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Sucks that SF is decay. But about the title - That's VERY Good! Humanity and society does not need an occupation identified as a "landlord". Housing should no
by wellthisisgreat 3y ago
Sucks that SF is decay. But about the title - That's VERY Good!
Humanity and society does not need an occupation identified as a "landlord".
Housing should not be an investment ever.
- alchemist1e9 3y agoWhat other arbitrary rules about investments do you have?
- eganist 3y agoNot OP, but probably that "fulfilling basic human needs shouldn't be for profit" I'm a colossal fan of co-ops and credit unions for this reason.
- johngladtj 3y agoWhy do you want those needs to go unfulfilled?
- breakyerself 3y agoDo you think places with privatized, for profit, electricity have less blackouts than places with non profit or municipal power?
- achates 3y agoSo if you fulfill basic human needs you aren't allowed to make a profit but every other industry can?
- sokoloff 3y agoI hope the people providing my food, utilities, clothing, and bedding are making a sustainable profit. I want them to be around in the future when I need those needs fulfilled.
- monkaiju 3y agoYes. You arent just like born into 'fulfilling' a basic human need. These services, think healthcare, food, and housing, should be public services that are guaranteed not delivered by the market. You cannot look at the market-based solutions to literally any of these objectively and think it is performing well. At least, not if you value human life.
- jdenning 3y agoThe problem, as always is about the definitions and the power associated with controlling those definitions. Does a fine wine count as food? What about an imported fruit? If the US made it illegal to profit on food I think we'd see rapid regulatory capture that supported some of the worst agri-business behemoths. (e.g. what happens to the local farmers that I prefer to support? They probably need a bigger profit margin than they have already, and can't even hope to compete at scale) I agree with your intent here, but the devil is in the details.
- alchemist1e9 3y agoSounds like you have alternative history to what I learned.
- breakyerself 3y agoSounds good to me.
- wellthisisgreat 3y agoMaybe buying up life-critical drugs to hike up the prices?
- evilos 3y agoMaybe a more workable and less authoritarian tack would be that the government plays in the market as a limited profit entity, thereby ensuring that a cartel cannot fully capture the market and endlessly drive prices upwards. Limited profit (capped at some percentage over revenue) is allowed in order to let the entity invest in expansions so that they don't simply end up being 1% of the market that can be ignored by their competitors.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoLandlords aren't a cartel in that sense. The way they get together and "fix prices" is by having the government restrict housing density to increase scarcity. A non-profit that has to follow the same zoning rules can't fix that. Whereas if prices are high and you don't prohibit lower density housing from being replaced with higher density housing, there is money in doing that and the market takes care of it for you.
- evilos 3y agoI mean my preferred solution would be zoning reform first, yes. I was just proposing an amendment to OPs policy, I don't think it's politically viable in the US. In my large US city, a lot of apartments are held by various corporations that collude via third party software to raise and keep prices high. The local building managers have no say in lease pricing. Maybe a small percentage of people are lucky enough to find mom/pop landlords but many are stuck paying whatever the large complexes charge.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoSoftware can't defeat supply and demand unless you have a monopoly. Suppose the amount rents have to hit before it's profitable to build a new building is $1000/month and right now rents are at $990/month. A cartel representing 70% of the landlords in the city collude to raise rents to $2500/month. If they're allowed to, builders will keep building new housing until rents are back below $1000, because until that point they can keep making money by doing it. Even if they have to increase the housing stock in the city by the entire 70% and leave the cartel with a bunch of empty buildings. But if they're not allowed to build, prices go up. And some entity with a profit cap can't do anything about it because they have no path to supplying enough housing to lower the market price.
- jfghi 3y agoSeems like a rhetorical question that intentionally ignores the overall premise without adding value.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoFair complaint. But one could also complain about the initial post. It does nothing to motivate the claim that housing should not be an investment, so it does in fact appear to be an arbitrary rule that is being put forward.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- HarryHirsch 3y agoGuess he is against private ownership of public infrastructure, because of what experience has shown. Invariably, there is persistent underinvestment to increase short-term profit, and once the physical plant is so run down that it plainly can't function any longer, it is renationalized at great loss to the public. The current model has led to a persistent underinvestment in housing, especially entry-level housing since at least the late 1990's.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoOK, but there is still an unstated proposition, that housing is (or should be) public infrastructure. That was not even stated, and if it were stated, there would be very wide disagreement with it. This style of posting - assuming but not stating a controversial position, but stating as given what follows from it - is real bad news. First, it's essentially a dishonest way of communicating. They state as truth something that is very far from accepted, in the attempt to get people to accept something that they don't, without having to go through the hard work of actually persuading them on the real point of disagreement. But even if no dishonesty is intended - they think the controversial point is not controversial at all, but rather something that everyone accepts - it's still bad news, because it hides the actual point of disagreement that needs discussed. It results in a "conversation" that is both sides hurling sound bytes at each other, but never actually talking about where the disagreement is. That's not a good conversation, even in general, but it's a terrible conversation for HN.
- alchemist1e9 3y agoIt’s a terrible post I agree. The other issue is how basic capitalism is constantly under attack despite the overwhelming empirical evidence of it’s remarkable success. It’s a repeated pattern in history that always ends in darkness for humanity if it gains enough momentum to make changes. https://iea.org.uk/publications/socialism-the-failed-idea-that-never-dies/ https://iea.org.uk/publications/socialism-the-failed-idea-th... How are we even debating private ownership of property and housing. What an incredible failure of basic education systems. It’s like denying evolution or holding some other profoundly unscientific and un-objective emotional belief. Hopefully my comment complies with HN guidelines. It’s can be hard to comply we dealing with such absurd proposals and theories. Unless tinker-bell is real and has fairy dust to build houses and provide basic needs.
- blitz_skull 3y agoNot sure it’s an “occupation” for most. I make less than 5% of my monthly living expenses off my rental property and treat my tenants with the care I’d treat my own family. I’m not sure a few bad actors taking advantage of people warrants statements like, “Housing should not be an investment ever.”
- mistrial9 3y agonice defense, but you realize that edit many landlords are not like that at all.. the court system here in Alameda County California has a backlog of a decade+ for extremely abusive landlords
- zapdrive 3y agoAnd some tenants are sucky too. Courts are backed up for evictions due to non payment of rent too.
- mistrial9 3y ago"A recent report detailing the dismal housing conditions faced by 150,000 people in unincorporated Alameda County estimated that up to one-third of renters could be living in buildings that should legally be deemed uninhabitable. But according to Alameda County’s Healthy Homes Department, the county has millions of dollars from the federal government to address exactly these concerns ..."
- mistrial9 3y ago"two wrongs don't make a right"
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoYour anecdote doesn't do anything whatsoever to justify your claim that most landlords are not like that at all.
- breakyerself 3y agoA few bad actors? You are the exception to the norm. Beyond that people are working to pay your mortgage increasing your net worth. You may not have much income, but you are getting wealthier.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoSuppose you don't have enough money to buy real estate right now but you have enough to rent an apartment. If you don't want to be homeless, from whom do you acquire a lease?
- th0ma5 3y agoIf rent was illegal, you would buy.
- readthenotes1 3y agoBuy what? If rent were illegal, there would be far less housing because most people cannot (or will not) save enough capital to create or buy their own.
- th0ma5 3y agoYou need to challenge your assumptions more, why couldn't you just make single family dwellings illegal in high demand areas? And have the state in charge of housing? Unless you mean to argue about current laws and situations, the main point of these discussions and this post is that they are not working.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoThe existing problem is that multi-family dwellings are illegal in many high demand areas. Otherwise it would be highly profitable to build them there. If you fix that you don't need to do anything else. Putting the state in charge of housing is the cause of the existing problem. They become captured by landlords, or favor higher property values because they increase property tax revenues. What you need is some constitutional restraint on local zoning rules.
- th0ma5 3y agoWhy isn't more regulation the answer? If children misbehave at school we don't give them more freedom. There are widely published opinions that state this just makes landlords richer and housing rarer to further deregulate.
- TheGigaChad 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 29athrowaway 3y ago62% of people in SF are renting
- siliconc0w 3y agoThere is a difference between building a building that is actually providing housing to a local area and this bullshit where you buy property and just let it sit empty as an investment vehicle. The latter is actively harmful and essentially freeloading off the growth/work of the local community and the former is beneficial.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoIt only works as an investment vehicle if construction is constrained which keeps the prices going up as demand increases and supply can't. If you want to screw the people doing that, build enough new housing that prices go down and they lose money on their investment.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoThere was a place with no landlords. It was called the Soviet Union. I am sure you would love it there.