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It’s not just NIMBY-ism, and NIMBY-ism isn’t what drove these away. What it is is pretty much the minimum mage—housing has to meet a minimum threshold in qualit

It’s not just NIMBY-ism, and NIMBY-ism isn’t what drove these away. What it is is pretty much the minimum mage—housing has to meet a minimum threshold in quality or else it can’t exist. Never mind that people might still be willing to live there and are able to make their own decisions. And some people might not have other options. To many, this seems like exploitation. They’d rather have people living on the street than have a business make money off of them.

bilbo0s 6y ago
Bingo. And it's not even the exploitation. Believe it or not, it's the fact that there is no one to hold liable if things go wrong. At root, it's about on which head does liability rest. You don't meet code, firefighters rush in, and the staircase collapses. Who do the cops and the firefighters go after? If it's the owner of the SRO, then no real estate investor will build one. (At least, not one that isn't up to code.) You can try to loosen the code, but the firefighters are only going to allow you to cut so much before their unions have your picture up on billboards around town as the big, bad, slumlord pushing for substandard housing. Owning a lot of real estate is not a picnic, and you learn a lot of things you never knew before about how local politics work.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  My dad ran section 8 programs for a decade or more. They meet higher code standards than many suburbia “luxury” apartments. Slumlords who don’t maintain buildings to code are bottom of the barrel renting to a very limited and desperate clientele. Encouraging that is nuts. The notion that evil firefighter unions are making real estate expensive by advocating for codes that put them out of business is probably the most ill-informed comment I’ve read in some time. Absurd. Getting rid of balloon frames and cocklofts raised construction costs... but saved thousands of lives.
imtringued 6y ago
>They’d rather have people living on the street than have a business make money off of them. Considering the way these cities are going they will end up with a lot of people on the street.

bilbo0s 6y ago

Bingo. And it's not even the exploitation. Believe it or not, it's the fact that there is no one to hold liable if things go wrong. At root, it's about on which head does liability rest. You don't meet code, firefighters rush in, and the staircase collapses. Who do the cops and the firefighters go after? If it's the owner of the SRO, then no real estate investor will build one. (At least, not one that isn't up to code.) You can try to loosen the code, but the firefighters are only going to allow you to cut so much before their unions have your picture up on billboards around town as the big, bad, slumlord pushing for substandard housing. Owning a lot of real estate is not a picnic, and you learn a lot of things you never knew before about how local politics work.

Spooky23 6y ago
My dad ran section 8 programs for a decade or more. They meet higher code standards than many suburbia “luxury” apartments. Slumlords who don’t maintain buildings to code are bottom of the barrel renting to a very limited and desperate clientele. Encouraging that is nuts. The notion that evil firefighter unions are making real estate expensive by advocating for codes that put them out of business is probably the most ill-informed comment I’ve read in some time. Absurd. Getting rid of balloon frames and cocklofts raised construction costs... but saved thousands of lives.

imtringued 6y ago

>They’d rather have people living on the street than have a business make money off of them. Considering the way these cities are going they will end up with a lot of people on the street.