6 ms·

In a just society, these companies would be dissolved and its leadership imprisoned at least.

bequanna 3y ago
If a behavior is occurring that is technically legal but the majority believe the behavior is harmful/undesirable we pass laws to stop that behavior. In this case, stopping or slowing this is actually pretty simple: Change the tax code which is currently overly favorable to real estate investors. Specifically: No accelerated depreciation, stretch out the depreciation schedule to 40 years from 27.5, stop allowing 1031 exchanges, eliminate real estate step up tax basis on death, etc.
- narcraft 3y ago
  Do the majority believe that 3 companies owning 19,000 homes between them in a particular city is harmful/undesirable behavior? Why? There's nothing obviously bad about that fact alone. How many houses are in Atlanta? The possibility that there are hundreds of LLCs shared between these 3 companies seems a bit suspect on the surface, but I could see how they could be simply acquiring smaller companies naturally. Idk how difficult it is or isn't to consolidate smaller LLCs into larger ones, but the implication of the article seems to be that this is a deliberate tactic to limit the amount of money these companies can be sued for in any one given case. Maybe, but would need more details to see that this is clearly what is happening and how much harm it is causing to aggrieved tenants.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I dare say the majority of renters feel the "rent is too damn high" - I've rarely found someone wishing they could pay more rent for what they're currently in (usually if they can afford more rent they move to something bigger/better). So the missing link is somehow proving the causality between "rents are high" and "3 companies own 19,000 rentals". That may seem obvious but could be very difficult to prove, especially as it may not be correct. Walmart owns 25% of the grocery business in the USA - does anyone really think grocery prices would go down if they divested? (It may still be better for society for them to do so, lowest price is not the only measurement, of course.)
  - bequanna 3y ago
    Yea, I don’t think the LLC liability game is that big of a deal. First, most of these companies will hold large liability insurance protection. But also, if someone sues and can prove negligence they can go further up the chain to the individual holding companies making the LLC shell game irrelevant.
- bombcar 3y ago
  None of those would do much against these behemoths, but they would harm the smallest landlords (which might be the intention). The "best" might be to adjust property tax on a given description of dwelling unit such that it's pretty annoyingly high, but each family effectively gets one for free. Then corporations and multi-unit owners would pay that, but individuals wouldn't. Prop 13 in CA would be much less of an issue if it excluded commercial real estate and only applied to "homesteads" owned and held by the resident owners.
  - bequanna 3y ago
    Companies don’t pay property tax, their renters do. I say this as someone who owned rental properties in an area that jacked up property taxes. Me and all the other landlords simply raised rent to compensate.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Sure, companies never pay anything, their customers do. But if your property tax was 200%, and a home-owner's was 1%, things would change. Now the argument about what the "minimal available housing" should be would come into play, because people who could not buy no matter what would now be homeless ...
      - bequanna 3y ago
        Right. I just think property tax is the wrong lever to pull here. I think we should remove carrots (the tax advantages at the federal level) instead of trying to penalize via harsher taxes.
chollida1 3y ago
In a just society, we'd identify what specific law they broke and try them based on that, no? If you think they are breaking the law then specify what law they are breaking.
- bavent 3y ago
  In a just society we would have laws that prevent this sort of thing, instead of lobbying by these corporations to prevent the passing of them in the first place, so people like you can go “well it’s not illegal therefore it’s ok”
- RHSeeger 3y ago
  > In a just society, we'd identify what specific law they broke and try them based on that ... and we would have the ability to get laws that best benefit society passed. Unfortunately - It's almost impossible to actually hold anyone with significant money accountable for anything - It's almost impossible to hold any company accountable for anything - It's almost impossible to get good laws passed, because the companies pay to get the lawmakers elected
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- cj 3y ago
  Or lobby/advocate for establishment of new laws that might be needed now, which may not have been needed in the past. Humans are inventive and creative (and often greedy). Once we find a loophole or a point of advantage, we tend to exploit it. For better or worse, the US legal system is slow to change so it takes a long time of people exploiting the system before the legal framework catches up. This morning I was reading some outrage post in a local facebook group for my small town. Everyone is up in arms about a new apartment complex being built. Then someone chimes in on the thread asking where everyone was when the permits were approved (hint: no one complaining attended the meetings to voice their concerns). TLDR: get involved in local politics. Too many people assume someone else will do it (or other people will vote so I don't have to), and rarely is that the case.
piyh 3y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
- pydry 3y ago
  A reminder not to throw the baby (culture) out with the bathwater. Maybe if it was called and treated as a landlord revolution it would have gone better.
  - piyh 3y ago
    "Stripping property rights from 10 million people" has a certain ring to it that is sure to garner bi-partisan support. I'm sure our congressmen can write some water tight legislation to do with with minimal second order effects.
    - pydry 3y ago
      Last time they did it in the US it led to a civil war. Still the right thing to do.
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  This. For those of you who DON'T know the history. Mao did just what OP wants. It went very very badly. Like millions of people died badly.
epistasis 3y ago
Having rented a single family home from a "small" landlord, and rented an apartment in a large building owned by a corporate landlord, and having had far worse experiences with law-breaking and exploitation from the "small" landlords, I really have no idea at all what motivates this thinking. At least the corporate landlord isn't going to control the local planning process to block housing, like small landlords and homeowners residents do. But to me, a corporation owning a home and renting it out is no worse than anybody else renting it out, and given that they likely are more rule-abiding and knowledgeable about the rules, it's often a big win.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Small-landlords are almost always a "mistake" on one side or the other. Most of them have an incorrect assessment of the costs associated with being a landlord, and this depresses the rental market and also traps them, making them do unethical and illegal things, like not maintaining properties, etc. And if the only reason they're renting their property is because it appreciated and they're carrying a low-interest rate mortgage, they're almost certainly not accounting for the costs. When people realize you can't rent properties profitably and pay a property management firm to manage it, they realize they're not a landlord, they're an underpaid property management firm for the bank. That only makes sense if appreciation is nuts and you can go long on huge leverage. The surest thing to strip down the number of landlords is to slow appreciation, when appreciation is sky-high even idiots doing everything wrong come out smelling like roses. I think a strong thing to work on would be to reduce the "single rental LLC" trick that people use to separate the various properties
IncreasePosts 3y ago
In a just society, why would anyone own a house? Wouldn't we all be renters, and the rent would be reasonable, and we wouldn't be saddled with worrying about major home repairs, and we should have strong protections from being evicted, and we would be able to move to some other house without going through a huge real estate deal?
- pydry 3y ago
  In a just society we'd have something akin to a land value tax. That would make land-lording into a low profit respectable profession and would drive slumlords out of business. The only way to profit would be to actually be good at it would be to manage homes well. Margins would come from that, not from property speculation (how trump made his money). It would also create a titanic amount of tax revenue from the non-productive economy (land hoarding) which would mean that taxes could be reduced or even eliminated on the productive economy (e.g. income taxes).
- bombcar 3y ago
  Ownership comes with privileges for the cost. Sure, you have to deal with major repairs, but you also get to choose the designs, colors, layout, and more for your house, and you don't have someone watching over your shoulder to "preserve their investment" beyond the bank requiring insurance. Ownership has other advantages for society beyond that, there's a reason people say "drive it like a rental".
phailhaus 3y ago
Based on what law? If you can't identify an actual law they're breaking, then you're asking people to act on "feelings". That's how you get things like the Cultural Revolution, which saw communities destroy themselves over ideological purity tests. Oh, you bought yourself a kind-of nice car? Bourgeoisie scum! What we need is systemic change, one that makes accumulating 19,000 houses unprofitable. Georgism is one potential solution to the problem of housing speculation, without resorting to randomly locking up people that "have too many houses". [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
dukeyukey 3y ago
Why? Like genuinely, why? Metro Artlanta has a population of 6,237,435 people. With an average of ~2.1 persons per household, that gives 2.97 million homes in Metro Atlanta. These companies own 0.64% of them. That's incredibly, ridicously few.
- caditinpiscinam 3y ago
  "Three corporate landlords control nearly 11 percent of the single-family homes available for rent in metro Atlanta’s core counties"
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    Walmart owns 25% of the entire US grocery market. 11% of a certain class of homes split between 3 companies doesn't strike me as too bad. There's always the other 89% of single-family homes to rent if they get too pushy or expensive, or of course non single-family homes. Or areas just outside the core counties, like Athens or Columbus. I fucking _wish_ I could rent from corporate landlords. The few times I have they've been _miles_ better than the amateur landlords that own most of my city.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      The surprising thing is corporate landlords owning single-family homes. That is the aberration; most corporate landlords want to own multi-tenant buildings to eke out a bit more profit from the economies of scale. The fact that they do own 19,000 homes is indicative of appreciation being insane (and they're gambling on that, when it slows down they'll dump) OR they're stuck with them for whatever reason and trying to deal with it as best they can (banks in the 2000s crisis often did NOT rent the houses they foreclosed on, because it would cost them more than just leaving them empty).
      - dukeyukey 3y ago
        Which suggests the market is broken somewhere. At least here in the UK, the land a house is around half the price of the home. Which is insane, and suggests the market is broken by limited access to land. Which is _directly_ controlled by local governments. Ergo, liberalise planning.
caditinpiscinam 3y ago
I know a lot of people look at this sort of rhetoric and write it off as absurd, but I think your underlying point is correct: the people who do this sort of thing are probably in the top 10% in terms of making the world a worse place. For many though this is a tough pill to swallow, so you end up in the situation we're in now: daily posts about the collapse of the "social contract", mental health crises, and institutional dysfunction, while completely ignoring the underlying causes. That being said, the last thing we need is more people in prison
- epistasis 3y ago
  The closest I have ever gotten to somebody articulating how it makes the world worse was a homeowner saying that they didn't like it because it allowed renters into their neighborhood. But I'm guessing there's some other reason that you think this makes the world worse. Can you tell me how?
  - caditinpiscinam 3y ago
    I can try, but it'll depend on where you're coming from. A few preliminary questions: how many close people in your life (family, friends, spouse, you yourself) are currently live in rental housing? How many own rental housing?
    - epistasis 3y ago
      This is an inauspicious start... would your answer change based on how I answer? I have lived in rental housing far longer than I have owned a house, and my personal politics are such that I don't think that land should be private property. I don't associate with landlords. None of my family members have ever been landlords, but again, why would this matter? (Edit: and I am younger than 50 in California, most of my friends are renters and have little hope of ever buying a home, and more friends have been forced to leave the state due to high housing costs than I have friends currently. The churn of displacement makes me furious) The only real reason (and one that I heartily disagree with) to be against corporate ownership of single family homes is that it gives renters access to the amenities that have been hidden behind the door of a 20% down payment in a wealthy neighborhood.

If a behavior is occurring that is technically legal but the majority believe the behavior is harmful/undesirable we pass laws to stop that behavior. In this case, stopping or slowing this is actually pretty simple: Change the tax code which is currently overly favorable to real estate investors. Specifically: No accelerated depreciation, stretch out the depreciation schedule to 40 years from 27.5, stop allowing 1031 exchanges, eliminate real estate step up tax basis on death, etc.

narcraft 3y ago
Do the majority believe that 3 companies owning 19,000 homes between them in a particular city is harmful/undesirable behavior? Why? There's nothing obviously bad about that fact alone. How many houses are in Atlanta? The possibility that there are hundreds of LLCs shared between these 3 companies seems a bit suspect on the surface, but I could see how they could be simply acquiring smaller companies naturally. Idk how difficult it is or isn't to consolidate smaller LLCs into larger ones, but the implication of the article seems to be that this is a deliberate tactic to limit the amount of money these companies can be sued for in any one given case. Maybe, but would need more details to see that this is clearly what is happening and how much harm it is causing to aggrieved tenants.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I dare say the majority of renters feel the "rent is too damn high" - I've rarely found someone wishing they could pay more rent for what they're currently in (usually if they can afford more rent they move to something bigger/better). So the missing link is somehow proving the causality between "rents are high" and "3 companies own 19,000 rentals". That may seem obvious but could be very difficult to prove, especially as it may not be correct. Walmart owns 25% of the grocery business in the USA - does anyone really think grocery prices would go down if they divested? (It may still be better for society for them to do so, lowest price is not the only measurement, of course.)
- bequanna 3y ago
  Yea, I don’t think the LLC liability game is that big of a deal. First, most of these companies will hold large liability insurance protection. But also, if someone sues and can prove negligence they can go further up the chain to the individual holding companies making the LLC shell game irrelevant.
bombcar 3y ago
None of those would do much against these behemoths, but they would harm the smallest landlords (which might be the intention). The "best" might be to adjust property tax on a given description of dwelling unit such that it's pretty annoyingly high, but each family effectively gets one for free. Then corporations and multi-unit owners would pay that, but individuals wouldn't. Prop 13 in CA would be much less of an issue if it excluded commercial real estate and only applied to "homesteads" owned and held by the resident owners.
- bequanna 3y ago
  Companies don’t pay property tax, their renters do. I say this as someone who owned rental properties in an area that jacked up property taxes. Me and all the other landlords simply raised rent to compensate.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Sure, companies never pay anything, their customers do. But if your property tax was 200%, and a home-owner's was 1%, things would change. Now the argument about what the "minimal available housing" should be would come into play, because people who could not buy no matter what would now be homeless ...
    - bequanna 3y ago
      Right. I just think property tax is the wrong lever to pull here. I think we should remove carrots (the tax advantages at the federal level) instead of trying to penalize via harsher taxes.

chollida1 3y ago

In a just society, we'd identify what specific law they broke and try them based on that, no? If you think they are breaking the law then specify what law they are breaking.

bavent 3y ago
In a just society we would have laws that prevent this sort of thing, instead of lobbying by these corporations to prevent the passing of them in the first place, so people like you can go “well it’s not illegal therefore it’s ok”
RHSeeger 3y ago
> In a just society, we'd identify what specific law they broke and try them based on that ... and we would have the ability to get laws that best benefit society passed. Unfortunately - It's almost impossible to actually hold anyone with significant money accountable for anything - It's almost impossible to hold any company accountable for anything - It's almost impossible to get good laws passed, because the companies pay to get the lawmakers elected
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
cj 3y ago
Or lobby/advocate for establishment of new laws that might be needed now, which may not have been needed in the past. Humans are inventive and creative (and often greedy). Once we find a loophole or a point of advantage, we tend to exploit it. For better or worse, the US legal system is slow to change so it takes a long time of people exploiting the system before the legal framework catches up. This morning I was reading some outrage post in a local facebook group for my small town. Everyone is up in arms about a new apartment complex being built. Then someone chimes in on the thread asking where everyone was when the permits were approved (hint: no one complaining attended the meetings to voice their concerns). TLDR: get involved in local politics. Too many people assume someone else will do it (or other people will vote so I don't have to), and rarely is that the case.

piyh 3y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

pydry 3y ago
A reminder not to throw the baby (culture) out with the bathwater. Maybe if it was called and treated as a landlord revolution it would have gone better.
- piyh 3y ago
  "Stripping property rights from 10 million people" has a certain ring to it that is sure to garner bi-partisan support. I'm sure our congressmen can write some water tight legislation to do with with minimal second order effects.
  - pydry 3y ago
    Last time they did it in the US it led to a civil war. Still the right thing to do.
zer00eyz 3y ago
This. For those of you who DON'T know the history. Mao did just what OP wants. It went very very badly. Like millions of people died badly.

epistasis 3y ago

Having rented a single family home from a "small" landlord, and rented an apartment in a large building owned by a corporate landlord, and having had far worse experiences with law-breaking and exploitation from the "small" landlords, I really have no idea at all what motivates this thinking. At least the corporate landlord isn't going to control the local planning process to block housing, like small landlords and homeowners residents do. But to me, a corporation owning a home and renting it out is no worse than anybody else renting it out, and given that they likely are more rule-abiding and knowledgeable about the rules, it's often a big win.

bombcar 3y ago
Small-landlords are almost always a "mistake" on one side or the other. Most of them have an incorrect assessment of the costs associated with being a landlord, and this depresses the rental market and also traps them, making them do unethical and illegal things, like not maintaining properties, etc. And if the only reason they're renting their property is because it appreciated and they're carrying a low-interest rate mortgage, they're almost certainly not accounting for the costs. When people realize you can't rent properties profitably and pay a property management firm to manage it, they realize they're not a landlord, they're an underpaid property management firm for the bank. That only makes sense if appreciation is nuts and you can go long on huge leverage. The surest thing to strip down the number of landlords is to slow appreciation, when appreciation is sky-high even idiots doing everything wrong come out smelling like roses. I think a strong thing to work on would be to reduce the "single rental LLC" trick that people use to separate the various properties

IncreasePosts 3y ago

In a just society, why would anyone own a house? Wouldn't we all be renters, and the rent would be reasonable, and we wouldn't be saddled with worrying about major home repairs, and we should have strong protections from being evicted, and we would be able to move to some other house without going through a huge real estate deal?

pydry 3y ago
In a just society we'd have something akin to a land value tax. That would make land-lording into a low profit respectable profession and would drive slumlords out of business. The only way to profit would be to actually be good at it would be to manage homes well. Margins would come from that, not from property speculation (how trump made his money). It would also create a titanic amount of tax revenue from the non-productive economy (land hoarding) which would mean that taxes could be reduced or even eliminated on the productive economy (e.g. income taxes).
bombcar 3y ago
Ownership comes with privileges for the cost. Sure, you have to deal with major repairs, but you also get to choose the designs, colors, layout, and more for your house, and you don't have someone watching over your shoulder to "preserve their investment" beyond the bank requiring insurance. Ownership has other advantages for society beyond that, there's a reason people say "drive it like a rental".

phailhaus 3y ago

Based on what law? If you can't identify an actual law they're breaking, then you're asking people to act on "feelings". That's how you get things like the Cultural Revolution, which saw communities destroy themselves over ideological purity tests. Oh, you bought yourself a kind-of nice car? Bourgeoisie scum! What we need is systemic change, one that makes accumulating 19,000 houses unprofitable. Georgism is one potential solution to the problem of housing speculation, without resorting to randomly locking up people that "have too many houses". [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

dukeyukey 3y ago

Why? Like genuinely, why? Metro Artlanta has a population of 6,237,435 people. With an average of ~2.1 persons per household, that gives 2.97 million homes in Metro Atlanta. These companies own 0.64% of them. That's incredibly, ridicously few.

caditinpiscinam 3y ago
"Three corporate landlords control nearly 11 percent of the single-family homes available for rent in metro Atlanta’s core counties"
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  Walmart owns 25% of the entire US grocery market. 11% of a certain class of homes split between 3 companies doesn't strike me as too bad. There's always the other 89% of single-family homes to rent if they get too pushy or expensive, or of course non single-family homes. Or areas just outside the core counties, like Athens or Columbus. I fucking _wish_ I could rent from corporate landlords. The few times I have they've been _miles_ better than the amateur landlords that own most of my city.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    The surprising thing is corporate landlords owning single-family homes. That is the aberration; most corporate landlords want to own multi-tenant buildings to eke out a bit more profit from the economies of scale. The fact that they do own 19,000 homes is indicative of appreciation being insane (and they're gambling on that, when it slows down they'll dump) OR they're stuck with them for whatever reason and trying to deal with it as best they can (banks in the 2000s crisis often did NOT rent the houses they foreclosed on, because it would cost them more than just leaving them empty).
    - dukeyukey 3y ago
      Which suggests the market is broken somewhere. At least here in the UK, the land a house is around half the price of the home. Which is insane, and suggests the market is broken by limited access to land. Which is _directly_ controlled by local governments. Ergo, liberalise planning.

caditinpiscinam 3y ago

I know a lot of people look at this sort of rhetoric and write it off as absurd, but I think your underlying point is correct: the people who do this sort of thing are probably in the top 10% in terms of making the world a worse place. For many though this is a tough pill to swallow, so you end up in the situation we're in now: daily posts about the collapse of the "social contract", mental health crises, and institutional dysfunction, while completely ignoring the underlying causes. That being said, the last thing we need is more people in prison

epistasis 3y ago
The closest I have ever gotten to somebody articulating how it makes the world worse was a homeowner saying that they didn't like it because it allowed renters into their neighborhood. But I'm guessing there's some other reason that you think this makes the world worse. Can you tell me how?
- caditinpiscinam 3y ago
  I can try, but it'll depend on where you're coming from. A few preliminary questions: how many close people in your life (family, friends, spouse, you yourself) are currently live in rental housing? How many own rental housing?
  - epistasis 3y ago
    This is an inauspicious start... would your answer change based on how I answer? I have lived in rental housing far longer than I have owned a house, and my personal politics are such that I don't think that land should be private property. I don't associate with landlords. None of my family members have ever been landlords, but again, why would this matter? (Edit: and I am younger than 50 in California, most of my friends are renters and have little hope of ever buying a home, and more friends have been forced to leave the state due to high housing costs than I have friends currently. The churn of displacement makes me furious) The only real reason (and one that I heartily disagree with) to be against corporate ownership of single family homes is that it gives renters access to the amenities that have been hidden behind the door of a 20% down payment in a wealthy neighborhood.