5 ms·

Reminds me of an issue with another Paradox Interactive title, Victoria 3. They had to rework it because, basically, the upper-classes stood in the way of all

Reminds me of an issue with another Paradox Interactive title, Victoria 3. They had to rework it because, basically, the upper-classes stood in the way of all the good laws and reforms. On top of that, communism was overpowered to the point where the middle class (and sometimes lower class) in communist countries were materially better-off than the upper class in non-communist countries (https://www.pcgamer.com/victoria-3-communism-op/ https://www.pcgamer.com/victoria-3-communism-op/). God I love Paradox Interactive. They aren't even trying to radicalize gamers against rent-seeking capitalism. They're just putting out games with complex simulations under the hood and inadvertently discovering that landlords ruin the game.

recursive 2y ago
Speaking from the perspective of a long-time renter, and current home owner. (well, the bank actually) Maybe I'm hopelessly corrupted by the system, but I'd like to try to understand. Let's say you wanted to live somewhere for like a year. If there were no landlords, how could you do that? Buy a house? I mean, I wouldn't have been able to afford that when I was in college. And I had different roommates each year. The paperwork would have been a nightmare. Just the closing costs and agent fees can be $10k. Maybe houses would be cheaper, and the whole realtor/title thing can be reformed too. Maybe you could flip your house ownership more like a used car. But if that's the case, where are these houses coming from? Who would build them and why? Or maybe it would be all government housing projects? Landlords get a lot of hate. I've had a bunch of them, and most of them have been fine, basically. But like, honest question, what's the alternative?
- haileys 2y ago
  Lots of public housing of a decent standard. The problem is that people, unless they can afford to buy, are forced into renting from a private landlord and working to pay off someone else's mortgage. If you have enough livable public housing such that anybody who needs a place to live can get a place on the public system, the power balance changes and private landlords aren't so much of a problem.
  - smeej 2y ago
    Given how poorly government seems to run everything else it touches, this sounds like a dystopia to me.
    - BirdieNZ 2y ago
      It might depend on your government; Singapore is at least one example of a country which does state housing very well.
    - em-bee 2y ago
      it works in vienna: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40257927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40257927
    - lazyasciiart 2y ago
      American government is built on the idea that government is intrinsically both malign and incompetent. That's why they have broken it up into infinite pieces - so that every section of government is constrained by every other section, and then they complain that no section of the government does anything. Why can't the city fix public transit? Well, maybe you should ask the separately funded and elected Transit Authority. Oh, they say there's no point running buses along roads with one house per mile? Well, maybe you should ask the city to upzone. Oh, they say they can't upzone because there's no infrastructure for electricity or sewer? Well, maybe you should ask the Public Utility District. And then they would need schools? That's a problem for the Local School District. But the school district can't afford to run school buses everywhere? Well, that's nothing to do with the Transit Authority! Perhaps you should burn it all down, which will be easy because the levy to fund the local Fire Department failed and they can't afford trucks.
    - r00fus 2y ago
      When you live in a country where the unrestrained ruling class wants to make government run poorly then that’s what you get.
  - mjevans 2y ago
    It's the same fix IRL. The solution to a broken market, is to fix the market. Write the rules / laws to encourage competition and thus the desired outcome. If something is a natural monopoly then make it a utility, regulate it properly, and have the competition at the worker union and/or contracted workers layers. The only way to fix too expensive housing is to build enough housing to drive the cost down via supply. If there's enough 'close enough' to where people want / need to live, then if someone asks too much it won't sell. Taxes that incentivize one (or at most two for a summer/winter home) dwelling per person and the 'Land Value Tax' for density and under-utilization issues help prevent unwanted speculation and rent seeking in the market.
- HDThoreaun 2y ago
  What people dislike I think isnt actaully the act of being a landlord, but the land speculation that most landlords partake in. Clearly providing homes to rent is valuable to society, the problem is that a huge part of the landlording business is waiting for the value of the land to increase, which obviously pisses people off as they see the landlords getting something for nothing. The alternative is land value tax which makes land essentially worthless because the government captures most of its value, destroying the ability to speculate on it.
  - r00fus 2y ago
    Land value tax does not make land worthless. It makes land speculation less “rent-seeking”. If you’re not doing anything meaningful with the land, then it’s not gonna be profitable to own.
    - HDThoreaun 2y ago
      True land value tax collects almost all of the lands rents. An asset with no profits is inherently worthless.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  It's a good question with no good answer. Obviously, renting needs to be an option for those that actually want to rent because they don't expect to be somewhere on a long-term basis. But rent-seeking (among other forms of treating real estate as an investment) is an absolute and utter cancer. Buying a house for the sole purpose of extracting profit makes you a financial vampire, as far as I'm concerned. The problem is made worse by banks that don't trust you with a $2,000/month mortgage payment while the landlord will happily let you sign a $2,500/month rental agreement. Look, housing can either be affordable, or it can be a form of investment. It's simply not possible to be both. Landlords are participating in the investment camp, which causes a negative effect on affordability. What's the alternative? I don't know. But I don't need to have a solution in mind to point out the problem.
  - kelseyfrog 2y ago
    > What's the alternative? You would think this area would be ripe for innovative economic models and simulation, but in my entire life I've only heard of one alternative.
    - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
      Any simulation that doesn't result in land owners getting richer will be a non-starter.
  - Panzer04 2y ago
    I think this mindset comes from a misunderstanding of the cost of capital. Buying and owning a house is not free - even if the entire thing had zero upkeep and maintenance. The money spend on the house (lets say 1m) has a cost associated with the foregone interest/income it could have earned you elsewhere (opportunity cost, basically) Buying a 1m house, even if you borrow no money, costs you a net 50kpa (currently) in foregone, zero-risk interest income from a bank or the government. Them renting it out is just trying to earn a return on that investment (which is just putting upfront capital and hoping to earn more than it costs). Sometimes they lose (I think housing in many places costs significantly more in interest than rental return right now), but largely they've done well because supply is constrained in most places leading to bidding up of prices. It's just a supply issue - not enough housing for everyone. There's no reason housing can't be both an investment and a place to live - Do you think farmers grow and sell food out of the goodness of their hearts? Most places make it nigh-impossible to just chuck up a building for people to live in - local governments want permits, you have to provide minimum levels of parking, whatever. Even granny flats will get you in trouble in a lot of places. That's the problem, IMO. In few other fields is it so hard to actually invest in building more of something. Well-meaning regulations that enforce a minimum standard of housing do have drawbacks as well - eg. minimum 50sqm apartments. It means people that might just want a single room apartment to live in have to buy (or rent) more property than they want or need. I think these make sense for things that are definitely net good (eg. insulation, efficiency standards, etc) for everyone as a whole, but less so when they translate into a oversized housing, excessive parking, and so on - things that add expense that might not be used.
- Iulioh 2y ago
  The problem is just the price. Trowing away 30-40% of your paycheck with no downsides for the other part is no fun. There is basically 0 risk involved in renting besides...having less than what you plan to make? You will always find someone is your price is good enough. Like i understand how for example a hotel works, houses are like that but long term, the landlords manage houses and get a salary by doing so but...why has to be such a big part of my salary? Rent control and public housing (you can't buy it, you can only rent it for a price that covers maintainance and emergency found)
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    Stability can also be a problem. If you own a home, only eminent domain can take it from you. If you've got a mortgaged home, only eminent domain and the bank can take it from you. If you're renting your home, your landlord can just say "nope, you don't get to live here any more, here's your 6 months' notice" (or whatever), and then you don't have your home any more.
    - Iulioh 2y ago
      Well, on a way that's a problem but i don't really think it's that big of a problem. If you are a good renter (important part) a landlord will kick you out only if he wants to 1)Sell the house 2)Increase the amount of money and trowing you out is the only way to do so The first problem is unsolvable but pretty rare, a good renter is a money printer and landlords like stability the same way you do. The second could be mitigated by rent protection laws. In the end is still a compromise, you don't have to invest massive amounts of capital but don't have complete control
      - em-bee 2y ago
        in austria/germany rent protection even does not allow you to evict a tenant when you are selling a house. the new landlord has to continue the rent contract, unless they want to use the house for themselves. (but then they have to prove that forcing the tenant to move does not cause them problems. no chance of that if moving would cause the tenant to lose a job or force their kids to change schools)
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  There is an alternative, which doesn’t seem to be common, but isn’t novel: some variant of “rent to own”. If you really squint, a mortgage is a monthly rent to a bank-owned property. Obviously that’s not what’s happening legally but that’s basically the “UX” of a mortgage. So why have rentals without ownership at all, instead of 0%-down mortgages. Obviously credit-worthiness seems like an issue at first but everyone needs to pay their bills whether it’s to a bank or to a landlord. Our legal system already has plenty of methods to recoup unpaid debts. When it’s to a mortgage, the bank also has the entire equity of the paid off loan to potentially draw down before eviction/foreclosure is necessary. This could be a huge lifeline for people who have a random financial emergency mid-life to avoid eviction. In this hypothetical world of no landlords, I could also see a specific provision of renting just for roommates to simplify this too because a rotating cast of roommates would make equity balancing a nightmare.
- Panzer04 2y ago
  I agree with you, fwiw. I don't get the hate for landlords either. There's just a large segment of the population that want to own a house and don't care who gets stepped on once they own it - which is really how we got into this situation in the first place. I'd much rather blame systems and regulations that make it hard for enough housing to be built. It makes zero sense to me that there are blocks worth 5m in the inner city, while houses in newbuild suburbs cost 400k. In any reasonable system it should be trivial to unlock value by buying the expensive block, sticking 20 apartments on it and selling them for 1m each.
  - Carrok 2y ago
    > I don't get the hate for landlords Maybe it's because you pay their mortgage, often close to a hundred dollars a day if not more, and they won't fix the front door or the refrigerator. Then when you move out, they charge you for normal wear and tear like you threw a series of raves.
    - recursive 2y ago
      I've had at least half a dozen landlords in my life. None were this bad, even the bad ones.
      - Carrok 2y ago
        Lucky you.
- squishboi 2y ago
  The alternative is housing cooperatives. Basically, a non-profit that owns the property(ies) and is democratically operated by the tenants. Tenants still sign contracts and pay rent, but there's no landlord. Some cooperatives, if they're large enough or have the funds, even have employees that do all the work that a landlord normally would. I'd love to live in a world where all residential property is owner-occupied, owned by cooperatives, or maybe public housing. Just take the rent-seeking behavior and speculation out of the equation entirely.
bitwize 2y ago
This is exactly what was done with the Landlord's Game (now known as Monopoly).
mcmoor 2y ago
I mean there are several reasons why this is not argument for communism: 1. Here communism means handling it all yourself and capitalism means leaving some part of the economy to AI. It's immediately obvious why one will prevail since we dont have AGI yet. Also the game provides million times more information than Project Cybersyn ever hoped it'd have. 2. The dev have been accused to be very biased for communism. For the first few patches they don't even allow capitalists to set up their own investment ffs, only able to invest money to "investment pool" that will be used by government (player). Apart from design choices, they are also ones responsible for AI. They can set up landlords to be super selfish and revolutionaries to be super selfless and vice versa. 3. One of the most notable thing is that in the previous game, Victoria 2, it's not this lopsided. Even when that game is as robust of a simulation or even more so.
jowea 2y ago
> Reminds me of an issue with another Paradox Interactive title, Victoria 3. They had to rework it because, basically, the upper-classes stood in the way of all the good laws and reforms. A bit generalizing but I don't see what's wrong with that. At least for the landowning classes.

recursive 2y ago

Speaking from the perspective of a long-time renter, and current home owner. (well, the bank actually) Maybe I'm hopelessly corrupted by the system, but I'd like to try to understand. Let's say you wanted to live somewhere for like a year. If there were no landlords, how could you do that? Buy a house? I mean, I wouldn't have been able to afford that when I was in college. And I had different roommates each year. The paperwork would have been a nightmare. Just the closing costs and agent fees can be $10k. Maybe houses would be cheaper, and the whole realtor/title thing can be reformed too. Maybe you could flip your house ownership more like a used car. But if that's the case, where are these houses coming from? Who would build them and why? Or maybe it would be all government housing projects? Landlords get a lot of hate. I've had a bunch of them, and most of them have been fine, basically. But like, honest question, what's the alternative?

haileys 2y ago
Lots of public housing of a decent standard. The problem is that people, unless they can afford to buy, are forced into renting from a private landlord and working to pay off someone else's mortgage. If you have enough livable public housing such that anybody who needs a place to live can get a place on the public system, the power balance changes and private landlords aren't so much of a problem.
- smeej 2y ago
  Given how poorly government seems to run everything else it touches, this sounds like a dystopia to me.
  - BirdieNZ 2y ago
    It might depend on your government; Singapore is at least one example of a country which does state housing very well.
  - em-bee 2y ago
    it works in vienna: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40257927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40257927
  - lazyasciiart 2y ago
    American government is built on the idea that government is intrinsically both malign and incompetent. That's why they have broken it up into infinite pieces - so that every section of government is constrained by every other section, and then they complain that no section of the government does anything. Why can't the city fix public transit? Well, maybe you should ask the separately funded and elected Transit Authority. Oh, they say there's no point running buses along roads with one house per mile? Well, maybe you should ask the city to upzone. Oh, they say they can't upzone because there's no infrastructure for electricity or sewer? Well, maybe you should ask the Public Utility District. And then they would need schools? That's a problem for the Local School District. But the school district can't afford to run school buses everywhere? Well, that's nothing to do with the Transit Authority! Perhaps you should burn it all down, which will be easy because the levy to fund the local Fire Department failed and they can't afford trucks.
  - r00fus 2y ago
    When you live in a country where the unrestrained ruling class wants to make government run poorly then that’s what you get.
- mjevans 2y ago
  It's the same fix IRL. The solution to a broken market, is to fix the market. Write the rules / laws to encourage competition and thus the desired outcome. If something is a natural monopoly then make it a utility, regulate it properly, and have the competition at the worker union and/or contracted workers layers. The only way to fix too expensive housing is to build enough housing to drive the cost down via supply. If there's enough 'close enough' to where people want / need to live, then if someone asks too much it won't sell. Taxes that incentivize one (or at most two for a summer/winter home) dwelling per person and the 'Land Value Tax' for density and under-utilization issues help prevent unwanted speculation and rent seeking in the market.
HDThoreaun 2y ago
What people dislike I think isnt actaully the act of being a landlord, but the land speculation that most landlords partake in. Clearly providing homes to rent is valuable to society, the problem is that a huge part of the landlording business is waiting for the value of the land to increase, which obviously pisses people off as they see the landlords getting something for nothing. The alternative is land value tax which makes land essentially worthless because the government captures most of its value, destroying the ability to speculate on it.
- r00fus 2y ago
  Land value tax does not make land worthless. It makes land speculation less “rent-seeking”. If you’re not doing anything meaningful with the land, then it’s not gonna be profitable to own.
  - HDThoreaun 2y ago
    True land value tax collects almost all of the lands rents. An asset with no profits is inherently worthless.
Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
It's a good question with no good answer. Obviously, renting needs to be an option for those that actually want to rent because they don't expect to be somewhere on a long-term basis. But rent-seeking (among other forms of treating real estate as an investment) is an absolute and utter cancer. Buying a house for the sole purpose of extracting profit makes you a financial vampire, as far as I'm concerned. The problem is made worse by banks that don't trust you with a $2,000/month mortgage payment while the landlord will happily let you sign a $2,500/month rental agreement. Look, housing can either be affordable, or it can be a form of investment. It's simply not possible to be both. Landlords are participating in the investment camp, which causes a negative effect on affordability. What's the alternative? I don't know. But I don't need to have a solution in mind to point out the problem.
- kelseyfrog 2y ago
  > What's the alternative? You would think this area would be ripe for innovative economic models and simulation, but in my entire life I've only heard of one alternative.
  - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
    Any simulation that doesn't result in land owners getting richer will be a non-starter.
- Panzer04 2y ago
  I think this mindset comes from a misunderstanding of the cost of capital. Buying and owning a house is not free - even if the entire thing had zero upkeep and maintenance. The money spend on the house (lets say 1m) has a cost associated with the foregone interest/income it could have earned you elsewhere (opportunity cost, basically) Buying a 1m house, even if you borrow no money, costs you a net 50kpa (currently) in foregone, zero-risk interest income from a bank or the government. Them renting it out is just trying to earn a return on that investment (which is just putting upfront capital and hoping to earn more than it costs). Sometimes they lose (I think housing in many places costs significantly more in interest than rental return right now), but largely they've done well because supply is constrained in most places leading to bidding up of prices. It's just a supply issue - not enough housing for everyone. There's no reason housing can't be both an investment and a place to live - Do you think farmers grow and sell food out of the goodness of their hearts? Most places make it nigh-impossible to just chuck up a building for people to live in - local governments want permits, you have to provide minimum levels of parking, whatever. Even granny flats will get you in trouble in a lot of places. That's the problem, IMO. In few other fields is it so hard to actually invest in building more of something. Well-meaning regulations that enforce a minimum standard of housing do have drawbacks as well - eg. minimum 50sqm apartments. It means people that might just want a single room apartment to live in have to buy (or rent) more property than they want or need. I think these make sense for things that are definitely net good (eg. insulation, efficiency standards, etc) for everyone as a whole, but less so when they translate into a oversized housing, excessive parking, and so on - things that add expense that might not be used.
Iulioh 2y ago
The problem is just the price. Trowing away 30-40% of your paycheck with no downsides for the other part is no fun. There is basically 0 risk involved in renting besides...having less than what you plan to make? You will always find someone is your price is good enough. Like i understand how for example a hotel works, houses are like that but long term, the landlords manage houses and get a salary by doing so but...why has to be such a big part of my salary? Rent control and public housing (you can't buy it, you can only rent it for a price that covers maintainance and emergency found)
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  Stability can also be a problem. If you own a home, only eminent domain can take it from you. If you've got a mortgaged home, only eminent domain and the bank can take it from you. If you're renting your home, your landlord can just say "nope, you don't get to live here any more, here's your 6 months' notice" (or whatever), and then you don't have your home any more.
  - Iulioh 2y ago
    Well, on a way that's a problem but i don't really think it's that big of a problem. If you are a good renter (important part) a landlord will kick you out only if he wants to 1)Sell the house 2)Increase the amount of money and trowing you out is the only way to do so The first problem is unsolvable but pretty rare, a good renter is a money printer and landlords like stability the same way you do. The second could be mitigated by rent protection laws. In the end is still a compromise, you don't have to invest massive amounts of capital but don't have complete control
    - em-bee 2y ago
      in austria/germany rent protection even does not allow you to evict a tenant when you are selling a house. the new landlord has to continue the rent contract, unless they want to use the house for themselves. (but then they have to prove that forcing the tenant to move does not cause them problems. no chance of that if moving would cause the tenant to lose a job or force their kids to change schools)
vineyardmike 2y ago
There is an alternative, which doesn’t seem to be common, but isn’t novel: some variant of “rent to own”. If you really squint, a mortgage is a monthly rent to a bank-owned property. Obviously that’s not what’s happening legally but that’s basically the “UX” of a mortgage. So why have rentals without ownership at all, instead of 0%-down mortgages. Obviously credit-worthiness seems like an issue at first but everyone needs to pay their bills whether it’s to a bank or to a landlord. Our legal system already has plenty of methods to recoup unpaid debts. When it’s to a mortgage, the bank also has the entire equity of the paid off loan to potentially draw down before eviction/foreclosure is necessary. This could be a huge lifeline for people who have a random financial emergency mid-life to avoid eviction. In this hypothetical world of no landlords, I could also see a specific provision of renting just for roommates to simplify this too because a rotating cast of roommates would make equity balancing a nightmare.
Panzer04 2y ago
I agree with you, fwiw. I don't get the hate for landlords either. There's just a large segment of the population that want to own a house and don't care who gets stepped on once they own it - which is really how we got into this situation in the first place. I'd much rather blame systems and regulations that make it hard for enough housing to be built. It makes zero sense to me that there are blocks worth 5m in the inner city, while houses in newbuild suburbs cost 400k. In any reasonable system it should be trivial to unlock value by buying the expensive block, sticking 20 apartments on it and selling them for 1m each.
- Carrok 2y ago
  > I don't get the hate for landlords Maybe it's because you pay their mortgage, often close to a hundred dollars a day if not more, and they won't fix the front door or the refrigerator. Then when you move out, they charge you for normal wear and tear like you threw a series of raves.
  - recursive 2y ago
    I've had at least half a dozen landlords in my life. None were this bad, even the bad ones.
    - Carrok 2y ago
      Lucky you.
squishboi 2y ago
The alternative is housing cooperatives. Basically, a non-profit that owns the property(ies) and is democratically operated by the tenants. Tenants still sign contracts and pay rent, but there's no landlord. Some cooperatives, if they're large enough or have the funds, even have employees that do all the work that a landlord normally would. I'd love to live in a world where all residential property is owner-occupied, owned by cooperatives, or maybe public housing. Just take the rent-seeking behavior and speculation out of the equation entirely.

bitwize 2y ago

This is exactly what was done with the Landlord's Game (now known as Monopoly).

mcmoor 2y ago

I mean there are several reasons why this is not argument for communism: 1. Here communism means handling it all yourself and capitalism means leaving some part of the economy to AI. It's immediately obvious why one will prevail since we dont have AGI yet. Also the game provides million times more information than Project Cybersyn ever hoped it'd have. 2. The dev have been accused to be very biased for communism. For the first few patches they don't even allow capitalists to set up their own investment ffs, only able to invest money to "investment pool" that will be used by government (player). Apart from design choices, they are also ones responsible for AI. They can set up landlords to be super selfish and revolutionaries to be super selfless and vice versa. 3. One of the most notable thing is that in the previous game, Victoria 2, it's not this lopsided. Even when that game is as robust of a simulation or even more so.

jowea 2y ago

> Reminds me of an issue with another Paradox Interactive title, Victoria 3. They had to rework it because, basically, the upper-classes stood in the way of all the good laws and reforms. A bit generalizing but I don't see what's wrong with that. At least for the landowning classes.