7 ms·

Tenant "protection" laws are the type of idiocy that economically illiterate progressive politicians always produce. They end up having the opposite effect by m

by nradov 4mo ago

Tenant "protection" laws are the type of idiocy that economically illiterate progressive politicians always produce. They end up having the opposite effect by making property owners less willing to rent out to anyone. The only effective way to protect tenants is to set public policies that encourage new housing development. When there is a housing surplus, the laws of economics force landlords to treat tenants well. Build more housing!

senectus1 4mo ago
sure because a property owner is going to not rent out a property and just take the month on month hit for having an empty property. They'll either rent it or sell it. There is a middle ground, just need to find that point.
- nradov 4mo ago
  Apparently you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the rental market. Landlords in cities with strong tenant protection laws will absolutely leave a unit vacant for months until they find someone with a high income ratio and credit score. This leaves poorer people stuck with no options.
  - archagon 4mo ago
    Vacancy tax. No one should have the right to buy multiple, rentable homes and keep them unused in the middle of a housing crisis. It’s sociopathic.
    - mx7zysuj4xew 4mo ago
      So in the Netherlands, For many years any property left vacant and unused dor more than a year could be legally squatted. it forced landlords to keep their properties on the market and insured full usage of the severely limited available housing stock
  - mmooss 4mo ago
    Do you have evidence? There is evidence that RealPage software illegally coordinated (maybe coordinates) landlords in keeping units off the market in order to reduce demand and increase prices for everyone. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/technology/realpage-doj-settlement.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/technology/realpage-doj-s...
    - itake 4mo ago
      Me (and others in this thread). I have a 5 bedroom house that I rent out 2 rooms, but not interested in accepting more people unless they are friends or have a very high income. At my home’s peak, we had 6 adults living there, now its at 50% capacity.
      - verall 4mo ago
        How many high income individuals want to share a house with 5 strangers?
        bombcar 4mo ago
        It's surprisingly common in places like SF, and near popular colleges.
        itake 4mo ago
        Apparently not many hence the empty house. In SF and Seattle during hiring booms, a lot of young workers move to the city with no social connections, so they start their new life in hacker houses to kickstart their friend group.
  - CalRobert 4mo ago
    In Amsterdam it led to them getting sold
woodruffw 4mo ago
There's an economic floor for the price of housing: the amortized cost of the building and its maintenance, plus taxes and overhead imposed by governments, utilities, mortgages, etc. In other words: even in a plentiful housing market, there will always be someone who struggles to pay rent (including transiently), because a rational housing market can't offer $0 rents. Tenant protection laws exist to protect that person from a landlord who would otherwise be incentivized to throw them onto the street.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- itake 4mo ago
  Yeah… these laws for private landlords to subsidize housing for other families. If you only have 1 rental property and your tenant doesn’t pay, that’s a 100% loss of revenue while your family personally bears the cost of supporting this other family. Whereas corporate landlords can absorb these losses by raising rents on 100 doors to cover the families that refuse to pay
  - inigyou 4mo ago
    Don't rent it then. All these laws are designed to make being a landlord hell so that people won't be landlords.
    - halfxing 4mo ago
      So, you would like there to be less housing, which makes housing more scarce and raises prices on everyone else?
      - itake 4mo ago
        My house fits up to 6 adults, but only 3 are living there now because I don’t want to be a landlord. Having 3 empty rooms helps no one except corporate landlords that can navigate and scale (and collude…).
    - 4mo ago
archagon 4mo ago
Do you own your own house? Are you rich? I’ve known acquaintances who got de facto evicted without warning just because their landlord decided to make a few extra bucks. Were that to happen to me, I would not be able to rent in my current city at all due to the recent influx of wealthy tech workers. (Read: extremely high rents with ridiculous income requirements.) Fortunately, my city has robust tenant protections and rent control, so I don’t have to live my life in fear of ending up on the curb. Some people see that as a bad thing; I guess they think I should save up a few million dollars to buy a condo or abandon my community and move to the boonies. This would be less of an issue with more housing stock, but that takes decades to build. As a city resident inconveniently living in the present, that does not help me much. Obviously, I’d never vote for a politician who would make it easier for a landlord to evict me arbitrarily. And I’d eagerly vote for the same protections for any other renter.
- itake 4mo ago
  I think you’re leaving details out of your story. If the landlord wants to make a few bucks, then they keep their good tenants (lowers vacancy rate, keeps repairs low, etc). Kicking out good tenants cost landlords money.
  - archagon 4mo ago
    It’s pretty simple. There’s a tech boom or similar, a bunch of rich workers move in, rents go up. Landlord spikes rent by 30% to take advantage. You can see this happening in r/sanfrancisco today, for non-rent-controlled units.
    - itake 4mo ago
      Sf is kinda a mess. Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave (locking up more housing, reducing supply, forcing everyone else to pay more), thus continue to discourage rent controlled tenants from moving since moving means even higher prices. The property tax situation in SF is a mess. SF also requires a lot of expensive regulations (earthquake proofing, renovation permits, rising California insurance costs, etc). Also… the unfortunate reality is there is only so much space and the capital markets determine who gets to live where. If you’re not able to keep up in a city, then there are better places for you.
toast0 4mo ago
Tentant protection laws are always a matter of degree. Requiring a process in order to evict tennants is a good thing. If the process is unsatisfyable or extremely lengthy, I don't think it's a good thing anymore. There should be a way to get destructive and severely disruptive tenants out in a hurry. Ordinary breach of contract things (failure to pay rent, problematic behaviors that violate the lease but aren't an immediate issue, etc) should have something like a 3-7 notice period and then be referred to court and figured out without undue delay. I'm ok with limiting the reason for the landlord ending a lease, especially where the tenant has stayed there for a long time. IMHO rent control/rent stabilization can be useful when the cap isn't set too low, and there's reasonable ways to pass through less predictable costs. If the cap is too low, rent gets significantly behind the market rent which causes trouble for landlords but also leads to situations where renters end up stuck where they are; maybe better than being forced out but not if the property deteriorates. If the cap is too high, it doesn't provide meaningful stability or a planning horizon for tenants. If it's in the right place, it gives renters reasonable time to adjust to market changes. Again, IMHO, 3% is probably too low, 10% may be too high, somewhere in the middle is nice to have. Tenant protections setting deposit limits and process for assessing against the deposit seem reasonable to me. Landlords are going to screw tenants out of deposits if they can, regardless of the market realities, because the relationship is over, the renter is busy with other stuff, and the landlord has the money.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  Is there any morally valid reason to evict a tenant other than nonpayment of rent? For bad behavior that should be between them and the police, not you.
  - Plasmoid 4mo ago
    Tampering with smoke detectors
  - jandrewrogers 4mo ago
    Absolutely. The law with respect to behavior has almost no force within multi-tenant buildings. It is primarily subject to contract law. The police have no power there. Tenants that repeatedly violate the contractual rights of other tenants have few remedies beyond eviction. A single asshole can destroy an entire building.
pixelatedindex 4mo ago
> The only effective way to protect tenants is to set public policies that encourage new housing development Which the local landowning population promptly block with NIMBY tactics. Have you wondered if that has any impact? Not everything is some progressive boogeyman.
dwroberts 4mo ago
> They end up having the opposite effect by making property owners less willing to rent out to anyone. Yes, good! Then they will sell their bloody housing stock and people can BUY them instead
- CalRobert 4mo ago
  "Sorry bud, I know you just wanted a place to live while you went to college in this city but if you're not ready to buy a house we don't want you here"
  - dwroberts 4mo ago
    If all the properties owned by career landlords were returned to be sold, the value (and price) of property would go down. This idea that ubiquitous rental (which is normally at obscene prices any way) makes cities more accessible to live in is nonsense. Landlords are creating the problem that they state they are fixing
    - CalRobert 4mo ago
      This is true, the prices do drop. In Amsterdam at least it meant low income renters getting evicted so that people with roughly 2x their income could buy their former homes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05cFv02pzY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05cFv02pzY is an interesting discussion of this.
- kelnos 4mo ago
  That assumes that everyone who wants housing can afford to buy it rather than rent it. It also assumes that everyone who wants housing even wants to buy it.

by nradov 4mo ago

senectus1 4mo ago

sure because a property owner is going to not rent out a property and just take the month on month hit for having an empty property. They'll either rent it or sell it. There is a middle ground, just need to find that point.

nradov 4mo ago
Apparently you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the rental market. Landlords in cities with strong tenant protection laws will absolutely leave a unit vacant for months until they find someone with a high income ratio and credit score. This leaves poorer people stuck with no options.
- archagon 4mo ago
  Vacancy tax. No one should have the right to buy multiple, rentable homes and keep them unused in the middle of a housing crisis. It’s sociopathic.
  - mx7zysuj4xew 4mo ago
    So in the Netherlands, For many years any property left vacant and unused dor more than a year could be legally squatted. it forced landlords to keep their properties on the market and insured full usage of the severely limited available housing stock
- mmooss 4mo ago
  Do you have evidence? There is evidence that RealPage software illegally coordinated (maybe coordinates) landlords in keeping units off the market in order to reduce demand and increase prices for everyone. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/technology/realpage-doj-settlement.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/technology/realpage-doj-s...
  - itake 4mo ago
    Me (and others in this thread). I have a 5 bedroom house that I rent out 2 rooms, but not interested in accepting more people unless they are friends or have a very high income. At my home’s peak, we had 6 adults living there, now its at 50% capacity.
    - verall 4mo ago
      How many high income individuals want to share a house with 5 strangers?
      - bombcar 4mo ago
        It's surprisingly common in places like SF, and near popular colleges.
      - itake 4mo ago
        Apparently not many hence the empty house. In SF and Seattle during hiring booms, a lot of young workers move to the city with no social connections, so they start their new life in hacker houses to kickstart their friend group.
- CalRobert 4mo ago
  In Amsterdam it led to them getting sold

woodruffw 4mo ago

There's an economic floor for the price of housing: the amortized cost of the building and its maintenance, plus taxes and overhead imposed by governments, utilities, mortgages, etc. In other words: even in a plentiful housing market, there will always be someone who struggles to pay rent (including transiently), because a rational housing market can't offer $0 rents. Tenant protection laws exist to protect that person from a landlord who would otherwise be incentivized to throw them onto the street.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
itake 4mo ago
Yeah… these laws for private landlords to subsidize housing for other families. If you only have 1 rental property and your tenant doesn’t pay, that’s a 100% loss of revenue while your family personally bears the cost of supporting this other family. Whereas corporate landlords can absorb these losses by raising rents on 100 doors to cover the families that refuse to pay
- inigyou 4mo ago
  Don't rent it then. All these laws are designed to make being a landlord hell so that people won't be landlords.
  - halfxing 4mo ago
    So, you would like there to be less housing, which makes housing more scarce and raises prices on everyone else?
    - itake 4mo ago
      My house fits up to 6 adults, but only 3 are living there now because I don’t want to be a landlord. Having 3 empty rooms helps no one except corporate landlords that can navigate and scale (and collude…).
  - 4mo ago

archagon 4mo ago

Do you own your own house? Are you rich? I’ve known acquaintances who got de facto evicted without warning just because their landlord decided to make a few extra bucks. Were that to happen to me, I would not be able to rent in my current city at all due to the recent influx of wealthy tech workers. (Read: extremely high rents with ridiculous income requirements.) Fortunately, my city has robust tenant protections and rent control, so I don’t have to live my life in fear of ending up on the curb. Some people see that as a bad thing; I guess they think I should save up a few million dollars to buy a condo or abandon my community and move to the boonies. This would be less of an issue with more housing stock, but that takes decades to build. As a city resident inconveniently living in the present, that does not help me much. Obviously, I’d never vote for a politician who would make it easier for a landlord to evict me arbitrarily. And I’d eagerly vote for the same protections for any other renter.

itake 4mo ago
I think you’re leaving details out of your story. If the landlord wants to make a few bucks, then they keep their good tenants (lowers vacancy rate, keeps repairs low, etc). Kicking out good tenants cost landlords money.
- archagon 4mo ago
  It’s pretty simple. There’s a tech boom or similar, a bunch of rich workers move in, rents go up. Landlord spikes rent by 30% to take advantage. You can see this happening in r/sanfrancisco today, for non-rent-controlled units.
  - itake 4mo ago
    Sf is kinda a mess. Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave (locking up more housing, reducing supply, forcing everyone else to pay more), thus continue to discourage rent controlled tenants from moving since moving means even higher prices. The property tax situation in SF is a mess. SF also requires a lot of expensive regulations (earthquake proofing, renovation permits, rising California insurance costs, etc). Also… the unfortunate reality is there is only so much space and the capital markets determine who gets to live where. If you’re not able to keep up in a city, then there are better places for you.

toast0 4mo ago

Tentant protection laws are always a matter of degree. Requiring a process in order to evict tennants is a good thing. If the process is unsatisfyable or extremely lengthy, I don't think it's a good thing anymore. There should be a way to get destructive and severely disruptive tenants out in a hurry. Ordinary breach of contract things (failure to pay rent, problematic behaviors that violate the lease but aren't an immediate issue, etc) should have something like a 3-7 notice period and then be referred to court and figured out without undue delay. I'm ok with limiting the reason for the landlord ending a lease, especially where the tenant has stayed there for a long time. IMHO rent control/rent stabilization can be useful when the cap isn't set too low, and there's reasonable ways to pass through less predictable costs. If the cap is too low, rent gets significantly behind the market rent which causes trouble for landlords but also leads to situations where renters end up stuck where they are; maybe better than being forced out but not if the property deteriorates. If the cap is too high, it doesn't provide meaningful stability or a planning horizon for tenants. If it's in the right place, it gives renters reasonable time to adjust to market changes. Again, IMHO, 3% is probably too low, 10% may be too high, somewhere in the middle is nice to have. Tenant protections setting deposit limits and process for assessing against the deposit seem reasonable to me. Landlords are going to screw tenants out of deposits if they can, regardless of the market realities, because the relationship is over, the renter is busy with other stuff, and the landlord has the money.

inigyou 4mo ago
Is there any morally valid reason to evict a tenant other than nonpayment of rent? For bad behavior that should be between them and the police, not you.
- Plasmoid 4mo ago
  Tampering with smoke detectors
- jandrewrogers 4mo ago
  Absolutely. The law with respect to behavior has almost no force within multi-tenant buildings. It is primarily subject to contract law. The police have no power there. Tenants that repeatedly violate the contractual rights of other tenants have few remedies beyond eviction. A single asshole can destroy an entire building.

pixelatedindex 4mo ago

> The only effective way to protect tenants is to set public policies that encourage new housing development Which the local landowning population promptly block with NIMBY tactics. Have you wondered if that has any impact? Not everything is some progressive boogeyman.

dwroberts 4mo ago

> They end up having the opposite effect by making property owners less willing to rent out to anyone. Yes, good! Then they will sell their bloody housing stock and people can BUY them instead

CalRobert 4mo ago
"Sorry bud, I know you just wanted a place to live while you went to college in this city but if you're not ready to buy a house we don't want you here"
- dwroberts 4mo ago
  If all the properties owned by career landlords were returned to be sold, the value (and price) of property would go down. This idea that ubiquitous rental (which is normally at obscene prices any way) makes cities more accessible to live in is nonsense. Landlords are creating the problem that they state they are fixing
  - CalRobert 4mo ago
    This is true, the prices do drop. In Amsterdam at least it meant low income renters getting evicted so that people with roughly 2x their income could buy their former homes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05cFv02pzY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05cFv02pzY is an interesting discussion of this.
kelnos 4mo ago
That assumes that everyone who wants housing can afford to buy it rather than rent it. It also assumes that everyone who wants housing even wants to buy it.