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Rent is a nonproductive component in the economy. It shouldn't even exist. If we want an economy that actually provides goods that people need we should focus o

Rent is a nonproductive component in the economy. It shouldn't even exist. If we want an economy that actually provides goods that people need we should focus on productive components like building more houses and actual shelter rather than using limited housing to extract profit, often without even improving the housing itself. > are already facing is that on the margin people he hopes will pay for it will just move away. This myth is promulgated constantly with no evidence to back it up. The tax increases he has proposed are a drop in the pond to the bracket he aims to tax. If those people care so little for the city, so be it, they can leave. I don't need to share communal space with people who want to live as atoms and don't actually care about the place they live beyond how it affects their bottom line. If they actually love NYC for the city it is, they will stay. The increases are not going to be untenable for those people, it all comes down to their priorities, and if they don't want to prioritize NYC, then yes, they should gtfo because they are characterless, tasteless people who only care about themselves and their money.

nostrebored 11mo ago
Rent is a nonproductive component in the economy is a ridiculous statement. People need shelter and like nice shelter. People pay for access to amenities and convenience. _incentivizing building housing in areas where people want to live or where people work is efficient_
- voidhorse 11mo ago
  Nothing you've said has anything to do with rent. It'd be equally possible to build and incentivize building housing and then to enable people to own homes or at least own units within multi family homes. Rent is a predatory practice established over and above the supply of a basic need (housing) that does nothing more than extract profits for no productive contribution. If anything I'm incentivized to limit housing supply as a landlord in the limit because growing housing supply means competition for me as a landlord.
  - nostrebored 11mo ago
    Right, and it’s a good thing that the people producing housing, legislating housing production, and in control of housing supply aren’t the same. Why is owning a home important? I do not think that home ownership is what most people want. We have attempted to make this desirable at through state intervention by pitching housing as an investment instead of a durable good. saying one of the many reasons rent is good “is not about rent” doesn’t mean there’s no clash in the argument. All moving to an entirely ownership model would do is reduce elasticity of the housing market, which would be disastrous.
    - voidhorse 11mo ago
      These are good points—I think you're right to flag rent in itself isn't the issue per se, and this points to the fact that the main crux of housing affordability is a mismatch between supply/demand and prices. I think the issue with rent is that it just complicates the situation regardless and leads to bad power differentials, and again, I don't know how you prevent slumlords but permit renting. The way I see it rent takes an inherently unproductive fact of life (occupancy) and makes it a profit mechanism. Now if we had something like old school English land improvement laws or something, you could have a system in which rent and home ownership are forced to be productive, but barring that, I don't see a way of doing it and thus rent mostly just seems to complicate the market and mostly drive up costs and potentially prevent the majority of people from owning. I agree that elasticity reduction would be bad, but let's build more homes and reduce costs enough to make buying and selling homes not literally the biggest financial undertaking in life and this will be less of an issue. I just find it incredibly difficult to conceive of a scenario in which renting contributes benefits beyond those you could realize simply by solving actual demand and cost issues. If you get lucky and have a good landlord who actually takes care of home management for you, sure, but this is not the reality. I'd maybe accept a renting economy with strong regulations around what landlords must provide, reasonable caps on increases, maybe even required improvements every N years, but barring that, renting mostly just enables parasites to sit on property, scoop up more property, and prevent swaths of people from owning in neighborhoods.
    - ygjb 11mo ago
- OkayPhysicist 11mo ago
  You equate "housing" and "rent". In a world where consumers had unlimited access to capital, the free market rate for housing would converge on the interest rate + shared costs (think condo fees, property taxes, etc) -/+ appreciation/depreciation of the housing, because consumers would always have the option of taking a loan to buy the property, then re-selling when they want to move, paying off the loan and receiving back whatever they paid on the principal. Comparing to the real world, the cost of rent is greater than that, because people are paying a premium for their inaccess to capital. Looking at where I live, the hypothetical value is approximately the condo fees (5.5% interest, 1% property tax, 6-and-change% appreciation), which for a 2b2b apartment around around $600 bucks a month. Rent for an equivalent apartment literally next door is $2700 a month. That suggests that more than 75% of the value of rent is paying for inaccess to capital, i.e., textbook rentseeking.
bawolff 11mo ago
> If we want an economy that actually provides goods that people need we should focus on productive components like building more houses and actual shelter What if we built some on spec and then charged people who live in them a monthly fee to recoup the cost. That way we could build more houses immediately without having to get all the money together all at once. We could then use the extra money to build even more houses.
arijun 11mo ago
> Rent is a nonproductive component in the economy ... we should focus on productive components like building more houses Through... rent?
sershe 11mo ago
So if I build a building full of studios targeted at young people who would have no interest in owning one permanently, or poorer ppl who don't have money or stability to buy, how am I to be compensated/incentivised? I guess it's not being built then! As for population e.g. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-congressional-maps-could-change-2030 https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-...
- anon7000 11mo ago
  Or, a public developer could construct and operate housing at cost, where rent pays off just enough to service the debt and operations.
  - sershe 11mo ago
    That has been tried in the US before. Public option sucks unless like in Singapore (or USSR where it sucked only moderately) you force almost everyone into a public option. Otherwise people most capable of moving out, move out; the public option gets worse; rinse, repeat.
- Hikikomori 11mo ago
  Here new buildings are paid by loans taken out by the tenant owned association that owns the building and people buying a condo (share) in it. The tenant association operates as a non-profit and tenants pay a "rent" that is used to pay off the loan, interest, maintenance, etc.

nostrebored 11mo ago

Rent is a nonproductive component in the economy is a ridiculous statement. People need shelter and like nice shelter. People pay for access to amenities and convenience. _incentivizing building housing in areas where people want to live or where people work is efficient_

voidhorse 11mo ago
Nothing you've said has anything to do with rent. It'd be equally possible to build and incentivize building housing and then to enable people to own homes or at least own units within multi family homes. Rent is a predatory practice established over and above the supply of a basic need (housing) that does nothing more than extract profits for no productive contribution. If anything I'm incentivized to limit housing supply as a landlord in the limit because growing housing supply means competition for me as a landlord.
- nostrebored 11mo ago
  Right, and it’s a good thing that the people producing housing, legislating housing production, and in control of housing supply aren’t the same. Why is owning a home important? I do not think that home ownership is what most people want. We have attempted to make this desirable at through state intervention by pitching housing as an investment instead of a durable good. saying one of the many reasons rent is good “is not about rent” doesn’t mean there’s no clash in the argument. All moving to an entirely ownership model would do is reduce elasticity of the housing market, which would be disastrous.
  - voidhorse 11mo ago
    These are good points—I think you're right to flag rent in itself isn't the issue per se, and this points to the fact that the main crux of housing affordability is a mismatch between supply/demand and prices. I think the issue with rent is that it just complicates the situation regardless and leads to bad power differentials, and again, I don't know how you prevent slumlords but permit renting. The way I see it rent takes an inherently unproductive fact of life (occupancy) and makes it a profit mechanism. Now if we had something like old school English land improvement laws or something, you could have a system in which rent and home ownership are forced to be productive, but barring that, I don't see a way of doing it and thus rent mostly just seems to complicate the market and mostly drive up costs and potentially prevent the majority of people from owning. I agree that elasticity reduction would be bad, but let's build more homes and reduce costs enough to make buying and selling homes not literally the biggest financial undertaking in life and this will be less of an issue. I just find it incredibly difficult to conceive of a scenario in which renting contributes benefits beyond those you could realize simply by solving actual demand and cost issues. If you get lucky and have a good landlord who actually takes care of home management for you, sure, but this is not the reality. I'd maybe accept a renting economy with strong regulations around what landlords must provide, reasonable caps on increases, maybe even required improvements every N years, but barring that, renting mostly just enables parasites to sit on property, scoop up more property, and prevent swaths of people from owning in neighborhoods.
  - ygjb 11mo ago
OkayPhysicist 11mo ago
You equate "housing" and "rent". In a world where consumers had unlimited access to capital, the free market rate for housing would converge on the interest rate + shared costs (think condo fees, property taxes, etc) -/+ appreciation/depreciation of the housing, because consumers would always have the option of taking a loan to buy the property, then re-selling when they want to move, paying off the loan and receiving back whatever they paid on the principal. Comparing to the real world, the cost of rent is greater than that, because people are paying a premium for their inaccess to capital. Looking at where I live, the hypothetical value is approximately the condo fees (5.5% interest, 1% property tax, 6-and-change% appreciation), which for a 2b2b apartment around around $600 bucks a month. Rent for an equivalent apartment literally next door is $2700 a month. That suggests that more than 75% of the value of rent is paying for inaccess to capital, i.e., textbook rentseeking.

bawolff 11mo ago

> If we want an economy that actually provides goods that people need we should focus on productive components like building more houses and actual shelter What if we built some on spec and then charged people who live in them a monthly fee to recoup the cost. That way we could build more houses immediately without having to get all the money together all at once. We could then use the extra money to build even more houses.

arijun 11mo ago

> Rent is a nonproductive component in the economy ... we should focus on productive components like building more houses Through... rent?

sershe 11mo ago

So if I build a building full of studios targeted at young people who would have no interest in owning one permanently, or poorer ppl who don't have money or stability to buy, how am I to be compensated/incentivised? I guess it's not being built then! As for population e.g. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-congressional-maps-could-change-2030 https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-...

anon7000 11mo ago
Or, a public developer could construct and operate housing at cost, where rent pays off just enough to service the debt and operations.
- sershe 11mo ago
  That has been tried in the US before. Public option sucks unless like in Singapore (or USSR where it sucked only moderately) you force almost everyone into a public option. Otherwise people most capable of moving out, move out; the public option gets worse; rinse, repeat.
Hikikomori 11mo ago
Here new buildings are paid by loans taken out by the tenant owned association that owns the building and people buying a condo (share) in it. The tenant association operates as a non-profit and tenants pay a "rent" that is used to pay off the loan, interest, maintenance, etc.