6 ms·

There’s nothing wrong with, say, buying a two family home, living in one unit, and renting out the other to help pay the mortgage. But corporate landlording, w

by crmd 2y ago

There’s nothing wrong with, say, buying a two family home, living in one unit, and renting out the other to help pay the mortgage. But corporate landlording, where an organization owns multiple buildings and runs it as a profit-maximizing enterprise, is a cancer on modern society and needs to be phased out.

wdh505 2y ago
Did you just say HOAs for all in order to have ownership of apartment units?
- inetknght 2y ago
  HOAs are a completely awful concept.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    No they aren't. Some are awful, because awful people get on the boards. But an HOA is just a management organization for all the shared property and amenities in a neigborhood or condominium development. Some people like living with well defined rules, mandatory property and exterior appearance standards, some people don't. If you don't like the idea of an HOA then don't buy property that's subject to one.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > HOAs are a completely awful concept. Having served on an HOA board for years, I can mostly verify this. There isn't a lot of overlap between wise, community minded people and the people who strongly desire to be on a board. The boards that have lost their way are dominated by people who really want to be there.
  - nothercastle 2y ago
    Only because there isn’t clear regulation on what they can and cannot do so they tend to overreach
  - silisili 2y ago
    Having lived in like 9 different places now, I completely keep flip flopping on them. It only takes one neighbor burning tires while doing burnouts, drag racing, and shooting rifles at all hours of the day to seek sane people to live around (true story). Or a lady who refuses to cut her yard, so you get mice and snakes everywhere in your yard. In the nonHOA places I lived, 3 were awful, and three were mostly fine. On the other hand with HOA, having another entity to tell you what to do with your large purchase doesn't sit right with me. On paper they're not so bad. My experiences with them(three times) have been completely incident free, plus got access to a nice pool and garbage collection. But you'll read a lot of no doubt true horror stories that show how things can go awry.
    - simfree 2y ago
      Functional municipal governments handle garbage collection, building recreation centers with pools, cleaning up green spaces when people dump tires, mowing overgrown sidewalks and controlling vermin. I've personally had my city pick up tires from a green space (also recorded the company that dumped 'em), cut overgrown yards and sidewalks, and they consistently collect my trash. Why would someone with a functional local government ever entertain the straightjacket that an HOA enforces on its residents? It's not their business what color I paint my house, where I put my basketball hoop, or what size and style hedge I grow around my front yard.
      - silisili 2y ago
        The simple answer to your question I think is that the vast, vast majority of the US does not have a functional local government that does any of those things. I remember calling the police about the rifle firing(this was not on acreage), and they acted like I was annoying them! From what one developer in Florida told me, the local government doesn't want to pay for roads, services, or amenities for any new developments, so requires they set up an HOA to cover it. Seeing as over 80% of new build homes are in an HOA, I tend to believe that.
        WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    HOA's that exist for the management of the common areas of a shared development and, when the development involves one or more multi-unit structures, for managing issues that relate to the shared structure are not an awful concept. HOA's whose charters allow them to, and who actually do, act to regulate things like the aesthetics or worse specifically negating functional utility of non-shared parts of the property when there are no structural or safety impacts to the share infrastructure are awful.
  - ryan_lane 2y ago
    HOAs for neighborhoods consisting of single-family housing are a nightmare. HOAs for co-ops are a necessity as you need to maintain the building, elevators, entryways, shared-spaces, etc.
- HWR_14 2y ago
  You need an HOA if you share ownership of a multiunit building. Someone has to maintain the elevator, lobby, roof etc.
rco8786 2y ago
Organizations owning multiple buildings and renting them out probably goes back beyond written history. It is not the boogeyman you think it is.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  It is when the owners collude to raise historically high prices even higher, maximizing pain and further reducing renters' meager resources. Because without ethics or meaningful enforcement there is nothing to stop them.
  - astrange 2y ago
    Prices are set by supply and demand, not by whether the seller has decided to be evil or not that day. They cannot collude without assistance from governments restricting new construction.
    - cool_dude85 2y ago
      I think the "build more" stuff rings very hollow. I live in the sun belt where no politician has ever said no to a developer, and I assure you that rents and home prices are broadly unaffordable here too, though perhaps less so than elsewhere.
      - astrange 2y ago
        It's definitely less than elsewhere - housing is only really bad in coastal blue states esp. CA/NY. You have single family zoning and height limits like everywhere else in the US. Allowing sprawl development works for a while but eventually you just run out of sprawl. Rents are down in Austin, Berkeley and LA lately because of construction though. Funny enough, the LA one was an accident and they're trying to undo it.
        HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
        > It's definitely less than elsewhere - housing is only really bad in coastal blue states esp. CA/NY. Rents in my politically purple region 900+ miles from any coast have increased 100% over the past decade. What I pay now for a 1bd exceeds what I paid for a 2bd in a nicer part of the city when I originally moved here. Rental applications no longer require 3x income, only 2x now; it's just expected that people devote half their gross income on housing. How anyone not making six digits lives in NYC is beyond me.
cscurmudgeon 2y ago
The cancer exists because of carcinogenic zoning laws and NIMBYism that make housing scarce.
rtpg 2y ago
to be honest as a renter I've had way more annoying experiences with individual landlords than with corporate landlords. My sort of conspiracy theory is that it's individuals expecting big returns driving up a lot of rent prices, rather than big rental corps that understand the value of slow consistent returns and don't feel the need to drive people out to resell. I have no proof of this though.
okasaki 2y ago
> There’s nothing wrong with, say, buying a two family home, living in one unit, and renting out the other to help pay the mortgage. There's obviously something wrong with that. > But corporate landlording, where an organization owns multiple buildings and runs it as a profit-maximizing enterprise, is a cancer on modern society and needs to be phased out. It's literally the same but on a larger scale? And actually I found little landlords to be the most "profit maximizing", petty, cruel and stupid. At least big organizations have some sort of reputation to protect, unlike anonymous landlords.
Aunche 2y ago
Corporate landlords are the only people adding new housing units in NYC.
throwaway2037 2y ago
"corporate landlording" -- I like this term. I haven't heard it before. It sounds like it will go well on a rag newspaper for a front page headline. Question about this so-called "corporate landlording": Tall apartment blocks in urban centers are exclusively build by corporations, as they require many millions in financing to build. What is your proposal for these urban centers?
- ryan_lane 2y ago
  High-rises aren't generally more efficient in terms of space than low-rises. Urban centers should be primarily large numbers of low-rise multi-housing complexes, which don't necessarily need to be owned by corporations. Ideally they'd be co-ops, and those co-ops would allow subletting.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    That doesn't make sense to me. If you stack 30 floors of apartments or offices, surely that takes roughly 10x less land (except extra space for elevators) than stacking them to 3 floors.
    - ryan_lane 2y ago
      A relatively large percentage of the space in a high rise is wasted: https://westnorth.com/2015/04/27/high-rises-land-efficient-but-not-floorspace-efficient/ https://westnorth.com/2015/04/27/high-rises-land-efficient-b... They also tend to be more expensive and use considerably more resources to build and maintain. Obviously any form of multi-tenant space is more efficient than single-family housing, but there's a sweet spot somewhere between single-family and high rise that's the most space efficient.
- Aethelwulf 2y ago
  You are confusing the initial construction with the long-term ownership. Most of the time, the corporation that builds the apartment block will sell the apartments, not continue to own them and rent them out.
infecto 2y ago
People say this but on average, the renter experience with a corporate landlord is most likely going to be much smoother and business like.

by crmd 2y ago

wdh505 2y ago

Did you just say HOAs for all in order to have ownership of apartment units?

inetknght 2y ago
HOAs are a completely awful concept.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  No they aren't. Some are awful, because awful people get on the boards. But an HOA is just a management organization for all the shared property and amenities in a neigborhood or condominium development. Some people like living with well defined rules, mandatory property and exterior appearance standards, some people don't. If you don't like the idea of an HOA then don't buy property that's subject to one.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > HOAs are a completely awful concept. Having served on an HOA board for years, I can mostly verify this. There isn't a lot of overlap between wise, community minded people and the people who strongly desire to be on a board. The boards that have lost their way are dominated by people who really want to be there.
- nothercastle 2y ago
  Only because there isn’t clear regulation on what they can and cannot do so they tend to overreach
- silisili 2y ago
  Having lived in like 9 different places now, I completely keep flip flopping on them. It only takes one neighbor burning tires while doing burnouts, drag racing, and shooting rifles at all hours of the day to seek sane people to live around (true story). Or a lady who refuses to cut her yard, so you get mice and snakes everywhere in your yard. In the nonHOA places I lived, 3 were awful, and three were mostly fine. On the other hand with HOA, having another entity to tell you what to do with your large purchase doesn't sit right with me. On paper they're not so bad. My experiences with them(three times) have been completely incident free, plus got access to a nice pool and garbage collection. But you'll read a lot of no doubt true horror stories that show how things can go awry.
  - simfree 2y ago
    Functional municipal governments handle garbage collection, building recreation centers with pools, cleaning up green spaces when people dump tires, mowing overgrown sidewalks and controlling vermin. I've personally had my city pick up tires from a green space (also recorded the company that dumped 'em), cut overgrown yards and sidewalks, and they consistently collect my trash. Why would someone with a functional local government ever entertain the straightjacket that an HOA enforces on its residents? It's not their business what color I paint my house, where I put my basketball hoop, or what size and style hedge I grow around my front yard.
    - silisili 2y ago
      The simple answer to your question I think is that the vast, vast majority of the US does not have a functional local government that does any of those things. I remember calling the police about the rifle firing(this was not on acreage), and they acted like I was annoying them! From what one developer in Florida told me, the local government doesn't want to pay for roads, services, or amenities for any new developments, so requires they set up an HOA to cover it. Seeing as over 80% of new build homes are in an HOA, I tend to believe that.
      - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  HOA's that exist for the management of the common areas of a shared development and, when the development involves one or more multi-unit structures, for managing issues that relate to the shared structure are not an awful concept. HOA's whose charters allow them to, and who actually do, act to regulate things like the aesthetics or worse specifically negating functional utility of non-shared parts of the property when there are no structural or safety impacts to the share infrastructure are awful.
- ryan_lane 2y ago
  HOAs for neighborhoods consisting of single-family housing are a nightmare. HOAs for co-ops are a necessity as you need to maintain the building, elevators, entryways, shared-spaces, etc.
HWR_14 2y ago
You need an HOA if you share ownership of a multiunit building. Someone has to maintain the elevator, lobby, roof etc.

rco8786 2y ago

Organizations owning multiple buildings and renting them out probably goes back beyond written history. It is not the boogeyman you think it is.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
It is when the owners collude to raise historically high prices even higher, maximizing pain and further reducing renters' meager resources. Because without ethics or meaningful enforcement there is nothing to stop them.
- astrange 2y ago
  Prices are set by supply and demand, not by whether the seller has decided to be evil or not that day. They cannot collude without assistance from governments restricting new construction.
  - cool_dude85 2y ago
    I think the "build more" stuff rings very hollow. I live in the sun belt where no politician has ever said no to a developer, and I assure you that rents and home prices are broadly unaffordable here too, though perhaps less so than elsewhere.
    - astrange 2y ago
      It's definitely less than elsewhere - housing is only really bad in coastal blue states esp. CA/NY. You have single family zoning and height limits like everywhere else in the US. Allowing sprawl development works for a while but eventually you just run out of sprawl. Rents are down in Austin, Berkeley and LA lately because of construction though. Funny enough, the LA one was an accident and they're trying to undo it.
      - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
        > It's definitely less than elsewhere - housing is only really bad in coastal blue states esp. CA/NY. Rents in my politically purple region 900+ miles from any coast have increased 100% over the past decade. What I pay now for a 1bd exceeds what I paid for a 2bd in a nicer part of the city when I originally moved here. Rental applications no longer require 3x income, only 2x now; it's just expected that people devote half their gross income on housing. How anyone not making six digits lives in NYC is beyond me.

cscurmudgeon 2y ago

The cancer exists because of carcinogenic zoning laws and NIMBYism that make housing scarce.

rtpg 2y ago

to be honest as a renter I've had way more annoying experiences with individual landlords than with corporate landlords. My sort of conspiracy theory is that it's individuals expecting big returns driving up a lot of rent prices, rather than big rental corps that understand the value of slow consistent returns and don't feel the need to drive people out to resell. I have no proof of this though.

okasaki 2y ago

> There’s nothing wrong with, say, buying a two family home, living in one unit, and renting out the other to help pay the mortgage. There's obviously something wrong with that. > But corporate landlording, where an organization owns multiple buildings and runs it as a profit-maximizing enterprise, is a cancer on modern society and needs to be phased out. It's literally the same but on a larger scale? And actually I found little landlords to be the most "profit maximizing", petty, cruel and stupid. At least big organizations have some sort of reputation to protect, unlike anonymous landlords.

Aunche 2y ago

Corporate landlords are the only people adding new housing units in NYC.

throwaway2037 2y ago

"corporate landlording" -- I like this term. I haven't heard it before. It sounds like it will go well on a rag newspaper for a front page headline. Question about this so-called "corporate landlording": Tall apartment blocks in urban centers are exclusively build by corporations, as they require many millions in financing to build. What is your proposal for these urban centers?

ryan_lane 2y ago
High-rises aren't generally more efficient in terms of space than low-rises. Urban centers should be primarily large numbers of low-rise multi-housing complexes, which don't necessarily need to be owned by corporations. Ideally they'd be co-ops, and those co-ops would allow subletting.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  That doesn't make sense to me. If you stack 30 floors of apartments or offices, surely that takes roughly 10x less land (except extra space for elevators) than stacking them to 3 floors.
  - ryan_lane 2y ago
    A relatively large percentage of the space in a high rise is wasted: https://westnorth.com/2015/04/27/high-rises-land-efficient-but-not-floorspace-efficient/ https://westnorth.com/2015/04/27/high-rises-land-efficient-b... They also tend to be more expensive and use considerably more resources to build and maintain. Obviously any form of multi-tenant space is more efficient than single-family housing, but there's a sweet spot somewhere between single-family and high rise that's the most space efficient.
Aethelwulf 2y ago
You are confusing the initial construction with the long-term ownership. Most of the time, the corporation that builds the apartment block will sell the apartments, not continue to own them and rent them out.

infecto 2y ago

People say this but on average, the renter experience with a corporate landlord is most likely going to be much smoother and business like.