8 ms·
Renters now rule the suburbs in DC, Miami and Los Angeles
- CobrastanJorji 5y ago"Rule" is a weird choice of words there.
- ModernMech 5y agoYeah, I think it's the landlords doing the ruling. It's right there in the name.
- criley2 5y agoVoting is by person, not by land parcel. Just ask landlords in Seattle how it goes when the renters have more political power than the landlords.
- kaesar14 5y agoWhen is renters having more political power than landlords a bad thing?
- rblatz 5y agoWhen you are a landlord for instance.
- selectodude 5y agoSounds like owning huge amounts of property concentrated in a single area gives you some counterparty risk you should consider.
- kaesar14 5y agoAnd that the financial power this gives you as a class needs to be countered by political power in your opposition.
- criley2 5y agoWho said it's a good OR bad thing? This is a discussion of who has the power, not the ethics of the power. Having said that, I think the current balance in some places can be harmful because there is a non-insignificant number of tenants who stopped paying rent simply because the eviction moratorium means they can enjoy the property for free. When questioned they say "investments have risks ". This leads a number of landlords to jack up credit requirements or let properties stay empty, exacerbating supply problems.
- xanaxagoras 5y agoWhen the renters are a collection of screeching children who want to defund the police.
- ModernMech 5y agoVoting is by person, but money is speech, and one side has a lot more speech to influence voting patterns than the other.
- klyrs 5y agoVoting is one sort of power. Many see rent-seeking as a form of regressive taxation; setting of tax rates is another form of power. Landlords, in this situation, are kinda like middle management. While they don't have absolute power, denying that they have power is a bit narrow-minded.
- criley2 5y agoI didn't deny that landlords have power. But the power of the vote includes the ability to regulate and control nearly every form of landlords inherent power. Rent control and eviction moratoriums nearly completely neuter landlord power. Which as I said elsewhere to downvotes, leads to heavy discrimination based on income/class and less supply for the neediest of folk
- banannaise 5y agoAnd when no candidates will enact these policies, largely because of the monied interests elevating them to contention, how does the power to vote help?
- criley2 5y agoThese policies are enacted across the country. I must admit to confusion about your hypothetical. Rent control and eviction moratoriums exist in major cities across the USA, so an argument that they can't be enacted because no one will run that supports them is very odd to me.
- jjoonathan 5y agoWhen the incentives are asymmetric, the party that cares more only has to install a few hurdles to win. I congratulate renters in Seattle on jumping over the hurdles, but I suspect it required some doing.
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- jdhn 5y ago>The American Dream may no longer be about buying a home, but renting one There should be a stipulation that if you see this line or one like it, you append "in high value areas where there are lots of high paying jobs". If the American Dream is defined as owning a home (and nothing more), then there are multiple affordable areas outside of the traditional hotbed areas like LA, DC, and NYC.
- heavyset_go 5y agoThen you're buying property outside of areas where you can commute to where the jobs are. You can't pay a mortgage on a Walmart stocker's wages, nor can you afford health insurance for a family working for a small business in the sticks.
- jdhn 5y agoThere are lots of jobs outside of DC, LA, and NYC where housing is significantly cheaper than the housing in those cities without being in "the sticks".
- symlinkk 5y agoWhere?
- heavyset_go 5y agoWhere? Because in my experience, the well-paying jobs are either in cities, or in the areas that are within commuting distances of the cities. What will those places look like in 30 years? Because my experience is that while there might be one or two well-paying employers in such areas, they're bleeding talent and seem to be on the downturn compared to their heydays and competitors. I don't see a lot of those companies existing in a decade, much less 3.
- true_religion 5y agoWithin commuting distance of DC is a huge area that covers two states. If you dare live 30 minutes outside of DC in Maryland, you are literally in the middle of no where with farms to the east and forest to the west. Virginia is more pricey and populated near DC. Housing in Arlington is in the 600s. But if you just live 40 minutes away in Prince Williams, you pay 400s. Now this is all relative because hey even 600s is cheap compared to NYC and San Fran.
- hex4def6 5y ago"landlords now own the suburbs" might be a more accurate description.
- bilbo0s 5y agoThat's always the case to be fair.
- klyrs 5y agoIt's a relatively new phenomenon, which is why this is news. In years (decades?) past, suburbs were popular in large part because the middle class could afford to buy homes and there was little reason to rent. Today, the situation is different; wages haven't scaled with housing costs and folks can't afford to buy even in the suburbs.
- heavyset_go 5y agoProperty ownership among wage and salary earners is a relatively new phenomenon.
- klyrs 5y agoOn what timescale?
- heavyset_go 5y agoLess than half of the US owned their own homes before the 1940's, after which more than 65% of people owned their own homes. If we go back past the 1900's, the only workers that consistently owned their own property were farmers. Mortgages didn't become a thing until after the 1860's, and it wasn't until the 1890's that they became common. Before mortgages, workers did not have the lump sum of money required to purchase a home.
- jmugan 5y agoI've heard that houses in Paris have been impossible to buy for decades now, maybe US cities are becoming old and "grand" in the same sense.
- jmpman 5y agoWhat policies which would make owning a single family rental less attractive than owner occupied? Non-owner occupied property tax? We already have mortgage interest deduction, but many of these houses are purchased in cash, and when interest rates are down at 2-3%, that’s not a significant enough difference. An asymmetry of prices for owners versus landlords must be possible. Why don’t we see these policies in practice?
- reedf1 5y agoThe situation is far worse in the UK. Honestly I think it's terrifying, and the political implications are revolutionary.
- sakopov 5y agoI don't understand LA. I've been out here for a couple of months now and I'm seeing 2 trends - the salaries are generally very average (I'm not just talking about IT) and completely disproportionate to cost of living and it seems like a good majority of young adults are either broke or severely paycheck-to-paycheck. Yet, somehow these people love the fact that they will never own anything it because "the weather is nice here."
- lisper 5y agoWhat's so hard to understand? Some people value nice weather, and places with nice weather are scarce. Supply. Demand.
- sakopov 5y agoI suppose you're right, but at the cost of barely making ends meet... I don't know.
- lisper 5y agoDifferent strokes.
- banannaise 5y agoThis is what the market is optimizing for. For the vast majority of people, in order to have anything nice, you will barely make ends meet. The market doesn't want to leave any income in your pocket, and it's getting very good at that.
- duped 5y agoI lived in LA for a few years, I noticed the first. But the second is off a bit. LA is the cultural capitol of North America, and only rivaled in the anglosphere by London and New York City. It's where people go to "make it" (or break it) in film, music, art, comedy, (and to an extent, cuisine and theater). When I lived in there I was surrounded by interesting and beautiful people in every apartment building and there was always something going on, somewhere to go, a show to see, etc. It has its ugly side too. In my experience the glamour is lifted after about three months living in the Valley. But I can see why people would stay there, despite the lower wages and high cost of living. And fwiw I left LA for the Bay Area, and I would never live in the Bay Area again (to me the place is an abject dump and not worth the mental or physical toll of living there) but I still have fond memories of LA. It's dirty and loud but at least it has a soul.
- 1B05H1N 5y ago"Suburbs where renters became the majority between 2010 and 2019 are mainly concentrated in three parts of the country: California, Florida and the Washington, D.C. metro" https://www.rentcafe.com/blog/rental-market/market-snapshots/picket-fences-for-rent-100-suburbs-turned-renter-majority-this-decade/ https://www.rentcafe.com/blog/rental-market/market-snapshots... ^Better headline in my opinion. It's pretty funny that journalists take the high school/undergrad approach of essay writing (paraphrased/reworded source material). Sorta explains how we end up with odd titles like this one.
- degenerate 5y agoSadly the goal of news networks is not to convey information properly, it's to outrage or surprise you, and generate ad traffic. The more facetious a headline, the more $$$ it makes the news network from clicks. Because of this, consider all news another form of entertainment (and nothing more).
- mc32 5y agoIt’s like they are going for the Taboola approach to clickbait: Have a title that generates interest and don’t even bother delivering on it in the content. Content farms do something like: “Why travelers are advised to take blank sheet of paper with them.” Then they go on about some unrelated nonsense and never mention anything about any sheet of paper.
- cratermoon 5y agoFYI the person who writes the article rarely writes the headline. That's the job of editors. Source: I worked as a copyeditor at a newspaper. A big part of our job was writing the headline. Back in the day it was harder because it had to fit allotted space on paper, today it's easier.
- EricE 5y agoGreat, more grasshoppers and less ants.
- jimt1234 5y ago> ...they’re more likely to be renters by choice. So, being unable to afford a house, even with a 6-figure salary, and thus renting is a "choice" now? Hmmm. I'm sure many people choose to rent, but I feel like most renters, especially those with good salaries, do so because the cost of ownership is too damn high these days, and the tax incentives aren't what they used to be.
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- jimbob45 5y agoWe could house them all in a small fraction of the space if we mandated renting to be done in apartments rather than wasting space in houses. Everyone should be able to work toward owning their own home and banning non-efficient renting would do just that. We're really just building houses for the sake of making some greedy landlords richer. In fact, there is almost no difference between what we're doing and Chinese ghost cities that were built for artificial demand. However, I've only ever met severe disagreement when I bring this up. I don't know if it's clear or not but for me (and probably most of everyone who frequents HN), keeping the status quo will continue to make us richer. I'm very clearly arguing against my own self-interests because I don't find low-efficiency renting to make the world a better place.
- InitialLastName 5y agoEasier perhaps to make it legal to increase the housing supply in a sustainable way (by allowing densification) and to stop letting people write off interest payments on non-owner-occupied houses.
- silicon2401 5y agoI for one don't want a world of hive cities where it's 100-story skyscrapers everywhere you look. There's no human right to live in LA; if you can't afford it, live somewhere else.
- jimt1234 5y agoDoes anyone have anything besides doom-and-gloom predictions wrt to housing? I'm sincerely curious because I don't - that is, I don't see how all this plays out well for anyone other than big investment firms. Well, I guess that's the bright side: earning steady 15% returns from a property rental fund while society crumbles. :o