5 ms·

Housing as a for-profit business kinda makes sense, but I think the main takeaway of the article is this: > The thing is, "the algorithm" should have very litt

Housing as a for-profit business kinda makes sense, but I think the main takeaway of the article is this: > The thing is, "the algorithm" should have very little to do with that sick feeling. The coldness of the interface and robotic voice certainly make for a stark contrast with the thing you are doing, but they aren't the cause. The moment you start thinking about someone's longtime home as something that can "align with strategy," and about pricing someone out of their longtime home as "an adjustment that would be more beneficial," you have morally lost. It doesn't really matter how you go about making that adjustment. The tool and the training for the tool definitely matters, but the truth is, making business decisions about housing will necessarily hurt people in ways that are disproportionate to the amount of additional income a landlord gets. This sucks for everyone, but especially for less mobile or financially-secure tenants. I don't think there's a great solution for the American rental system yet other than less profit-maximizing owners or schemes like HDB flats in Singapore.

fsckboy 4y ago
> but especially for less mobile or [less] financially-secure tenants the burden of taking care of people who are less able to take care of themselves is not a burden that the government should place on certain individual people or individual companies, so rest of us can go on about our days happy that we don't have to think about it any more. If you want us to redistribute money to people so they don't need to move, the bite should equally come out of your and my income and bank accounts, not just landlords'. If you think that the govt should buy all this property so it can do a great job of being a landlord and tenants will be happier that way, get those laws passed. Till then, the fallback is not to simply punish rental property owners. (disclosure, I own property but I don't rent it out because I don't want the hassle, the money is not worth it)
- Avshalom 4y ago
  >punish rental property owners Y'all see this rhetorical jump right? arciini made no mention of any action against landlords but to get out ahead of any possibility even as small as social-pressure against raising rents fsckboy has both escalated the framing language to "punishing" them and also shifted the frame from the plight of renters to the plight of rentiers.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    It's not that big a rhetorical jump, though, is it? There's already a lot of anti-landlord rhetoric in this discussion, and historically it heads that way every time.
    - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      It's not about punishing, it's about constraining power, and aligning power with particular responsibilities. Is allocating certain powers to certain branches of government "punishing" the other branches? Is requiring certain duties from certain industries "punishing" those industries? I guess we're punishing Norfolk Southern by requiring them to pay for the cleanup in East Palestine, OH. "If you want us to redistribute money to people in East Palestine so they don't need to move, the bite should equally come out of your and my income and bank accounts, not just Norfolk Southern's."
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  > If you want us to redistribute money to people so they don't need to move, the bite should equally come out of your and my income and bank accounts, not just landlords'. So you're saying everyone should pay for an externality of a particular industry? Socialize the costs?
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  This conclusion hinges on viewing landlord as a range of human identity, like mother or craftsman. Landlords aren't a type of people, it's an activity, an economic relationship. Deciding that the correct place for that burden is on landlords is a valid and consistent view. That this is part of the risk and responsibility incurred by the action of landlording. No one is forced to be a landlord and so in this view if you don't like that responsibility you simply don't landlord. It's not "punishment" to reevaluate where we let burdens fall, and require that some roles now carry burdens that they were once free of. And if it is, shit, we punish lots of people for all kinds of things, why are landlords exempt.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Car companies shouldn't be required to add safety features. If the market wants it car companies will add them. Seatbelts should be an add on expense like they were in the 1960s. Get the government out of the business of looking after citizens!
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    I think you're getting downvoted because the analogy doesn't quite parallel, as car purchasers are indeed paying for those seatbelts in the car price. A better car analogy would be the mandate of safety features such as back-up cameras that the purchaser pays for, but ultimately benefit others.
nordsieck 4y ago
> I don't think there's a great solution for the American rental system yet other than less profit-maximizing owners or schemes like HDB flats in Singapore. Fundamentally, the solution is to allow much, much more building. So far voters are not a fan. Perhaps that will change with the increasing rise of corporate ownership.
- fwlr 4y ago
  “So far voters are not a fan.” While I’m always uncomfortable with violent rhetoric, the very public antipathy around “rent-seeking parasites” does give me hope that in the future, fewer voters will see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed landlords”.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    I don't think it's that many people aspire to be a landlord. It's just that homeowners have put a large amount of their net worth into real estate and declaring open season on new building directly hurts them. We can easily see this as millenials have gotten into owning homes themselves. People are quite good at tending to their own self interest.
    - noirbot 4y ago
      For sure. I have no aspiration to be a landlord, but I bought a place last year with a mortgage payment a bit higher than what I was paying to rent an equivalent place before. This made good financial sense. Now, let's suppose somehow we build all over my neighborhood over the next three years and rent craters. Instead of paying, say, 1200 on my mortgage to own a place instead of 1000 in rent, I could now be paying 600 in rent vs. 1200 on a mortgage. I'm now in a bind where I'm losing money every month over renting the place next door and there's a good chance my property even when I pay it off is worth less than I've paid. I'm certainly not against building, but if somehow every YIMBY dream came through for them near me, I've definitely just made a really terrible financial decision that's going to dramatically change the trajectory of my life. Moving to another city for a job is now borderline impossible if I'm tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars underwater on my mortgage, and couldn't rent the property for anything close to what I'm paying. Like many fixes to societal ills, it's easy to look at the end result and see how it's better for most people, but it's likely to hurt a lot of people who made totally reasonable choices.
shuckles 4y ago
The HDB system's outcomes aren't great if not paired with abundant supply. Singapore market rents are growing fast, HDBs have all sorts of unsavory (to Americans) queueing and prioritization rules, and there are plenty of rent seeking HDB owners who sublet their flats at high prices.
- pydry 4y ago
  The whole point of the HDB system was to streamline and standardize the creation of decent quality housing. It worked spectacularly at creating abundant supply. Compared to the 1950s the supply has taken off like a rocket. The "problem" was that population growth kept up with supply - initially through an extremely high birth rate and then, when that collapsed, through extremely high immigration rates. Given the high population growth and low availability of land the growth in housing stock has been pretty amazing. Both the quality and the quantity certainly blows the US and Europe out of the water.
  - shuckles 4y ago
    I don’t think Singapore has run out of (re-)developable land. It has lots of low rise homes that have very low land value tax assessments. In any case, I agree their current situation is better than ours, but my point that the HDB model cannot solve housing costs without abundant supply stands.
- causalmodels 4y ago
  IMO the ethnic quotas would be the most unsavory aspects to an American audience.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Suspect "virtually everyone lives in government housing projects" would be an even harder sell...
    - shuckles 4y ago
      HDBs are high quality and safe. I don’t think most Americans would object to owning their own apartment if the builder and operator happened to be a government agency.
firstplacelast 4y ago
There are tons of things America could do for the rental and home-ownership market, but we won’t because people will scream that it’s unfair and it will hurt the upper class and existing home owners. The government could force and pay for construction of massive numbers of condos/townhouses in/around large cities (say 20-40million). Sell them to first time home-owners for extremely cheap (say 200k) with all types of restrictions on it being owner occupied and only allowing the owner to recoup a certain % of appreciation after X numbers of years if sold (say 3% each year lived in). I’m sure that’s problematic and a team of people smarter than me could come up with a much better system, but there are very tenable solutions with the ability to change laws/policies and a massive pocket-book. The US used to give away large parcels of land to people just to move out west. So it’s not like there’s not precedence for helping citizens with real estate. Nothing significant will be done in our lifetimes though, oh well.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > I’m sure that’s problematic and a team of people smarter than me could come up with a much better system Agree, and disagree. Distortions of the market rarely go as planned, so trying a massive intervention is likely to have a whole bunch of negative side effects. And I don't believe smarter people are more likely to be successful with their own attempts. Keep it simple. Build more. Drop the zoning restrictions, reimagine the purpose of urban growth boundaries. Supply and demand actually does work.
  - unethical_ban 4y ago
    Build more relatively dense housing. And to those who may balk: Dense housing doesn't need to be cheap. If you think to yourself "Gosh these walls are thin", that should not be a given in a long-term investment like a multistory complex. High quality, somewhat private housing is possible! While "any housing" is better than an extreme like homelessness, I align with those who think ever expanding suburbs is a big waste of concrete, infrastructure buildout and promotes the use of needless daily private transport. I lament (rental) apartments being built all over my city's downtown, but I support increasing the density of living in urban areas.
anonymouskimmer 4y ago
> I don't think there's a great solution for the American rental system yet other than less profit-maximizing owners or schemes like HDB flats in Singapore. There are various co-ops that exist in the US to buy things like apartment complexes that the tenants then take ownership in. There are things such as Council housing in the UK. There are various alternate reality types of systems that basically haven't been tried, or have only been tried in small numbers. Once you bring in profit-maximizers into a larger, mostly free-market sector you tend the entire industry in the one direction of profit-maximizing (as the profit-maximizers can outbid the others on newly entering housing).
- 98codes 4y ago
  > to buy things Exactly. That's not renting, and co-op owners aren't landlords unless they turn around and rent the unit out.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    Yeah, but it's an ownership alternative for people who are otherwise stuck being long-term renters. And for long-term renters I think ownership is the better alternative in many cases.

fsckboy 4y ago

> but especially for less mobile or [less] financially-secure tenants the burden of taking care of people who are less able to take care of themselves is not a burden that the government should place on certain individual people or individual companies, so rest of us can go on about our days happy that we don't have to think about it any more. If you want us to redistribute money to people so they don't need to move, the bite should equally come out of your and my income and bank accounts, not just landlords'. If you think that the govt should buy all this property so it can do a great job of being a landlord and tenants will be happier that way, get those laws passed. Till then, the fallback is not to simply punish rental property owners. (disclosure, I own property but I don't rent it out because I don't want the hassle, the money is not worth it)

Avshalom 4y ago
>punish rental property owners Y'all see this rhetorical jump right? arciini made no mention of any action against landlords but to get out ahead of any possibility even as small as social-pressure against raising rents fsckboy has both escalated the framing language to "punishing" them and also shifted the frame from the plight of renters to the plight of rentiers.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  It's not that big a rhetorical jump, though, is it? There's already a lot of anti-landlord rhetoric in this discussion, and historically it heads that way every time.
  - anonymouskimmer 4y ago
    It's not about punishing, it's about constraining power, and aligning power with particular responsibilities. Is allocating certain powers to certain branches of government "punishing" the other branches? Is requiring certain duties from certain industries "punishing" those industries? I guess we're punishing Norfolk Southern by requiring them to pay for the cleanup in East Palestine, OH. "If you want us to redistribute money to people in East Palestine so they don't need to move, the bite should equally come out of your and my income and bank accounts, not just Norfolk Southern's."
anonymouskimmer 4y ago
> If you want us to redistribute money to people so they don't need to move, the bite should equally come out of your and my income and bank accounts, not just landlords'. So you're saying everyone should pay for an externality of a particular industry? Socialize the costs?
giraffe_lady 4y ago
This conclusion hinges on viewing landlord as a range of human identity, like mother or craftsman. Landlords aren't a type of people, it's an activity, an economic relationship. Deciding that the correct place for that burden is on landlords is a valid and consistent view. That this is part of the risk and responsibility incurred by the action of landlording. No one is forced to be a landlord and so in this view if you don't like that responsibility you simply don't landlord. It's not "punishment" to reevaluate where we let burdens fall, and require that some roles now carry burdens that they were once free of. And if it is, shit, we punish lots of people for all kinds of things, why are landlords exempt.
ROTMetro 4y ago
Car companies shouldn't be required to add safety features. If the market wants it car companies will add them. Seatbelts should be an add on expense like they were in the 1960s. Get the government out of the business of looking after citizens!
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  I think you're getting downvoted because the analogy doesn't quite parallel, as car purchasers are indeed paying for those seatbelts in the car price. A better car analogy would be the mandate of safety features such as back-up cameras that the purchaser pays for, but ultimately benefit others.

nordsieck 4y ago

> I don't think there's a great solution for the American rental system yet other than less profit-maximizing owners or schemes like HDB flats in Singapore. Fundamentally, the solution is to allow much, much more building. So far voters are not a fan. Perhaps that will change with the increasing rise of corporate ownership.

fwlr 4y ago
“So far voters are not a fan.” While I’m always uncomfortable with violent rhetoric, the very public antipathy around “rent-seeking parasites” does give me hope that in the future, fewer voters will see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed landlords”.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  I don't think it's that many people aspire to be a landlord. It's just that homeowners have put a large amount of their net worth into real estate and declaring open season on new building directly hurts them. We can easily see this as millenials have gotten into owning homes themselves. People are quite good at tending to their own self interest.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    For sure. I have no aspiration to be a landlord, but I bought a place last year with a mortgage payment a bit higher than what I was paying to rent an equivalent place before. This made good financial sense. Now, let's suppose somehow we build all over my neighborhood over the next three years and rent craters. Instead of paying, say, 1200 on my mortgage to own a place instead of 1000 in rent, I could now be paying 600 in rent vs. 1200 on a mortgage. I'm now in a bind where I'm losing money every month over renting the place next door and there's a good chance my property even when I pay it off is worth less than I've paid. I'm certainly not against building, but if somehow every YIMBY dream came through for them near me, I've definitely just made a really terrible financial decision that's going to dramatically change the trajectory of my life. Moving to another city for a job is now borderline impossible if I'm tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars underwater on my mortgage, and couldn't rent the property for anything close to what I'm paying. Like many fixes to societal ills, it's easy to look at the end result and see how it's better for most people, but it's likely to hurt a lot of people who made totally reasonable choices.

shuckles 4y ago

The HDB system's outcomes aren't great if not paired with abundant supply. Singapore market rents are growing fast, HDBs have all sorts of unsavory (to Americans) queueing and prioritization rules, and there are plenty of rent seeking HDB owners who sublet their flats at high prices.

pydry 4y ago
The whole point of the HDB system was to streamline and standardize the creation of decent quality housing. It worked spectacularly at creating abundant supply. Compared to the 1950s the supply has taken off like a rocket. The "problem" was that population growth kept up with supply - initially through an extremely high birth rate and then, when that collapsed, through extremely high immigration rates. Given the high population growth and low availability of land the growth in housing stock has been pretty amazing. Both the quality and the quantity certainly blows the US and Europe out of the water.
- shuckles 4y ago
  I don’t think Singapore has run out of (re-)developable land. It has lots of low rise homes that have very low land value tax assessments. In any case, I agree their current situation is better than ours, but my point that the HDB model cannot solve housing costs without abundant supply stands.
causalmodels 4y ago
IMO the ethnic quotas would be the most unsavory aspects to an American audience.
- notahacker 4y ago
  Suspect "virtually everyone lives in government housing projects" would be an even harder sell...
  - shuckles 4y ago
    HDBs are high quality and safe. I don’t think most Americans would object to owning their own apartment if the builder and operator happened to be a government agency.

firstplacelast 4y ago

There are tons of things America could do for the rental and home-ownership market, but we won’t because people will scream that it’s unfair and it will hurt the upper class and existing home owners. The government could force and pay for construction of massive numbers of condos/townhouses in/around large cities (say 20-40million). Sell them to first time home-owners for extremely cheap (say 200k) with all types of restrictions on it being owner occupied and only allowing the owner to recoup a certain % of appreciation after X numbers of years if sold (say 3% each year lived in). I’m sure that’s problematic and a team of people smarter than me could come up with a much better system, but there are very tenable solutions with the ability to change laws/policies and a massive pocket-book. The US used to give away large parcels of land to people just to move out west. So it’s not like there’s not precedence for helping citizens with real estate. Nothing significant will be done in our lifetimes though, oh well.

rootusrootus 4y ago
> I’m sure that’s problematic and a team of people smarter than me could come up with a much better system Agree, and disagree. Distortions of the market rarely go as planned, so trying a massive intervention is likely to have a whole bunch of negative side effects. And I don't believe smarter people are more likely to be successful with their own attempts. Keep it simple. Build more. Drop the zoning restrictions, reimagine the purpose of urban growth boundaries. Supply and demand actually does work.
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  Build more relatively dense housing. And to those who may balk: Dense housing doesn't need to be cheap. If you think to yourself "Gosh these walls are thin", that should not be a given in a long-term investment like a multistory complex. High quality, somewhat private housing is possible! While "any housing" is better than an extreme like homelessness, I align with those who think ever expanding suburbs is a big waste of concrete, infrastructure buildout and promotes the use of needless daily private transport. I lament (rental) apartments being built all over my city's downtown, but I support increasing the density of living in urban areas.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago

> I don't think there's a great solution for the American rental system yet other than less profit-maximizing owners or schemes like HDB flats in Singapore. There are various co-ops that exist in the US to buy things like apartment complexes that the tenants then take ownership in. There are things such as Council housing in the UK. There are various alternate reality types of systems that basically haven't been tried, or have only been tried in small numbers. Once you bring in profit-maximizers into a larger, mostly free-market sector you tend the entire industry in the one direction of profit-maximizing (as the profit-maximizers can outbid the others on newly entering housing).

98codes 4y ago
> to buy things Exactly. That's not renting, and co-op owners aren't landlords unless they turn around and rent the unit out.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  Yeah, but it's an ownership alternative for people who are otherwise stuck being long-term renters. And for long-term renters I think ownership is the better alternative in many cases.