7 ms·

This is basically a maximum wage for landlords, bound to start a secret society. IMO it's a crooked notion that landlords are rent seeking and nothing else - t

• notepad0x90 10mo ago
  Renting should be viewed is a negative in society. Imagine if car dealerships moved to a rental model instead of ownership..oh wait, they sort of already are, they just call it "financing", they make no money from cash buys because of that economic perversion. Rent income is not wages, that's the critical part you're mistaken. Income and wages are not the same thing. Rent income is as much wages as Elon Musk selling stocks is to him, or a bank making income on interest payments. Renting is a business, it's income is business revenue, not wages. There is this terrible view that landlords are "just like you and me, hard working regular people" - not that it's false, but so are the people that own mom & pops shops, or a local subway franchise, they're all business owners making business profits, not wages. Business practices that harm the public should be regulated and curtailed. With taxis for example, the medallion system was used to limit the number of Taxis in operation. Similarly, not only should an individual be limited to (directly or via an ownership/shareholder interest in a company -- even with them or their family) a reasonable number of properties, but the number of rental properties in an area should itself be limited. Property owners can either sell houses, or sell condos and make income via condo (regulated) condo fees. Food, shelter, health-care/medicine should be heavily regulated, if private parties take part as intermediaries between individuals and their food, shelter, health-care, they should expect lots of red-tape and limits. Ideally, the government itself would be driving these markets directly by building and selling properties, hospitals, pharmacies, grocery stores, etc.. that's not socialism or communism. That's just common-sense capitalism, everyone, especially the richest make more money this way. not only that their money will spend better this way. The kind of capitalism we have now is a short-sighted parasitical money-grab. The kind where if fully realized, you'll build your own mansions and sky scrapers but you'd be complaining about the slums and crime nearby, how you can't get good help, skilled labor, and spend a ton of money on bribes instead of paying a fraction of that in taxes. In theory, reaganism and trickle-down economics could have worked. A rising tide does indeed lift all boats. But in reality, it's more of the "scorpion and the frog" story. In this case, landlords can own a reasonable number of decent homes and make decent income, and then diversify the money in other markets. But currently, it's a race to become the biggest slumlord or until the markets collapse again.
  • andrekandre 10mo ago
    > The kind of capitalism we have now is a short-sighted parasitical money-grab. it would seem so, at least in the west perhaps... but i wonder what the cause is; is it culture? or just organic growth is becoming harder and harder?
    • tstrimple 10mo ago
      It's the nature of a capitalist society. Perverse incentives are everywhere and our primary measurement of success is wealth. We richly reward grifters and cheaters and folks with integrity often fall behind. The decades of perverse incentives have created a perverse society that no amount of "golden rule" theory taught in kindergarten can stand up against.
      • notepad0x90 10mo ago
        I commented elsewhere in more detail, but it is in my opinion caused by a lack of national pride. If I was a billionaire, how would I feel about other Americans living the way they do? Would i be apathetic or would I feel ashamed as an American? Even paying taxes used to be considered a patriotic act a few decades ago.
  • 15155 10mo ago
    > they make no money from cash buys because of that economic perversion. This is completely false. This might be surprising to learn, but for normal car dealerships (not buy-here, pay-here or used car dealerships) a huge amount of their compensation rides on receiving holdback payments from manufacturers, as well as per-unit bonuses that often have cliffs. Cash buyers paying invoice price are welcomed (if they aren't too big of a headache) because they push a dealership over or at least closer to the next sales-volume bonus cliff. Holdback alone is worth more than any realistic origination fee.
    • notepad0x90 10mo ago
      What I heard is that they make no profit. I'm sure they'll make revenue, but if they simply sold all cars at the cash price, they will be losing money, especially dealerships. But if you're certain they do make profit, not just revenue, then you sound like you know more about the industry than myself, so I'll concede that point.
• mikepurvis 10mo ago
  I'm not sure if this is what you mean by secret society, but I could well imagine that these kind of limits would be hard to enforce. Like a person creates shell corporations to own their properties on their behalf, or buys them in the name of their kids, or employs randos to "own" pieces of their portfolio.
  • tadfisher 10mo ago
    They already do these things to take advantage of "primary residence" or "first-time home buyer" incentives; see the big hullabaloo over Letitia James doing it by accident.
    • sokoloff 10mo ago
      I feel like a lot of politicians get exposed making these “accidents” that just fortunately happen to be beneficial to them. Perhaps they ought to be more careful when filling out paperwork. Or perhaps they’re not accidents.
  • jazzyjackson 10mo ago
    Check out the origin of freemasons, a originally a secret society of stone masons whose labor was in such high demand after the black plague rolled through Europe and England that London set a maximum wage. I forget exactly what the meetings were for but it was something like a union / underground political resistance / price-fixing agreement club that worked in all the Pythagorean and Egyptian ritual later on .
• estearum 10mo ago
  No, the real problem is that the vast majority of their income does not come from their role in creating supply or maintaining housing. Proof: Propose a 100% land value tax, which definitionally only removes that part of income that is generated by the community around their property, and see if they go for it.
  • nerdponx 10mo ago
    The actual value of a landlord is insulating the tenant from financial risk, charging a predictable rent and absorbing the costs of repairs and maintenance. That's a lot of value for some people, but it also comes with problematic incentives and obvious bad outcomes when combined with other aspects of housing markets.
    • waffleiron 10mo ago
      In a perfect world, but rent is often less significantly predictable than mortgage payments. Of course the cost of repairs and maintenance isn’t absorbed, it is paid in full by the renter in the cost of rent.
      • sokoloff 10mo ago
        Over the term of the lease agreement, rent is contractually predictable.
        • pphysch 10mo ago
          Which is rarely longer than a year, and many people go month-to-month, if they even have a contract.
• pepperball 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  • QuarterReptile 10mo ago
    If you would like, I'll explain why you should care and value starter homes.
  • tyami94 10mo ago
    Speaking from experience, that is miles ahead of living on the street.
  • jazzyjackson 10mo ago
    I've lived in studio apartments smaller than the homes that are allowed to be built, and a tiny home has a yard you can grow produce in ...
  • sokoloff 10mo ago
    IMO, government owned basic dormitories with high density should exist. Think of something one or two steps above emergency shelters. Call them pods if you like. Rent and utilities could be positioned at a level that permitted people to survive and have a foundation from which to lift themselves back up and perhaps eventually to a private housing situation with some luxury.
• tshaddox 10mo ago
  > This is basically a maximum wage for landlords Well sure, but it's good to incentivize looking for sources of wages other than (literally) rent-seeking.
  • Plasmoid 10mo ago
    Renting out property isn't rent seeking.
    • mapontosevenths 10mo ago
      Ok. I'll bite. Why is the thing thats literallly the basis for the term rent seeking not rent seeking?
      • Plasmoid 10mo ago
        Because: > Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking) Given that renting out property you own doesn't meet this definition it can categorically not be called rent seeking. I'm always shocked that people apply this definition exclusively to property rentals, and not VHS rentals, without seeing the hypocrisy.
        • mapontosevenths 10mo ago
          Wild. It seems to be a very common misunderstanding too. Googling it after reading Wikipedia shows that about half the sites out there talking about it are also using it wrongly. Thanks for explaining!
          • JoshTriplett 10mo ago
            Massive credit for genuinely changing position in the face of evidence; this is rare and deserves lauding.
        • 10mo ago
• selfmodruntime 10mo ago
  > they do create supply and maintain housing. Clearly you have never interacted with most land lords
  • mapontosevenths 10mo ago
    Back when I was a renter mine just created slums and maintained misery, but maybe he was special.
    • triceratops 10mo ago
      I've had slumlord landlords, landlords who maintained and kept up the property and focused on retaining tenants over increasing rents, and corporate landlords with prices set by a computer. Landlords are a spectrum.
  • jazzyjackson 10mo ago
    I guess not most, all of mine were fine, mostly individuals with one or two investment properties who were friendly neighbors I happened to pay rent to. Point is, in choosing to be a landlord and buying property, an ideal world would respond to this demand pressure by building housing, didn't mean to suggest the landlords themselves put on their hard hats and frame a new building. Just that they're also part of the marketplace.
• cosmic_cheese 10mo ago
  If nothing else, landlords should be held to much stricter standards for maintenance and the overall state of their properties. What’d make sense for me is if a rental has a documented history of being poorly maintained, past some threshold the property can be auctioned off, with the proceeds going towards funding public housing. This should help filter slumlords and bare-minimum-effort speculators.
• mcherm 10mo ago
  > if it's democratic like that I'm mostly OK with it One thing to keep in mind. It might be that it's "democratic" in that all the homeowners are allowed to vote for or against the zoning policy (or for or against the local leaders who set zoning policy) but ONLY the local homeowners are allowed to vote. Those who rent (or who can't even afford to rent) live in a different district and aren't allowed to participate in the election. If that's the case, then voting doesn't represent "the will of the people", just the will of those people permitted to participate.
  • sokoloff 10mo ago
    I live in Massachusetts. Maybe I’d like to move to Palo Alto or Malibu. I hear they’re lovely. To what extent, and by what mechanism, should the government of those two areas weight my preferences on housing policies in those areas? (I think it is properly exactly zero, even I say really, really want to.)
• deepsun 10mo ago
  > landlords are rent seeking and nothing else Noone says it's nothing else. But rent seeking is a big component of it, you just focus on other minor parts. In general, locking down some limited but critical commodity (e.g. land) is bad for any economic system. It doesn't really matter whether it's "Wall Street" or "your neighbor". A healthy economy is geared towards creating an added value.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo ago
    << A healthy economy is geared towards creating an added value. I am trying to read this charitably, but it is hard to read as anything but: 'landlords do not add value'.
    • deepsun 10mo ago
      Rephrasing my original point -- landlords do add value, but not as much to offset the negatives of locking down the resources.
      • iugtmkbdfil834 10mo ago
        I disagree, but I am interested in pulling this thread somewhat. What would be alternative? The role will likely exist in some form regardless, but I suppose there are obviously ways to make it less common just by removing of its incentives. That said, I might be tipping my hand a little.
        • deepsun 10mo ago
          Land Value Tax is one way, a very old idea. Germany practices basically rent control, so that 60%+ of population rent and consider it stable. That's another way. Maybe there are more, I didn't think hard. The basic idea is to prevent formation of an "aristocracy" that holds some limited but necessary (not luxury) resource. Pretty much every revolution happened because of that.
          • 10mo ago
• alextingle 10mo ago
  "Rent seeking" has nothing to do with landlords and tenants. It's about buying legislation that forces people to give you money for nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking Tenants who rent property get something tangible in exchange for their cash - exclusive use of the property. Just because the word "rent" is common to both, doesn't mean they are connected in any way.
  • gfaster 10mo ago
    gp used "rent seeking" correctly. The concept of "landlords do nothing while collecting passive income, therefore not creating any value but instead are just exploiting that they own the land" would be correctly described as "rent-seeking behavior".
    • alextingle 10mo ago
      You should read the wiki article. Criticising landlords is fine, but words (and phrases) have actual meanings, and the term "rent seeking" has literally no place in a discussion about landlords.
      • gfaster 10mo ago
        I am well aware of what the phrase means, and I re-read the Wikipedia article to be sure. Maybe you read the use of the word in a different way than I did, but I helpfully included my precise interpretation of it in my comment to clarify the meaning. > the term "rent seeking" has literally no place in a discussion about landlords Having "literally no place" is certainly a strong choice of words, particularity as it was introduced in this thread as being a inaccurate label to apply to landlords. Personally, I first learned about the term applying it to Feudalism, in which the (land)lords' only contribution was their ownership of the land. That example alone seems to pretty handily disprove your claim of "literally no place", in fact it's specifically cited in the Wikipedia article as the Georgist interpretation of economic rent.
      • zzbzq 10mo ago
        Your own wiki link disagrees with you, most of the article uses landlordism as the base-level example. You've just discovered how "rent seeking" is used as a more broad term to describe many phenomena, but they're still describing them essentially in the metaphor of landlordism.
• pixelatedindex 10mo ago
  > IMO it's a crooked notion that landlords are rent seeking and nothing else - they do create supply and maintain housing. They don’t create supply in any way, the only ones who do that are builders. But sure they maintain houses. Although just the bare minimum, they will never fix it nicely - just enough to rent it out.
  • nerdponx 10mo ago
    The actual value of landlording is offloading financial risk. The tenant pays a stable rent including a premium in exchange for maintenance, repairs, and not having to sell a home in order to move to a new one. I just can't bring myself to agree with the hard-line socialists who think landlording is fundamentally a bad thing. There are a lot of problems with it, but it does have a legitimate place in the world.
    • pixelatedindex 10mo ago
      I don’t think it’s fundamentally a bad thing. It has its place. But it’s an industry that’s easily exploited - I rented over a dozen places and like 80% would try to do things that the tenant handbook would not allow. I sued one of them, and settled out of court for another. And surprise surprise a lot of them don’t want to rent in areas that are pro-tenant rights.
      • nerdponx 10mo ago
        Right, it's entirely possible that landlording in practice has so many opportunities for abuse that it's irredeemable despite its potential for benefit in certain cases. I don't know if I agree with that, but at least it's more intelligent than "Marx says landlords bad therefore landlords bad."
  • jjav 10mo ago
    > They don’t create supply in any way, the only ones who do that are builders. For a house to be available for me to rent, both things need to happen. Someone had to build it, obviously. But just as necessary, someone needs to offer it up for a rental.
• potato3732842 10mo ago
  The municipality cares about the taxes, sure but it goes far beyond that. Literally everyone in every department is more convenienced by attracting the well off and being hostile to those who aren't. Those rich people in those big houses with their big assets are much "easier to own" for the town than a bunch of rowdy generally noncompliant trailer trash who crank out a bunch of kids who need services, have poor elderly who need services, don't goose step in line without a bunch of enforcement, can't pay the taxes to pay for the "do we really need this" equipment and facilities government always wants, the working parents can't pick up the slack if the schools slip and scores will show it, etc, etc, etc. Growing municipalities kind of have to choose if they want to become bedroom communities or industrial/business communities and if they choose the former optimizing for rich people is the easy lazy not sticking their neck out choice and what does government employment optimize for if not retaining people disposed toward that sort of decision making.