Basically you believe that properties are Investments that should always increase and if people that can’t afford to pay what some literal rent seeker demands then they should go pound sand.
  - cwhiz 6y ago
    I sincerely doubt that you even understand what "rent seeking" actually means.
  - simonh 6y ago
    That doesn't follow at all from cwhiz' comment. There are plenty of other ways excess costs can be socialised without imposing them all on landlords as suggested by the OP, or imposing them all on tenants.
    - thatcat 6y ago
      If you make an investment in property for profit then you should accept the risk you've taken and expect to take an L when everything goes tits up instead of socializing the costs through some post-hoc insurance scheme to bail out property owners.
TeeMassive 6y ago
> My personal view is that the natural birth rights in a social contract for a functioning society must include basic needs being met. People have to exist, they need shelter, food, medicine, etc. The notion of positive rights is inherently absurd. Nobody is entitled to nobody's labor or resources except from their caretakers when they are a minor. This may seem like a needlessly harsh position but think about it: farmers can't be forced to grow food, doctors and nurses can't be forced into taking care of patients and nobody has an obligation to build anything for anybody just because "it is a basic right". Making the government pay for it does not make more of it nor does it make it cost less. Unless the basic problem has not been addressed, that is scarcity, then any solutions is pure utopian bs. Why drugs and treatments cost so much? Why we can't build new buildings? Why do we insist on living in impractical over-packed big cities? > Losses and deferments should be taken by banks, land/property-owners, and generally the 1%. You know, the people that bribe politicians with campaign funding. Banning foreclosures will backfire very quickly. Where I come from a law was passed that banned banks from foreclosing houses built on native grounds / reservations. Result? Now no one has access to the credit needed to own a house and everything are in the hands of a very few corrupt individuals.
refurb 6y ago
Losses and deferments should be taken by banks What about the people who aren’t in the 1% but their pension investments include bank stocks? You’re ignoring that economic shocks work their way through the system. Let banks take the hit and shareholders and employees all get hit, which then impacts others as well.
imtringued 6y ago
You let tenants stop paying then landlords cant pay their mortgages. If you let landlords stop paying then banks run out of money. If banks shut down then people lose their bank accounts and must wait for their insurance claim. It would be better to fix the problem at the root and let government cover rent instead of pretending that a bailout can be avoided. You can't prevent a bailout by sweeping the problem under the rug.
- jlokier 6y ago
  We already let landlords stop paying. Some landlords are already let off from paying their mortgages during the pandemic. Pandemic mortgage holidays are a thing. Generally the landlord's mortgage holiday is not being passed on to the tenant though. If you think the government should pay rent to prevent the banks from losing income from landlords, what's wrong with this simpler system: Tenant stops paying -> landlord stops paying -> government pays the bank? But it's not really a concern. Unless they really screw up, serious banks don't run out of money at this scale. There are problems from stopping mortgage payments, but "the bank closes" isn't likely to be one. Same reason you can talk about government covering the rent. The government doesn't have more money than the banks. Its super power is the ability to obtain or create money as needed. It could give it to tenants to pay landlords, give it to landlords to pay the bank, or give it to the bank directly. (Btw, I don't think it should give direct to the bank, because people need to cover more than just rent, they need food and other things, and individuals have different urgent priorities which any blanket directed payment would miss. For this reason, I don't think it should pay rent directly either.)
  - uzakov 6y ago
    > We already let landlords stop paying From what I know in the UK and in Kazakhstan it was a very small proportion of landlords
taxcoder 6y ago
> If someone is rich enough to rent things to others, by definition, they have more than they need. I don't know of many landlords who will continue to own property if the rent does not pay their expenses and a reasonable profit. Profit is not bad, it is the reward society gives individuals for taking risks. Rental prices start from basic supply and demand. People who need a place to live will pay what they can afford, often unwisely paying more than they would need to if they were content with less. Landlords adjust prices accordingly - up if there is more demand, down if there is less. Add in the emotional component of "owning my own place", which drives up the price of single family properties and forces landlords to raise prices if they will cover costs and profit. Add in the property value increase caused by tax benefits the government has, in my opinion, unwisely handed out to homeowners. Push up prices more due to large minimum lot sizes and NIMBYism constraining supply in desirable areas. (After all, what makes an area desirable? From an economic standpoint, the ability to easily exchange labor for money or some other store of value.) The result? Society largely is responsible for its own dilemmas.

thebradbain 6y ago

I agree. I often hear "landlords need to make an income too" as an argument against rent relief / freezes. However: a) Many landlords have financing at their disposal that renters don't: loan forbearance, mortgage freezes (and yet rent freezes are unfair?), etc. b) In good times, the defense for landlords raising rents is "they're taking a financial risk by renting out their property others" -- if that's the case, then why is it the government's priority to protect them more than the tenants these landlords are evicting? You invested in the opportunity to generate income. Not the guarantee. If you lose your shirt, that's on you -- nothing prevented you from putting the money in savings or less risky account. This may be my own subjective view and politics coming through, but I firmly believe that if you're wealthy enough to afford a property to rent out to the less wealthy, the needs of the tenants trump the needs of the landlords; similarly, the needs of the landlords should trump the needs of the banks. The economy is hurting, everyone is hurting, yes. But why is it the people at the bottom have to hurt the most?

happytoexplain 6y ago
>why is it the people at the bottom have to hurt the most? The people above them would have it that way. In a functioning democracy, the will of the people would naturally prevent that, but many of the people have been convinced that those in low places "deserve it".
toast0 6y ago
> In good times, the defense for landlords raising rents is "they're taking a financial risk by renting out their property others" -- if that's the case, then why is it the government's priority to protect them more than the tenants these landlords are evicting? It's one thing if the risk is tenants don't pay, and the landlord won't get the rent, plus they'll have to pay legal fees and what not to evict, plus they may need to fix damages that they will be unlikely to recoup from the departing tenant and then have the uncertainty of finding a new tenant. That's the risk they signed up for in becoming a landlord. It's another thing if the government says hey, we know people can't/aren't paying rent, but you can't evict them cause it's a bad situation for everyone. If the landlords then have trouble paying the mortgage and employees/contractors and what not, if there's no consessions that's going to be a problem. Maybe you tell the banks not to forclose and the banks have to eat it, because they're banks and universally reviled. It seems easier to drop helicopter money and keep most bills paid, and maybe just slow down the courts rather than prohibit evictions and foreclosure. But helicopter money has to be federal, and states can block evictions and foreclosures, so that's what we get without agreement at the federal level.
fierarul 6y ago
> You invested in the opportunity to generate income. Not the guarantee. They may still have the opportunity to get income from another tennant but you want them to be responsible for the tenant that can't/won't pay. The state would effectively offload any social responsibility it has. Also, who says the living conditions have to be the same under crisis? The state could sub-rent out some places but double the density. After all, if you are staying for free a shared bathroom is not the end of the world. > But why is it the people at the bottom have to hurt the most? The $1200 stimulus was probably the most generous in the world. Seems to me everybody is pretending it didn't happen.
- seized 6y ago
  $1200 one time was laughable. CERB in Canada was $2000 a month for months on end.
  - smnrchrds 6y ago
    CERB was a temporary alternative to EI (what unemployment benefits are called in Canada) for people who did not qualify for EI. It was not given to everyone, just to people who lost their jobs due to COVID.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    The US also had a $2400/mo unemployment benefit, like CERB but more money (and in USD not lower value CAD). Of course Canada has other benefits like socialized medicine.
- thebradbain 6y ago
  As a one time payment, maybe (though as noted above Canada is offering the equivalent of $1400 USD every month). Yet most other wealthy countries opted for a recurring payment or subsidy of some sort -- on top of an expanded social safety net, which, by and large in Europe, were already much more robust than the US's to begin with.
  - fierarul 6y ago
cwhiz 6y ago
>If you lose your shirt, that's on you -- nothing prevented you from putting the money in savings or less risky account. ...except you are preventing the landlord from making money. Presumably there is another potential tenant that would pay rent. It is pretty interesting for you to argue that landlords shouldn't be able to evict people and also if landlords "lose their shirt" it is their own fault. >the needs of the tenants trump the needs of the landlords Which tenant? The one that is currently in the building, or the one that could move in and pay rent? >But why is it the people at the bottom have to hurt the most? The US gave everyone a $1,200 check and an additional $600 PER WEEK in unemployment benefits. People were making $60,000+ annualized during the peak of covid. There is also an eviction moratorium. How much more do you think people need?
- mjevans 6y ago
  A supply side correction rather than a market one. The market is relatively inelastic in it's needs. More money in goes right through to the other side. Those extra 600 per week did not get banked, it got spent. Granted, I didn't see any of it because I'm thankfully still working; but I'm under zero illusions that it didn't pay for things like TV, cable, maybe a computer; and most probably some touchless delivery meals.
- thebradbain 6y ago
  How much do I think people need? I think all people deserve a place to call home; food; water; electricity; education; healthcare; a reliable means of transportation; a guaranteed retirement plan or pension. Even with an above-minimum-wage job, or even two, this is no longer feasible for so many citizens of the US: you either end up compromising or forgoing some options entirely. I don't believe having access to these things should be a standard to aspire to that many struggle to achieve -- rather, this should be the bare minimum that, were you to lose your job tomorrow and have almost no savings (as is the situation for so many people in the US), you would have no fear of losing. But if you want to attach a number to it (which I think is the wrong way to put it into terms, as money focuses the conversation on short term cost, when really it's a long term investment), let's start at $5000/mo. $60,000 per year, annualized, all the time, in perpetuity. Per adult. Afraid someone who is otherwise able to work is abusing the system? Start up a large national public works program: I think we can all agree there's SO much to rebuild, fix, and improve in the US and in our communities. FDR envisioned something close to this when he signed minimum wage into law: "No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By ‘business’ I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level — I mean the wages of decent living"

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> If someone is rich enough to rent things to others, by definition, they have more than they need. This is not the case. There are a significant number of landlords for which renting out properties is their occupation. You have someone who owns a small apartment complex, lives in one of the units, rents out the others, and their primary job is to be the superintendent and caretaker of the property. The rents pay their salary and the property tax and insurance on the building. Without them they can't pay their taxes or expenses and have nothing with which to buy food. Meanwhile the tenants are still living there and expecting the property to be maintained. In many cases the rent includes utilities, which the landlord can't pay if they don't receive rent to pay it with. And they're not the 1%, they're just a regular person whose full-time occupation is property maintenance. There is no reason in putting the cost on such people, but also no fairness in waiving the rents of only those people who live in housing that really is owned by the 1%. Which is why things like rent forgiveness and student loan forgiveness are intrinsically unfair and the better way to deal with those sorts of problems is stimulus checks. Anyone who needs the money gets it, meanwhile people who don't need it as much aren't punished for being more responsible and have the money to stimulate demand at a time when unemployment is higher than normal, and the money can come from taxes paid disproportionately by the people who actually do have more than they need rather than people we're only assuming do (and some of them don't).

rland 6y ago
If a landlord who lives as you say puts their entire 'salary' into Tesla stock, rather than using it to pay down the equity on the property, we would say that it's fair that they would lose their investment if their Tesla bet doesn't pan out. But if they put it into their home equity instead, any loss is unacceptable to us. Why?
- fierarul 6y ago
  The stock rules weren't changed out of the blue. But, no worries, once people figure out the risk involved in home equity this will be derisked and have surprising outcomes.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago

umvi 6y ago

How does self-reliance fit into your worldview? Wouldn't you agree that it's generally a bad thing to be reliant on an entity you can't control for survival?

Gibbon1 6y ago
Observation by one of my dads friends. If people truly understood how little control they have over things they'd go mad.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
As long as you're OK with being self-reliant when the hungry homeless come to move into your home and loot your local grocery store and raid your local hospital, sure, self-reliance sound great. Or did you mean self-reliance for the poor, but not for the rich?
hunterloftis 6y ago
I believe this is why OP brought up the birthright social contract. Given an absence of society, it’s fair to argue self-reliance, and that no one should have to carry another. However, being born into a society strips you of certain natural rights. You can’t just choose a nice place to build shelter for yourself - that’s “property” and it’s owned by someone already. You can’t hunt or farm your own food for similar reasons. Society demands, from birth, that you follow social laws that limit your own ability to be self-reliant. I believe it’s reasonable then when OP proposes that the balance of that social contract might mean that society should also provide a safety net for the basic necessities of life.
- umvi 6y ago
  Sure, I agree with that. However, I guess my point is: - If someone is reliant on the government for basic necessities of life, should they ideally work to reach a state where they can provide for themselves using their own income/skills/etc. and wean themselves off of government aid? - If the answer to the previous question is 'yes', how can we subsidize/incentive getting off of government aid? It seems to me that it's easy to get stuck in an inter-generational trench where the government provides your food, shelter, etc. I'm interested in how to help people help themselves.

dbcurtis 6y ago

Please take an economics course at the earliest opportunity. Rental housing is a business. If the marginal return to capital of providing rental housing goes up relative to other investments, then more capital will be invested in providing rental house, until equilibrium. Likewise, if the marginal return to capital of providing rental housing goes down, capital will be moved out of rental housing. If the risk of being a landlord is increased, then a small landlord has a bit of problem in that it will be hard to diversify their portfolio. They will need to enter into some kind of risk-transfer transaction. The simplest would be to purchase some kind of insurance that pays out in case of government-mandated rent moratorium. Insurance company actuaries would work out a reasonable premium, and that premium would be added to the rent required of tenants. All-in-all, that would be a reasonably orderly solution -- with the net effect of raising rents to cover the insurance premium. Of course, we can all imagine a world in which we have both rent control and government-mandated rent moratoriums. In which case, the return to capital in rental house goes down and the supply dries up. Which means instead of an orderly market, rental units are transferred based on non-monetary consideration. I don't see how this world is better for anybody.

dredmorbius 6y ago
In theory, yes. In practice, rising real estate prices even in the absence of rent or price controls has not seen corresponding increases in construction, the effect of which would be constant housing costs, adjusted forbinflation. The business of real estate is not to increase housing supply but to increase housing value as an asset class. And, given an inherently inelastic supply and rising demand, the best way to do this is by artificially constraining supply: keepin unnits off-market, limiting construction, density limmits, setbacks and separations, height limits, restrictions on multuple tenancies, and some aspects of building codes. This isn't new: When recently the mechanized industries, particularly in metal, entered the housing field with the production of “prefabricated houses”, they were met by the resistance of property holders, especially of the banks, who hold mortgages on about 58 percent of all 1933 value of all urban real estate, and who fear that an influx of cheap modern dwellings would subtract substantially from the market value of existing structures. These banks and loan companies have been unwilling to finance prefabricated houses except in rare exceptions and then on a limited basis. -- Bernhard J. Stern, "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", 1937 https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/page/39 https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...

roenxi 6y ago

So some parts of your argument make a lot of sense. Nobody should be starving on the streets. But there are some issues with the perspective I want to challenge on the principle that the person who takes the risk should get the reward: 1) If owning a rental property makes me responsible for my tenant's failures and misfortune beyond a rental contract: - Why am I not also entitled to a cut of their successes beyond the rental contract? - If they are making decisions that affect my financial prosperity, when will I get a say? Can I demand they go into IT rather than going for a communications degree? - What do you think of the incentives that puts on me not to ever rent my property out to poor people? 2) People have to exist, they need ... medicine ... That word "medicine" is much more flexible than the others (fed & shelter are binary things), it changes over time. What standard are we applying here? Does the landlord get to object if they give themselves a lifestyle disease, eg, smoker gets lung cancer or tenant refuses to wear a mask for political reasons and then gets COVID? Where is the line for rare conditions that cost a large fortune to treat, verging on untreatable?

an_opabinia 6y ago
> Why am I not also entitled to a cut of their successes beyond the rental contract? Leave it to the landlord to miss whom property appreciation comes from. It ain’t you! It’s the people living there that make your property more valuable over time. If your renters do well your property value rises. I don’t know. I mean you might be coming from a place culturally that simply diminishes how you benefit from the system. It’s a narrow minded, ill conceived, jingoist, reductionist culture that attributes all personal good to multi-generational hard work and independence or whatever and belittles the losers for being stupid or lazy or having inadequate families or whatever. But a professional landlord must certainly understand the basic economics of why their renters doing well is also good for them. It boggles the mind to make an error like that, which is why I’m suspecting it would take years of conditioning to be skeptical of your customer’s success.
- roenxi 6y ago
  Special bonus questions for you: * Can I force my tenant to make up the difference if I sell into a down market? * If I support policies that keep house prices steady, do I get any brownie points in this conversation? I'm something of a Georgist btw, That appreciation ain't worth much to an owner forced to sell cheaply after losing their rental stream. You're talking about trading very real value right now for reasonable but ultimately speculative returns.

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cwhiz 6y ago

Basically... You don't like people who own property. You don't think people should be able to own property that they don't live in. You don't think banks should be able to foreclose. And when push comes to shove, you want property owners and banks to lose money first. And you falsely believe that owning property puts you into the top 1%. I think that about sums it up? ------------- Nearly half of landlords are what is called "mom and pop" landlords. Just normal people who happen to own rental property, a duplex, or a small apartment complex. These aren't rich people. They aren't 1%ers. I genuinely think you need to venture out into the world more and meet some different people. Meet some of these evil people that need to pay. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-frm-asst-sec-061118.html https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr-edge-frm-asst-sec...

thatcat 6y ago
Basically you believe that properties are Investments that should always increase and if people that can’t afford to pay what some literal rent seeker demands then they should go pound sand.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  I sincerely doubt that you even understand what "rent seeking" actually means.
- simonh 6y ago
  That doesn't follow at all from cwhiz' comment. There are plenty of other ways excess costs can be socialised without imposing them all on landlords as suggested by the OP, or imposing them all on tenants.
  - thatcat 6y ago
    If you make an investment in property for profit then you should accept the risk you've taken and expect to take an L when everything goes tits up instead of socializing the costs through some post-hoc insurance scheme to bail out property owners.

TeeMassive 6y ago

> My personal view is that the natural birth rights in a social contract for a functioning society must include basic needs being met. People have to exist, they need shelter, food, medicine, etc. The notion of positive rights is inherently absurd. Nobody is entitled to nobody's labor or resources except from their caretakers when they are a minor. This may seem like a needlessly harsh position but think about it: farmers can't be forced to grow food, doctors and nurses can't be forced into taking care of patients and nobody has an obligation to build anything for anybody just because "it is a basic right". Making the government pay for it does not make more of it nor does it make it cost less. Unless the basic problem has not been addressed, that is scarcity, then any solutions is pure utopian bs. Why drugs and treatments cost so much? Why we can't build new buildings? Why do we insist on living in impractical over-packed big cities? > Losses and deferments should be taken by banks, land/property-owners, and generally the 1%. You know, the people that bribe politicians with campaign funding. Banning foreclosures will backfire very quickly. Where I come from a law was passed that banned banks from foreclosing houses built on native grounds / reservations. Result? Now no one has access to the credit needed to own a house and everything are in the hands of a very few corrupt individuals.

refurb 6y ago

Losses and deferments should be taken by banks What about the people who aren’t in the 1% but their pension investments include bank stocks? You’re ignoring that economic shocks work their way through the system. Let banks take the hit and shareholders and employees all get hit, which then impacts others as well.

imtringued 6y ago

You let tenants stop paying then landlords cant pay their mortgages. If you let landlords stop paying then banks run out of money. If banks shut down then people lose their bank accounts and must wait for their insurance claim. It would be better to fix the problem at the root and let government cover rent instead of pretending that a bailout can be avoided. You can't prevent a bailout by sweeping the problem under the rug.

jlokier 6y ago
We already let landlords stop paying. Some landlords are already let off from paying their mortgages during the pandemic. Pandemic mortgage holidays are a thing. Generally the landlord's mortgage holiday is not being passed on to the tenant though. If you think the government should pay rent to prevent the banks from losing income from landlords, what's wrong with this simpler system: Tenant stops paying -> landlord stops paying -> government pays the bank? But it's not really a concern. Unless they really screw up, serious banks don't run out of money at this scale. There are problems from stopping mortgage payments, but "the bank closes" isn't likely to be one. Same reason you can talk about government covering the rent. The government doesn't have more money than the banks. Its super power is the ability to obtain or create money as needed. It could give it to tenants to pay landlords, give it to landlords to pay the bank, or give it to the bank directly. (Btw, I don't think it should give direct to the bank, because people need to cover more than just rent, they need food and other things, and individuals have different urgent priorities which any blanket directed payment would miss. For this reason, I don't think it should pay rent directly either.)
- uzakov 6y ago
  > We already let landlords stop paying From what I know in the UK and in Kazakhstan it was a very small proportion of landlords

taxcoder 6y ago

> If someone is rich enough to rent things to others, by definition, they have more than they need. I don't know of many landlords who will continue to own property if the rent does not pay their expenses and a reasonable profit. Profit is not bad, it is the reward society gives individuals for taking risks. Rental prices start from basic supply and demand. People who need a place to live will pay what they can afford, often unwisely paying more than they would need to if they were content with less. Landlords adjust prices accordingly - up if there is more demand, down if there is less. Add in the emotional component of "owning my own place", which drives up the price of single family properties and forces landlords to raise prices if they will cover costs and profit. Add in the property value increase caused by tax benefits the government has, in my opinion, unwisely handed out to homeowners. Push up prices more due to large minimum lot sizes and NIMBYism constraining supply in desirable areas. (After all, what makes an area desirable? From an economic standpoint, the ability to easily exchange labor for money or some other store of value.) The result? Society largely is responsible for its own dilemmas.