For those looking for the actual data. It's from 2024 - says nothing about the current situation.
* ~37K affordable housing units (baseline) across ~400 projects
* 89% rent collection rate (down from 90.6% in 2023)
* That's 600 units that went 'delinquent' in 2024 - assuming a $24K 'base' rent (just a guess) that's $15M in lost rent.
* Deeply troubled projects (that can't survive without this rent) are at 11% - seems like the inverse.
* Cumulative arrears (unpaid rent) of $500M
Here's the problem:
* If no one had to pay, no one would.
* We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society.
* The projects fall into disrepair, there's no way to bring them back, because they won't be maintained.
Landlords aren't a great solution to the problem to be sure. They can be greedy and heartless.
The bigger problem is the bid up of asset prices - aka private equity and class warfare. As soon as you switch (from renting to owning) your incentives immediately shift.
There doesn't actually seem to be a way around this. Taxing to spend on rent ironically makes the problem worse because you just transfer the money into the cash flows of the owners.
Anyone thinking there's a simple solution to this problem hasn't spent enough time with the problem.
The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. America has enough land. We could build new infrastructure, give people lots of land or build houses like we did in the 40s and 50s. Of the price of a house was brought down to 1x the annual salary of the median individual income some of these problems wouldn’t exist. We need to flood the system with investment and inventory.
> The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities.
So it is not simple. "Just build more" always comes up in those discussions, and while it does help (and has been proven to help), it is not the definite answer for the housing issues.
Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move. People don't move just because housing is cheap. Actually many people are willing to spend a significant amount of their income to live in specific places. We move to have a job, to build a career, to be close to friends and family, to have better access to entertainment and activities, ...
This is why most developed country experience rural flight. The housing crisis is (mostly) a big city problem. You can usually find extremely cheap housing if you go deep in the countryside. And building is also cheaper (the price of the land is less, there is less permits issues, etc).
And for big cities, "build more" is way more challenging. Ground space is limited, so one solution is to build more vertical, but it is costly and has its own limitation. Spreading may cause issue with water management and require big investment in a public transport infrastructure if you don't want to have a nightmare traffic. Pollution can be a very big issue, etc.
And that's for all the non-political issues. The political side of things can get very messy, very quickly.
If there was a simple solution, every big city in the world would have done it by now.
Actually we already had a solution to this, normalized remote work.
If I can work remote for Citadel from a 6 bedroom house in North Dakota it’s a choice to rent a studio apartment in Manhattan.
Not to mention the massive environmental benefits of taking cars off the streets. If you have mobility issues, working remote is a game changer. For those who need to use wheelchairs it’s miles easier to work from home. The nightmare of public transportation while in a wheelchair isn’t something I’d wish on anyone
Instead of just building houses I'd consider building social networks - of the physical kind - which have shops, entertainment, and co-working spaces within walking distance.
Not everyone loves the isolation of WFH, so you could replace "jobs" in the old factory sense, now long gone, with co-working spaces which include a social element but are basically still remote work.
The big issue with the US housing market isn't the distribution of housing, it's the distribution of work and support infra of all kinds, including social support.
Because Systems Thinking isn't much of a thing in the US you get these partial solutions when what's needed are integrated solutions that consider all of the moving parts and try to fit them together in a workable way.
The US is very good at extracting and concentrating wealth, but not so good at systems-first distributed investment.
Some people prefer to build those networks online. For one of my developer groups we have members that are a few states away and can only come in once a year.
Given a more worker friendly legal system I’d argue forcing anyone who can’t easily travel due to a disability, to work in person for a remote possible job is an undue burden.
I could never ever ever imagine that working currently however.
I don’t need work to make friends. I’d rather be freer to speak my mind when I do socialize.
I had a higher paying full remote job last year. No one there knows what my personal beliefs are, or what music I like. If it wasn’t for the profile picture they wouldn’t even know my appearance.
As it should be. I hate LinkedIn photos since it opens the flood gates to all sorts of discrimination.
The US used to be really good at this. Look at the city grid system that built new York or savanah Georgia or st Louis. Those land grant cities created blocks that were essentially self contained neighborhoods with local businesses, parks, schools, government services and housing.
> Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move.
If you build a city full of empty buildings in a place with minimal existing population like the Alaskan wilderness then obviously. But what if you double the housing stock in all the existing cities where people want to live?
> Ground space is limited, so one solution is to build more vertical, but it is costly and has its own limitation.
Extremely tall buildings can get pretty expensive, but moderate height buildings (e.g. five stories) have similar per-unit construction costs to single family homes. Meanwhile now count the number of places you can draw a 100 mile radius where the median height of the existing buildings is even that tall. It might literally be nowhere in the US.
Notice also the extent to which density can thwart the scarcity of land. You put a five story building with four units per story on a plot of land instead of a single family home and the contribution per unit of the cost of land has gone down by 95%.
> Meanwhile now count the number of places you can draw a 100 mile radius where the median height of the existing buildings is even that tall.
100 miles? My dude, that is a circle from Poughkeepsie to the tip of Long Island. Forget one-story single-family housing, there is farmland in that circle. There are hundreds of square miles of state parks in that circle.
If people were willing and able to commute that distance you could easily quintuple the housing stock in that area building nothing but one story SFH.
Manhattan itself has a median height of 4-5 stories; the outer boroughs bring that down to 2-3, because commuting from Far Rockaway to midtown is already a schlep.
> My dude, that is a circle from Poughkeepsie to the tip of Long Island. Forget one-story single-family housing, there is farmland in that circle.
That's kind of the point. Notice that housing demand is recursive.
The area you're talking about is NYC metro. If you draw a 100 mile radius around Manhattan then Poughkeepsie is inside it. Is someone going to live in Poughkeepsie and commute to Manhattan? Probably not. Is someone going to live in Poughkeepsie and commute in the direction of Manhattan? Absolutely. Which in turn recursively alleviates housing pressure in that direction. More housing in Poughkeepsie frees up existing housing in Peekskill, more availability in Peekskill frees up existing housing in Yonkers, lots of people are willing to commute from Yonkers to Manhattan.
And both "100 miles" and the NYC metro area (the highest population density metro area in the US) are far extremes. The point is that even that would improve affordability if it was the only option. Meanwhile in reality there are single family homes that could be 5 story buildings in Yonkers, if it wasn't prohibited by zoning.
> If people were willing and able to commute that distance you could easily quintuple the housing stock in that area building nothing but one story SFH.
If you actually did that, would housing affordability improve? Yes it would. It's in fact what's slowly happening on its own when the better alternatives are banned; it's why housing in Manhattan isn't twice what it is now. But that's sprawl. Sprawl sucks. People pay less for housing but have 60 minute commutes. Why do that by adding far away single family homes instead of adding medium-height buildings closer to where people work?
Is your suggestion "we should do the status quo, except the bridge and tunnel commuters should be confined to tiny high-rise enclaves clustered around train stations strung out over a hundred miles"?
My suggestion is that we should get rid of zoning density restrictions and allow the market to respond to high housing costs in a sensible way instead of the nonsensible way it's being forced to right now.
It's the people who like density restrictions who keep trying to force people to build high rises next to train stations. But that's the thing that doesn't work, because high rises cost significantly more per unit to build and if you constrain where things can be built like that then the cost of land in the few areas that allow multi-unit housing gets out of control because of the legislated scarcity.
High rise buildings cost significantly more per unit to build than mid rise buildings or single family homes. They would continue to exist or even increase in number in places like Manhattan because some people are willing to pay the extra cost to have even a slightly shorter commute, and then the cost of land closer to that area will still be higher than it costs further away because of expected future growth. Building mid rise buildings reduces the effective scarcity of land, doesn't eliminate it.
So the availability of housing 100 miles away still affects the price, because there are still people (e.g. retirees who only go into the city once a month) who would choose a longer distance for a lower rent, or who prefer to live in a lower density area even for a similar cost, and giving them a place to get that means they're not bidding up the price in the city.
Expecting 31,416 square miles of area with a median height of 5 stories would be wild. That's most of the entire Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale MSA (~37,000sqmi).
But yet people think the heart of Paris, Rome or even Hong Kong are wonderful. Build the neighborhoods correctly and beautifully and the city can continue indefinitely
The Paris metro area (Aire d'attraction des villes) is only ~7,300 square miles, with the city proper only being 41 square miles. They're talking 31,400 square miles of essentially Paris proper.
So imagine the city of Paris, but stretched about 766x. If you want to include the whole metro area, then ~4.3x
Hong Kong is ~431 square miles. So about 73 Hong Kongs. But not really, because only ~25% of that area is actually urban. So more like 291x the urban area of HK.
> doesn’t mean it can’t exist or wouldn’t be desired if built.
I never said anything contrary to that. I'm just saying it would be wild to see a metro area that size with that high of average development.
The above commenter suggested:
> It might literally be nowhere in the US.
It's definitely not a thing in the US. It's almost certainly not a thing in Europe either, but I'm open to being proven wrong there. It might exist in China, I haven't looked. A 100mi radius circle is massive in area. Pies are squared, if you get my point.
This makes no sense. People want to commute to the best job they can get, not the one that happens to be in their neighborhood. And people aren't going to move neighborhoods when they move jobs, especially with spouses and kids who have jobs and schools in the existing place.
Id argue you are just taking the status quo as inevitable when it is really just a result of policy choices and not how human society has ever been structured before
Madrid is doing this. Savanah Georgia did this. Manhattan did this. You could also reverse the consolidation of everything. Instead of CVS owning every pharmacy, incentives to prompt the pharmacy being owned by the pharmacist. Or a local butcher. And most jobs that require commutes don't require it now, and if cities were built with the appropriate mix of housing all incomes could live in a section of down further cutting down on commutes.
It would of course be a functioning state's responsibility to plan urban/city development and economic incentives to move there. Regarding the ownership vs renter housing debate: I think Singapore may be an excellent example of a state doing it's duty: affordable state-owned housing and people are distributed per housing per the national demographics so you also build social coherence vs ghetto-fication.
> nobody will move. People don't move just because housing is cheap.
Judging by what I see happening in Texas where the mentality definitely is build, build, build...people definitely do choose to live in the way flung out there suburbs and actively look to move there. Just around DFW places like Prosper, Forney, Weatherford, Burelson, and far more continue to attract tons of people wanting to buy a house even if its way flung out there. People drive from as far out as Kyle and Serenada and consider themselves part of Austin. Houston is about done with its third highway loop, TX SH 99. Tons of people don't blink an eye about having an hour long commute it seems.
I'd argue this isn't a great way to build our cities without also laying the groundwork for decent transit but you can't say people aren't choosing it. I kind of like the multi-polar MSA setup in some ways that we have here in DFW, although it could be a lot better. If you're wanting a more urban lifestyle, you don't have to be directly in Dallas.
For a lot of the US this just isn't true. It is true for several notable big cities in the US though, I will agree. Can't really add more land to San Francisco or Manhattan cheaply.
I don’t agree. Orlando was nothing. Raleigh research triangle park was nothing. Silicon Valley was nothing until they were. Each of them were built from a single seed project: Disney, State grant of free land and two roads being built, NASA facility respectively.
We could also recognize that at certain levels of development single family residences are no longer viable. The government should use eminent domain to take entire blocks back for redevelopment vertically. They should be required to give the home owners triple the value of
The property they are taking in the form of replacement square footage or a property in the new development and one or more properties elsewhere. Imagine ing each nimby stood to have a windfall in the form of multiple properties they could rent or sell in exchange for giving up their property. There would be a lot less resistance. Not no resistance but a lot less.
Build the infrastructure, plan the city grid like we used to, incentivize employers to move headquarters there, build new factories, create special economic zones. There are tons of options.
We could increase supply and demand by having a “grow to 1 billion Americans” project. We would create a path to citizenship for people with a requirement that they help build and/or finance the build of homes store fronts etc. create a targeted immigration plan so the new metro is comprised of a broad range of culture, ages, income levels and skills so cultural mixing occurs and assimilation into the shared American experience is facilitated. Make the new metros operate on lower minimum wage, grant 5 year tax abatement for individuals, give the land away for free. Then once the city is established in 20 years do the same thing.
Rural real estate prices just keep going up while the population goes down. You'd expect the opposite, but it's not happening. As long as everything except real estate is cheap and pensions are high, old people will never sell. They consider themselves to be saintly generous to leave real estate to their (then also elderly) children when they die.
Free land for internal colonisation was a successful policy that almost every country in the recent past has employed. Even small countries.
America already has plenty of cities that aren't doing very well, and aren't getting migration, so new cities aren't going to help. There's plenty of cheap housing inventory in the US, just not in the places where the jobs are.
I guess many jobs don't want to be in the places where very cheap housing exists. What is the point of earning SV money and live in a bad neighbourhood?
Depends on what you mean. Sidney, Nebraska, for example, doesn't really have "bad neighborhoods" in the NY or SF sense. But it's still a small town in Nebraska. Not a dying one, though. And you can get a non-trashed - by NY standards - 3 bedroom house for $120K.
So, what do you actually want? Do you have to live in NY or SF, or can you live in flyover country? You can buy out there, if you're willing to live out there. If it were me, I'd consider taking 20% less Silicon Valley money for full remote (if I could get that), and live where I could buy something.
This. Also, not everybody wants the same thing, so there's no single universal solution.
I live in the big city because I enjoy going out dancing, having a drink at a bar with a bunch of acquaintances, coming home late at night, etc., all without having to sit in traffic or in transit for more than one hour each way. If I lived where my parents live (which I actually did for a few months at the beginning of the year, so I know), my social life would be dead.
My sister, on the other hand, lives in a big-ass house with a larger yard than her dogs know what to do with, which cost less than my apartment. She doesn't care about going out, neither does her SO; they're full WFH, and the school bus picks up her kids from their front gate. Their setup works great for them.
And it is also a matter of age and stage in life. I enjoyed living in a big city (Bucharest) for the parties and socializing (in my 20), dancing (Casa de Tango) in my 30-40, with schools nearby. Now I sometimes work from a house in the mountains next to the Ukraine border, my neighbors are hundreds of meters from each other, the nearest supermarket is 15 km away (15 min drive) and a family of deer live in my outer yard.
I mean that higher end jobs don't want to be in an area where they don't enjoy. They are the higher tax payers and they want to enjoy their lives far from the kind of people that live in rent controlled housing - there are differences in education, culture, habits that make people want to separate. Not elitism or something like this, just living with similar people. Whatever we want or say, people are different, not identical, not equal as potential friends and buddies.
Well, in Sidney, you won't live next to rent controlled housing type people. (At least, there won't be many, and you can pick a place where you don't.)
But you won't live next to people who are similar to you, either. (Though that dirt farmer's land may be worth more than your startup...)
America doesn't need new cities. There is an unbelievable amount of space wasted within every city and any urban planner can show you. Development policy in the 40s and 50s was backward and we continue to suffer the consequences today.
Absolutely, but it's easier to build quality mixed use development and walkable, bikable neighbourhoods when you don't have thousands of NIMBYs screaming down every proposal.
"This solution won't work in <ludicrously overextended case>, therefore let's do nothing!" -- common software engineering requirements management technique
Go read about the history of paris. One government minister bulldozed most of the city to create what the world now loves. At the time many people wept for the loss of what paris had been (described as a that commercial street in Harry Potter a quaint, magical village that stretched on in any direction). Paris has now created business districts in the suburbs. But even they are are building single family housing instead of the low rise blocks everyone loves in paris core.
Single-family homes are built out in the suburbs. In the city proper, they build multi-story buildings. There are SFH inside the city limits, but these are old, and I'm not aware of any such new developments.
But the thing is, just like elsewhere, much fewer people actually want to live out in the suburbs, which is reflected in the price. Because getting to Paris proper sucks if you don't have a direct rail connection (which most of the outer 'burbs don't), and even then, you're likely to waste hours commuting, between the unreliable service and just sheer distance. Things are improving for "mid-distance" suburbs, but we're not quite there yet.
I live in one of the most populous metropolitan areas on the planet because it's the best place to live in the world. Increasing density and population is working great so far; maybe it won't scale all the way to 8 billion, but as and when there's a problem we'll deal with it.
... I'm talking about building new cities, which seems like the exact opposite of what you're describing?
Anyway, as far what happens when you make renting impossible (or just de facto not financially realistic), in Amsterdam it led to a lot of rentals being sold. The people buying had roughly 2x the income of those renting, on average. So, I guess that's a good thing, if your goal is to evict lower income renters so people can buy a place more cheaply. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05cFv02pzY discusses this at length.
It can be both. A well developed new city will be faster and easier to build. Retrofitting an existing city bumps up against existing infrastructure (we have to move these pipes and electricity lines) and the individual property owners. My grand father owns the last remaining house with a few acres in a dense office park. He is single handedly blocking about a billion dollars of new development.
World is full of empty houses. It's just that people want to live in New York and not in some other place where housing is cheap or, occasionally, even free. And New York is already pretty full.
Detroit had tons of extra housing. Why have people people fled to other cities?
There is no easy fast solution to this. Just build more housing will not solve complex issues. Not saying there should not be more construction, though.
Because outsourcing and globalization decimated the economy. Now people are going back and doing amazing things. Same think happened in most cities in the Midwest and north Carolina (when textiles and furniture manufacturers left)
But the same thing happened in every downtown core when the federal highway system carved up neighborhoods and companies like IBM moved their headquarters out of new York and into suburban office parks.
> New York is a city that people all around the world want to live in
I don't know anyone that wants to live in NY. I would not move there for a 7 figure salary. I think some opinions in this discussion are based on old realities from 50 years ago, no longer accurate.
We shouldn't talk about "objective best" without pinning down what that means. I can only really imagine it in a sort of Aristotelian sense - a city could be the best city because it most fully embodies the notion of what it means to be city (as opposed to a more rural or suburban area): a usually cosmopolitan agglomeration of people where the density/economies of scale/competition create an environment that allows art, culture, entertainment, public services, etc. to flourish. In that particular sense I think NYC is the clear best city in the country, no competition, with maybe Chicago being a somewhat distant runner-up. In that mode of thinking it's arguably the best city in the world, actually.
Now, that said: when I lived in the US I (mostly) preferred living in Seattle over NYC for the weather, natural beauty, and more laid-back vibe...subjectively Seattle was better for me, but I still don't have an issue with saying NYC is "objectively" a better city than Seattle.
I'm not sure how you get there without killing or violently subjugating tens of millions of people.
Everything preventing what you want is backed by a law. On the other side of that law is someone making a buck either via business being driven straight to them or business being driven away from someone else and they will fight to preserve it.
Even a simple amendment to the clean water act to exempt residential square footage would have every asshole who makes money off an engineering stamp up in arms. Even some guy who designs bridges would be pissed because he doesn't to compete with all the other labor that would put on the market.
Wash rinse repeat for literally every other issue that's roadblocking the construction of housing.
And this is assuming you want to just develop existing areas further (turn suburbs into cities, exurbs into suburbs, as happened from ~1870 through ~1970). Creating cities from scratch is way harder. Where are those people gonna work?
That’s a bad example. Detroit isn’t an example of over building it’s an example of eroding the demand across the entire economy by outsourcing jobs. There is a big difference between a city with full employment with a robust consumer base that happens to have a ton of housing hit the market and one that has it’s entire bedrock industry carved into pieces over several generations.
If you want a valid example look at Austin Texas or Japan. Housing inventory growth in a robust economy leads to….wait for it….rent decreases.
> Now, Austin is one of the only major U.S. cities where rents are falling.
> Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth.
> The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market.
Austin had a rent and house price explosion in 2021-2022 when a lot of people moved in at the same time, rents had been falling in 2023-2025 from the peak but did not fall to the level of 2020, they are picking up again in 2026.
It happened over a longer period obviously, and what happened is the US adopted a failed industrial policy that saw our core manufacturing base shipped to China for the benefit of Wall Street and the financial sector.
Globalization wasn't a loss for all of America - the benefit of shipping manufacturing overseas was that the resulting imports were cheaper than producing domestically. After all if they weren't, people would've preferred to buy domestic. So it was a net win for the consumer via cheaper goods, but came at the expense of Detroit, Pittsburgh and other "rust belt" cities & communities.
We're still grappling with the consequences. We should've invested in transitioning those workers to comparable or better jobs but the ball got completely dropped on that.
If your purchasing power is cut in half because you lost your manufacturing job and had to replace it with running a cash register, but the cost of toys also dropped in half (but not things like food and housing, which doubled in price), are you actually better off?
No.
Average Americans are poorer now than they were before they could buy everything at Walmart. As long as housing continues to be a "Line must go up" investment, Americans will continue to become poorer as more and more of their income has to be directed to housing.
The price didn't even fall that much. One look at Temu and friends should disabuse you of the notion that we are actually getting things for "Cheap". Usually it just means product quality was drastically reduced thanks to millions spent on "value engineering", so that your new products don't last long enough to put you out of business.
Sure is great that GE can now reliably predict the lifespan of parts in their washing machines so they never make the mistake of gasp overspeccing a component so it lasts a lifetime!
I'll see if I can find a source i saw recently that showed that thinks like appliances, TVs, computer, toys, clothes etc that were outsourceable have dropped in price a lot but health care, education, insurance, housing and basically every domestic has increased at rates well beyond inflation and incomes.
And part of the problem is systematic under investment in the public sector. We haven't built enough schools, hospitals or required universities to expand in proportion to the population.
I thought that as well. But the benefits of cheaper goods when manufacturing is shift elsewhere comes at the cost if the future innovations that follow manufacturing. American businesses forget that happening to the British when we took over manufacturing for England. Now China and Mexico have innovations we lack because their engineering has access to the assembly lines and see where innovations need to happen.
Detroit was the hub of the auto industry. Outsourcing and foreign competition hollowed out the central city (which deliberately didn't have public transit) and left gigantic abandoned houses and skyscrapers throughout.
There has been massive public investment and popular support to cause a revival of sorts in the city and is a success story.
This happened throughout North Carolina where I live when textiles and furniture manufacturing was off shored. I assure you it wasn’t over building that caused the same outcome. It’s almost like the is an alternate explanation that is the common thread. What could it be?
Detroit was pretty much the place where cars were designed and manufactured in the US at one point in time. The highest producing factories, the engineering, the management, most of it happened practically inside the city. Over time these auto manufacturers opened plants on lower cost of living places, spreading out across the Midwest while a lot of the engineering and management still took place in Detroit.
People often point to foreign competition for the downfall of urban Detroit but the writing was on the wall and decay starting well before foreign imports made a big splash. Between 1945 and 1957, GM, Ford, and Chrysler built 25 brand-new auto plants in the Detroit metro area. Not a single one was built inside the city limits. They weren't building these factories overseas (yet), they were building them in cheaper parts of the US. Detroit lost hundreds of thousands of well-paying factory jobs well before Volkswagen and Toyota started selling things in real numbers in the 1960s.
The great lakes cities were the wealthiest most influential region for a period of time. Go watch movies from the 80s. Detroit was the industrial heart of America.
There are lots of factors but broadly characterizing them as globalization is generally fair. Some included: The rise of japanese cars added competition but they were held at bay by import restrictions and the American preference for massive cars until the gas shortages in the 70s, the trend towards efficient capital meant most industrial firms switched to prioritizing their more profitable financing arms, Reagan liberalized international trade that let foreign imports into the US market, NAFTA moving manufacturing to mexico and canada, companies moving manufacturing to non union states in the south, then moving the parts supply chain abroad.
We could talk about the merits of Georgeism but honestly let's set that aside - conventional property taxes are sufficient here. Most of Manhattan apparently has <1% annual property tax, and the eclectic sometimes regressive way it's calculated in NYC is suggestive of corruption. These asset bubbles can only inflate because the owners make nearly as much money sitting on a vacant property as they make with tenants, so they borrow approximately All The Money to dump it into real estate. Property taxes are not just a necessary evil to keep the schools running and the garbage collected (cough), they're a tiny fractional "decommodification" of property as asset, because the money collected from the owners is spent on the residents. Most of this money passes through directly into higher rents, and we shouldn't care about that, because it's spent on the residents (if the residents don't want good public services, literally hand them a check, direct redistribution). This punishes vacant properties appreciably, and pushes them back into the market.
The ecosystem of debt and bank collateral that has grown around near-zero property taxes has strongly encouraged high vacancy rates, because the banks directly demand that what rents be collected, are high enough to justify the collateral valuation, but don't actually demand that rents be collected.
Set property values to the rate of inflation (depending on your preferences, CPI or local COL or local selling prices or S&P), and you have fully "decommodified" housing without lining the landlords up against the wall and shooting them, an option that is increasingly popular.
Am I understanding your point correctly as you hoping that an increase in tax rates drives property values down enough thay aggregate tax amounts are reduced?
The practical rental math in NYC is simple. Buy a $1M coop in a building with near zero costs. HOA will be at least 2k per month with the majority of that being property taxes. Thats your base rent. If you have a loan, add that to the base. You will not get cheaper rent until you drive aggregate taxes or interests rate down. There isn’t a huge profit margin on rents in NYC. I looked at a unit next door, and if we wanted to have rents break even on mortgage we would need to offer 85% cash up front. Im on the board of our coop, so I see how all of our financials function and same for prior buildings.
Your coop building is on the unfair side of the "eclectic sometimes regressive" property tax calculation the parent comment mentions. Large (10+) multi-family rental properties are taxed at a much higher rate than single-family and 2-4 family properties. Correcting this imbalance would lower property taxes on your coop building while still raising overall tax revenue for the city.
We have 36 units in our coop iirc, so we are “large”. Generally I think our taxes are fairly reasonable. I just don’t think there is any reasonable solution here that isnt focused on a simple triangle:
- Build more, destroy short term value of existing owners
- Lower taxes, hurt short term city functioning
- Lower interest rates, drive up inflation
The only “fun” solution IMO is cut taxes and cut jobs programs that don’t deliver city value. DOE is a welfare scheme at this point.
NYC is home to ~half of the co-op housing in the United States. This is a relatively unusual arrangement. Co-ops generally forbid renting / subletting, they practically ban REITs, new resident-owners go before a board to get approval. They should be considered the same as owner-occupied housing, and for long-term owner-occupied houses where the asset value isn't a big deal, higher property taxes are on average a wash - they pay higher amounts for higher levels of public services. Perhaps your $2k/month goes to $3k/month but transit becomes free, trash collection becomes effective, and the schools become better. Or in the alternate universe your $2k a month goes to $3k a month and then we hand residents a $12k check at the end of the year.
Either way, vacancy gets punished, landlords can't treat the city's housing like gold boullion, and the price of housing is fractionally more tied to the cost of living than the future economic outlook in potentia.
Picture a conventional Ponzi scheme operating in the Lower East Side, which has scaled to be 30% of the city's economy. Whole industries have risen up around this scheme, it's essentially printing money in a way that seems like it might be legal if you squint, and you're not trying to regulate/tax it. It's growing so fast that it's actually causing problematic inflation for the rest of the city.
Can you afford to let it grow unchecked, indefinitely?
> Most of Manhattan apparently has <1% annual property tax, and the eclectic sometimes regressive way it's calculated in NYC is suggestive of corruption.
While NYC has never lacked for rot and corruption, those really aren't needed - or even particularly useful - for something like this.
As soon as you've got any sort of law / regulation / status quo that benefits a class of well-to-do people, there will be intense pressure to maintain that situation. Vs. the opposition - honest reformers, idealists, the poor, whoever - even if they're far more numerous, just never seem to have the zeal / focus / attention span / whatever to correct the problem.
Somewhat. 99%-ish of adult humans will show far more zeal, focus, attention span, etc. on any "Issue X", if both they and their peers have a whole lotta money riding on Issue X.
Then there's the problem of late-stage capitalism's whole "Those who have the most gold should make most of the rules. Especially rules about who is entitled to how much gold. And double especially if they're obsessed with nothing beyond more-is-better gold hoarding."
Ignoring the morality, that optimization leads to the sort "Rich get richer, poor get poorer, God obviously only loves the rich, desperately poor people resort to desperate measures" instabilities and violence that made Europe an often-horrible place from the Napoleonic Wars through WWII.
> These asset bubbles can only inflate because the owners make nearly as much money sitting on a vacant property as they make with tenants, so they borrow approximately All The Money to dump it into real estate.
The problem is, as long as the stonk based US pension system keeps flooding dozens of billions of dollars a month into the markets, there will always be enough money to flow into REITs and driving up prices, even for vacancies.
Now, introducing (or adequately hiking) property taxes has the problem it may cost the REITs a bit of their profits - but it will be a nasty issue for individual families and small shops, and the large stores will just pass on the cost to customers because even with that, they will still be cheaper than small stores.
Vacancy taxes sound good on paper, because they - if done well - only hit REITs that hope for value gains and other unproductive uses of rare real estate (like Chinese and Russians parking wealth in Western real estate so it can't be seized by the government). The issue with them is a second order effect. If made painful enough to be worth the effort and actually force landlords to either rent out if need be at a lower price or sell, again if need be at a lower price. That however immediately forces REITs to write off significant chunks of the asset value (if rented out) or, even worse, actually realize a loss on the books (if selling).
Unfortunately, the markets really, really do not like either of these two things happening, we've seen that during Covid and the hard pushback against remote working that followed.
I have said it before, and I will say it again: the US pension system being so laser focused on stock and asset markets is going to fry its host society alive, because what needs to be done for society to survive cannot be done because too much pensioner wealth would be wiped out.
Vacancy taxes are, to my understanding, nearly impossible to administer effectively without approaching them formally as normal property taxes that have some kind of out. Lying about when the unit got vacated is basically expected, while creating a new resident out of whole cloth and filing taxes for them including a Residency Benefit Transfer is a bunch of easy to detect felonies†, and understood as such by everyone. Spend the money on better schools/roads/park and even this isn't practical.
Ever heard of the tale of the goose that laid golden eggs?
Imagine progressively feeding the goose less, so as to have a greater profit margin on the golden eggs it laid. No particular percentage of feed reduction seemed too harmful, until one day it died unexpectedly.
a certain share A of the prospective benefit of housing is in potential asset price appreciation, and a certain share B is in the utility value of the home.
The systems that contribute towards A are mutually reinforcing, vicious spirals in a neoliberal capitalist world. Just like in the art world, there is no hard objective value to vacant housing, and many purchases are made on debt. It's worth whatever the last guy paid, and so the banks will loan you 80% (or more) of whatever the last guy paid. This is a form of money creation. We have collectively bid up the housing stock, completely separated from the utility value, at a rate we generally expect to be competitive to loaning real operating businesses money to invest in actual operations.
If you tax ALL of the prospective value, and price sinks down all the way to B, you can still have profitable private housing development in a steady state. Unmet demand is a thing that exists. Yes getting to B overnight probably represents a crash in your overall asset investment picture, but getting 1/10th of the way there, locally, less so. Phasing it in over time, less so. If you're expecting 5% and you get 4.5% that's still a return.
The thing about this type of redistribution is, it's just a way better more functional economy than the idea of conventional price setting with the addition of rent control, or than the status quo. Rent control tears incentive structures and makes willing landlords into unwilling landlords who are instructed to be creative in how miserable they make their tenants; Its supposed goal of affordability simply shifts costs from older tenants to newer tenants. The status quo where property taxes are very low and so A is significantly greater than B simply doesn't establish those incentives of mutually agreeable economic exchange to a great degree in the first place. "I bought a house as an investment. Rent it out? I mean... there are upsides and downsides."
> We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society
We tried cramming people from generational poverty into one place and it didn't go super great, therefore public housing as a concept must be the failure, and not our hilariously bad implementation?
Singapore, Austria, Finland, and even a number of mixed income public housing projects in the US have actually done quite well. The narrative that it's all inevitably going to turn into the worst examples is pretty worn out.
> The bigger problem is the bid up of asset prices - aka private equity and class warfare.
This is definitely true: housing can either be affordable or it can be a safe investment, never both. Really private equity moving in on the safe investment is a symptom of the problem: regulatory capture by the landed gentry resulting in strangulation of production which benefits a small group at the expense of the greater public.
The thing that goes wrong again and again and again with public and low cost housing is that they build housing, and nothing else.
Stick a bunch of people in a tower in a field with no entertainment, no work nearby, building rubble surrounding their environment, no maintenance happening, no follow through on planned facilities, and the consequences are absolutely 100% predictable. Literally last night I watched a pair of bbc documentaries about a new estate, one from when it was new in the mid 60s, one from the late 70s. The residents are there in the 60’s, going “well it’s a pain having to walk all the way up but we trust that the lifts will be installed soon, and we’re looking forwards to the leisure centre” - fast forward 15 years, still no lifts, no leisure centres, and surprise surprise the kids are setting fire to cars to have something to do. If government won’t uphold the social contract, why should citizens?
The implementation is entirely the problem, and unfortunately few seem to realise that it can be done well. You can’t just make containers for humans and expect that to solve everything.
Public housing isn’t actually free in the countries you listed. It’s subsidized, but the people who live there still have to pay. The affordable housing units in New York are also subsidized. The question is what do we do if people stop paying even the subsidized rent?
> The question is what do we do if people stop paying even the subsidized rent?
If they stop because they actually can't pay it, then we should pay it for them. Another homeless person on the street makes us all less safe and less healthy, and tax dollars going toward keeping them housed is a good use of that money.
If they stop paying because they just don't feel like it, you evict them.
Why bother with such details? Class warfare is right, and details are details. /sarcasm
For example mixed income housing is really nice for “us” that have been in generational poverty. For “them” it is just living with signals of alcohol abuse, domestic abuse and more. All while their children get a good front seat into “empowerment”.
With sarcasm over, details matter, complexity matters, social assistance matters, a contingency plan for total failure to rehabilitate some people matters.
Many people would benefit from the Northern European style of institutionalisation where if incarcerated people would need to go to isolated communities and learn to buy groceries, cook a meal take care of personal hygiene (in Sweden they literally have prison islands where inmates have houses and must live as they would in the outside world. Then progressively move to temporary shelters to get their footing and then be released. If need be put those people in the countryside.
As a personal experience: Many German youths get sent to the middle of Portugal when their environment leads them astray. In the countryside there is a publicly funded host family or community to receive them and they have to learn trade jobs like being a painter or a plumber and get pushed into an normalised environment. There is no access to drugs as well in the middle of nowhere. There is alcohol but in the next morning there is work to do and people who are waiting for you. I met some of those youths when I was young and it always struck me that a good solution for failed communities in urban environments was to break them apart and scatter them into other more rural communities in such small units (family at most) that their habits would not impact the locals and that the habits could not be fulfilled as a matter of fact. Where are you going to hang out at night in a village of 1k? There is housing but you likely need to repair it; the locals will lend you a hand but they will exert peer pressure for you to normalise.
There is no need for class warfare. But there needs to be a warfare against antisocial self destruction behaviours.
Singapore system won't work in USA cities. Their town councils are near scholars level. Quite a few of them doctorate. They are pretty much selected on 2 criteria, merit and perceived likability with accountabilities evaluated both by government and locals citizens. American leaders are selected based on sound bites with zero accountability to citizens for maybe 2 years to 4 years. They do accountable to mega donors which almost always work against for the good of the public. Singapore also have world class city planners that entire America have never experienced or seen before. Heck even China look up to Singapore during 80s and 90s for advice. And the quality of people going to USA in the last 10 years are very low. Look at Singapore Amos going there. Meanwhile hundreds of American engineers migrated to Russia and China.
One of the real reason Singapore system won't work is also the mentality (respect level is way higher), I believe it's actually the primary thing, at 15 years old many Singaporeans are already talking about investment, how to compete hard and so-on, the level is way higher than in the west and people are driven in life in general, but life is hard over there, harder even but more rewarding.
In SG, they can also plan for decades ahead because of a more stable political climate where people actually respect their government for most and ACCEPT that there is some humans that are considered "superior" and take the lead, it's a huge difference with the west where people favorite sport is to non-stop shit on their government or denigrate without offering solutions, in the west, we seem to not be able to accept that there is even a class system where people have more power/rights than others (while there is, it's inevitable).
I don't think respect is the explanation for Singapore's success, it's more likely a side effect of the real magic: ethics and reputability.
Singapore is the third least corrupt country in the world[1]. Another country that has managed to pull off successful public housing, Finland, is the second least corrupt in the world.
The United States meanwhile is in 29th place (and that's being generous, imho) and at its worst ever in the corruption index[2]. It's been falling for a decade. Perhaps that's the real explanation: we can't have nice things because the resources needed to build and operate them are actively siphoned off through embezzlement, bribes, kickbacks, and fraud. Rigid class systems don't do anything to prevent fraud, either, in fact they entrench it deeply.
It only works in Singapore because there’s too little land. There is too little options. HDBs are capped value. While Condos are quite expensive in comparison, and you cannot own both. Singapore system for housing would be hard to replicate anywhere else without government stealing everything off the citizens and disallowing private ownership of land.
> We tried cramming people from generational poverty into one place and it didn't go super great, therefore public housing as a concept must be the failure, and not our hilariously bad implementation?
Well-stated! Yes, defective implementations with negative outcomes should not be used to make overly broad or even grossly incorrect assertions about human nature.
You're seeing the next version of this - cooked up by the smartest public policy people - fail in real time. That's what this article is about.
89% of these projects are - in fact - doing well. But that number is decreasing. The net result is less supply of public housing in one of the richest states in the entire world.
> We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society.
I tried free housing for the first 18 years of my life and it worked out fine
1) Pass legislation to ban the fed from pulling interest rates below 2%. The unprecedented ZIRP completely fucked up asset values and it will take decades to unwind it.
2) In cities, the government should own all the land and owners of properties should hold only a long-term lease. This will allow the government to control land use and upzone density while ensuring private building owners have skin in the game to actually build and maintain dwellings.
the main reasons for public housing failing (see Cabrini Greene, Pruitt Igoe) in the US are concentrated poverty, rents not covering maintenance/capital expenses, lack of good jobs (too far to access on transit, companies relocated to suburbs), high youth to adult ratios. it's too reductive to say lack of ownership when tenants formed unions to get thing fixed but management didn't have funds, threat to maintenance workers (needing police escort to do work), organizational issues with mgmt (patronage system for jobs in public housing, lack of accountability).
I don't understand why we can't just copy another country's housing strategy. There are many countries in the world where housing is affordable, relatively high quality, and the homelessness rate is low. What are we doing that makes this problem so seemingly intractable? Why is our approach to public housing seemingly worse than any other approach in history?
Far fewer than you'd think: The vast majority of Europe is in the same boat as the US.
Whenever there's value in agglomeration (ie, all the time), the value of well placed properties just skyrockets, because growth is only going to make that land better. That's why a common recommendation is to up the tax of land as to make speculation with valuable property a bad investment: It's already price like an auction, so higher taxes cannot increase rent prices. The problem is political, as countries with housing problems have a whole lot of individuals have a big percentage of their net worth in housing. Big tax increases would make their property values drop, and they'd be quite upset. So it solves the problem while losing elections.
Instead, governments are happy providing tax advantages to existing residents, in practice making prices go up even faster.
What makes the problem intractable is that we have a system where for a huge chuck of the country your retirement is based on housing prices appreciating. It's clear if you directly own a home but even if you don't lots of the places you park your money to watch it grow are ultimately investing/speculating on real estate.
Some might call it housing asset based welfare. Even if you don't like that mouthful another simple example is the University of California putting 4 billion into Blackstone's REIT with "a minimum 11.25% annualized net return through January 2028." That REIT is 90% rentals. So probably at least a few people will feel the squeeze from it.
It's the other way round:) Europe is salivating at the American real estate market. Some European countries don't have capital gains tax on real estate and real estate is the only investment vehicle without this tax. The only country where real estate prices haven't skyrocket looks to be Finland but their general situation is very specific and it's hard to say whether it's by design or by accident.
Social housing in Europe while exists, distribution of it is extremely corrupted process. Applying and waiting will give you something in 5 years or never, you'll know in 5 years. You have to be young couple both employed with perfect portfolio, or whatever the role model in that time and location is. Young couples both employed in desirable city basically don't exist anymore, even if you are after two rounds of waiting suddenly you are not a young couple anymore:) Usually you have to know someone and give a bribe.
That's due to moving away from the government ensuring an adequate supply of rental units over the last decades. Intentional free market style policies.
A bit of a misnomer. Housing is, actually, extremely affordable across the US - just not in major cities.
You can plunk $10-$20K and get land and a homestead in dozens of states.
Agree with the other comment that overbuilding is a reasonable strategy, but if you look at Detroit downtown (mid 2010s) having an overbuilt downtown is bad too.
Similar things in lots of countries. There are villages in Italy and Spain with near-zero housing prices. The qualifier that needs added is "housing in commute range of jobs".
And of course if 'jobs' becomes 'there is nothing a person can do that can't be more efficiently done by hiring AI more cheaply, plus you get to treat AI completely differently because AI is not a person' that complicates matters very much.
> You can plunk $10-$20K and get land and a homestead in dozens of states.
In a place where the only jobs to be had are at below-subsistence minimum wage at the dollar store and you have to drive 2 hours to see a doctor, sure.
There's a huge middle ground between Manhattan and homesteading on a $10k property. Here in Atlanta you can buy a 4/3 house for $270k or a 2/1 house for $160k. The rust belt and sunbelt are full of places with cheap housing.
Well we didn't exactly divvy up either housing or employment rationally, so looking through history without state subsidies and development, we're going to see slums pop up where the jobs are. Or just massive homeless populations I guess.
China managed this quite well with the hukou system, which allegedly is going to be loosened over time, but that seems distinctly unlikely to be understood by the powers that be here in the US.
That's actually the same in most countries: the cities where everyone wants to move to (examples from Germany: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich) become unaffordable, and at the same time smaller cities and villages in less desirable areas (e.g. in East Germany, but also in more remote areas of Bavaria) are depopulated - there you can buy a cheap house, but you can't get a job. Remote working would have helped to somewhat alleviate this, but no, now we all have to go back to the office so we can sit there and spend the whole day in Zoom/Slack/Teams calls instead of doing the exact same thing from home...
10k??? Yes because I want to live in east bumfuck in a food desert and drive 40 minutes to the one megamart and where the services barely work and my police/fire/usps is on the next town over 20 miles away.
Did I mention the legions of uneducated anti-Christians who would probably kill me for being queer?
> Here's the problem: * If no one had to pay, no one would. * We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons
Here's the actual problem. You've based your argument on a debunked economic theory ie the tragedy of the commons. You may as well argue trickle down economics.
Garrett Hardin wrote an essay called The Tragedy of the Commons in 1968 [1] and it became all the rage in neoliberal circles to justify wealth transfer to private hands (ie privatization) [2]. It never fit experimental data. Ultimately, Elinor Ostrom debunked it entirely using empircal data from the world over, work for which she won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics [3].
Whatever your arguments against free housing might be, the tragedy of the commons ain't it.
> Anyone thinking there's a simple solution to this problem hasn't spent enough time with the problem.
I've spent a lot of time with the problem. and there is a simple solution: relax zoning restrictions and various lot requirements to allow private developers to build more housing. the market incentives are already there, they're just blocked by NIMBY's and stupid city councils, etc.
> The uptick in rental delinquency isn’t new. It started six years ago
It has nothing to do with Mamdani, for those of who don't want to bother to read. Most of this occurred under Eric Adams's watch.
Anecdotally, I do think covid made people a lot more aware of how deeply backlogged the housing courts are. It seems like a lot of people (like the anonymous one in the article) realized they could not pay rent and avoid being actually evicted for quite some time.
This is a recurring theme in city problems: Backlogged courts. Sometimes that's to the benefit of the less fortunate (here), but it also often results in terrible outcomes (see: Kalief Browder).
I think even the benefit for the less fortunate here is at most a short-term one. In the longer one, you need building and renting out shelter to be reasonably profitable, so that people do it.
It's basically the same argument that says rent caps are bad for the renters in the long run.
We don't always have to consider the apparently very fragile and fickle motivations of investors. Social housing can and has worked very well in many cases.
Unfortunately, most housing "investors" are people who bought a home 10-30 years ago and will be furious if they can't sell at a large profit compared to what they bought it for.
Sadly, a lot of places (Netherlands and Ireland come to mind) _discourage_ you from investing in things like stocks, and _encourage_ you to "invest" in a primary residence, making the problem even worse.
If you want people to be able to live in a place without paying rent, please just outright gift that to them and make that official policy. That may or may not be good policy, but at least it's honest.
But if the deal that people agreed to is to pay rent, then the courts should also enforce that.
You can get from one regime to the other, by eg buying out the landlords or outright expropriating them. But if you want to do that, please just advocate so outright.
Social housing may or may not be a good idea. But it's a completely separate issue from non-enforcement of existing rental contracts.
Maybe. That narrower focus definitely makes your remark more defensible.
On a tangent: along with most economist, I generally prefer giving poor people money that they can spend on goods and services as they please; instead of having some pencil pusher decide what they need and giving that to them in-kind.
I currently live in an HDB property in Singapore. It's great.
I'm originally from the Netherlands, which traditionally had a strong social housing sector: regions and cities would have their own housing corporations ('woningbouwcorporaties') tasked with building affordable housing. Those corporations were given government support after 1950 to help with the post-WW2 housing shortage, but were semi-privatized in the mid-90s, and in 2015 their scope was strongly curtailed.
It would be reductive to say that this privatization was the sole cause of the current housing crisis affecting the Netherlands -- rents and housing prices have also increased a lot in Singapore since Covid -- but it probably didn't help.
No. Social housing is government owned and rented. Singapore is government built and sold. Singapore is a tiny island with little space. The government has to control what is built where and avoids it turning into Hong Kong slums.
>Public housing, also known as social housing, is subsidized or affordable housing provided in buildings that are usually owned and managed by local government, central government, nonprofit organizations or a combination thereof.
Wikipedia says 'usually'. And, yes, you are right that the individual HDB flats are typically owned by individual families (though the government also owns some and rents them out, but that's the exception).
However, HDB still does a lot of the managing. Eg HDB manages the lifts and other common spaces. They organise getting the exterior repainted, or general upgrading works to plumbing etc.
HDB also subsidises the price of a flat when you buy directly from them. There's a reason they have maximum income caps for buying.
My unpopular opinion: HDB should declare victory and go home. They more than solved the original acute housing shortage they were created for.
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Singapore does a lot of things right. And HDB is, as usually a lot more competent than pretty much any other public housing programme anywhere else in the world. But that doesn't mean everything Singapore does (including HDB) is automatically a good idea forever.
Just like our local recreational drug policy could probably be improved by moving closer to what we do with the casinos. And the ban on vaping is just silly.
> However, HDB still does a lot of the managing. Eg HDB manages the lifts and other common spaces. They organise getting the exterior repainted, or general upgrading works to plumbing etc.
By that logic every apartment block is public housing.
If the criteria to be public housing is that someone manages the lifts, lights, and exterior. Then all apartment blocks are public housing. Condos and HDBs are all public housing.
Your logic is infallible. Of course, your premise is rubbish.
It's not about whether 'someone' is managing these things. Even an owner-occupier is managing their own lights and exteriors.
A useful criterion is whether the government (or an arm of the government) is managing these things. Like HDB, but unlike your typical condo management organisation. It's far from the only criterion, but it's a useful indicator.
"Singapore has one of the highest home ownership rate in the world, due to the commitment of our founding fathers since the very beginning of nation building. Today, there are more than 1 million HDB flats across the island, home to close to 80% of Singapore's resident population. The schemes highlighted below help Singaporeans meet their housing needs at different life stages."
So the dictionary says that HBD housing is public housing, wikipedia says that HBD housing is public housing, and the Singaporean government says that HBD housing is public housing.
For the benefit of any others (miraculously) still reading, I will repeat the statement of fact that you continue stubbornly to deny against all evidence: "'social housing' is a general term that implies subsidization and affordability rather than any one specific ownership model".
For the benefit of any others. Bluebarbet has never been to Singapore and ultimately doesn’t know what he’s talking about. HDBs are not public housing. It’s land control because Singapore is so tiny.
Primarily Vienna. There's nothing complicated about what Vienna did - other cities just prefer to please billionaires instead of providing services to citizens.
Do you actually know what Vienna did? Because the overwhelming number of people who reference the city basically just repeat a few dubious talking point about restricting rent.
Well, Berlin's history was a bit more complicated. Between the 'losing the empire' bit and the 'surplus housing' was a whole generation or two of the city being divided and one part living under siege and the other under real world socialism.
But you are right, that surplus housing is no longer a thing in Berlin.
I don't know about restricting rent but they certainly had a progressive tax on high rents, a 1% income tax to fund housing, and then used that to build a ton of high quality social housing with balconies and amenities for all. I also like to think it helped that they slapped a big sign on each to proudly let people know it was their tax dollars at work.
I didn't stay in social housing while I living there but I never once heard people complain about it. They basically just didn't think much about it at all and felt it was a good system and then would ask me why the US only makes it for poor people.
I mean, to be fair, having your population semi-permanently depleted by two major wars and a fundamental loss of national economic centrality and prestige will help you keep a fixed stock of social housing lasting longer.
No one absolutely no one considers that to be remotely true. Look at French banlieues, German Plattenbauten or British Councils - they are synonymous with Crime and physical as well as cultural despair.
And while Vienna or Stockholm are often cited as Utopias, the citees often intentionally leave out the negative side effects (ie. Waiting-times of years, housing black markets, etc) that are eventually coming full circle to the thing they were proposed as a solution against. Just with much less transparency.
There have been social housing projects that paint a more nuanced picture, eg Hamburg-Steilshoop, where a giant block (for EU standards) has been erected in the 1970s and was basically divided into three sections: one to be run by existing housing coops, one by owner occupants, and one by the city. Needless to say that those parts run by the city were quickly becoming a prime example of a German „banlieue“ while the other parts became a prime example for those eager to dismiss any criticisms.
This was aggravated by modern city planning with it's separation of function that left these new districts with no third spaces, barely any shops and large spaces of 'no man's land' between buildings.
In classics European cities there were shops on street level and dense blocks that generated demand for those.
The post war developments followed the 'high rise in the park' concept, lots of greenery and parking lots between buildings to create a mid density neighborhood.
But there is no life in the streets and you have to walk a lot through repetitive environment but to do anything you still have to go to the 'old city'.
High rises were far from being the only, or even the dominant model for social housing in Europe. Different plans such as low rises, semi-detached houses and single homes also got implemented.
Those are even worse - you need a certain density for urban life, otherwise you'll just create large empty spaces that belong to no-one, so nobody feels responsible for them.
> Look at French banlieues, German Plattenbauten or British Councils - they are synonymous with Crime and physical as well as cultural despair.
Sure, because what existed before was absolutely fine [1][2]...
The truth is that these policies worked so well that pepole completely forgot what existed before. The alternative to housing projects wasn't a country without crime or despair, it was more crime, shanty towns, people displaced by war and unable to get back to normal life, and young workers unable to move to places of employment in the postwar economic boom. That topic was so uncontroversial that every european government, leftwing or rightwing, did it.
I agree that a social housing project alone isn't enough to fix every problem, but that doesn't make it the source of other unsolved problems.
Eh, I agree with the general point that rental housing has to be financially viable over the long run. I just don’t think NYC politics lets this particular problem turn quickly into a clean “landlords stop renting/developers stop building” outcome. It’ll look a lot weirder.
Affordable housing is too central to NYC democratic politics for the city/state to simply let a large share of subsidized housing totally collapse. More likely, they keep patching it with public money: arrears assistance, vouchers, preservation funds, regulatory tweaks, etc. That’s already basically the pattern.
The real likely long-term problem is that the city robs Peter to pay Paul: It props up housing operations by reducing funding for other services, creating recurring subsidy obligations, or risking pressure on its fiscal position and bond ratings.
They’re already doing that all the time: Part of how Mamdani plugged the budget gap, for example, was by delaying a classroom size reduction in public schools.
Obviously, I don’t think that’s a great long-term strategy. It turns a blind eye to an enforcement problem in favor of a recurring taxpayer-funded operating subsidy.
It's a shame that NYC can't raise more from property taxes / land taxes?
They sit on some of the most valuable real estate in the world, surely that should be able to find public infrastructure etc? Especially since the density they have would allow them to provide the infrastructure rather efficiently.
But they are so ham-strung / incompetent, they still have surface level street parking on public roads. Surely, there's more valuable uses of NYC real estate than that, and the market would be more than happy to find them.
(At least they made some inroads recently by introducing some congestion pricing. As neutered as that programme turned out, it's a lot better than nothing, which they had before.)
They can and it often comes up: One of Mamdani's tax proposals was to raise property taxes, though he backtracked on it.
Still, NYC's municipal budget is already the largest in the world by far. When I last looked, it was roughly double Tokyo's and bigger than many countries: NYC's municipal budget is larger than Singapore's, for example, and obviously NYC's budget gets to exclude things countries pay for like national defense.
It's likely they will need to continue raising taxes, but we also need to take a hard look at how effective each dollar being spent is.
Not to mention that to move they would need to have resources to do so. And in many cases would take them away from what little interpersonal safety net they have in the form of friends and family — which for people who are struggling typically makes things worse.
You can't blame Adams for delinquent payments. He dramatically expanded housing vouchers (the source of the budget crisis) which in theory should have reduced delinquency.
Moreover rents for affordable housing haven't kept up with inflation while benefits have.
Arm chair speculation like what's in the article won't suffice. People need to be surveyed and interviewed to get to the bottom of this.
I can and do put some blame on Adams here, but I don’t think the story is ineptitude or corruption, at least on this issue. I think his administration mostly chose to prioritize the long-term housing supply problem, even if that meant more short-term pain for tenants.
He had a pretty good "Abundance-style" agenda IMO: City of Yes didn’t go far enough, but passing it at all was a big deal in NYC land-use politics. Various tax policies like 485-x are at least serious long-term attempts to restart housing production, even if the details are debatable.
> He dramatically expanded housing vouchers
This is being extremely charitable to Adams. The big CityFHEPS expansion was vetoed by Adams and the city council overrode him. The Adams administration was clearly skeptical of short-term tenant-side relief.
You can see that in simple things like his rent board appointees: Adams-era boards approved rent increases every single year. I'm not saying that's bad and it's in-line with his general view of housing as a supply-side problem. He inherited a system coming off years of freezes and very low increases under BDB, so some correction was necessary.
But overall when given the choice, he did choose to inflict a bit of short-term pain for a longer-term view.
Blood from a stone. Sure the landlord could theoretically go after them, but they would spend a bunch of money on legal fees for someone that will probably never pay it back.
> “There is a subset of people, maybe the smallest subset, who are literally making a choice not to pay rent, and we don’t do well with acknowledging that but there is a subset for whom that is the case,” [...] Others bristle at the notion that some tenants are not paying rent just because they may be able to get away with it.
These people absolutely exist. To pretend that they don't is willful ignorance. They are, however, indeed a "small[est] subset" to quote the gentleman in the article. In the era of $4 McDoubles and $6 gallons of gas I have trouble believing that one in four people is my burnout college roommate who spends on Fireball shots and Xbox games instead of paying rent. Life is expensive these days.
I anecdotally know of a few cases in Seattle where tenants with high incomes that could easily pay just don't. There is a subculture that actively encourages this type of behavior and the laws are setup such that there are almost no consequences for it. I've also met people who bragged about doing it. While rare, it is still common enough that it has become a real problem and has become socially acceptable in some circles.
It is corrosive to the social contract when government policy tacitly encourages this behavior.
It's not rare. I repeat. It's not rare. I am a landlord in Seattle with ~55 active tenants/leases. Let's just say that I know of many landlords in the circles I run in that have absolutely stopped renting to leftie types because they've had so many issues over the last few years with many of them over litigating everything; and deciding not to pay rent over the smallest non-issues, or just not paying rent at all. I could cite case after case; and this topic is especially salient to me in the present moment because I am in fact dealing with one of these tenants right now and its a total nightmare. I will spare you the gruesome details of trying to work with this particular tenant but just trust me—I have an incredibly high tolerance to stress and this individual is doing their best to get as far under my skin as possible.
When the political class or the cultural zeitgeist tells you over and over that landlords are leeches and that "any attempt to profit off of housing is unethical"—people are going to take that to heart and have a hatred for even well-meaning small landlords. If you don't believe this is the attitude, go visit r/Seattle. The inflammatory language of politicians and cultural leaders sets the tone which plays out as legal battles and fights in properties across the city.
This obviously creates an adverse selection problem where small landlords illegally apply their own prejudices and biases in tenant selection. Honestly—could you expect them not to—when the repercussions of picking a bad tenant are so great? And when there are other demographic groups—like immigrants—who are absolutely, verifiably and consistently reliable as tenants. It used to be that it was the section 8 or low income type that were a huge problem but now there's an educated leftish fringe that landlords are also avoiding. Honestly with good reason, IMO.
Some homeowners just decide to not list extra rooms in their house outright. I remember hearing something like that Seattle has the highest number of unrented empty rooms in the country (though someone should fact check that). With the political climate the way it is here, it's obvious as to why this is the case.
Its spread across about ~ 6 houses. I'm definitely a small landlord. I deal with all tenant issues myself, handle all repairs, leases, and most importantly for me—maintain a healthy relationship (which has grown to many friendships). I use this term in contrast to a faceless, corporate landlord who owns larger apartment buildings. Small landlords and corporate landlords are nothing alike
55 isn’t small by definition and under the law. You may feel small because it’s just you, and you don’t realize how much you’ve accomplished or the asymmetric bargaining position that affords you but your perspective isn’t corresponding with reality.
That being said, I do think a system that tenant rights to be as abusive of legal process as we have in some states ends up hurting tenants themselves. I think our courts should move much faster so nonpayment is resolved faster. But I also think all landlords should be required to pay 20% of rent to a home building fund so that new housing actually gets built.
> If a landlord can charge 1200 instead of 1000 why wouldn’t they?
Because someone else could undercut them. If everyone is being levied the same toll, and everyone knows that, it’s not that risky to just pass along the tax.
> If a landlord can charge 1200 instead of 1000 why wouldn’t they? They’ll charge the maximum they can get away with, costs are irrelevant
This is rarely true. Only universally true for large corporate landlords where there is an entire corporate structure maximizing every dollar due to personal incentives put in place by executives/ownership.
Small landlords (yes, even those with 6 buildings) are almost never min/maxing rent like this. They are optimizing for other things like time investment and hassle factor. And even doing the right thing.
I've both rented and landlorded. In neither side of those transactions over decades was I either paying maximal rent or charging it. When property taxes went up as a renter, my small time landlord would show me the tax bill and I'd pay exactly the increase. Same went for when I had tenants.
I'd go as far as to say the majority of mom and pop landlords are not looking to charge maximum rent. They only start doing so when they have a problematic tenant they are trying to "manage out" of the unit.
>Small landlords (yes, even those with 6 buildings) are almost never min/maxing rent like this. They are optimizing for other things like time investment and hassle factor. And even doing the right thing.
Yup. Have a single residential in a otherwise commercial building in NYC. They pay ~50% market for a spacious 3 BR for a number of reasons; mainly because we have known them for a long time and they struggle with health issues so we never really raised them. Charging them market would put them on the street. They can afford the 50%, live nicely, and the commercial tenants pay market which pays for the building with a little leftover. If they ever move we will certainly charge more but I see no reason to gouge like others.
This is right. Increased costs are either passed on to tenants or decrease the landlord’s cash flow. Those are the only two options. I don’t have any data on which occurs more frequently. But what is true is an increase in expenses means less debt service is available so purchase prices come down.
Yes. And the other one is forced to charge 1200. So the other one can charge for example 1190. And the renters will choose the 1190. And then the next renter has to pay 1200.
Or the one without mortgage goes like I only get 800. Maybe instead I just throw this money in government bonds for better gains and save money...
Other option for same outcome could be just to charge any renter 20% on top of their rent. Which they directly pay to this fund. That would push rents down as they are able to pay less. Achieving exactly same effect.
Purchase prices will come down because the percentage of rent available for debt service will decrease. So the cap rate will be calculated on a smaller denominator.
If leads to building that floods the system with supply then rent won’t increase. Landlords and lenders would have to adjust purchase prices and cap rates so valuations would come down. So this would need be gradually phased in until normal. The government would need to support home builders, buyers and landlords. But eventually the housing stock supply increase would match and be tied to new household formation.
At the end of the day most economic activity is really an exercise in ratios. Some states don’t charge sales taxes. Some change double digits. Yet retailers are able to function in both environments.
What is clear is that rental and purchase housing is increasing beyond inflation since 2008 and COVID and that’s not good for tenants or landlords.
Being generous with your ~6 number to be either 5 or 7 houses you have either 7.8-11 people per unit?
That's slumlord territory and not any morally better than corporate landlords unless your average unit size is a 4 bed/2 bath.
Also there is zero world where you have 6 houses, 50+ people and can call yourself a small time landlord. That's being able to live entirely off of your rental income and a full time landlord. You could maybe, _maybe_ get away with describing yourself as a medium time landlord.
Small time is living in a 3 floor house and renting the other 2 floors, or owning 1 other home to rent.
I'm sure OP meant 6 houses with several units in it each, not 7-11 people per house. Otherwise the distinction between house and unit doesn't make sense.
This is a small time landlord. Large landlords have easily over 10000 units, and he is one half of a percent of that.
I hope he is able to live off the rental income. It's a big job to manage 55 units and keep everything in shape and administratively going, deal with turnover and so on.
nah, having 6 buildings(not houses, if were being precise with terminology here) with multiple units in each, is not a small time landlord. If you can live entirely off the rental income then you are a full time landlord and can at best claim that you aren't a large corporate landlord, but you don't get to invoke the idea that you are some sort of mom and pop situation renting out a spare unit, which is what people assume when you say "small time landlord"
I'm the OP—just chiming in, I can just hardly live off the rental income I make, but its a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE. Yes what I am is not analogous to someone renting out a few extra rooms. I just think my experience is analogous to that of a small time landlord in that I know each tenant very well and we have good relationships—and I manually handle each part of their tenant experience. To add more detail, I share a bedroom in a 25 bedroom house that I own, which accounts for a bit more than half of my tenants.
That's a telling detail. How many 'big time landlords' are in the position of living in one of their 25 bedroom units? I'm going to skip the 'share a bedroom' 'cos that might well mean something otherwise desirable. In the best case scenario I too would be sharing a bedroom, but it wouldn't be my best case scenario to be in a 25 unit building unless it was quite large and well built.
Sorry, I meant I live in a bedroom in the 25 br house. Its not a particularly nice or well-built house; it's a frat house near the UW campus in Seattle. As a matter of fact, I live in the basement in the smallest room in the house. I am not a fancy person and don't need anything more than the basic necessities to remain content, and I like the neighborhood here.
> I can just hardly live off the rental income I make, but its a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE
there is a large gap between "can live off of"(my words) and "a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE"(your words). If you're making more than the median household income which based on the fed numbers is ~84k/yr[1] you've crossed the line past small time landlord. You may be making less than that, but I am going to be surprised if you are with ~55 tenants.
I didn't invoke a "mon and pop situation renting out a spare unit" idea, that's your own that you're projecting on my comment.
I did say that they are a small landlord, and I stand by it given that a large landlord is several orders of magnitude larger than them. If in your world that's only a label you want to give someone renting out a single spare unit, then so be it. I disagree.
Those are effectively synonymous to me. The line in the sand that definitively makes you not a small time landlord is if you earn enough from rental income after expenses to make as much as the average job's income.
If you disagree I will need you to define what "small time landlord" means to you then so we can figure out the gap in our understanding.
"Small" is a word indicating that quantitatively relative to other things, it is less, i.e. Very Small < Small < Medium < Large < Very Large.
According to [1] (Doorloop, 2026), Greystar manages 823,581 units as the largest landlord. The 10th largest landlord is WinnCompanies with 120,855 units. These are "very large" to me. If we make a generous curve then a large landlord has 10% of those units, so somewhere in the 10,000 unit range, a medium landlord 10% of that or 1,000 units, a small landlord 10% of that or 100 units, and a very small landlord has the last interval of 1-10 units. Hence, 55 units is somewhere between very small and small.
The net effect is most of the people I know with a rental or two in Seattle will only rent via direct referrals from people they know, which also allows them to rent at a lower rate. Their properties are no longer available to the general public. The demand is high enough that this works. Sucks if you are new to Seattle though.
This kind of non-payment of rent abuse exploded during COVID.
I’m curious how they’re managing to do this. I don’t give any outward signals of being a “leftie type” but I absolutely am. Conversely, I know lots of people who have a very punk look but are super conservative.
> And when there are other demographic groups—like immigrants—who are absolutely, verifiably and consistently reliable as tenants.
I know someone with something like 120 units. Unassuming nice old lady that makes over a million a year. She tries to rent to immigrants as much as possible since they don't cause issues.
The best people to rent to are illegal immigrants, you don’t have to do things like ensure they have livable accommodation as they first sign of complaint you just phone up the authorities and they get kicked out.
The lefty landlords are an even bigger problem for housing affordability than the lefty tenants. They want the anti-property rights boot up the ass of anyone trying to build new homes or dwellings, under the auspices of endangered owls or environmental review or "character of the community" or the wetlands or whatever the current scam is. It's all the same commie shit but only for themselves and at the expense of everyone else, of course dressed up that the dumber and younger end of the tenants actually believe it's in their interest.
If you own 6 houses, you don't only have an income the size of a full-time job but also make money out of the appreciation of property prices. Couldn't you and your immediate family retire by just selling these 6 houses? Or is the situation different in Seattle?
Also you are saying you are also working as a senior SWE. How are you so involved with 55 tenants and balance a full-time job at the same time? I've known people with 1 tenant who needed days off to deal with their issues, I find it hard to imagine personally dealing with 55.
I could sell all of the houses and retire, yeah. Especially the poor performing ones, after accounting for the mortgage I am in the red on two of them every month. I don't know if I expect property prices to appreciate in Seattle as we're flooding the market with housing and in the US we're having some unstable demographic shifts so I try to select properties that perform well on day 1, going forward.
Yes, my family also asks me how I do it. I am just working constantly, from sunup to sundown; pretty much 7 days a week. I don't always do a perfect job juggling the responsibilities but I do my best and I think 99-100% of my tenants would say they're enjoying the accommodations; and I think my manager would say my performance is good. Hoping I can get married and start a family soon and at that point I think hiring a property manager would be the correct move. But I have a very high amount of resilience to stress and being upset so being consistently under pressure isn't too much of a problem for me personally.
Also keep in mind there are certain types of tenants that are lower maintenance than others, so proper tenant selection is important.
I just try to be the landlord that I would want to have. I respond to my tenants quickly, always give them concessions, let them pay late, or at a discount when they’re struggling, referred them to work at my companies, etc, etc. it’s not all about the money, it’s also being a good member of the community, for me. This is in contrast to a corporate landlord where your $1500 disappears into a void every month.
That’s awesome. When I was growing up my parents were denied housing because they had too many kids and were almost homeless one time until a nice landlord of the same religion agreed to rent to us. Please take your responsibility seriously as it seems you do.
That being said there are “professional” tenants that try to scam the system to the detriment of landlords and other tenants. I would fully applaud resistance to their efforts to take advantage of the system.
Much of the land in New England / northeastern USA was apportioned to proprietors without any service rendered, plus squatting on grandfathered regulations that no one else can take advantage of. The actual improvement is a service, but commonly it's something like a shithole house where the physical manifestation of the improvement is like 10% of the real estate value.
In someplaces like Kansas where people actually mixed their labor with the land (homesteading) to claim it and then improved it and the title transferred in capitalistic exchange, landlords are basically 100% providing a service. But in New York very little of the "value" provided has anything to do with services and labor mixed with the land as someone like Adam Smith envisioned as value generation. It's largely just some proprietor being handed land in the 1600s with the wand of a King, taking the shit by violence, then making regulations out the ass with violence (to make their shithole house pretend to provide a more valuable 'service') and then exempting themselves via grandfathering and then people exchanging title for same. Their service is a legacy of beating the shit out of Indians with weapons and then the populace with government and then allocating the value to themselves.
What exactly are you asking for? They clearly are expressing empathy for others’ situations.
I live in a managed building that is completely soulless. I needed to extend my lease by one month before moving out. They wanted me to sign a new 12 month lease at a higher rate, break it, and pay a two month penalty for terminating early. This took over a month to get to something remotely human.
There is absolutely a difference between someone treating people like people and bad landlords.
Also, they aren’t throwing their money into a void. They’re literally getting housing.
> From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.
Surely that's the case for all sorts of services we pay for. Renting a house is paying for a service. The money disappears and in return you get the service. A nice landlord (and by nice I mean - responsive to problems, following laws, empathetic to the tenant, trusting of the tenant etc) provides a better service than a bad one. Unfortunately you rarely know which kind of landlord you have until you move in.
I think it's fair to say that there are bad landlords, and that there are circumstances where landlords are exploitative. But that doesn't change the fact there are also circumstances where landlords provide a useful service to people. Buying a house isn't always practical - landlords should exist to provide a service to people who don't want long term financial commitments.
> From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.
Not true for everyone. I was quite happy to pay my previous small time landlord. We had a very productive business relationship, at least from my perspective.
He fixed the large things and I didn't have to worry about it. In return I did basic maintenance and bothered him maybe once a year on average when something larger needed fixing.
I felt I got plenty of value from that relationship and my money certainly did not o into a void. My current mortgage though? Most of that goes off into the void of the market and I miss my previous living situation quite a bit most days.
What are you basing your judgment of OP on? He is listing various ways he goes above and beyond for his tenants even though he certainly doesn't have to. Your credit card company doesn't waive your late fees, yet he does when he knows tenants experience hardships. That's pretty awesome.
Also, the money doesn't go into a void: Tenants receive housing in return.
> but I think you've drunk a bit too much of your own kool-aid
That (rather judge-y) part negates the "nice" part your started out with. I don't think OP "drank too much of his own kool-aid", he simply listed all the nice things he does for his tenants, which are great and well beyond what you could expect from an unrelated party in a contract for a service.
I'd like to try and give you some sympathy, but my last landlord was a well-regarded property management firm who left me with no heat from the end of October to the weekend of Martin Luther King Day in New England, effectively only fixing it once I withheld rent, got on the local news, and was threatening a lawsuit. So, uh... yeah plenty of landlords have done a lot to earn that reputation for the class as a whole.
That's true, but I think when you pick a place to live in, you're not only really only interviewing the living establishment itself, but also the landlord/property management associated with it. I make an effort to do all of the tours of the units myself and establish good repoire with the tenants from the get-go. It's certainly inexcusable if a landlord doesn't fix things that impair living conditions—in Seattle we have a law that things of this nature must be fixed within 48 hours which I think is a reasonable law.
Yes I’m doing it for the money, I have to be compensated for my time and the financial investment obviously. People who decide to deceive me break not only a social contract but also a legal contract and a commitment they made at the time of signing a lease. If everyone acted like them, there would be no stable housing available for anyone. Talk about a bad take…
I never said my only interest is money. At your job, is your only interest money? Do you not feel a social obligation to your coworkers; want to do good for your teammate and your company? Again, talk about a stupid take, as if humans are one dimensional like that. Corporate landlords and hedge funds that own apartment sky rises are probably only in it for the money. You can't say the same thing about every small landlord just because they make a profit.
I'm an open source developer. To me, it tracks that people can have other motivations and balance those with money/survival and all. What nikkwong is saying is, you can want to do well, have social obligations, take action to serve the community and not just your own benefit, and even want to do so because you sleep better and have nicer interactions with people as a rule. That tracks, I believe it, that's what I do.
The critics here are trying to make the argument that no you can't. Any such motivation is completely pretend, and everybody is 100% always dedicated to only their own benefit, not taking any of these squishier benefits into account ever, and you're fooling yourself if you think otherwise and you're conning other people on purpose if you PRETEND otherwise. There is nothing but paperclip maximizing, and we're all robots but some of us are lying robots.
These critics exist, and I'm sure they live their beliefs. Sucks to be them, even when they include the literal wealthiest people in the world, because they live those beliefs. They're inflicting them on the rest of us, but it doesn't make them correct, it just means the rest of us have to deal with the harm they inflict. Cheers nikkwong, thanks for being more of a gray area, like a lot of us are :)
I'm sure some slave owners were 'nice people'. Still slave owners, right?
But I treat my slaves better than everyone I know and I only have half a dozen! I don't only have slaves for profit!
Slave owners in the south were actually far more likely to be better people than today's landlords because they had far less choice but to compete with other people who engaged in slavery than landlords of today.
The 'only' strawman and the projections, oh my. 'Every accusation is a confession' remains true. 'Sucks to be them', 'inflicting them on the rest of us'. Gee, the person on the internet you know nothing about is 'inflicting harm' on society. Think of the landlord's feelings, they appear to be hurt! Look, he accused someone with an already high paying job who landlords in his free time of only caring about money! Only he said, does he not know that there can be multiple motivating factors? He said only fellas, only! I rest my case, only.
Landlords are slave owners? Gosh. On the bright side, who knew Hacker News was so revolutionary?
Alex, how do you interact with AI? I don't, 'cos I don't use it. Are you one of the people who eke out performance gains by threatening to shoot the AI's dog if it makes a mistake? Or are you one of the people who are prepared to accuse those people of doing literally the same thing as extorting living humans?
I stand by, sucks to be the critics to whom everything is dominance and profit and nothing else merits the slightest consideration.
And yikes whoo boy does it suck to be a person who argues 'back in the day the slave owners were nicer than landlords of today because they had to compete with other slave owners'. WOW. what?
Good lord, renting a property to someone who voluntarily signs a lease is equivalent to slavery?! Give me a break.
I will say you're doing an excellent job of backing up OPs post. There absolutely are people with an unhinged view of reality who will aggressively try to screw over people they think are in the "wrong" group.
Arguing that poor people never try to abuse the system is some serious ivory tower BS.
Wow, way to not actually read what a person said, and then quote things and say they mean something that they don't.
I get that you don't like the concept of people owning property and renting it to others, but maybe stop arguing in bad faith?
Here's a hint: it's possible to be doing something for the money, but not only do it for the money. It's possible to operate a business, but also be a well-meaning person who treats customers of that business with empathy and compassion.
I don't know the landlord in this subthread, so I can't say if he's telling the truth about how he treats his tenants, but if he is telling the truth, he sounds better than the vast majority of landlords out there. Not just better, actually good.
Lefty tenant here. I def. stopped paying my rent a few times until my landlord fixed their shit or agreed to stop scamming me.
Last time I did it I signed a lease for a year, with 2 months of advance notice if I decided to leave (in the UK). I told them 2 months before the end of my lease, and they told me I had to wait for the end of my lease, then wait 2 months, and then I could be out.
I just stopped paying rent, and left them a horrible one star review on gmaps.
One day he showed up at my place (with soup who was coming to fix something) and tried to enter. I told him to stay out. And then he started crying and telling me how I could not just stop paying rent. I could tell how hard it was to be a small landlord.
I told him that I would resume paying if they signed smthg to agree to let me break the lease at the year end AND reimburse me the fees that appeared at the least minute, a year ago, right as I was signing the lease in front of them.
They agreed, reimbursed me my caution/deposit at the end, easy.
Would recommend just stop paying your rent if anything ever happens. I would do it again.
What we see is iterated prisoner's dilemma. Enough people have had their landlords play "defect" against them (rent rises in excess of wage inflation, evictions, failure to do maintenance, intrusion) that the public have started playing "defect" against the landlords.
Also like, objectively the courts are on the side of evictions. They have lots of practice and your local PD will be happy to help. The process works just fine.
Most places have a pretty clean eviction process: You provide a very short notice, 14 days for non-payment, and then get a court hearing.
If landlords are upset that it takes a long time to get to a court date, sorry, get in line with the rest of us who can't get basic Justice because the US doesn't fund public services, which the court is.
Like what do you expect, that we just throw people out onto the street on your word? Do you not see how obviously that will get abused?
There are such people. I have a unit in Seattle that sits empty because I don't want to risk getting stuck with such tenants.
In Seattle, you can't:
1. Evict people from November to April (it's "winter").
2. Evict people with schoolchildren during the school year.
3. Run background checks on prospective tenants.
4. You _must_ rent to the first qualifying tenant.
5. You must offer 3 months in rent as compensation if you decline to renew the lease.
6. The maximum rent increase is capped.
Oh, and eviction process takes about 1.5 years now because the courts are overloaded and the tenant can use procedural tricks to drag out the process.
Apart from maybe being a little more flexible on evictions, none of the other reasons seem problematic.
For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate?
The giving tenant three month rent thing is for a very small circumstance - for example huge rent increases if the tenant income is low, condo remodeling, etc. The wording is: “landlords who issue a housing cost increase of 10% or more (within a 12-month period) must pay relocation assistance if the affected household earns 80% or less of the Area Median Income and chooses to move.”
Maximum rent increase being capped also makes sense - I’ve been hit with 15-20% rent increases with no choice but to move.
It seems like you don’t like the tenant having any rights, and you want to impose your will upon them.
Are you also wanting a company to have to hire the first qualifying candidate and immediately stop all hiring? That is nonsensical. A landlord and a tenant should be free to contract as both parties wish.
Does this "first tenant" rule not incentivize people to apply immediately, sight unseen, and then they just eat the credit check fee on the apartments that they end up not choosing? Or maybe they can even bail before the credit check is done, if they can see all of their candidate apartments in that time, or at least do see the one they applied for and decide they don't want it?
> Does this "first tenant" rule not incentivize people to apply immediately, sight unseen
Is that a bad thing? Presumably that means they liked something about your rental. Happened a ton during COVID.
> Or maybe they can even bail before the credit check is done, if they can see all of their candidate apartments in that time
I highly doubt this happens in practice. It can be like $50 per application easy - renters are in general cost conscious. I certainly only put down the fees on apartments I’m serious about (usually two max). Why waste money?
> For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate?
You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house. If you're a building owner, there are reasons that you might want to be able to have freedom of choice in choosing who you have live in your building. When the government forces you to choose the first applicant who meets your selection criteria, your selection criteria becomes incredibly strict—720+ credit score, makes 4x the rent, etc. Especially when evicting a bad tenant becomes basically impossible, landlords work even harder to vet candidates, meaning there are a lot of false negatives that aren't offered housing. Seriously, you can't evict a tenant just because its winter? You know how many people take advantage of that — read my sibling comment in my thread. I myself in Seattle have dealt with multiple tenants who have done this so they could have free rent as their lease expired. What do you think this does to my tenant selection process? I up the bar.
> Maximum rent increase being capped also makes sense - I’ve been hit with 15-20% rent increases with no choice but to move.
You act like there's an oligopoly that dictates rent prices from their mountaintop that we all have to abide by. We live in a free market, and small landlords compete with large buildings for tenants. Creating these types of caps just makes the system less efficient — focuses efforts on the false pretense of tenants rights rather than the true equalizer like building more housing. And honestly, it just drives small landlords out of the market who can't handle it. This just leaves corporate landlords who are certainly less tenant friendly and will further this tenant vs landlord arms-race. We should be creating incentives and making it easy for individual homeowners to become landlords (at least in Seattle) if we want the paradigm to improve.
I've lived in properties with no form of rent control whatsoever. Landlords issuing 10%+ rent increases is awful. it denies you the stability that's granted by fair/consistent rent increases. It erodes the community fabric by having a revolving door of tenants who live there 1-2 years before leaving.
I do agree that we should focus on other remedies such as building more. However, even in a market with ample housing, I'm not convinced that some Landlords would still just as happily take the 'I bet they'd rather a 10% rent increase than deal with the hassle of moving' gamble.
Most of the people I've met who are anti rent control/stabilization usually don't have the pleasure of a landlord who has decided to engage in such tactics. Almost always they argue from some place of guaranteed housing safety.
this is an issue that applies to people making 30k and also people making 300k.
I like the approach Finland took when it abolished rent control in the 1990s. Basically, you are not allowed to chain fixed-term leases indefinitely. If the actual intent is that the tenant stays until further notice, the lease agreement must reflect that.
Now, if you have an indefinite lease, the landlord can't increase the rent, unless the basis for the increase is already in the agreement. Typically the rent is tied to a measure of inflation, and the landlord chooses once a year if they should make the increase.
That's actually fine, but the people who oppose rent control would probably not accept that because that's basically the system (give or take) that already exists in places where rent control already exists.
My ex also had a lease that stipulated automatic 5% increases, until they made him sign a new agreement mandating the non-negotiated increase would be 7.5% instead.
NYC has a particularly spectacular brand of hostility towards tenants (the latest trend I've seen is, instead of broker fees, absorbent move in/move out fees paid to property managers).
> You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house
We already tried that. It turns out that people are racist, so now we need laws to protect against that. It sucks for all the decent non-racist folks but the alternative of not having those protections was far worse.
If you force people to have someone in their house that they don't want, they are not going to rent their house out. This will lead to less units on the market. Your point about racism is fair, but I don't think the answer is a solution that reduces rentable units on the market.
The one that actually exists? Have you never heard of the HUD fair housing initiatives programs? You hire a white actor and a black actor with the same job, income, credit, etc and if a landlord consistently refuses to rent to the black actors, you sic the DoJ on them for violating the Fair Housing Act
Nope, I hadn't heard of that. Neat. I see two problems though:
1. I can see this being effective against larger landlord that will have many units available every year, ensuring that adequate testing can be performed. But on smaller landlords with only a few units, it seems like it'd be hard to test. (for example, you get rejected from an apartment. The landlord rents it out to someone else. You file a FHIP complaint, but the landlord no longer has any units available so they cannot test.)
2. It seems like this is largely driven by complaints? If I was rejected from an apartment, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to glean whether or not it was based on race.
Re #2: I feel like people of the kinds of races that often get discriminated against have pretty decent radar when it comes to figuring out why they were rejected.
How is renting different from hiring in that regard? Nobody would consider requiring employers to hire the first qualified candidate, but at the same time, we don't allow employers to discriminate on the basis of race.
Why couldn't the same law apply to residential leasing?
Are we sure that law is working as intended? Or are employers simply not admitting to factoring race into the decision? It is next to impossible to prove a candidate was rejected on the basis of race, especially when you can legally reject someone for not being a "culture fit" on the team.
I'd also argue the stakes are higher when leasing, so landlords will be less likely to take a chance on a race they don't like. Most jobs in the US are at-will employment so you can be fired at any time for almost any reason, but evicting a tenant can be a long process.
>t is next to impossible to prove a candidate was rejected on the basis of race
It is possible to prove a company is disproportionally one or the other when making the claim. Of course when an industry has far less applicants or members of a certain group that's to be expected but still.
Consequentially I've heard of some pretty blatant race based selection especially in the US.
It's just that that selection ends up excluding white people (or east asians)
A while ago I even discussed with a hr person here on hn who was defending their hiring of that sort with the most flowery wording about 'just giving priority' or 'reaching out to members of their prefered group specifically' fist if all they get is not the desired group.
> You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house. If you're a building owner, there are reasons that you might want to be able to have freedom of choice in choosing who you have live in your building.
That’s basically discrimination? Make a strict selection criteria, that’s fine. The city also has affordable housing for people who don’t qualify. You set what works for you, why do you care if it’s too strict?
I am not acting like there is an oligopoly, but not having tenant protections means tenants are at the mercy of shitty landlords. And there are a TON of them. Am I not supposed to have any rights, and the landlords gets to do whatever they want? Free market doesn’t mean regulation free.
Edit: you said “We should be creating incentives and making it easy for individual homeowners to become landlords (at least in Seattle) if we want the paradigm to improve.” - what do you propose? What about landlords who don’t want housing built because they like owning a scarce asset? What kind of rights do you think tenants should have?
Yes, discrimination based upon characteristics that aren't immutable is perfectly fine and something we do every day. I discriminate against my neighbor who invited me over drinks in favor of my best friend who invited me to his birthday. I discriminate against the potential hire who doesn’t have experience in this line of work in favor of the person who’s a nationally renowned expert. I discriminate against a tenant with a history of failing to make rent in favor of someone who consistently provides payment every month. People are different and valuing one over another in specific contexts is hardly scandalous. It only becomes a proble if you decide to discriminate against someone based upon immutable characteristics such as their race, sex, national origin, etc. because you’re not treating them as an individual.
I get where you’re coming from, but none of them are scarce inelastic resources. The work one especially doesn’t feel like discrimination.
It’s also very different - you’re hiring someone to do a job for you, vs wanting someone who’ll pay rent on time and not destroy the property. A mediocre employee vs an excellent employee can make any huge difference to a business.
That’s not the case with renters - if person A and person B both pay on time and don’t trash the place then they are quite fungible.
> if person A and person B both pay on time and don’t trash the place then they are quite fungible.
Based on those two sole criteria, no, they aren't. Person A might call weekly about trivial matters that they should be taking care of themselves (lightbulb burned out, oven needs cleaning, refrigerator water filter needs replacement, etc.), while person B just takes care of things and doesn't bother the landlord.
Yeah but you can’t eat your cake and have it too. Part of renting is responding to complaints. If you don’t want to do that then you shouldn’t be renting.
I had a landlord ask me “you’re not going to call me for basic things right?”. I’m paying you money, I’ll call you whenever I want. Didn’t rent from him. You can tell me do it yourself but why would I put money into someone else’s property?
This is such binary thinking. People have different ways of interacting with people. Some people are easier to deal with than others, and that was the parents' point, not that they never want to respond to reasonable complaints.
Landlords should provide well maintained housing and respond to reasonable complaints, and tenants should be swiftly evicted if they don't pay rent or destroy the unit they're living in. That's fair to both sides.
Your experience as a renter is not the same as the experience of a landlord. If you've been on your first job for a month and you pinky swear to pay rent on time and the next candidate has been on their job for 3 years then I'll take that candidate every time. It's a risk calculation. You are more likely to lose your job than the other candidate, and when you do and can't pay rent anymore and won't leave then that is a very expensive problem for me.
The same goes for savings, credit score, and other factors. These are not nearly as fungible as you seem to think.
> If everyone did that then how’s the person with a new job able to get a home?
That's exactly my point. If the regulations weren't so insane and burdensome (see other posters' points on not being able to evict promptly for nonpayment, for example) then the person with the brand new job would be able to quickly rent a home because it's not an undue risk for a landlord.
You can't ask landlords on the one hand to open their home to anyone, and on the other hand deny them the right to remove tenants that don't hold up their end of the bargain. Do you not see how that's completely unfair?
> You also have more capacity to absorb a short vacancy in case this person is to lose their job.
That is not a universal truth. Landlords have debt service/mortgage payments, taxes, maintenance, insurance and other payments. Especially smaller landlords actually do not - at all - have the capacity to absorb a vacancy or (even worse) a non-paying tenant.
> Can’t derisk your way out of everything.
Yes, but unduly moving risk from one party (tenant) to the other party (landlord) is certainly not the way to go either. If I just take your car and you don't have any recourse to get it back for 6+ months because the courts are backlogged and everyone else goes "well, you have a car, so you must be wealthy, what are you complaining about?" how would that make you feel?
Discrimination is fine, as long as the discrimination is not based on protected classes. If I were a landlord, I'd discriminate against people who act like assholes, for example, regardless of their ability to pay the rent, my rationale being that an asshole will likely be a problem tenant. And that I just don't enjoy dealing with assholes. Not sure "no assholes" is a reasonable thing to list on an official rental advertisement.
The fact that you cannot evict your tenant until they get a court hearing IS the system providing justice. It's ensuring that a landlord can't just throw you out on a whim, and you have to figure out housing until you get a court to say "Actually you weren't allowed to throw out that tenant" and have to deal with evicting the new tenant who was moved into your unit and also get you back into it.
It sure seems funny that it's only "Injustice" when it hurts the landlord, because apparently landlords aren't allowed to read the history of before we had these kinds of things.
If you are upset that court takes forever now in the US, congratulations, join the rest of us. You are not special in that regard.
Many people do. I certainly never wanted anything to do with that rental market when I had a vacant condo.
The unintended consequence is that there are closed rental networks that never advertise and only rent to vetted people with reputation on the line. These often have cheaper rents than publicly advertised rental properties because the risk of bad tenants has been reduced.
It turns the public rental market into an adverse selection phenomenon. Over time, the best tenants have access to cheaper better rentals that are never even visible to the average rental tenant.
Apparently, even with all these rules designed to damage the profitability of landlords, being landlord must be extremely profitable as they keep doing it.
It's not. Seattle is losing small landlords left and right. Instead, people are selling houses to large management companies that can spread the risk across multiple units.
People who have just one unit are usually not renting it for mega-profits but to cut their losses. It's moving due to a job with the mortgage underwater or slumping market so selling would incur a heavy loss or you want to come back and live in the house eventually, or inheriting a house where you'd like to move but unable at the moment due to job or family circumstances.
Even if you don't live in the house it still costs money in taxes, maintenance, and possibly mortgage so renting it would offset that. Having someone living in the house would also reduce maintenance costs. However, if renting can cost you more money at the end due to tenant protections, it would be wise to take a fixed loss of keeping the house empty than try your luck on rental market. Landlords with multiple units can price the risk into the rent so they can come ahead but with just one unit your risk-adjusted rent will be way out of the market.
Nothing on that list sounds like a particular hardship. Your "Oh, and" is unfortunate and ought to be addressed, but then again, that was intended as your cherry-topper, not your main course.
This is people's _homes_ we're talking about here, not a baseball card where privileging the owner is without too much consequence. If you lack the empathy to understand why this is a special case, maybe don't be a landlord.
They can't walk in, wipe their shoes on the hallway rug, make a pot of coffee, use the bathroom, turn on the TV, and take a nap on the couch. At least not without their tenant's invitation.
When they chose to rent out the house they yielded some of their property rights. The old landlord argument that "it's my house I should be able to XYZ" doesn't hold water.
Why should landlords have that expectation? I think the default case should be that when someone rents a space they have freedom to do what they want with that space until they stop renting it, and then when they stop renting it they must be forced to return it to its original condition.
Did you know in Australia it's normal to give your landlord a tour of your house every 3 months to prove you haven't broken it? That's completely ridiculous.
A deposit doesn't even cover the legal fees to evict a tenant (which can be north of $10,000 between lawyer, filing fees, and so on).
Add to that loss of rents for multiple months (while the landlord has to pay mortgage, insurance, taxes) and damages to property, and now you're asking a landlord to pay tens of thousands of dollars of their money.
I researched this. And there are no insurance companies in WA that offer these kinds of products for landlords.
Renters insurance primarily covers damage to _their_ property and only some narrow cases of damage to the unit (e.g. fires, flooding, etc.). A deadbeat tenant also will likely not be paying for insurance past the first month.
To give you some perspective, the eviction process costs around $20000 right now in legal fees. And you'll need to pay them, because the commie "housing justice" redistributionists know all the procedural tricks to delay and derail the process. Even in the best case, you're looking at a year of delay, and it can be more than 2 years for people with children. So that can be $100k+ of loss.
No insurance company is going to assume these kinds of risks without sky-high premiums.
He said “anecdotally”. In any case, I was wondering that if I know a friend who does this, how could I ever present a verifiable citation for it? You may have to rethink your ask.
Okay. I can anecdotally tell you that user jandrewrogers does not know of any cases in Seattle where tenants with high incomes that could easily pay just don't. Our anecdotes cancel each other out.
> how could I ever present a verifiable citation for it?
There would likely be at least one (1) report of such a wild claim due to how wild it is. We wouldn't need anecdotes!
> They are, however, indeed a "small[est] subset" to quote the gentleman in the article.
The numbers don't have to stay small because this behavior is not generated independently in a population. Multiple people may become aware of it by talking to each other, social media, forums, some crazy news event that refers to it, etc. All of the sudden a lot more people decide they can do it as well and tell their friends.
I am not defending it or saying one side is right or wrong just that when it comes to things like this there may be a different model at play on how this behavior is generated.
There's entire Reddit communities of these people where they encourage and validate their shitty behavior.
With some of the stories I've read, you'd have to be positively insane to be a small-time landlord these days, especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone.
Go watch Pacific Heights with Michael Keaton for a fictionalized account but this stuff absolutely happens every day.
I saw one recently where the renter has not paid rent for six years and is unable to be evicted. It made national news.
So where does that leave the industry? You eventually push out the mom and pop landlords by making the regulations so insane it only leaves behind the large corporate property management companies and their army of lawyers. Who will collude and drive rents up. It's a vicious cycle and these cities are not helping one bit.
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!
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.
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.
I'm sure there's lots, but lease says no X, tenant insits on doing X seems like a reasonable thing to evict about, but not a reasonable thing to ask the police to adjudicate.
At least as long as 'no X' is a reasonably moral thing to restrict. So no pets, no working on cars in the parking lot, no smoking, no loud noises/no more than N police noise complaints, etc. At least my moral code allows one to form a contract that restricts such thing and that when one party refuses to honor a (reasonable) contract, the other party should be able to require the breach be mended or the contract be ended, and that some breaches can't be mended.
Some things that might not be stated in a lease but would also be reasonable to evict for could include no interfering in the quiet enjoyment rights of neighbors, no storing of dangerous goods, no causing dangerous/unsafe situations.
I don't see why that would be an immoral restriction.
I don't think it's a reasonable restriction, but unreasonableness doesn't make it immoral. At the same time, if you make an agreement not to program in a rental and then you program, shouldn't you need to stop or leave? I might have moral concerns about how one enforces a restriction against programming, it's probably intrusive
Now, if your question is no programmers and/or no overnight guests who are programmers and/or you can have six tenants in the unit, but no more than three who are unmaried programmers... Then my moral compass is pointing towards no. Restricting the practicing of a profession on premesis seems fine, descriminating against the practitioners is ick.
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 lease is a contract that both parties have agreed to. If the tenant breaks that contract, it should be terms for eviction. If the landlord breaks that contract, the tenant should be free to break the contract and move.
If the tenant does something criminal, sure, that's up to the police.
Not all bad behavior meets the threshold of police intervention.
Here's a nearly-strawman-but-definitionally-valid example: a landlord may want to remove a tenant who's being unusually hard on the place and accelerating the wear-and-tear. Could be serious enough that paying the tenant to go away would be cheaper than the cost to remediate the damage accrued over the length of the contract.
That's bad. Now everyone who lives in a home (which is everyone) is required to guess what the average amount of wear and tear is, instead of abiding by the contract.
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.
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
So it's better that huge corporate landlords own all the rentable housing stock?
You seem to be assuming that if we, say, just made renting illegal, everyone would a) want to own a home, and b) have the finances necessary to do so. That's not the case.
If grandma pays 90% less taxes than me (prop13), where is the leverage?
If grandma bought the the house in 1990 and property values have risen faster than wages and inflation, where is the leverage?
If grandma is under insured, either due to the insurance company not updating coverages with inflation or no insurance bc she isn’t required to, where is the leverage?
The leverage I am talking about is being a landlord where most of your cash flow is dependent on one or a handful of tenants reliably paying rent. Maybe it would have been better to not be a single owner of a fourplex, but to go in with 20 other people on ownership of an underlying llc of that fourplex, and invest in another 19 similarly structured fourplex llc's. Same investment but de risked due to spreading it across some 80 people paying rent vs just four people. Or you can just put that money into REITs where now its what several hundred or maybe thousands of people in the tenancy pool you are investing in.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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"
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
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 is an interesting discussion of this.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave
They have exactly as much freedom to leave as they would without rent control. They _choose_ to stay because rent control has made it advantageous to stay. The way you phrased it implies you're suggesting this is a bad thing for renters but that is strictly a positive. Without rent control they'd have zero affordable options, with rent control they have 1 affordable option. Woe to the inhabitants of rent controlled apartments with their golden handcuffs.
Obviously it does not drive up the rent price of the person who is paying less rent. That's the whole point. The residents of SF have voted to prevent you from taking their apartments, so if you don't want to bid very competitively for an already empty apartment, you'll just have to take an apartment somewhere else.
> 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.
This is disingenuous. In the absence of rent control (or prop 13 for property owners) you famously get a situation where tenants ALSO can't afford to leave... but have to anyway.
Why should anyone be forced to leave just because someone richer wants to move in?
You don't have to support someone being unable to evict people who don't pay to believe that there should be limits on how much landlords (or the state, in the case of prop 13) should be able to force current residents to leave just to make a quick buck.
> Why should anyone be forced to leave just because someone richer wants to move in?
This triggers my other frustration: empty nesters. They continue to live in great 3-4 bedroom homes that are amazing to raise a family in (near job centers, plenty of bedrooms, tight community, near good schools). This forces people like myself to spend 85+ minutes in a car (away from my family, friends etc) everyday while I drive past all these amazing empty homes.
Yes, if you’re not using the space efficiently, GTFO and let people have the space! Let dad have more time with his kids. Let the tech bro that created 10m jobs and have more time with his wife and kid. Let people burn less fossil fuels to get to work.
Rent-controlled/prop13 grandma needs to find another place to live for the next generation.
Someone living alone in a rent controlled unit paying below market rates is much “richer” than a family of 4 paying 5x more cramped into a 2 bedroom apartment.
Many of those grandmas would love to move to a smaller house or apartment in their neighborhood, but paradoxically cannot afford to do so. Blame the system, not the individual who has to make rational decisions for themselves within it.
It sounds like you're living in a badly governed city. Have you considered voting for politicians with an abundance agenda? Or moving to a city with more intelligent housing policies such as Dallas?
NIMBYism and single-family zoning are alive and thriving in Dallas; what Dallas has is this thing called a huge-fucking-flat-prairie all around it that means Frisco, Addison, etc, have been able to add to the low-density car-centric sprawl and help keep prices down some.
(But even then, plenty of Dallas residents have been upset in the past decade by what happens to rental prices when a bunch of higher-income folks move to town!)
One wonders why the people who don't want to have to leave a city like San Fransisco just cause some other people have more money than them and want to raise their rents out of their reach are the ones who should move to Texas. Why shouldn't the would-be newcomers just be the ones go to all those cookie-cutter new developments?
If you jumped back in time 20 years ago and were able to ensure that YCombinator, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, and other high-paper-valuation companies, and they all had imported their from-out-of-town high-income-or-equity-leveraging employees to McKinney, Texas, not much materially would prevent those companies from still doing what they did. But people who already lived in SF or on the peninsula but didn't own much land there would have a materially better standard of living due to their costs not running away from their existing incomes. And the Texas burbs happily would've built a shit-ton of houses and apartments for the startup workers, because of the aforementioned giant quantities of near-empty land. Greenfield businesses for greenfield real-estate. Much better fit than force-transforming cities.
> One wonders why the people who don't want to have to leave a city like San Fransisco just cause some other people have more money than them and want to raise their rents out of their reach are the ones who should move to Texas. Why shouldn't the would-be newcomers just be the ones go to all those cookie-cutter new developments?
Because my money should be just as good as yours? Why should you get a huge discount just because of where you were lucky to be born? I'm not asking for a better deal than you, just fair competition between equals.
> And the Texas burbs happily would've built a shit-ton of houses and apartments for the startup workers, because of the aforementioned giant quantities of near-empty land.
For first 100, sure. Then they'd complain about the newcomers changing the character of the place and ban new buildings. The same thing happens everywhere, you can't route around it by starting your own new city because as soon as you've built any kind of community you have the same NIMBY problems as every other city.
The accord you’re proposing is “I deserve your spot because I have more money than you, and we’ll just build more housing later to get you back in.” You can see why I’m not going to go for that as a renter and voter.
> What mechanism do you propose instead for allocating scarce housing?
The one that we’re in the middle of talking about? Rent control.
You can do that, but now it's just "I was here first" which eventually turns in to "I'm old" (after all, young people were not there first, by virtue of not existing when rent control was enacted), which doesn't seem fair either.
To be clear, the full solution I would like is rent control plus lots of new housing construction, using whatever incentives are necessary. I do not begrudge old people "taking up space" in a city they've called their home for most of their lives; in fact, I think it adds a lot to a city's character. I'd like to think that someday I'd be able to retire in my favorite city as well.
Nothing against old people but when the city gets greyer and greyer because young people can't move in and old people stay in 3+ bedroom homes it's not great.
> 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.
If you can't afford to live in your city, what distinguishes you from the people in the boonies? Why should they be relegated to the boonies while you successfully game the system?
I can afford to live in my city. I’m living in it right now! The nice thing is that I don’t get pushed out by arbitrary economic fluctuations completely out of my control.
> If only we could all get free protection from economic forces we don't control.
> That kind of insurance is usually pretty expensive. Why should you get it for free?
Protecting its constituents from the whims of out-of-town money seems like an excellent purpose for a local government. Especially if some of that money wants to move in so badly that it can be very profitably taxed!
Why shouldn't local government try to serve its constituents like that?
Because I'm rich, and I want to live in SF dagnabbit, and how dare the (checks notes) existing residents of SF vote to block me from taking one of their apartments that I obviously deserve to live in more than they do because I'm rich?
By that logic, we should let the Ohlone tribes underbid all existing residents. They too are just rich assholes who displaced those that were rightfully there before them.
Why shouldn't everyone get everything for free that can be provided for free? Forcing other people to pay a cost because you paid a cost is just sour grapes.
It can’t be provide for free, that’s the point. Mitigating risks has costs that you are ignoring. Those costs aren’t cheap and someone has to pay for them.
One, we vote for it, and there's far more renters out there than owners. Sorry.
Two, there are many "free protections" that are taken for granted at our stage of civilizational development. Should fire departments be privatized? Police? I'd argue that housing security is even more important than those. We bear the costs together so that our lives are collectively better.
Three, your entire framing is kind of bananas. Rent control is neither insurance nor expensive, but a cap on landlord profits. If anything, it's unbounded profiteering of basic necessities that's actually "expensive."
> there are many "free protections" that are taken for granted at our stage of civilizational development. Should fire departments be privatized? Police? I'd argue that housing security is even more important than those. We bear the costs together so that our lives are collectively better.
But we don't. Everyone who works in the city is paying the costs, while the lucky few who moved in decades ago are the only ones who get the benefit. If everyone got to pay the same level of rent then I'd maybe support it, but there's nothing "collective" about the people who got here quicker protecting themselves while pulling the ladder up behind them.
> Three, your entire framing is kind of bananas. Rent control is neither insurance nor expensive, but a cap on landlord profits. If anything, it's unbounded profiteering of basic necessities that's actually "expensive."
It's got nothing to do with profit; if there are x homes and y>x people who want to live in them, either you give them to the x highest bidders, or you unfairly screw some people over. Rent control is one form of option B (there are others).
> If everyone got to pay the same level of rent then I'd maybe support it, but there's nothing "collective" about the people who got here quicker protecting themselves while pulling the ladder up behind them.
I'm very sympathetic to this sort of framing, but I don't think that's happening here. Or if it is, then pulling up the ladder is a pretty reasonable, rational thing to do when you're protecting against other people climbing that ladder and throwing you back down to the ground.
I moved to my city less than three years ago, not ten. I was not “lucky” to get my rent-controlled apartment: just had some foresight and was diligent in my search. My rent is high, but not as egregious as what the recent AI migrants are paying. (New upstairs neighbors are literally paying $2000/m more than we are for the same floor plan.) Thankfully, I have no fear of getting kicked out of my home due to a sudden rent spike, so I can focus on building a life.
None of this seems egregious to me. Yes, existing residents are prioritized over new residents. This feels like an obvious tradeoff if you want to maintain community and QoL. The alternative is prioritizing the rich — landlords and wealthy renters alike. I do not want to live in a city where money has the final say.
My upstairs neighbors have very well-paying jobs that allow them to move to the city in the midst of an AI boom. (When I moved here, I was in a similar boat.) They are not infuriated or offended by the rent they have to pay. And I've also had neighbors that payed thousands less in rent than me. (I was happy for them.) Everyone knows the rules when they move to my city; it's just not a big deal unless you're completely self-absorbed.
The alternative is that half my street gets ousted whenever a tech boom happens. What a horrible way to live.
> The alternative is that half my street gets ousted whenever a tech boom happens. What a horrible way to live.
Or maybe if the pain was more evenly distributed you'd vote to legalise more housing. Not being able to live in a street like yours is just as horrible for those of us who didn't luck into arriving there earlier, we're just out of sight, out of mind.
No, not getting to live on my street is not "just as horrible" as getting kicked to the curb with pets and/or dependents and losing your entire lifestyle and community without warning or recourse.
(But again, I am 100% for building more housing using any incentives available. This is orthogonal to having robust tenant protections.)
> not getting to live on my street is not "just as horrible" as getting kicked to the curb with pets and/or dependents and losing your entire lifestyle and community without warning or recourse.
Come off it, no-one's talking about kicking people out on the curb instantly. I'm all for processes and reasonable notice periods. But ultimately if you're not willing to pay what it costs to live where you do, yeah you should be pushed out for someone who will, rather than the rest of us subsidising you even as we're forced to cram into shared rooms miles away from our jobs.
> This is orthogonal to having robust tenant protections.
How can it be? How will residents know or care that their city doesn't have enough market-rate housing, that market-rate homes are too expensive, when they're not exposed to that market-rate price? Ever if they support building more housing in theory, they're absolutely going to object to it anywhere near them. It's not a coincidence that cities with rent control consistently build fuck all, that the few cities that have managed to actually build some homes over the past few years are in places like Texas.
Sounds like folks who don't like rent control should move to Texas, then. Market forces and all.
Anyway, you can get mad at this policy all you want, but the bottom line is this: renters don't like getting priced out of their homes and far outnumber landowners. They will vote for rent control as the economy starts to squeeze them.
Maybe more effort should be put into thinking of ways to incentivize housing construction rather than getting fruitlessly angry at social policy.
(Also, as a rent-controlled renter, I'd love more housing to be built near me. I don't think I've ever met any renters who feel otherwise. Most of the actual NIMBYs seem to be owners, not renters. As for how would they know that more housing is needed? Um, by reading the news and talking to people? It's a constant topic of conversation in SF.)
> Maybe more effort should be put into thinking of ways to incentivize housing construction
A properly functioning housing market is a way to incentivise housing construction.
> Also, as a rent-controlled renter, I'd love more housing to be built near me. I don't think I've ever met any renters who feel otherwise. Most of the actual NIMBYs seem to be owners, not renters. As for how would they know that more housing is needed? Um, by reading the news and talking to people? It's a constant topic of conversation in SF.
Everyone talks a good game about supporting more homebuilding, yet somehow SF never builds any homes.
But again, you will not get rid of rent control by getting mad about it. Renters literally do not care; they need housing security first and foremost. They will not vote for their own evictions just for the promise of lower rent many years in the future.
> you will not get rid of rent control by getting mad about it. Renters literally do not care; they need housing security first and foremost. They will not vote for their own evictions just for the promise of lower rent many years in the future.
Maybe stories of massive, immediate increase in housing supply in places that scrapped rent control will change their minds. Maybe appeals to fairness will work. It's certainly got no worse chance of working out than trying to build houses in San Francisco, which smart, motivated people have been trying very hard to do for decades to no avail.
Doesn’t help that the landlords want to squeeze the renter for what they are worth. It’s weird to me that shitty landlords are normalized but shitty tenants get a (rightfully) bad rap.
These laws become the way they are because landlords brought it upon themselves for the most part - they’re keeping assets that have massively increased in price and want to extract more and more out of the tenant.
If you have a home that’s paid off your expenses are basically just property taxes, maybe they should do what they can to keep good tenants instead of chasing profits.
> These laws become the way they are because landlords brought it upon themselves for the most part
These laws seem quite unrelated to the problems.
There needs to be laws to protect the renter against bad landlords and there needs to be laws to protect the landlord against bad tenants.
Nowhere there it implies there should be insane laws that make no sense. Such as creating a system where someone can skip paying rent for many years and continue to live there.
Landlords need laws that hold their feet to the fire to maintain the properties to a livable standard (the state/county should define) and fulfill any other obligations of the lease. At the same time there need to be laws that force the renters to pay on time and not destroy the property. It's not a case of one or the other.
I’m not denying any of that. If you don’t pay rent it makes sense that you’re evicted. This is completely okay with me, and the city should change their rules around it.
The issue is that housing is a necessity, and the relationship isn’t an equal one. A landlord can usually absorb vacancy, repairs, or a bad investment decision; a renter can’t easily absorb losing their home or a sudden 20% rent increase.
> a renter can’t easily absorb losing their home or a sudden 20% rent increase
Right, so let's pass laws (where not already in place) that prevent sudden eviction (e.g. nobody should be able to be evicted if they are a few days late or even a few weeks) and prevent sudden 20% rent increases.
No need to pass laws that prevent eviction for years. We can solve all these problems without causing other problems.
the obvious middle ground is preventing eviction until a new tenant is found. if you owe 3 months of back rent your landlord can put up your apartment but you can stay there as long as nobody takes it. if you pay back your debt they have to cancel the listing and keep your lease. that way theres less empty apartments and homeless people putting pressure on support systems.
> the obvious middle ground is preventing eviction until a new tenant is found.
Not sure that's obvious (is it done that way anywhere?), but it is an intriguing idea.
On the positive side it does decrease the inefficiency of places sitting empty while a tenant is found, which is good.
On the downside, it kind of goes back to being a sudden eviction, since the current tenant can't predict when a new one will be found, so whenever it happens they'll have a short-notice to move out.
Also, unfortunately there exist people who will take this time to destroy the place, making it un-rentable, to perpetuate staying there. Need to handle this edge case somehow.
People who want to rent a flat want to tour it first, this makes sense. But in your situation the tenant in arrears has an incentive to make the unit look uninhabitable preventing it from renting.
Additionally, if they are behind on rent, the deposit will not be enough to handle both.
Rental prices stay surprisingly steady even when house prices go insane - compare similar apartments/houses in major expensive cities and cheaper ones.
They're limited by what people will pay - and "techbro" cities have people with insane salaries willing to fork over big bucks. But there are similarly expensive areas that don't support the income necessary, and there often you find huge rental inversions.
I'm not sure what you mean by "squeeze the renter," but it's hard to find any person that invests substantial money (risk) in a business that doesn't want to maximize profits and charge what the market will bear.
Laws became the way they are because policy created a housing shortage, and renters are a bigger voting block than landlords.
I look at it this way: housing is a basic human necessity. Structuring it as a standard business is a detriment to society. Sure, being a landlord is a business, but the whole "maximize profits" thing and "charge what the market will bear" thing should not be allowed for housing.
Nonsense. We came up with a name for those terrible landlords they are called slumlords. NYC even has a whole website dedicated to them: https://www.landlordwatchlist.com/
Totally wrong. A home has a lot of expenses beyond taxes, especially maintenance/upkeep. If the landlord just breaks even, where does the money to repair the roof come from?
Also, providing housing is a service that should be done at market rates, and as an investment must yield a return to make sense. Or do you expect stock investments to yield nothing and just retain their value too? Should companies not raise their prices for goods? Do you realize that this also means that you would never get a salary increase? Are you never asking for a raise because you'd be "chasing profits" for yourself?
There's a huge lack of financial literacy in some of these comments.
Homes do have a lot of expenses but it depends on when you bought your home. If you have a cheap mortgage then rents can quite easily cover repair costs. Landlords also minimize the maintenance costs by cutting costs wherever they can. I also never said they shouldn’t make money - they absolutely should, otherwise nobody would want to be a landlord.
But, I think you are overly harsh and your comparisons misplaced. Homes are quite inelastic and a necessity for everyone. They are very unique category of assets. Financial impacts to a landlord vs a renter is also quite lopsided - a landlord has far more “financial padding” to account for macroeconomic shocks compared to a renter, so you end up with some protections in case of sudden job loss. They have morphed into something worse now, but the intent makes a lot of sense.
Repair costs are hugely jagged: Sometimes you have a few months with no repair, and then a huge sewer/roof/electrical repair, so rents need to account for that.
> I also never said they shouldn’t make money - they absolutely should, otherwise nobody would want to be a landlord.
Correct, and that is why it is so important that the housing asset class remains competitive with alternative investments. If you force the return of housing to be less than other investments at the same risk level, it reduces investment in housing and in return creates more scarcity and higher rents, exactly what some of the people here seem to want to avoid yet don't understand that the policies they're arguing for is causing.
> Homes are quite inelastic and a necessity for everyone.
Yes, but homes in a particular location are not. If you want to live in Manhattan you have to be able to afford to live there. You don't get to claim living in Manhattan is a necessity for everyone and that therefore prices there must accommodate your financial circumstances.
> a landlord has far more “financial padding” to account for macroeconomic shocks compared to a renter
That is not universally true since smaller landlords typically have a pretty big mortgage to service for a long time. They don't have the flexibility to just not pay just because a tenant decides not to pay. A house is not easy to sell in an economic downturn and may even be underwater.
> providing housing is a service that should be done at market rates
That's an opinion, not a fact. I don't share that opinion. Societies are healthier when people are housed, and when that housing is well-maintained. "Let the market decide" often doesn't get you that.
> an investment must yield a return to make sense
Agreed, but we can and should cap that return if not doing so leads to housing insecurity.
> There's a huge lack of financial literacy in some of these comments.
From you I'm seeing a huge lack of understanding about what capitalism is good and bad at.
I am also for housing all people and for all housing to be well maintained. As a societal issue our government should provide housing where needed though, including paying for (via our taxes) reasonable housing where someone can't afford it.
However, to force a private party to provide a service at non-market rates to another private party doesn't seem right to me, and as I mentioned in other comments, causes a decrease in housing (and therefore makes the problem worse rather than better).
> an investment must yield a return to make sense
> Agreed, but we can and should cap that return if not doing so leads to housing insecurity.
Again, if you cap the return, you cause a redirection of investment in housing to other asset classes, and effectively reduce housing. Your stated goal is in direct conflict of your desire to cap the return.
> There's a huge lack of financial literacy in some of these comments.
> From you I'm seeing a huge lack of understanding about what capitalism is good and bad at.
I have friends and coworkers that want to have rental properties, and I advise them it's not worth it.
I don't want to be in a position where I have to pay more to fix damages than I collectected in rent if I accidentally rent to deadbeats. Or in a position where I have to provide services to someone not paying me.
One of those friends has parents that rented out their old house to deadbeats at the top of the housing market instead of selling it. Those deadbeats have been nothing but trouble and yet my friend still wants to be a landlord.
Somehow the idea of owning rental properties became a pervasive notion in the U.S.
This form of insurance is exceeding expensive and exceedingly rare. Large buildings self-insure (by having a ton of doors) and small landlords don't want to pay it.
Wage theft is the number one form of theft in the USA at around $15 billion. Hopefully you advised your friends to avoid working for wages as that is the number one way to be ripped off by deadbeats in the USA.
Somehow the idea of working for wages became a pervasive notion in the U.S.
The way to handle this, which no one seems to be willing to face, is to make laws that are not wealth-neutral. If you are a mom-and-pop landlord (with a relatively low net worth), your should have more leeway in dealing with tenants. If you are a large landlord, you should have very little. Couple this with ruinous penalties (e.g., full forfeiture) for attempting to hide the true beneficial ownership of the property.
In many locations, this exists in practice - especially if you rent parts of a building that you reside in (one half of a duplex or 1/4th of a quadplex, etc).
In some cases, anti-discrimination laws don't even apply.
The question that many do not want to think about. We (as a society (referring to all Western Liberalism, not just the US)) are so thoroughly convinced that Liberal Democracy is the End of History, and it's the 'flawed but best,' as many say, but refuse to imagine something better.
It's puzzling that a system that is supposed to reward creativity and genius like capitalism limits it's inhabitants in their imagination when it comes to how one might structure society.
I don't claim to have the answer, and _no,_ my issues with Liberal Democracy/Capitalism don't mean I'm a communist / socialist / thing-people-don't-like.
It's not Liberal Democracy that is the problem but a society where all of the slack has been optimized out, every extraction maximized, every infraction forever a scarlet letter on an individual, zero stability but constant crisis inflicted on individuals. There is no room in modern day America for people in the margins. Society needs to make a place for them and a path out of constant crisis, or the homeless problem will continue to grow.
Another hidden issue in the USA is many households are dependent on contributing income from a retired/disabled/working past retirement age elderly parent/family member. Those people are going to start passing in mass, and a lot of households will become even less resilient.
What would you like us to imagine? So far everything that we've tried at scale other than liberal democracy and capitalism has inevitably led to war, famine, and genocide. Western liberalism appears to be the only system that empirically works. Some would claim that "socialism with Chinese characteristics" works better, but if you look below the surface prosperity in first-tier cities the actual economic situation is rather grim and the human rights situation is horrific.
Make an argument, beyond one city (if it's true there - Singapore might be better off, on some of the best real estate in the world, with free elections)? All the most free, wealthy, safe, creative, innovative societies in the world are democratic.
And on what basis does some dictator get to tell others what to do? OK, I am the dictator and I'm telling you to give me 10% of your income and never post this nonsense in HN again. :)
There are a lot of values there that.you're presenting as though "this is what society should be" when it's actually "this is what liberal democracy thinks society should be". So obviously we have a foregone conclusion.
Plenty of societies happily trade away one or more of those values for other values.
That's not an argument: You don't specify which values, don't address my argument, and just repeat an old trope of dictators and their apologists with no support.
> Plenty of societies happily trade away one or more of those values for other values.
Which ones? Let's hear some evidence.
People around the world strongly embrace and defend their freedom, including self-determination; the idea that it's not universal (in any meaningful sense) has little support. It's embraced wherever people have the opportunity in Europe and N. America, in East Asia, in China (Taiwan, and also Hong Kong until it was taken from them), S. America, SE Asia, South Asia, a variety of places in Africa, ... you can see the mass protests in Iran, the Arab Spring, etc.
And rationally, again, why should you or anyone else tell me what to do? On that basis, why can't I just as well tell you or them what to do?
Human rights' universality is essential - without it, it's just people fighting for power. That's why it's so important, and that's why those who want to control others try to attack the universality.
Democracy isn't freedom. It's quite easily possible for a democracy to be non-free (many current examples) or for a non-democracy to be free (not as many).
As I said in my original comment, I don’t have an answer. I refuse to believe though that the only options that exist are the ones already tried. Do you really think in the couple thousand years of history, we’ve exhausted every viable option when liberal democracy is only an incredibly recent invention?
If everything but liberal democracy and capitalism lead to war, famine, and genocide, and we're currently trying capitalism and it's not working, then maybe it's time to try liberal democracy
> especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone
The problem is that there will always be more voting renters than voting landlords. So in a purely democratic system, policies which favor renters at the expense of landlords will always be supported.
And that said, some renter protections are definitely needed, because there is a subset of landlords that engage in flat out illegal behavior.
Deposit withholding, making illegal demands, illegal renter selection practices, etc.
Imho, that tends to be concentrated in the "1-5 unit" landlord range, because those landlords are usually (a) not lawyers & (b) treat their properties like pets instead of a business.
> The problem is that there will always be more voting renters than voting landlords. So in a purely democratic system, policies which favor renters at the expense of landlords will always be supported.
I don’t know about that… the voting landlords (NIMBYs) sure make it a point to reduce development “to preserve their neighborhood character”.
You're conflating landlords with property owners as a whole. There are a lot more people who own and live in their home than there are landlords. Homeowners are less likely to favor pro-landlord legislation than landlords themselves, and many may even strongly support pro-renter legislation (like myself, though I agree some of the pro-renter legislation certainly goes too far).
The NIMBY "character of the neighborhood" phenomenon has nothing to do with landlords; that's a homeowner thing.
Landlords might be anti-development because a constrained housing supply means higher rents, but that's something else entirely. And if NIMBY homeowners magically stopped being NIMBYs tomorrow, we wouldn't even bother talking about NIMBYs anymore, because NIMBY landlords wouldn't have enough political power to matter.
In my city, and I assume many others, there's an informal landlord's group that shares lists of problem tenants to avoid renting to. While problematic, I wonder if it's made any impact.
Usually this is handled with credit reports right? It’s only when the state forbids landlords from demanding credit reports that informal networks are necessary.
In general as a tenant you can only get away with not paying rent once (until eviction happens, no one will ever rent to you again without federal or state assurances), and as a landlord you will only skip the credit report requirement once (because your first tenant is going to be a deadbeat who screw’s you).
In cities with excessive tenant protection laws, sometimes landlords will negotiate agreements with deadbeat tenants in which the tenant agrees to leave and the landlord doesn't report anything to the credit bureaus.
Someone I know rented a flat in Draguignan to a "friend" of a "friend". After some time he stopped paying the rent and bought alcohol instead. It was a tiny rent but it lasted for a long time. She didn't have a mortgage on it but still I don't think I would be that patient as a landlord.
i occasionally come across some of the forums and online groups of landlords and the things they have to deal with, particularly in cities with strong protections for the tenants and its interesting to watch the perspectives.
on one hand i feel for some of the landlords who have to deal with some of the very real slacks who go out of their way to be difficult tenants.
on the other we’re talking about homes, by this i mean to stress home over investment. i think we’ve made a terrible mistake in incentivizing people to use homes as an investment. it should be difficult to evict someone from their home, and it should be risky and a pain in the ass to use someone else’s home as an investment.
i feel bad for _some_ of the landlords but from a larger societal perspective we’re going to look back at incentivizing so many people to invest as a landlord as a massive mistake.
The landlord can divest themselves of the property. It's also ok if people lose money on investments. I don't think you have to feel especially bad for landlords.
> It's also ok if people lose money on investments.
The more likely it is for landlords to lose money on the housing provided, the more rents will go up to account for that risk premium. It's no different than risk-return calculations for any other investments such as stocks.
They're being evicted from their home, but from the landlord's property. It would be the landlord's home if the landlord lived there, but they don't, because they're renting it to the tenant.
All slack has been removed from society. All pricing has been maximized. Every interaction capitalized. Every point of extraction extracted from.
People living in these situations now live from crisis to crisis. Not paying rent/dealing with the consequences is just another on the list. At some point people just become numb. Modern society at the peripherals is not sustainable. There will always be people in the peripherals, but society is now structured to require middle class type stability as the bottom baseline for an individual to survive.
> We have to consider what the unintended consequences are of public policies or practices where there are no immediate consequences for someone who falls behind on rent
> Many [landlords] say they don’t actually intend to evict anyone, but that filing these cases is the most expedient way to get emergency rental aid from the city.
While that is certainly true, it's a very narrow view disconnected from the reasons for the policies. The most likely explanation for more people not paying their rent is that even fixed rents have become increasingly unaffordable because other costs have risen faster than wages. So yes, people are "choosing" not to pay rent because the consequences of not paying the rent lag substantially behind the consequences of not eating or buying gas. But it's an absolutely rational decision. FTA:
>...plenty of economic indicators suggest worsening financial duress for people already struggling. Costs are going up faster than wages, and inflation that took hold after the pandemic has proven painfully persistent.
Now that i saw the framing, i am looking differently on the discussion here. The smalles troublemakers are more news worthy than broad economic factors behind us all, so you dumb down your headline...
There's a limit to every city, and just building new infrastructure won't solve everything. It always lags behind demand and there are space constraints, budget constraints and countless other limitations.
At the same time, expectations keep rising for everyone (myself included): not wanting to spend one or two hours commuting to work, not wanting to live 45 minutes away from a large supermarket and not wanting to spend three hours or more just to meet friends or family among others. The problem is that it simply doesn't scale, and every country/city faces different challenges so there is no single universal solution.
I'm afraid the real discussion can't happen outside of small circles at this time because it'd involve highly controversial topics that much of the population in Western democracies (can only talk about what I know) isn't ready to confront. We have deeply ingrained ideas that are difficult to challenge so instead we'll probably watch cities fully collapse before anything.
Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working.
Also perhaps there should be a new field for startups (yes i'm aware of 'proptech' but there has to be more than that), that will collect dirt on tenants to threaten them with legal consequences unless they pay.
Every day I doubt why I even bother reading this site. Then anovikov reminds me why. It's so I can keep on top of the creativity/depravity my fellow engineers are capable of.
(1) - what's horrible? renting out flats is a business. not paying the bills shouldn't be tolerated, ideally shouldn't be technically possible.
(2) is negated very simply - have both old door key AND digital security key which auto closes if there are unpaid bills for say more than 5 business days.
and in cyberpunk 2077 there are neon signs above each apartment door indicating rent payment status, gotta bring public shaming into it too. This is the future our loyal soldiers for capitalism fight for on this platform in every thread lol.
Gotta use collective punishment to create collective enforcement. Make it so when a sign is red, police storm that block like in half-life 2. Then people who let their signs turn yellow will be ostracized until they fix it.
NYC even before covid was renter friendly and difficult to evict, so things must have taken quite the turn.
Which sucks because—and the essay doesn’t specify—rent stabilized apartments remain one of the few ways for lower income to make it into the middle class.
It’s not all pleasant (mice and cockroaches measured in inches) but it’s what allowed me to save, invest, and get out.
the article said asset managers claimed rent collections went from 94% to 89% - wow such a drop! they fail to highlight that these assets are theirs to own indefinitely!
People can't afford to live and food comes before paying your landlord? Economy is fucked right now. Income inequality pushes any gains into the hands of the wealthy.
And frankly, more and more people are willing to stuff their landlord if they feel their landlord isn't holding up their end of the deal.
"The uptick in rental delinquency isn’t new. It started six years ago, when the pandemic flung the city’s economy into chaos and plunged low-income New Yorkers into dire financial straits. But even as the city has rebounded, rent collection rates in affordable housing remain short of pre-pandemic levels. As costs balloon, landlords say insufficient rental income is threatening their ability to stay afloat."
I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of low-income people who are delinquent on their rent have no clue who Cea Weaver is. Nor is there any kind of organized rent strike occurring. Do you live in NYC?
What a strange remark, both the 'no way' as well as the ad-hominem related to the odd choice of a 'democratic socialist' as mayor for NYC. There was a time when people with differing political opinions could get along outside of the realm of politics but this has been made impossible by people who react like you just did here.
The reason why nobody gets along with you has literally nothing to do with your "differing political opinions" and everything to do with the fact that I have to tell you that.
Why do you think nobody gets along with [me] and what is it that you assume gives you such insight into other people's life? Take a mirror, have a good look at it and notice that the problem is staring right at you.
Don't register accounts to post vile comments like this. We don't care what the source is; we care about the insinuation and the agenda, and everything it pattern-matches with. We've already banned a previous account of yours for one of the most egregious comments ever seen here. Please stop wasting everyone's time.
The question raised by the article isn't why people don't pay their rent; it is why the number of people not paying their rent has increased. Occam's Razor suggests that the most likely reason is also the simplest one: that prices have risen much faster than wages, making even fixed rents less affordable.
I agree with the skull calipers comment, you came out of left field with the race shit and all benefit of the doubt for dog whistles left a few years ago
Social housing in the West is rewarding the bad habits of the people under the pretext that they need help. Every social housing place a like wound in the city and normal residents run away from those areas. People revolt when they hear of any plans to setu0 a social housing building in their locality.
Why this happens? That's because, the housing problem give the opposition a weapon to use against the ruling party, constantly hitting out and winning the sympathy of people. The incumbent administration has no other choice except pouring money into social housing and show that they are doing something to address the issue. No one cares about the actual fall out of this philosophy.
For those looking for the actual data. It's from 2024 - says nothing about the current situation.
* ~37K affordable housing units (baseline) across ~400 projects * 89% rent collection rate (down from 90.6% in 2023) * That's 600 units that went 'delinquent' in 2024 - assuming a $24K 'base' rent (just a guess) that's $15M in lost rent. * Deeply troubled projects (that can't survive without this rent) are at 11% - seems like the inverse. * Cumulative arrears (unpaid rent) of $500M
Here's the problem: * If no one had to pay, no one would. * We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society. * The projects fall into disrepair, there's no way to bring them back, because they won't be maintained.
Landlords aren't a great solution to the problem to be sure. They can be greedy and heartless.
The bigger problem is the bid up of asset prices - aka private equity and class warfare. As soon as you switch (from renting to owning) your incentives immediately shift.
There doesn't actually seem to be a way around this. Taxing to spend on rent ironically makes the problem worse because you just transfer the money into the cash flows of the owners.
Anyone thinking there's a simple solution to this problem hasn't spent enough time with the problem.
The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. America has enough land. We could build new infrastructure, give people lots of land or build houses like we did in the 40s and 50s. Of the price of a house was brought down to 1x the annual salary of the median individual income some of these problems wouldn’t exist. We need to flood the system with investment and inventory.
> The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities.
So it is not simple. "Just build more" always comes up in those discussions, and while it does help (and has been proven to help), it is not the definite answer for the housing issues.
Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move. People don't move just because housing is cheap. Actually many people are willing to spend a significant amount of their income to live in specific places. We move to have a job, to build a career, to be close to friends and family, to have better access to entertainment and activities, ...
This is why most developed country experience rural flight. The housing crisis is (mostly) a big city problem. You can usually find extremely cheap housing if you go deep in the countryside. And building is also cheaper (the price of the land is less, there is less permits issues, etc).
And for big cities, "build more" is way more challenging. Ground space is limited, so one solution is to build more vertical, but it is costly and has its own limitation. Spreading may cause issue with water management and require big investment in a public transport infrastructure if you don't want to have a nightmare traffic. Pollution can be a very big issue, etc. And that's for all the non-political issues. The political side of things can get very messy, very quickly.
If there was a simple solution, every big city in the world would have done it by now.
Actually we already had a solution to this, normalized remote work.
If I can work remote for Citadel from a 6 bedroom house in North Dakota it’s a choice to rent a studio apartment in Manhattan.
Not to mention the massive environmental benefits of taking cars off the streets. If you have mobility issues, working remote is a game changer. For those who need to use wheelchairs it’s miles easier to work from home. The nightmare of public transportation while in a wheelchair isn’t something I’d wish on anyone
Instead of just building houses I'd consider building social networks - of the physical kind - which have shops, entertainment, and co-working spaces within walking distance.
Not everyone loves the isolation of WFH, so you could replace "jobs" in the old factory sense, now long gone, with co-working spaces which include a social element but are basically still remote work.
The big issue with the US housing market isn't the distribution of housing, it's the distribution of work and support infra of all kinds, including social support.
Because Systems Thinking isn't much of a thing in the US you get these partial solutions when what's needed are integrated solutions that consider all of the moving parts and try to fit them together in a workable way.
The US is very good at extracting and concentrating wealth, but not so good at systems-first distributed investment.
Some people prefer to build those networks online. For one of my developer groups we have members that are a few states away and can only come in once a year.
Given a more worker friendly legal system I’d argue forcing anyone who can’t easily travel due to a disability, to work in person for a remote possible job is an undue burden.
I could never ever ever imagine that working currently however.
I don’t need work to make friends. I’d rather be freer to speak my mind when I do socialize.
I had a higher paying full remote job last year. No one there knows what my personal beliefs are, or what music I like. If it wasn’t for the profile picture they wouldn’t even know my appearance.
As it should be. I hate LinkedIn photos since it opens the flood gates to all sorts of discrimination.
The US used to be really good at this. Look at the city grid system that built new York or savanah Georgia or st Louis. Those land grant cities created blocks that were essentially self contained neighborhoods with local businesses, parks, schools, government services and housing.
> Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move.
If you build a city full of empty buildings in a place with minimal existing population like the Alaskan wilderness then obviously. But what if you double the housing stock in all the existing cities where people want to live?
> Ground space is limited, so one solution is to build more vertical, but it is costly and has its own limitation.
Extremely tall buildings can get pretty expensive, but moderate height buildings (e.g. five stories) have similar per-unit construction costs to single family homes. Meanwhile now count the number of places you can draw a 100 mile radius where the median height of the existing buildings is even that tall. It might literally be nowhere in the US.
Notice also the extent to which density can thwart the scarcity of land. You put a five story building with four units per story on a plot of land instead of a single family home and the contribution per unit of the cost of land has gone down by 95%.
> Meanwhile now count the number of places you can draw a 100 mile radius where the median height of the existing buildings is even that tall.
100 miles? My dude, that is a circle from Poughkeepsie to the tip of Long Island. Forget one-story single-family housing, there is farmland in that circle. There are hundreds of square miles of state parks in that circle.
If people were willing and able to commute that distance you could easily quintuple the housing stock in that area building nothing but one story SFH.
Manhattan itself has a median height of 4-5 stories; the outer boroughs bring that down to 2-3, because commuting from Far Rockaway to midtown is already a schlep.
> My dude, that is a circle from Poughkeepsie to the tip of Long Island. Forget one-story single-family housing, there is farmland in that circle.
That's kind of the point. Notice that housing demand is recursive.
The area you're talking about is NYC metro. If you draw a 100 mile radius around Manhattan then Poughkeepsie is inside it. Is someone going to live in Poughkeepsie and commute to Manhattan? Probably not. Is someone going to live in Poughkeepsie and commute in the direction of Manhattan? Absolutely. Which in turn recursively alleviates housing pressure in that direction. More housing in Poughkeepsie frees up existing housing in Peekskill, more availability in Peekskill frees up existing housing in Yonkers, lots of people are willing to commute from Yonkers to Manhattan.
And both "100 miles" and the NYC metro area (the highest population density metro area in the US) are far extremes. The point is that even that would improve affordability if it was the only option. Meanwhile in reality there are single family homes that could be 5 story buildings in Yonkers, if it wasn't prohibited by zoning.
> If people were willing and able to commute that distance you could easily quintuple the housing stock in that area building nothing but one story SFH.
If you actually did that, would housing affordability improve? Yes it would. It's in fact what's slowly happening on its own when the better alternatives are banned; it's why housing in Manhattan isn't twice what it is now. But that's sprawl. Sprawl sucks. People pay less for housing but have 60 minute commutes. Why do that by adding far away single family homes instead of adding medium-height buildings closer to where people work?
Is your suggestion "we should do the status quo, except the bridge and tunnel commuters should be confined to tiny high-rise enclaves clustered around train stations strung out over a hundred miles"?
My suggestion is that we should get rid of zoning density restrictions and allow the market to respond to high housing costs in a sensible way instead of the nonsensible way it's being forced to right now.
It's the people who like density restrictions who keep trying to force people to build high rises next to train stations. But that's the thing that doesn't work, because high rises cost significantly more per unit to build and if you constrain where things can be built like that then the cost of land in the few areas that allow multi-unit housing gets out of control because of the legislated scarcity.
If NYC lifts all its density restrictions, why do you need people commuting inward over a hundred mile radius?
High rise buildings cost significantly more per unit to build than mid rise buildings or single family homes. They would continue to exist or even increase in number in places like Manhattan because some people are willing to pay the extra cost to have even a slightly shorter commute, and then the cost of land closer to that area will still be higher than it costs further away because of expected future growth. Building mid rise buildings reduces the effective scarcity of land, doesn't eliminate it.
So the availability of housing 100 miles away still affects the price, because there are still people (e.g. retirees who only go into the city once a month) who would choose a longer distance for a lower rent, or who prefer to live in a lower density area even for a similar cost, and giving them a place to get that means they're not bidding up the price in the city.
Expecting 31,416 square miles of area with a median height of 5 stories would be wild. That's most of the entire Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale MSA (~37,000sqmi).
But yet people think the heart of Paris, Rome or even Hong Kong are wonderful. Build the neighborhoods correctly and beautifully and the city can continue indefinitely
The Paris metro area (Aire d'attraction des villes) is only ~7,300 square miles, with the city proper only being 41 square miles. They're talking 31,400 square miles of essentially Paris proper.
So imagine the city of Paris, but stretched about 766x. If you want to include the whole metro area, then ~4.3x
Hong Kong is ~431 square miles. So about 73 Hong Kongs. But not really, because only ~25% of that area is actually urban. So more like 291x the urban area of HK.
Just because the scale doesn’t exist today doesn’t mean it can’t exist or wouldn’t be desired if built.
500 years ago people would have thought any of the cities described were impossible.
> doesn’t mean it can’t exist or wouldn’t be desired if built.
I never said anything contrary to that. I'm just saying it would be wild to see a metro area that size with that high of average development.
The above commenter suggested:
> It might literally be nowhere in the US.
It's definitely not a thing in the US. It's almost certainly not a thing in Europe either, but I'm open to being proven wrong there. It might exist in China, I haven't looked. A 100mi radius circle is massive in area. Pies are squared, if you get my point.
I'm actually inclined to believe it was a typo for 10 mile radius.
But if you design the city correctly around self contained neighborhoods that are no more than a 15 minute walk no one has to commute that far.
This makes no sense. People want to commute to the best job they can get, not the one that happens to be in their neighborhood. And people aren't going to move neighborhoods when they move jobs, especially with spouses and kids who have jobs and schools in the existing place.
Id argue you are just taking the status quo as inevitable when it is really just a result of policy choices and not how human society has ever been structured before
Madrid is doing this. Savanah Georgia did this. Manhattan did this. You could also reverse the consolidation of everything. Instead of CVS owning every pharmacy, incentives to prompt the pharmacy being owned by the pharmacist. Or a local butcher. And most jobs that require commutes don't require it now, and if cities were built with the appropriate mix of housing all incomes could live in a section of down further cutting down on commutes.
It would of course be a functioning state's responsibility to plan urban/city development and economic incentives to move there. Regarding the ownership vs renter housing debate: I think Singapore may be an excellent example of a state doing it's duty: affordable state-owned housing and people are distributed per housing per the national demographics so you also build social coherence vs ghetto-fication.
Singapore is a special case, since it doesn't really have any rural areas.
The housing doesn't need to be state owned to get the same effect though. A functional government can create the system
> nobody will move. People don't move just because housing is cheap.
Judging by what I see happening in Texas where the mentality definitely is build, build, build...people definitely do choose to live in the way flung out there suburbs and actively look to move there. Just around DFW places like Prosper, Forney, Weatherford, Burelson, and far more continue to attract tons of people wanting to buy a house even if its way flung out there. People drive from as far out as Kyle and Serenada and consider themselves part of Austin. Houston is about done with its third highway loop, TX SH 99. Tons of people don't blink an eye about having an hour long commute it seems.
I'd argue this isn't a great way to build our cities without also laying the groundwork for decent transit but you can't say people aren't choosing it. I kind of like the multi-polar MSA setup in some ways that we have here in DFW, although it could be a lot better. If you're wanting a more urban lifestyle, you don't have to be directly in Dallas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_State_Highway_99
> Ground space is limited
For a lot of the US this just isn't true. It is true for several notable big cities in the US though, I will agree. Can't really add more land to San Francisco or Manhattan cheaply.
I don’t agree. Orlando was nothing. Raleigh research triangle park was nothing. Silicon Valley was nothing until they were. Each of them were built from a single seed project: Disney, State grant of free land and two roads being built, NASA facility respectively.
We could also recognize that at certain levels of development single family residences are no longer viable. The government should use eminent domain to take entire blocks back for redevelopment vertically. They should be required to give the home owners triple the value of The property they are taking in the form of replacement square footage or a property in the new development and one or more properties elsewhere. Imagine ing each nimby stood to have a windfall in the form of multiple properties they could rent or sell in exchange for giving up their property. There would be a lot less resistance. Not no resistance but a lot less.
Build the infrastructure, plan the city grid like we used to, incentivize employers to move headquarters there, build new factories, create special economic zones. There are tons of options.
We could increase supply and demand by having a “grow to 1 billion Americans” project. We would create a path to citizenship for people with a requirement that they help build and/or finance the build of homes store fronts etc. create a targeted immigration plan so the new metro is comprised of a broad range of culture, ages, income levels and skills so cultural mixing occurs and assimilation into the shared American experience is facilitated. Make the new metros operate on lower minimum wage, grant 5 year tax abatement for individuals, give the land away for free. Then once the city is established in 20 years do the same thing.
> it is not the definite answer for the housing issues.
it kind of is.
Rural real estate prices just keep going up while the population goes down. You'd expect the opposite, but it's not happening. As long as everything except real estate is cheap and pensions are high, old people will never sell. They consider themselves to be saintly generous to leave real estate to their (then also elderly) children when they die.
Free land for internal colonisation was a successful policy that almost every country in the recent past has employed. Even small countries.
America already has plenty of cities that aren't doing very well, and aren't getting migration, so new cities aren't going to help. There's plenty of cheap housing inventory in the US, just not in the places where the jobs are.
I guess many jobs don't want to be in the places where very cheap housing exists. What is the point of earning SV money and live in a bad neighbourhood?
Depends on what you mean. Sidney, Nebraska, for example, doesn't really have "bad neighborhoods" in the NY or SF sense. But it's still a small town in Nebraska. Not a dying one, though. And you can get a non-trashed - by NY standards - 3 bedroom house for $120K.
So, what do you actually want? Do you have to live in NY or SF, or can you live in flyover country? You can buy out there, if you're willing to live out there. If it were me, I'd consider taking 20% less Silicon Valley money for full remote (if I could get that), and live where I could buy something.
> So, what do you actually want?
This. Also, not everybody wants the same thing, so there's no single universal solution.
I live in the big city because I enjoy going out dancing, having a drink at a bar with a bunch of acquaintances, coming home late at night, etc., all without having to sit in traffic or in transit for more than one hour each way. If I lived where my parents live (which I actually did for a few months at the beginning of the year, so I know), my social life would be dead.
My sister, on the other hand, lives in a big-ass house with a larger yard than her dogs know what to do with, which cost less than my apartment. She doesn't care about going out, neither does her SO; they're full WFH, and the school bus picks up her kids from their front gate. Their setup works great for them.
And it is also a matter of age and stage in life. I enjoyed living in a big city (Bucharest) for the parties and socializing (in my 20), dancing (Casa de Tango) in my 30-40, with schools nearby. Now I sometimes work from a house in the mountains next to the Ukraine border, my neighbors are hundreds of meters from each other, the nearest supermarket is 15 km away (15 min drive) and a family of deer live in my outer yard.
I mean that higher end jobs don't want to be in an area where they don't enjoy. They are the higher tax payers and they want to enjoy their lives far from the kind of people that live in rent controlled housing - there are differences in education, culture, habits that make people want to separate. Not elitism or something like this, just living with similar people. Whatever we want or say, people are different, not identical, not equal as potential friends and buddies.
Well, in Sidney, you won't live next to rent controlled housing type people. (At least, there won't be many, and you can pick a place where you don't.)
But you won't live next to people who are similar to you, either. (Though that dirt farmer's land may be worth more than your startup...)
America doesn't need new cities. There is an unbelievable amount of space wasted within every city and any urban planner can show you. Development policy in the 40s and 50s was backward and we continue to suffer the consequences today.
Absolutely, but it's easier to build quality mixed use development and walkable, bikable neighbourhoods when you don't have thousands of NIMBYs screaming down every proposal.
Pick your favorite place on the planet. Then tell me if 8 billion people can live there, and would it be the same place if they did?
I know the answer to both of these questions, and so do you.
"This solution won't work in <ludicrously overextended case>, therefore let's do nothing!" -- common software engineering requirements management technique
Go read about the history of paris. One government minister bulldozed most of the city to create what the world now loves. At the time many people wept for the loss of what paris had been (described as a that commercial street in Harry Potter a quaint, magical village that stretched on in any direction). Paris has now created business districts in the suburbs. But even they are are building single family housing instead of the low rise blocks everyone loves in paris core.
Single-family homes are built out in the suburbs. In the city proper, they build multi-story buildings. There are SFH inside the city limits, but these are old, and I'm not aware of any such new developments.
But the thing is, just like elsewhere, much fewer people actually want to live out in the suburbs, which is reflected in the price. Because getting to Paris proper sucks if you don't have a direct rail connection (which most of the outer 'burbs don't), and even then, you're likely to waste hours commuting, between the unreliable service and just sheer distance. Things are improving for "mid-distance" suburbs, but we're not quite there yet.
I live in one of the most populous metropolitan areas on the planet because it's the best place to live in the world. Increasing density and population is working great so far; maybe it won't scale all the way to 8 billion, but as and when there's a problem we'll deal with it.
... I'm talking about building new cities, which seems like the exact opposite of what you're describing?
Anyway, as far what happens when you make renting impossible (or just de facto not financially realistic), in Amsterdam it led to a lot of rentals being sold. The people buying had roughly 2x the income of those renting, on average. So, I guess that's a good thing, if your goal is to evict lower income renters so people can buy a place more cheaply. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05cFv02pzY discusses this at length.
It can be both. A well developed new city will be faster and easier to build. Retrofitting an existing city bumps up against existing infrastructure (we have to move these pipes and electricity lines) and the individual property owners. My grand father owns the last remaining house with a few acres in a dense office park. He is single handedly blocking about a billion dollars of new development.
World is full of empty houses. It's just that people want to live in New York and not in some other place where housing is cheap or, occasionally, even free. And New York is already pretty full.
Detroit had tons of extra housing. Why have people people fled to other cities?
There is no easy fast solution to this. Just build more housing will not solve complex issues. Not saying there should not be more construction, though.
Because outsourcing and globalization decimated the economy. Now people are going back and doing amazing things. Same think happened in most cities in the Midwest and north Carolina (when textiles and furniture manufacturers left)
But the same thing happened in every downtown core when the federal highway system carved up neighborhoods and companies like IBM moved their headquarters out of new York and into suburban office parks.
Some cities are desirable. Some are not. New York is a city that people all around the world want to live in. Detroit is the opposite.
New York wasn't in the 70s and 80s for the same reason Detroit is now.
if only there were a fungible way to measure which land is "desirable" or not, and then allow people to build there instead of making it illegal.
> New York is a city that people all around the world want to live in I don't know anyone that wants to live in NY. I would not move there for a 7 figure salary. I think some opinions in this discussion are based on old realities from 50 years ago, no longer accurate.
There must just be 8 million of us that haven't figured out how to leave, huh?
NYC is certainly the best city in the US.
This is a very bold and subjective statement. I don't disagree it is the best city in US for some people, but the objective best - I doubt it.
We shouldn't talk about "objective best" without pinning down what that means. I can only really imagine it in a sort of Aristotelian sense - a city could be the best city because it most fully embodies the notion of what it means to be city (as opposed to a more rural or suburban area): a usually cosmopolitan agglomeration of people where the density/economies of scale/competition create an environment that allows art, culture, entertainment, public services, etc. to flourish. In that particular sense I think NYC is the clear best city in the country, no competition, with maybe Chicago being a somewhat distant runner-up. In that mode of thinking it's arguably the best city in the world, actually.
Now, that said: when I lived in the US I (mostly) preferred living in Seattle over NYC for the weather, natural beauty, and more laid-back vibe...subjectively Seattle was better for me, but I still don't have an issue with saying NYC is "objectively" a better city than Seattle.
> In that particular sense I think NYC is the clear best city in the country,
yes. if you don't like cities, you won't like NYC. but as far as "city" goes, NYC is the clear best and I don't think it's particularly close.
Detroit’s population has been steadily increasing, and rents there have doubled or tripled in the last 5-10 years.
I'm not sure how you get there without killing or violently subjugating tens of millions of people.
Everything preventing what you want is backed by a law. On the other side of that law is someone making a buck either via business being driven straight to them or business being driven away from someone else and they will fight to preserve it.
Even a simple amendment to the clean water act to exempt residential square footage would have every asshole who makes money off an engineering stamp up in arms. Even some guy who designs bridges would be pissed because he doesn't to compete with all the other labor that would put on the market.
Wash rinse repeat for literally every other issue that's roadblocking the construction of housing.
And this is assuming you want to just develop existing areas further (turn suburbs into cities, exurbs into suburbs, as happened from ~1870 through ~1970). Creating cities from scratch is way harder. Where are those people gonna work?
See Detroit mid-2010s for why massive overbuilding isn't a good strategy here.
That’s a bad example. Detroit isn’t an example of over building it’s an example of eroding the demand across the entire economy by outsourcing jobs. There is a big difference between a city with full employment with a robust consumer base that happens to have a ton of housing hit the market and one that has it’s entire bedrock industry carved into pieces over several generations.
If you want a valid example look at Austin Texas or Japan. Housing inventory growth in a robust economy leads to….wait for it….rent decreases.
Austin sure has become so much more affordable ... Wait!
The rent in Austin is 22% lower than it was 3 years ago.
And 25% higher than 6 years ago.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f...
> Now, Austin is one of the only major U.S. cities where rents are falling.
> Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capital city sat at $1,645 as of December, according to Zillow — above where rents stood prior to the pandemic but below where they peaked amid the region’s red-hot growth.
> The chief reason behind Austin’s falling rents, real estate experts and housing advocates said, is a massive apartment building boom unmatched by any other major city in Texas or in the rest of the country. Apartment builders in the Austin area kicked into overdrive during the pandemic, resulting in tens of thousands of new apartments hitting the market.
Austin had a rent and house price explosion in 2021-2022 when a lot of people moved in at the same time, rents had been falling in 2023-2025 from the peak but did not fall to the level of 2020, they are picking up again in 2026.
Can you explain more? What happened in Detroit in the mid 2010s, how did itreverse course after that?
It happened over a longer period obviously, and what happened is the US adopted a failed industrial policy that saw our core manufacturing base shipped to China for the benefit of Wall Street and the financial sector.
Globalization wasn't a loss for all of America - the benefit of shipping manufacturing overseas was that the resulting imports were cheaper than producing domestically. After all if they weren't, people would've preferred to buy domestic. So it was a net win for the consumer via cheaper goods, but came at the expense of Detroit, Pittsburgh and other "rust belt" cities & communities.
We're still grappling with the consequences. We should've invested in transitioning those workers to comparable or better jobs but the ball got completely dropped on that.
If your purchasing power is cut in half because you lost your manufacturing job and had to replace it with running a cash register, but the cost of toys also dropped in half (but not things like food and housing, which doubled in price), are you actually better off?
No.
Average Americans are poorer now than they were before they could buy everything at Walmart. As long as housing continues to be a "Line must go up" investment, Americans will continue to become poorer as more and more of their income has to be directed to housing.
The price didn't even fall that much. One look at Temu and friends should disabuse you of the notion that we are actually getting things for "Cheap". Usually it just means product quality was drastically reduced thanks to millions spent on "value engineering", so that your new products don't last long enough to put you out of business.
Sure is great that GE can now reliably predict the lifespan of parts in their washing machines so they never make the mistake of gasp overspeccing a component so it lasts a lifetime!
Excellent analysis.
I'll see if I can find a source i saw recently that showed that thinks like appliances, TVs, computer, toys, clothes etc that were outsourceable have dropped in price a lot but health care, education, insurance, housing and basically every domestic has increased at rates well beyond inflation and incomes.
And part of the problem is systematic under investment in the public sector. We haven't built enough schools, hospitals or required universities to expand in proportion to the population.
It wasn’t a net win for the consumer. The consumer is now much worse off than before and our country is weaker.
It was just a mistake to allow ourselves to be ruled by the financial sector.
I thought that as well. But the benefits of cheaper goods when manufacturing is shift elsewhere comes at the cost if the future innovations that follow manufacturing. American businesses forget that happening to the British when we took over manufacturing for England. Now China and Mexico have innovations we lack because their engineering has access to the assembly lines and see where innovations need to happen.
Detroit was the hub of the auto industry. Outsourcing and foreign competition hollowed out the central city (which deliberately didn't have public transit) and left gigantic abandoned houses and skyscrapers throughout.
There has been massive public investment and popular support to cause a revival of sorts in the city and is a success story.
Go look at some photos from like 2010-2014.
This happened throughout North Carolina where I live when textiles and furniture manufacturing was off shored. I assure you it wasn’t over building that caused the same outcome. It’s almost like the is an alternate explanation that is the common thread. What could it be?
Such short term issues from massive economic collapse suggests building more housing works.
How was the work outsourced around that timeframe? Do they no longer have an auto-industry at all in Detroit, or is it just greatly reduced?
Detroit was pretty much the place where cars were designed and manufactured in the US at one point in time. The highest producing factories, the engineering, the management, most of it happened practically inside the city. Over time these auto manufacturers opened plants on lower cost of living places, spreading out across the Midwest while a lot of the engineering and management still took place in Detroit.
People often point to foreign competition for the downfall of urban Detroit but the writing was on the wall and decay starting well before foreign imports made a big splash. Between 1945 and 1957, GM, Ford, and Chrysler built 25 brand-new auto plants in the Detroit metro area. Not a single one was built inside the city limits. They weren't building these factories overseas (yet), they were building them in cheaper parts of the US. Detroit lost hundreds of thousands of well-paying factory jobs well before Volkswagen and Toyota started selling things in real numbers in the 1960s.
The great lakes cities were the wealthiest most influential region for a period of time. Go watch movies from the 80s. Detroit was the industrial heart of America.
There are lots of factors but broadly characterizing them as globalization is generally fair. Some included: The rise of japanese cars added competition but they were held at bay by import restrictions and the American preference for massive cars until the gas shortages in the 70s, the trend towards efficient capital meant most industrial firms switched to prioritizing their more profitable financing arms, Reagan liberalized international trade that let foreign imports into the US market, NAFTA moving manufacturing to mexico and canada, companies moving manufacturing to non union states in the south, then moving the parts supply chain abroad.
Tax property values.
We could talk about the merits of Georgeism but honestly let's set that aside - conventional property taxes are sufficient here. Most of Manhattan apparently has <1% annual property tax, and the eclectic sometimes regressive way it's calculated in NYC is suggestive of corruption. These asset bubbles can only inflate because the owners make nearly as much money sitting on a vacant property as they make with tenants, so they borrow approximately All The Money to dump it into real estate. Property taxes are not just a necessary evil to keep the schools running and the garbage collected (cough), they're a tiny fractional "decommodification" of property as asset, because the money collected from the owners is spent on the residents. Most of this money passes through directly into higher rents, and we shouldn't care about that, because it's spent on the residents (if the residents don't want good public services, literally hand them a check, direct redistribution). This punishes vacant properties appreciably, and pushes them back into the market.
The ecosystem of debt and bank collateral that has grown around near-zero property taxes has strongly encouraged high vacancy rates, because the banks directly demand that what rents be collected, are high enough to justify the collateral valuation, but don't actually demand that rents be collected.
Set property values to the rate of inflation (depending on your preferences, CPI or local COL or local selling prices or S&P), and you have fully "decommodified" housing without lining the landlords up against the wall and shooting them, an option that is increasingly popular.
Am I understanding your point correctly as you hoping that an increase in tax rates drives property values down enough thay aggregate tax amounts are reduced?
The practical rental math in NYC is simple. Buy a $1M coop in a building with near zero costs. HOA will be at least 2k per month with the majority of that being property taxes. Thats your base rent. If you have a loan, add that to the base. You will not get cheaper rent until you drive aggregate taxes or interests rate down. There isn’t a huge profit margin on rents in NYC. I looked at a unit next door, and if we wanted to have rents break even on mortgage we would need to offer 85% cash up front. Im on the board of our coop, so I see how all of our financials function and same for prior buildings.
Your coop building is on the unfair side of the "eclectic sometimes regressive" property tax calculation the parent comment mentions. Large (10+) multi-family rental properties are taxed at a much higher rate than single-family and 2-4 family properties. Correcting this imbalance would lower property taxes on your coop building while still raising overall tax revenue for the city.
We have 36 units in our coop iirc, so we are “large”. Generally I think our taxes are fairly reasonable. I just don’t think there is any reasonable solution here that isnt focused on a simple triangle:
- Build more, destroy short term value of existing owners
- Lower taxes, hurt short term city functioning
- Lower interest rates, drive up inflation
The only “fun” solution IMO is cut taxes and cut jobs programs that don’t deliver city value. DOE is a welfare scheme at this point.
NYC is home to ~half of the co-op housing in the United States. This is a relatively unusual arrangement. Co-ops generally forbid renting / subletting, they practically ban REITs, new resident-owners go before a board to get approval. They should be considered the same as owner-occupied housing, and for long-term owner-occupied houses where the asset value isn't a big deal, higher property taxes are on average a wash - they pay higher amounts for higher levels of public services. Perhaps your $2k/month goes to $3k/month but transit becomes free, trash collection becomes effective, and the schools become better. Or in the alternate universe your $2k a month goes to $3k a month and then we hand residents a $12k check at the end of the year.
Either way, vacancy gets punished, landlords can't treat the city's housing like gold boullion, and the price of housing is fractionally more tied to the cost of living than the future economic outlook in potentia.
Picture a conventional Ponzi scheme operating in the Lower East Side, which has scaled to be 30% of the city's economy. Whole industries have risen up around this scheme, it's essentially printing money in a way that seems like it might be legal if you squint, and you're not trying to regulate/tax it. It's growing so fast that it's actually causing problematic inflation for the rest of the city.
Can you afford to let it grow unchecked, indefinitely?
> Most of Manhattan apparently has <1% annual property tax, and the eclectic sometimes regressive way it's calculated in NYC is suggestive of corruption.
While NYC has never lacked for rot and corruption, those really aren't needed - or even particularly useful - for something like this.
As soon as you've got any sort of law / regulation / status quo that benefits a class of well-to-do people, there will be intense pressure to maintain that situation. Vs. the opposition - honest reformers, idealists, the poor, whoever - even if they're far more numerous, just never seem to have the zeal / focus / attention span / whatever to correct the problem.
> just never seem to have the zeal / focus / attention span / whatever to correct the problem
Mainly because, bluntly, the people who have the most zeal, attention span, talent, and focus... aren't in the group.
Somewhat. 99%-ish of adult humans will show far more zeal, focus, attention span, etc. on any "Issue X", if both they and their peers have a whole lotta money riding on Issue X.
Then there's the problem of late-stage capitalism's whole "Those who have the most gold should make most of the rules. Especially rules about who is entitled to how much gold. And double especially if they're obsessed with nothing beyond more-is-better gold hoarding."
Ignoring the morality, that optimization leads to the sort "Rich get richer, poor get poorer, God obviously only loves the rich, desperately poor people resort to desperate measures" instabilities and violence that made Europe an often-horrible place from the Napoleonic Wars through WWII.
> These asset bubbles can only inflate because the owners make nearly as much money sitting on a vacant property as they make with tenants, so they borrow approximately All The Money to dump it into real estate.
The problem is, as long as the stonk based US pension system keeps flooding dozens of billions of dollars a month into the markets, there will always be enough money to flow into REITs and driving up prices, even for vacancies.
Now, introducing (or adequately hiking) property taxes has the problem it may cost the REITs a bit of their profits - but it will be a nasty issue for individual families and small shops, and the large stores will just pass on the cost to customers because even with that, they will still be cheaper than small stores.
Vacancy taxes sound good on paper, because they - if done well - only hit REITs that hope for value gains and other unproductive uses of rare real estate (like Chinese and Russians parking wealth in Western real estate so it can't be seized by the government). The issue with them is a second order effect. If made painful enough to be worth the effort and actually force landlords to either rent out if need be at a lower price or sell, again if need be at a lower price. That however immediately forces REITs to write off significant chunks of the asset value (if rented out) or, even worse, actually realize a loss on the books (if selling).
Unfortunately, the markets really, really do not like either of these two things happening, we've seen that during Covid and the hard pushback against remote working that followed.
I have said it before, and I will say it again: the US pension system being so laser focused on stock and asset markets is going to fry its host society alive, because what needs to be done for society to survive cannot be done because too much pensioner wealth would be wiped out.
Vacancy taxes are, to my understanding, nearly impossible to administer effectively without approaching them formally as normal property taxes that have some kind of out. Lying about when the unit got vacated is basically expected, while creating a new resident out of whole cloth and filing taxes for them including a Residency Benefit Transfer is a bunch of easy to detect felonies†, and understood as such by everyone. Spend the money on better schools/roads/park and even this isn't practical.
†Modulo accomodations for undocumented immigrants
Tax more
Ever heard of the tale of the goose that laid golden eggs?
Imagine progressively feeding the goose less, so as to have a greater profit margin on the golden eggs it laid. No particular percentage of feed reduction seemed too harmful, until one day it died unexpectedly.
This sounds like private equity, except they'd also demand that the goose increase egg production by 10% per quarter.
Just to be clear on the analogy, the goose is the tenants, and the person feeding it less every day is the landlord class?
The golden goose is the landlords who develop and maintain housing, the withholding of feed excessive taxation.
But aren't the tenants feeding the goose, in that case? With rent?
It feels like you've left some important people out.
a certain share A of the prospective benefit of housing is in potential asset price appreciation, and a certain share B is in the utility value of the home.
The systems that contribute towards A are mutually reinforcing, vicious spirals in a neoliberal capitalist world. Just like in the art world, there is no hard objective value to vacant housing, and many purchases are made on debt. It's worth whatever the last guy paid, and so the banks will loan you 80% (or more) of whatever the last guy paid. This is a form of money creation. We have collectively bid up the housing stock, completely separated from the utility value, at a rate we generally expect to be competitive to loaning real operating businesses money to invest in actual operations.
If you tax ALL of the prospective value, and price sinks down all the way to B, you can still have profitable private housing development in a steady state. Unmet demand is a thing that exists. Yes getting to B overnight probably represents a crash in your overall asset investment picture, but getting 1/10th of the way there, locally, less so. Phasing it in over time, less so. If you're expecting 5% and you get 4.5% that's still a return.
The thing about this type of redistribution is, it's just a way better more functional economy than the idea of conventional price setting with the addition of rent control, or than the status quo. Rent control tears incentive structures and makes willing landlords into unwilling landlords who are instructed to be creative in how miserable they make their tenants; Its supposed goal of affordability simply shifts costs from older tenants to newer tenants. The status quo where property taxes are very low and so A is significantly greater than B simply doesn't establish those incentives of mutually agreeable economic exchange to a great degree in the first place. "I bought a house as an investment. Rent it out? I mean... there are upsides and downsides."
> We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society
We tried cramming people from generational poverty into one place and it didn't go super great, therefore public housing as a concept must be the failure, and not our hilariously bad implementation?
Singapore, Austria, Finland, and even a number of mixed income public housing projects in the US have actually done quite well. The narrative that it's all inevitably going to turn into the worst examples is pretty worn out.
> The bigger problem is the bid up of asset prices - aka private equity and class warfare.
This is definitely true: housing can either be affordable or it can be a safe investment, never both. Really private equity moving in on the safe investment is a symptom of the problem: regulatory capture by the landed gentry resulting in strangulation of production which benefits a small group at the expense of the greater public.
The thing that goes wrong again and again and again with public and low cost housing is that they build housing, and nothing else.
Stick a bunch of people in a tower in a field with no entertainment, no work nearby, building rubble surrounding their environment, no maintenance happening, no follow through on planned facilities, and the consequences are absolutely 100% predictable. Literally last night I watched a pair of bbc documentaries about a new estate, one from when it was new in the mid 60s, one from the late 70s. The residents are there in the 60’s, going “well it’s a pain having to walk all the way up but we trust that the lifts will be installed soon, and we’re looking forwards to the leisure centre” - fast forward 15 years, still no lifts, no leisure centres, and surprise surprise the kids are setting fire to cars to have something to do. If government won’t uphold the social contract, why should citizens?
The implementation is entirely the problem, and unfortunately few seem to realise that it can be done well. You can’t just make containers for humans and expect that to solve everything.
Public housing isn’t actually free in the countries you listed. It’s subsidized, but the people who live there still have to pay. The affordable housing units in New York are also subsidized. The question is what do we do if people stop paying even the subsidized rent?
> The question is what do we do if people stop paying even the subsidized rent?
If they stop because they actually can't pay it, then we should pay it for them. Another homeless person on the street makes us all less safe and less healthy, and tax dollars going toward keeping them housed is a good use of that money.
If they stop paying because they just don't feel like it, you evict them.
Singapore doesn’t have crime like the U.S. There is also no free public housing. You still must work and the housing is subsidised. But not free.
Why bother with such details? Class warfare is right, and details are details. /sarcasm
For example mixed income housing is really nice for “us” that have been in generational poverty. For “them” it is just living with signals of alcohol abuse, domestic abuse and more. All while their children get a good front seat into “empowerment”.
With sarcasm over, details matter, complexity matters, social assistance matters, a contingency plan for total failure to rehabilitate some people matters.
Many people would benefit from the Northern European style of institutionalisation where if incarcerated people would need to go to isolated communities and learn to buy groceries, cook a meal take care of personal hygiene (in Sweden they literally have prison islands where inmates have houses and must live as they would in the outside world. Then progressively move to temporary shelters to get their footing and then be released. If need be put those people in the countryside.
As a personal experience: Many German youths get sent to the middle of Portugal when their environment leads them astray. In the countryside there is a publicly funded host family or community to receive them and they have to learn trade jobs like being a painter or a plumber and get pushed into an normalised environment. There is no access to drugs as well in the middle of nowhere. There is alcohol but in the next morning there is work to do and people who are waiting for you. I met some of those youths when I was young and it always struck me that a good solution for failed communities in urban environments was to break them apart and scatter them into other more rural communities in such small units (family at most) that their habits would not impact the locals and that the habits could not be fulfilled as a matter of fact. Where are you going to hang out at night in a village of 1k? There is housing but you likely need to repair it; the locals will lend you a hand but they will exert peer pressure for you to normalise.
There is no need for class warfare. But there needs to be a warfare against antisocial self destruction behaviours.
Singapore system won't work in USA cities. Their town councils are near scholars level. Quite a few of them doctorate. They are pretty much selected on 2 criteria, merit and perceived likability with accountabilities evaluated both by government and locals citizens. American leaders are selected based on sound bites with zero accountability to citizens for maybe 2 years to 4 years. They do accountable to mega donors which almost always work against for the good of the public. Singapore also have world class city planners that entire America have never experienced or seen before. Heck even China look up to Singapore during 80s and 90s for advice. And the quality of people going to USA in the last 10 years are very low. Look at Singapore Amos going there. Meanwhile hundreds of American engineers migrated to Russia and China.
One of the real reason Singapore system won't work is also the mentality (respect level is way higher), I believe it's actually the primary thing, at 15 years old many Singaporeans are already talking about investment, how to compete hard and so-on, the level is way higher than in the west and people are driven in life in general, but life is hard over there, harder even but more rewarding.
In SG, they can also plan for decades ahead because of a more stable political climate where people actually respect their government for most and ACCEPT that there is some humans that are considered "superior" and take the lead, it's a huge difference with the west where people favorite sport is to non-stop shit on their government or denigrate without offering solutions, in the west, we seem to not be able to accept that there is even a class system where people have more power/rights than others (while there is, it's inevitable).
I don't think respect is the explanation for Singapore's success, it's more likely a side effect of the real magic: ethics and reputability.
Singapore is the third least corrupt country in the world[1]. Another country that has managed to pull off successful public housing, Finland, is the second least corrupt in the world.
The United States meanwhile is in 29th place (and that's being generous, imho) and at its worst ever in the corruption index[2]. It's been falling for a decade. Perhaps that's the real explanation: we can't have nice things because the resources needed to build and operate them are actively siphoned off through embezzlement, bribes, kickbacks, and fraud. Rigid class systems don't do anything to prevent fraud, either, in fact they entrench it deeply.
[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/singapore
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/10/business/corruption-index-tra...
It only works in Singapore because there’s too little land. There is too little options. HDBs are capped value. While Condos are quite expensive in comparison, and you cannot own both. Singapore system for housing would be hard to replicate anywhere else without government stealing everything off the citizens and disallowing private ownership of land.
> We tried cramming people from generational poverty into one place and it didn't go super great, therefore public housing as a concept must be the failure, and not our hilariously bad implementation?
Well-stated! Yes, defective implementations with negative outcomes should not be used to make overly broad or even grossly incorrect assertions about human nature.
You're seeing the next version of this - cooked up by the smartest public policy people - fail in real time. That's what this article is about.
89% of these projects are - in fact - doing well. But that number is decreasing. The net result is less supply of public housing in one of the richest states in the entire world.
I'm not sure what your proposal is?
> We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society.
I tried free housing for the first 18 years of my life and it worked out fine
Why aren’t you still there?
Because I'm 37 now. Be awkward to stay there.
Cities have to truly compete with private rent-seekers for it to work.
In Vienna they are still building state of the art for that reason:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...
I suspect the answer is two-fold:
1) Pass legislation to ban the fed from pulling interest rates below 2%. The unprecedented ZIRP completely fucked up asset values and it will take decades to unwind it.
2) In cities, the government should own all the land and owners of properties should hold only a long-term lease. This will allow the government to control land use and upzone density while ensuring private building owners have skin in the game to actually build and maintain dwellings.
the main reasons for public housing failing (see Cabrini Greene, Pruitt Igoe) in the US are concentrated poverty, rents not covering maintenance/capital expenses, lack of good jobs (too far to access on transit, companies relocated to suburbs), high youth to adult ratios. it's too reductive to say lack of ownership when tenants formed unions to get thing fixed but management didn't have funds, threat to maintenance workers (needing police escort to do work), organizational issues with mgmt (patronage system for jobs in public housing, lack of accountability).
Rents are going down in Austin, Texas despite an increasing population and lots of landlords.
Run it down, swoop in low, build it up, sell out high, repeat.
NY is back in the first phase of a realestate cycle. As the wheel turns ...
Is charging just enough rent to reasonably mantain the building such a strange prospect?
I don't understand why we can't just copy another country's housing strategy. There are many countries in the world where housing is affordable, relatively high quality, and the homelessness rate is low. What are we doing that makes this problem so seemingly intractable? Why is our approach to public housing seemingly worse than any other approach in history?
Far fewer than you'd think: The vast majority of Europe is in the same boat as the US.
Whenever there's value in agglomeration (ie, all the time), the value of well placed properties just skyrockets, because growth is only going to make that land better. That's why a common recommendation is to up the tax of land as to make speculation with valuable property a bad investment: It's already price like an auction, so higher taxes cannot increase rent prices. The problem is political, as countries with housing problems have a whole lot of individuals have a big percentage of their net worth in housing. Big tax increases would make their property values drop, and they'd be quite upset. So it solves the problem while losing elections.
Instead, governments are happy providing tax advantages to existing residents, in practice making prices go up even faster.
What makes the problem intractable is that we have a system where for a huge chuck of the country your retirement is based on housing prices appreciating. It's clear if you directly own a home but even if you don't lots of the places you park your money to watch it grow are ultimately investing/speculating on real estate.
Some might call it housing asset based welfare. Even if you don't like that mouthful another simple example is the University of California putting 4 billion into Blackstone's REIT with "a minimum 11.25% annualized net return through January 2028." That REIT is 90% rentals. So probably at least a few people will feel the squeeze from it.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/university-californ...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10901-009-9177-6
It's the other way round:) Europe is salivating at the American real estate market. Some European countries don't have capital gains tax on real estate and real estate is the only investment vehicle without this tax. The only country where real estate prices haven't skyrocket looks to be Finland but their general situation is very specific and it's hard to say whether it's by design or by accident.
Social housing in Europe while exists, distribution of it is extremely corrupted process. Applying and waiting will give you something in 5 years or never, you'll know in 5 years. You have to be young couple both employed with perfect portfolio, or whatever the role model in that time and location is. Young couples both employed in desirable city basically don't exist anymore, even if you are after two rounds of waiting suddenly you are not a young couple anymore:) Usually you have to know someone and give a bribe.
You mean like in Sweeden, where you have to wait 20 years for assigned flat?
Europe has no homelesness, because migrants are housed at hotels at great expense!
That's due to moving away from the government ensuring an adequate supply of rental units over the last decades. Intentional free market style policies.
You mean Stockholm. You can buy, wait 20 years, or find a private building owner. But same problem, not building enough.
I mean better than having no assigned flat at all....
Waiting time can last longer than your ability to rent housing on a market regulated by supply and demand.
A bit of a misnomer. Housing is, actually, extremely affordable across the US - just not in major cities.
You can plunk $10-$20K and get land and a homestead in dozens of states.
Agree with the other comment that overbuilding is a reasonable strategy, but if you look at Detroit downtown (mid 2010s) having an overbuilt downtown is bad too.
It's a hard problem.
Similar things in lots of countries. There are villages in Italy and Spain with near-zero housing prices. The qualifier that needs added is "housing in commute range of jobs".
Stoke on Trent was selling houses for £1 with improvement grants attached! https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/stoke-shows-why-selling-...
And of course if 'jobs' becomes 'there is nothing a person can do that can't be more efficiently done by hiring AI more cheaply, plus you get to treat AI completely differently because AI is not a person' that complicates matters very much.
> You can plunk $10-$20K and get land and a homestead in dozens of states.
In a place where the only jobs to be had are at below-subsistence minimum wage at the dollar store and you have to drive 2 hours to see a doctor, sure.
There's a huge middle ground between Manhattan and homesteading on a $10k property. Here in Atlanta you can buy a 4/3 house for $270k or a 2/1 house for $160k. The rust belt and sunbelt are full of places with cheap housing.
That’s most definitely not $10-20k, tho.
Well we didn't exactly divvy up either housing or employment rationally, so looking through history without state subsidies and development, we're going to see slums pop up where the jobs are. Or just massive homeless populations I guess.
China managed this quite well with the hukou system, which allegedly is going to be loosened over time, but that seems distinctly unlikely to be understood by the powers that be here in the US.
That's actually the same in most countries: the cities where everyone wants to move to (examples from Germany: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich) become unaffordable, and at the same time smaller cities and villages in less desirable areas (e.g. in East Germany, but also in more remote areas of Bavaria) are depopulated - there you can buy a cheap house, but you can't get a job. Remote working would have helped to somewhat alleviate this, but no, now we all have to go back to the office so we can sit there and spend the whole day in Zoom/Slack/Teams calls instead of doing the exact same thing from home...
10k??? Yes because I want to live in east bumfuck in a food desert and drive 40 minutes to the one megamart and where the services barely work and my police/fire/usps is on the next town over 20 miles away.
Did I mention the legions of uneducated anti-Christians who would probably kill me for being queer?
> Here's the problem: * If no one had to pay, no one would. * We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons
Here's the actual problem. You've based your argument on a debunked economic theory ie the tragedy of the commons. You may as well argue trickle down economics.
Garrett Hardin wrote an essay called The Tragedy of the Commons in 1968 [1] and it became all the rage in neoliberal circles to justify wealth transfer to private hands (ie privatization) [2]. It never fit experimental data. Ultimately, Elinor Ostrom debunked it entirely using empircal data from the world over, work for which she won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics [3].
Whatever your arguments against free housing might be, the tragedy of the commons ain't it.
[1]: https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy...
[2]: https://socialistproject.ca/2008/08/b133/
[3]: https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...
> Anyone thinking there's a simple solution to this problem hasn't spent enough time with the problem.
I've spent a lot of time with the problem. and there is a simple solution: relax zoning restrictions and various lot requirements to allow private developers to build more housing. the market incentives are already there, they're just blocked by NIMBY's and stupid city councils, etc.
> The uptick in rental delinquency isn’t new. It started six years ago
It has nothing to do with Mamdani, for those of who don't want to bother to read. Most of this occurred under Eric Adams's watch.
Anecdotally, I do think covid made people a lot more aware of how deeply backlogged the housing courts are. It seems like a lot of people (like the anonymous one in the article) realized they could not pay rent and avoid being actually evicted for quite some time.
This is a recurring theme in city problems: Backlogged courts. Sometimes that's to the benefit of the less fortunate (here), but it also often results in terrible outcomes (see: Kalief Browder).
I think even the benefit for the less fortunate here is at most a short-term one. In the longer one, you need building and renting out shelter to be reasonably profitable, so that people do it.
It's basically the same argument that says rent caps are bad for the renters in the long run.
We don't always have to consider the apparently very fragile and fickle motivations of investors. Social housing can and has worked very well in many cases.
Unfortunately, most housing "investors" are people who bought a home 10-30 years ago and will be furious if they can't sell at a large profit compared to what they bought it for.
Sadly, a lot of places (Netherlands and Ireland come to mind) _discourage_ you from investing in things like stocks, and _encourage_ you to "invest" in a primary residence, making the problem even worse.
Seems like a non sequitur?
If you want people to be able to live in a place without paying rent, please just outright gift that to them and make that official policy. That may or may not be good policy, but at least it's honest.
But if the deal that people agreed to is to pay rent, then the courts should also enforce that.
You can get from one regime to the other, by eg buying out the landlords or outright expropriating them. But if you want to do that, please just advocate so outright.
Social housing may or may not be a good idea. But it's a completely separate issue from non-enforcement of existing rental contracts.
Not a non sequitur. I was responding to this specifically:
> In the longer one, you need building and renting out shelter to be reasonably profitable, so that people do it.
Maybe. That narrower focus definitely makes your remark more defensible.
On a tangent: along with most economist, I generally prefer giving poor people money that they can spend on goods and services as they please; instead of having some pencil pusher decide what they need and giving that to them in-kind.
Where has it been successful, and what counts as success in that? I genuinely do not know.
It's been exceptionally successful in Singapore, for one.
I currently live in an HDB property in Singapore. It's great.
I'm originally from the Netherlands, which traditionally had a strong social housing sector: regions and cities would have their own housing corporations ('woningbouwcorporaties') tasked with building affordable housing. Those corporations were given government support after 1950 to help with the post-WW2 housing shortage, but were semi-privatized in the mid-90s, and in 2015 their scope was strongly curtailed.
It would be reductive to say that this privatization was the sole cause of the current housing crisis affecting the Netherlands -- rents and housing prices have also increased a lot in Singapore since Covid -- but it probably didn't help.
Rents and housing prices went down a lot in Singapore during Covid. So them going up again afterwards is just a reversion to the mean.
Singapore doesn’t have social housing. HDB is government built and sold for 99 year lease hold.
You're describing a form of social housing.
No. Because HDBs are not owned by the government.
Yes. Because "social housing" is a general term that implies subsidization and affordability rather than any one specific ownership model.
No. Social housing is government owned and rented. Singapore is government built and sold. Singapore is a tiny island with little space. The government has to control what is built where and avoids it turning into Hong Kong slums.
You're being stubborn. From Wikipedia:
>Public housing, also known as social housing, is subsidized or affordable housing provided in buildings that are usually owned and managed by local government, central government, nonprofit organizations or a combination thereof.
ITS NOT OWNED AND MANAGED BY THE GOVERNMENT.
You literally just quoted why it’s not public housing. Jesus Christ.
Wikipedia says 'usually'. And, yes, you are right that the individual HDB flats are typically owned by individual families (though the government also owns some and rents them out, but that's the exception).
However, HDB still does a lot of the managing. Eg HDB manages the lifts and other common spaces. They organise getting the exterior repainted, or general upgrading works to plumbing etc.
HDB also subsidises the price of a flat when you buy directly from them. There's a reason they have maximum income caps for buying.
My unpopular opinion: HDB should declare victory and go home. They more than solved the original acute housing shortage they were created for.
---
Singapore does a lot of things right. And HDB is, as usually a lot more competent than pretty much any other public housing programme anywhere else in the world. But that doesn't mean everything Singapore does (including HDB) is automatically a good idea forever.
Just like our local recreational drug policy could probably be improved by moving closer to what we do with the casinos. And the ban on vaping is just silly.
> However, HDB still does a lot of the managing. Eg HDB manages the lifts and other common spaces. They organise getting the exterior repainted, or general upgrading works to plumbing etc.
By that logic every apartment block is public housing.
No, why? The condos in Singapore are run by private-sector management companies.
Because someone manages the lifts lights and exterior. So it must be public housing by your logic.
Huh? HDB, which is an arm of the government, manages lifts, light and exterior.
The condo management companies are not arms of the government.
What is so hard about this? Is there something I'm not understanding?
If the criteria to be public housing is that someone manages the lifts, lights, and exterior. Then all apartment blocks are public housing. Condos and HDBs are all public housing.
Your logic is infallible. Of course, your premise is rubbish.
It's not about whether 'someone' is managing these things. Even an owner-occupier is managing their own lights and exteriors.
A useful criterion is whether the government (or an arm of the government) is managing these things. Like HDB, but unlike your typical condo management organisation. It's far from the only criterion, but it's a useful indicator.
The criteria for social housing is that the government subsidized it.
That's all.
Pushing the goalpost to justify your classification.
Not really. The goal posts have not moved since the beginning. I'm still claiming the same thing, and the definitions are the same.
How about you read the wikipedia article on public housong in Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
It says: "In 2025, close to 80% of Singapore's resident population was reported to be living in public housing,[1] down from a high of 88.0% in 2000."
Let's follow that reference, and take a look at what the Singaporean government says, at https://www.mnd.gov.sg/our-work/housing-a-nation/public-hous... , under the section title "Public Housing":
"Singapore has one of the highest home ownership rate in the world, due to the commitment of our founding fathers since the very beginning of nation building. Today, there are more than 1 million HDB flats across the island, home to close to 80% of Singapore's resident population. The schemes highlighted below help Singaporeans meet their housing needs at different life stages."
So the dictionary says that HBD housing is public housing, wikipedia says that HBD housing is public housing, and the Singaporean government says that HBD housing is public housing.
The definition is qualified: "usually", "nonprofit organizations", "combination".
>Jesus Christ.
Sometimes I'm disappointed by the level of contributions here.
I can say the same about your “contributions”
You can’t go calling things they are not.
For the benefit of any others (miraculously) still reading, I will repeat the statement of fact that you continue stubbornly to deny against all evidence: "'social housing' is a general term that implies subsidization and affordability rather than any one specific ownership model".
Others will make up their mind. Over and out.
For the benefit of any others. Bluebarbet has never been to Singapore and ultimately doesn’t know what he’s talking about. HDBs are not public housing. It’s land control because Singapore is so tiny.
Primarily Vienna. There's nothing complicated about what Vienna did - other cities just prefer to please billionaires instead of providing services to citizens.
Do you actually know what Vienna did? Because the overwhelming number of people who reference the city basically just repeat a few dubious talking point about restricting rent.
Have a massive empire and then lose it resulting in a capital city with surplus housing?
That was Berlin several decades ago. The gap has closed now and it's just another city.
Well, Berlin's history was a bit more complicated. Between the 'losing the empire' bit and the 'surplus housing' was a whole generation or two of the city being divided and one part living under siege and the other under real world socialism.
But you are right, that surplus housing is no longer a thing in Berlin.
I don't know about restricting rent but they certainly had a progressive tax on high rents, a 1% income tax to fund housing, and then used that to build a ton of high quality social housing with balconies and amenities for all. I also like to think it helped that they slapped a big sign on each to proudly let people know it was their tax dollars at work.
I didn't stay in social housing while I living there but I never once heard people complain about it. They basically just didn't think much about it at all and felt it was a good system and then would ask me why the US only makes it for poor people.
I mean, to be fair, having your population semi-permanently depleted by two major wars and a fundamental loss of national economic centrality and prestige will help you keep a fixed stock of social housing lasting longer.
Vienna's population has been growing constantly for the last 40 years.
Basically, all of Europe post-WW2. A significant share of new build in the 50s-60s was social housing.
No one absolutely no one considers that to be remotely true. Look at French banlieues, German Plattenbauten or British Councils - they are synonymous with Crime and physical as well as cultural despair.
And while Vienna or Stockholm are often cited as Utopias, the citees often intentionally leave out the negative side effects (ie. Waiting-times of years, housing black markets, etc) that are eventually coming full circle to the thing they were proposed as a solution against. Just with much less transparency.
There have been social housing projects that paint a more nuanced picture, eg Hamburg-Steilshoop, where a giant block (for EU standards) has been erected in the 1970s and was basically divided into three sections: one to be run by existing housing coops, one by owner occupants, and one by the city. Needless to say that those parts run by the city were quickly becoming a prime example of a German „banlieue“ while the other parts became a prime example for those eager to dismiss any criticisms.
This was aggravated by modern city planning with it's separation of function that left these new districts with no third spaces, barely any shops and large spaces of 'no man's land' between buildings.
In classics European cities there were shops on street level and dense blocks that generated demand for those.
The post war developments followed the 'high rise in the park' concept, lots of greenery and parking lots between buildings to create a mid density neighborhood.
But there is no life in the streets and you have to walk a lot through repetitive environment but to do anything you still have to go to the 'old city'.
High rises were far from being the only, or even the dominant model for social housing in Europe. Different plans such as low rises, semi-detached houses and single homes also got implemented.
Those are even worse - you need a certain density for urban life, otherwise you'll just create large empty spaces that belong to no-one, so nobody feels responsible for them.
> Look at French banlieues, German Plattenbauten or British Councils - they are synonymous with Crime and physical as well as cultural despair.
Sure, because what existed before was absolutely fine [1][2]...
The truth is that these policies worked so well that pepole completely forgot what existed before. The alternative to housing projects wasn't a country without crime or despair, it was more crime, shanty towns, people displaced by war and unable to get back to normal life, and young workers unable to move to places of employment in the postwar economic boom. That topic was so uncontroversial that every european government, leftwing or rightwing, did it.
I agree that a social housing project alone isn't enough to fix every problem, but that doesn't make it the source of other unsolved problems.
[1]: Nanterre's shanty towns, https://www.defense-92.fr/exposition/la-vie-des-bidonvilles-...
[2]: pre-war shanty town, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2019/jul/04/how-p...
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Eh, I agree with the general point that rental housing has to be financially viable over the long run. I just don’t think NYC politics lets this particular problem turn quickly into a clean “landlords stop renting/developers stop building” outcome. It’ll look a lot weirder.
Affordable housing is too central to NYC democratic politics for the city/state to simply let a large share of subsidized housing totally collapse. More likely, they keep patching it with public money: arrears assistance, vouchers, preservation funds, regulatory tweaks, etc. That’s already basically the pattern.
The real likely long-term problem is that the city robs Peter to pay Paul: It props up housing operations by reducing funding for other services, creating recurring subsidy obligations, or risking pressure on its fiscal position and bond ratings.
They’re already doing that all the time: Part of how Mamdani plugged the budget gap, for example, was by delaying a classroom size reduction in public schools.
Obviously, I don’t think that’s a great long-term strategy. It turns a blind eye to an enforcement problem in favor of a recurring taxpayer-funded operating subsidy.
It's a shame that NYC can't raise more from property taxes / land taxes?
They sit on some of the most valuable real estate in the world, surely that should be able to find public infrastructure etc? Especially since the density they have would allow them to provide the infrastructure rather efficiently.
But they are so ham-strung / incompetent, they still have surface level street parking on public roads. Surely, there's more valuable uses of NYC real estate than that, and the market would be more than happy to find them.
(At least they made some inroads recently by introducing some congestion pricing. As neutered as that programme turned out, it's a lot better than nothing, which they had before.)
They can and it often comes up: One of Mamdani's tax proposals was to raise property taxes, though he backtracked on it.
Still, NYC's municipal budget is already the largest in the world by far. When I last looked, it was roughly double Tokyo's and bigger than many countries: NYC's municipal budget is larger than Singapore's, for example, and obviously NYC's budget gets to exclude things countries pay for like national defense.
It's likely they will need to continue raising taxes, but we also need to take a hard look at how effective each dollar being spent is.
It’s fascinating that America can be the world’s superpower(?) and yet huge swathes of society still live in unstable conditions like this.
That's what it usually takes. To be a superpower, the government has to extract a lot from the citizens. Russia is an even more extreme case.
> It’s fascinating that America can be the world’s superpower(?) and yet huge swathes of society still live in unstable conditions like this.
Because huge swathes of society choose to live in these unstable conditions.
They could move to Detroit or even Salt Lake City, but they prefer the lifestyle of New York City.
Not to mention that to move they would need to have resources to do so. And in many cases would take them away from what little interpersonal safety net they have in the form of friends and family — which for people who are struggling typically makes things worse.
.. and the jobs? I mean, people moved out of Detroit precisely for that reason.
Just man up and ask your dad for more access to the family trust-fund. Work isn't the only way to make income you know.
You can't blame Adams for delinquent payments. He dramatically expanded housing vouchers (the source of the budget crisis) which in theory should have reduced delinquency.
Moreover rents for affordable housing haven't kept up with inflation while benefits have.
Arm chair speculation like what's in the article won't suffice. People need to be surveyed and interviewed to get to the bottom of this.
I can and do put some blame on Adams here, but I don’t think the story is ineptitude or corruption, at least on this issue. I think his administration mostly chose to prioritize the long-term housing supply problem, even if that meant more short-term pain for tenants.
He had a pretty good "Abundance-style" agenda IMO: City of Yes didn’t go far enough, but passing it at all was a big deal in NYC land-use politics. Various tax policies like 485-x are at least serious long-term attempts to restart housing production, even if the details are debatable.
> He dramatically expanded housing vouchers
This is being extremely charitable to Adams. The big CityFHEPS expansion was vetoed by Adams and the city council overrode him. The Adams administration was clearly skeptical of short-term tenant-side relief.
You can see that in simple things like his rent board appointees: Adams-era boards approved rent increases every single year. I'm not saying that's bad and it's in-line with his general view of housing as a supply-side problem. He inherited a system coming off years of freezes and very low increases under BDB, so some correction was necessary.
But overall when given the choice, he did choose to inflict a bit of short-term pain for a longer-term view.
So say they do get evicted eventually, what are their chances of getting the next rental?
i assume they also owe back payments? with interest?
Blood from a stone. Sure the landlord could theoretically go after them, but they would spend a bunch of money on legal fees for someone that will probably never pay it back.
In a Palantir style totalitarian state with panopticon tracking of everyone's every thought, action and history? I'd say pretty good!
The founders of palantir didn’t finish reading the books
Politico is an Axel Springer rag, in case anyone was wondering why they would put a photo of mamdani in the article. It's propaganda.
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> “There is a subset of people, maybe the smallest subset, who are literally making a choice not to pay rent, and we don’t do well with acknowledging that but there is a subset for whom that is the case,” [...] Others bristle at the notion that some tenants are not paying rent just because they may be able to get away with it.
These people absolutely exist. To pretend that they don't is willful ignorance. They are, however, indeed a "small[est] subset" to quote the gentleman in the article. In the era of $4 McDoubles and $6 gallons of gas I have trouble believing that one in four people is my burnout college roommate who spends on Fireball shots and Xbox games instead of paying rent. Life is expensive these days.
I anecdotally know of a few cases in Seattle where tenants with high incomes that could easily pay just don't. There is a subculture that actively encourages this type of behavior and the laws are setup such that there are almost no consequences for it. I've also met people who bragged about doing it. While rare, it is still common enough that it has become a real problem and has become socially acceptable in some circles.
It is corrosive to the social contract when government policy tacitly encourages this behavior.
It's not rare. I repeat. It's not rare. I am a landlord in Seattle with ~55 active tenants/leases. Let's just say that I know of many landlords in the circles I run in that have absolutely stopped renting to leftie types because they've had so many issues over the last few years with many of them over litigating everything; and deciding not to pay rent over the smallest non-issues, or just not paying rent at all. I could cite case after case; and this topic is especially salient to me in the present moment because I am in fact dealing with one of these tenants right now and its a total nightmare. I will spare you the gruesome details of trying to work with this particular tenant but just trust me—I have an incredibly high tolerance to stress and this individual is doing their best to get as far under my skin as possible.
When the political class or the cultural zeitgeist tells you over and over that landlords are leeches and that "any attempt to profit off of housing is unethical"—people are going to take that to heart and have a hatred for even well-meaning small landlords. If you don't believe this is the attitude, go visit r/Seattle. The inflammatory language of politicians and cultural leaders sets the tone which plays out as legal battles and fights in properties across the city.
This obviously creates an adverse selection problem where small landlords illegally apply their own prejudices and biases in tenant selection. Honestly—could you expect them not to—when the repercussions of picking a bad tenant are so great? And when there are other demographic groups—like immigrants—who are absolutely, verifiably and consistently reliable as tenants. It used to be that it was the section 8 or low income type that were a huge problem but now there's an educated leftish fringe that landlords are also avoiding. Honestly with good reason, IMO.
Some homeowners just decide to not list extra rooms in their house outright. I remember hearing something like that Seattle has the highest number of unrented empty rooms in the country (though someone should fact check that). With the political climate the way it is here, it's obvious as to why this is the case.
With all due respect, do you consider yourself, with ~55 active tenants/leases, to be a "small landlord"?
Its spread across about ~ 6 houses. I'm definitely a small landlord. I deal with all tenant issues myself, handle all repairs, leases, and most importantly for me—maintain a healthy relationship (which has grown to many friendships). I use this term in contrast to a faceless, corporate landlord who owns larger apartment buildings. Small landlords and corporate landlords are nothing alike
55 isn’t small by definition and under the law. You may feel small because it’s just you, and you don’t realize how much you’ve accomplished or the asymmetric bargaining position that affords you but your perspective isn’t corresponding with reality.
That being said, I do think a system that tenant rights to be as abusive of legal process as we have in some states ends up hurting tenants themselves. I think our courts should move much faster so nonpayment is resolved faster. But I also think all landlords should be required to pay 20% of rent to a home building fund so that new housing actually gets built.
Wouldn't 20% tax on rent just lead to 25% general increase on rents? I don't think there are that much margin around in leveraged landlords.
Really better would be just to bump something like income tax and use money from there for same purpose.
If a landlord can charge 1200 instead of 1000 why wouldn’t they? They’ll charge the maximum they can get away with, costs are irrelevant
Two landlords, one with a mortgage, one without, will charge the same amount for the same property.
> If a landlord can charge 1200 instead of 1000 why wouldn’t they?
Because someone else could undercut them. If everyone is being levied the same toll, and everyone knows that, it’s not that risky to just pass along the tax.
> If a landlord can charge 1200 instead of 1000 why wouldn’t they? They’ll charge the maximum they can get away with, costs are irrelevant
This is rarely true. Only universally true for large corporate landlords where there is an entire corporate structure maximizing every dollar due to personal incentives put in place by executives/ownership.
Small landlords (yes, even those with 6 buildings) are almost never min/maxing rent like this. They are optimizing for other things like time investment and hassle factor. And even doing the right thing.
I've both rented and landlorded. In neither side of those transactions over decades was I either paying maximal rent or charging it. When property taxes went up as a renter, my small time landlord would show me the tax bill and I'd pay exactly the increase. Same went for when I had tenants.
I'd go as far as to say the majority of mom and pop landlords are not looking to charge maximum rent. They only start doing so when they have a problematic tenant they are trying to "manage out" of the unit.
>Small landlords (yes, even those with 6 buildings) are almost never min/maxing rent like this. They are optimizing for other things like time investment and hassle factor. And even doing the right thing.
Yup. Have a single residential in a otherwise commercial building in NYC. They pay ~50% market for a spacious 3 BR for a number of reasons; mainly because we have known them for a long time and they struggle with health issues so we never really raised them. Charging them market would put them on the street. They can afford the 50%, live nicely, and the commercial tenants pay market which pays for the building with a little leftover. If they ever move we will certainly charge more but I see no reason to gouge like others.
This is right. Increased costs are either passed on to tenants or decrease the landlord’s cash flow. Those are the only two options. I don’t have any data on which occurs more frequently. But what is true is an increase in expenses means less debt service is available so purchase prices come down.
Yes. And the other one is forced to charge 1200. So the other one can charge for example 1190. And the renters will choose the 1190. And then the next renter has to pay 1200.
Or the one without mortgage goes like I only get 800. Maybe instead I just throw this money in government bonds for better gains and save money...
Other option for same outcome could be just to charge any renter 20% on top of their rent. Which they directly pay to this fund. That would push rents down as they are able to pay less. Achieving exactly same effect.
You’re assuming there’s too much supply, both landlords will be able to rent the unit, one will make more money.
> And the other one is forced to charge 1200.
No.
Nobody is forced to charge anything. The market forces limit what can be charged, as an upper bound.
And I'm saying this with experience as an actual landlord.
Purchase prices will come down because the percentage of rent available for debt service will decrease. So the cap rate will be calculated on a smaller denominator.
If leads to building that floods the system with supply then rent won’t increase. Landlords and lenders would have to adjust purchase prices and cap rates so valuations would come down. So this would need be gradually phased in until normal. The government would need to support home builders, buyers and landlords. But eventually the housing stock supply increase would match and be tied to new household formation.
At the end of the day most economic activity is really an exercise in ratios. Some states don’t charge sales taxes. Some change double digits. Yet retailers are able to function in both environments.
What is clear is that rental and purchase housing is increasing beyond inflation since 2008 and COVID and that’s not good for tenants or landlords.
Being generous with your ~6 number to be either 5 or 7 houses you have either 7.8-11 people per unit?
That's slumlord territory and not any morally better than corporate landlords unless your average unit size is a 4 bed/2 bath.
Also there is zero world where you have 6 houses, 50+ people and can call yourself a small time landlord. That's being able to live entirely off of your rental income and a full time landlord. You could maybe, _maybe_ get away with describing yourself as a medium time landlord.
Small time is living in a 3 floor house and renting the other 2 floors, or owning 1 other home to rent.
I'm sure OP meant 6 houses with several units in it each, not 7-11 people per house. Otherwise the distinction between house and unit doesn't make sense.
This is a small time landlord. Large landlords have easily over 10000 units, and he is one half of a percent of that.
I hope he is able to live off the rental income. It's a big job to manage 55 units and keep everything in shape and administratively going, deal with turnover and so on.
nah, having 6 buildings(not houses, if were being precise with terminology here) with multiple units in each, is not a small time landlord. If you can live entirely off the rental income then you are a full time landlord and can at best claim that you aren't a large corporate landlord, but you don't get to invoke the idea that you are some sort of mom and pop situation renting out a spare unit, which is what people assume when you say "small time landlord"
I'm the OP—just chiming in, I can just hardly live off the rental income I make, but its a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE. Yes what I am is not analogous to someone renting out a few extra rooms. I just think my experience is analogous to that of a small time landlord in that I know each tenant very well and we have good relationships—and I manually handle each part of their tenant experience. To add more detail, I share a bedroom in a 25 bedroom house that I own, which accounts for a bit more than half of my tenants.
That's a telling detail. How many 'big time landlords' are in the position of living in one of their 25 bedroom units? I'm going to skip the 'share a bedroom' 'cos that might well mean something otherwise desirable. In the best case scenario I too would be sharing a bedroom, but it wouldn't be my best case scenario to be in a 25 unit building unless it was quite large and well built.
Sorry, I meant I live in a bedroom in the 25 br house. Its not a particularly nice or well-built house; it's a frat house near the UW campus in Seattle. As a matter of fact, I live in the basement in the smallest room in the house. I am not a fancy person and don't need anything more than the basic necessities to remain content, and I like the neighborhood here.
Now, where could the world’s tiniest violin be? Garfield!
> I can just hardly live off the rental income I make, but its a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE
there is a large gap between "can live off of"(my words) and "a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE"(your words). If you're making more than the median household income which based on the fed numbers is ~84k/yr[1] you've crossed the line past small time landlord. You may be making less than that, but I am going to be surprised if you are with ~55 tenants.
[1]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
I didn't invoke a "mon and pop situation renting out a spare unit" idea, that's your own that you're projecting on my comment.
I did say that they are a small landlord, and I stand by it given that a large landlord is several orders of magnitude larger than them. If in your world that's only a label you want to give someone renting out a single spare unit, then so be it. I disagree.
> mon and pop situation renting out a spare unit
> small landlord
Those are effectively synonymous to me. The line in the sand that definitively makes you not a small time landlord is if you earn enough from rental income after expenses to make as much as the average job's income.
If you disagree I will need you to define what "small time landlord" means to you then so we can figure out the gap in our understanding.
"Small" is a word indicating that quantitatively relative to other things, it is less, i.e. Very Small < Small < Medium < Large < Very Large.
According to [1] (Doorloop, 2026), Greystar manages 823,581 units as the largest landlord. The 10th largest landlord is WinnCompanies with 120,855 units. These are "very large" to me. If we make a generous curve then a large landlord has 10% of those units, so somewhere in the 10,000 unit range, a medium landlord 10% of that or 1,000 units, a small landlord 10% of that or 100 units, and a very small landlord has the last interval of 1-10 units. Hence, 55 units is somewhere between very small and small.
[1] https://www.doorloop.com/blog/largest-property-management-co...
I gave my definition for what a small time landlord is in the comment you replied to.
You can disagree with that definition but don’t pretend like I didn’t give one and then explain to me what my beliefs should be.
So a slumlord
I read their story as "I'm not small, but I know a lot of smalls who tell me things they won't even tell their confessor."
The net effect is most of the people I know with a rental or two in Seattle will only rent via direct referrals from people they know, which also allows them to rent at a lower rate. Their properties are no longer available to the general public. The demand is high enough that this works. Sucks if you are new to Seattle though.
This kind of non-payment of rent abuse exploded during COVID.
>stopped renting to leftie types
I’m curious how they’re managing to do this. I don’t give any outward signals of being a “leftie type” but I absolutely am. Conversely, I know lots of people who have a very punk look but are super conservative.
> And when there are other demographic groups—like immigrants—who are absolutely, verifiably and consistently reliable as tenants.
I know someone with something like 120 units. Unassuming nice old lady that makes over a million a year. She tries to rent to immigrants as much as possible since they don't cause issues.
The best people to rent to are illegal immigrants, you don’t have to do things like ensure they have livable accommodation as they first sign of complaint you just phone up the authorities and they get kicked out.
Honest question - how do you know a potential tenant is “leftie type”?
Dyed hair, nose rings, tattoos, short hair on women, effeminate type looks on men, etc.
People on the fair ends of political spectrums tend to change their plumage to show their affiliation.
Short hair on women could just be German. Or a middle aged-career woman.
Social media? The problematic types of left- and right wingers don’t tend to be quiet.
You know the horseshoe on the door that will stop the fae? He has just put instead of it maga hat with a tesla badge on it.
Honestly? not op but that seems easy.
It was an honest question.
Don't worry: they'll tell you.
The lefty landlords are an even bigger problem for housing affordability than the lefty tenants. They want the anti-property rights boot up the ass of anyone trying to build new homes or dwellings, under the auspices of endangered owls or environmental review or "character of the community" or the wetlands or whatever the current scam is. It's all the same commie shit but only for themselves and at the expense of everyone else, of course dressed up that the dumber and younger end of the tenants actually believe it's in their interest.
If you own 6 houses, you don't only have an income the size of a full-time job but also make money out of the appreciation of property prices. Couldn't you and your immediate family retire by just selling these 6 houses? Or is the situation different in Seattle?
Also you are saying you are also working as a senior SWE. How are you so involved with 55 tenants and balance a full-time job at the same time? I've known people with 1 tenant who needed days off to deal with their issues, I find it hard to imagine personally dealing with 55.
Honestly curious here
I could sell all of the houses and retire, yeah. Especially the poor performing ones, after accounting for the mortgage I am in the red on two of them every month. I don't know if I expect property prices to appreciate in Seattle as we're flooding the market with housing and in the US we're having some unstable demographic shifts so I try to select properties that perform well on day 1, going forward.
Yes, my family also asks me how I do it. I am just working constantly, from sunup to sundown; pretty much 7 days a week. I don't always do a perfect job juggling the responsibilities but I do my best and I think 99-100% of my tenants would say they're enjoying the accommodations; and I think my manager would say my performance is good. Hoping I can get married and start a family soon and at that point I think hiring a property manager would be the correct move. But I have a very high amount of resilience to stress and being upset so being consistently under pressure isn't too much of a problem for me personally.
Also keep in mind there are certain types of tenants that are lower maintenance than others, so proper tenant selection is important.
What exactly do you mean by "well meaning small landlord"?
I just try to be the landlord that I would want to have. I respond to my tenants quickly, always give them concessions, let them pay late, or at a discount when they’re struggling, referred them to work at my companies, etc, etc. it’s not all about the money, it’s also being a good member of the community, for me. This is in contrast to a corporate landlord where your $1500 disappears into a void every month.
That’s awesome. When I was growing up my parents were denied housing because they had too many kids and were almost homeless one time until a nice landlord of the same religion agreed to rent to us. Please take your responsibility seriously as it seems you do.
That being said there are “professional” tenants that try to scam the system to the detriment of landlords and other tenants. I would fully applaud resistance to their efforts to take advantage of the system.
Look, I'm sure you're a nice person and a better landlord than many corporate landlords; and trying to do well.
I'm genuinely glad you're trying, and helping your tenants when you can; but I think you've drunk a bit too much of your own kool-aid.
From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.
I literally want to have a landlord. They provide a valuable service. I could afford to buy the places where I rent but actively avoid it.
The idea that landlords don’t provide a valuable service is a kind of willful denial of reality.
Much of the land in New England / northeastern USA was apportioned to proprietors without any service rendered, plus squatting on grandfathered regulations that no one else can take advantage of. The actual improvement is a service, but commonly it's something like a shithole house where the physical manifestation of the improvement is like 10% of the real estate value.
In someplaces like Kansas where people actually mixed their labor with the land (homesteading) to claim it and then improved it and the title transferred in capitalistic exchange, landlords are basically 100% providing a service. But in New York very little of the "value" provided has anything to do with services and labor mixed with the land as someone like Adam Smith envisioned as value generation. It's largely just some proprietor being handed land in the 1600s with the wand of a King, taking the shit by violence, then making regulations out the ass with violence (to make their shithole house pretend to provide a more valuable 'service') and then exempting themselves via grandfathering and then people exchanging title for same. Their service is a legacy of beating the shit out of Indians with weapons and then the populace with government and then allocating the value to themselves.
Maybe. But I had a landlord triple my rent in NYC because he wanted to sell the unit. I didn’t want to move but had no option.
>he wanted to sell the unit
You had an option if it was for sale.
Your handle is fitting.
What exactly are you asking for? They clearly are expressing empathy for others’ situations.
I live in a managed building that is completely soulless. I needed to extend my lease by one month before moving out. They wanted me to sign a new 12 month lease at a higher rate, break it, and pay a two month penalty for terminating early. This took over a month to get to something remotely human.
There is absolutely a difference between someone treating people like people and bad landlords.
Also, they aren’t throwing their money into a void. They’re literally getting housing.
“Money into a void” is the exact phrase that the _person I’m replying to_ used when comparing themselves to a corporate landlord.
> From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.
Surely that's the case for all sorts of services we pay for. Renting a house is paying for a service. The money disappears and in return you get the service. A nice landlord (and by nice I mean - responsive to problems, following laws, empathetic to the tenant, trusting of the tenant etc) provides a better service than a bad one. Unfortunately you rarely know which kind of landlord you have until you move in.
I think it's fair to say that there are bad landlords, and that there are circumstances where landlords are exploitative. But that doesn't change the fact there are also circumstances where landlords provide a useful service to people. Buying a house isn't always practical - landlords should exist to provide a service to people who don't want long term financial commitments.
> From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.
Not true for everyone. I was quite happy to pay my previous small time landlord. We had a very productive business relationship, at least from my perspective.
He fixed the large things and I didn't have to worry about it. In return I did basic maintenance and bothered him maybe once a year on average when something larger needed fixing.
I felt I got plenty of value from that relationship and my money certainly did not o into a void. My current mortgage though? Most of that goes off into the void of the market and I miss my previous living situation quite a bit most days.
What are you basing your judgment of OP on? He is listing various ways he goes above and beyond for his tenants even though he certainly doesn't have to. Your credit card company doesn't waive your late fees, yet he does when he knows tenants experience hardships. That's pretty awesome.
Also, the money doesn't go into a void: Tenants receive housing in return.
What judgment? I literally wrote that they’re a nice person!
“Money into a void” is the phrasing _they_ used!
> but I think you've drunk a bit too much of your own kool-aid
That (rather judge-y) part negates the "nice" part your started out with. I don't think OP "drank too much of his own kool-aid", he simply listed all the nice things he does for his tenants, which are great and well beyond what you could expect from an unrelated party in a contract for a service.
Yes, and then what was their last sentence?
I'd like to try and give you some sympathy, but my last landlord was a well-regarded property management firm who left me with no heat from the end of October to the weekend of Martin Luther King Day in New England, effectively only fixing it once I withheld rent, got on the local news, and was threatening a lawsuit. So, uh... yeah plenty of landlords have done a lot to earn that reputation for the class as a whole.
That's true, but I think when you pick a place to live in, you're not only really only interviewing the living establishment itself, but also the landlord/property management associated with it. I make an effort to do all of the tours of the units myself and establish good repoire with the tenants from the get-go. It's certainly inexcusable if a landlord doesn't fix things that impair living conditions—in Seattle we have a law that things of this nature must be fixed within 48 hours which I think is a reasonable law.
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> have a hatred for even well-meaning small landlords
In what way are you well meaning? You're only doing it for money.
The people not paying you rent are also only doing it for money.
Sucks when people behave like you, huh.
Yes I’m doing it for the money, I have to be compensated for my time and the financial investment obviously. People who decide to deceive me break not only a social contract but also a legal contract and a commitment they made at the time of signing a lease. If everyone acted like them, there would be no stable housing available for anyone. Talk about a bad take…
> Yes I’m doing it for the money
Right, so not well meaning. You said well meaning. You're taking that back. Correct?
You're upset at someone maximizing money at your expense. You like it when you maximize money at someone else's expense just fine. Correct?
The world's smallest violin is playing.
Please no 'I'm providing a valuable service' argument. We've already established your only interest is money.
I never said my only interest is money. At your job, is your only interest money? Do you not feel a social obligation to your coworkers; want to do good for your teammate and your company? Again, talk about a stupid take, as if humans are one dimensional like that. Corporate landlords and hedge funds that own apartment sky rises are probably only in it for the money. You can't say the same thing about every small landlord just because they make a profit.
I'm an open source developer. To me, it tracks that people can have other motivations and balance those with money/survival and all. What nikkwong is saying is, you can want to do well, have social obligations, take action to serve the community and not just your own benefit, and even want to do so because you sleep better and have nicer interactions with people as a rule. That tracks, I believe it, that's what I do.
The critics here are trying to make the argument that no you can't. Any such motivation is completely pretend, and everybody is 100% always dedicated to only their own benefit, not taking any of these squishier benefits into account ever, and you're fooling yourself if you think otherwise and you're conning other people on purpose if you PRETEND otherwise. There is nothing but paperclip maximizing, and we're all robots but some of us are lying robots.
These critics exist, and I'm sure they live their beliefs. Sucks to be them, even when they include the literal wealthiest people in the world, because they live those beliefs. They're inflicting them on the rest of us, but it doesn't make them correct, it just means the rest of us have to deal with the harm they inflict. Cheers nikkwong, thanks for being more of a gray area, like a lot of us are :)
I'm sure some slave owners were 'nice people'. Still slave owners, right?
But I treat my slaves better than everyone I know and I only have half a dozen! I don't only have slaves for profit!
Slave owners in the south were actually far more likely to be better people than today's landlords because they had far less choice but to compete with other people who engaged in slavery than landlords of today.
The 'only' strawman and the projections, oh my. 'Every accusation is a confession' remains true. 'Sucks to be them', 'inflicting them on the rest of us'. Gee, the person on the internet you know nothing about is 'inflicting harm' on society. Think of the landlord's feelings, they appear to be hurt! Look, he accused someone with an already high paying job who landlords in his free time of only caring about money! Only he said, does he not know that there can be multiple motivating factors? He said only fellas, only! I rest my case, only.
Landlords are slave owners? Gosh. On the bright side, who knew Hacker News was so revolutionary?
Alex, how do you interact with AI? I don't, 'cos I don't use it. Are you one of the people who eke out performance gains by threatening to shoot the AI's dog if it makes a mistake? Or are you one of the people who are prepared to accuse those people of doing literally the same thing as extorting living humans?
I stand by, sucks to be the critics to whom everything is dominance and profit and nothing else merits the slightest consideration.
And yikes whoo boy does it suck to be a person who argues 'back in the day the slave owners were nicer than landlords of today because they had to compete with other slave owners'. WOW. what?
Good lord, renting a property to someone who voluntarily signs a lease is equivalent to slavery?! Give me a break.
I will say you're doing an excellent job of backing up OPs post. There absolutely are people with an unhinged view of reality who will aggressively try to screw over people they think are in the "wrong" group.
Arguing that poor people never try to abuse the system is some serious ivory tower BS.
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Wow, way to not actually read what a person said, and then quote things and say they mean something that they don't.
I get that you don't like the concept of people owning property and renting it to others, but maybe stop arguing in bad faith?
Here's a hint: it's possible to be doing something for the money, but not only do it for the money. It's possible to operate a business, but also be a well-meaning person who treats customers of that business with empathy and compassion.
I don't know the landlord in this subthread, so I can't say if he's telling the truth about how he treats his tenants, but if he is telling the truth, he sounds better than the vast majority of landlords out there. Not just better, actually good.
Society isn't supposed to run on philanthropy.
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Lefty tenant here. I def. stopped paying my rent a few times until my landlord fixed their shit or agreed to stop scamming me.
Last time I did it I signed a lease for a year, with 2 months of advance notice if I decided to leave (in the UK). I told them 2 months before the end of my lease, and they told me I had to wait for the end of my lease, then wait 2 months, and then I could be out.
I just stopped paying rent, and left them a horrible one star review on gmaps.
One day he showed up at my place (with soup who was coming to fix something) and tried to enter. I told him to stay out. And then he started crying and telling me how I could not just stop paying rent. I could tell how hard it was to be a small landlord.
I told him that I would resume paying if they signed smthg to agree to let me break the lease at the year end AND reimburse me the fees that appeared at the least minute, a year ago, right as I was signing the lease in front of them.
They agreed, reimbursed me my caution/deposit at the end, easy.
Would recommend just stop paying your rent if anything ever happens. I would do it again.
> I def. stopped paying my rent a few times until my landlord fixed their shit
In most municipalities, this is OK so long as the thing that needs to be fixed is a habitability issue. Heat, water, etc
> One day he showed up at my place (with soup who was coming to fix something) and tried to enter. I told him to stay out.
??? You wouldn't let him solve the issue you stopped paying for? How do you justify that?
The issue he stopped paying for was an explicit rejection of their tenant rights, and fixing a separate issue doesn't fix that.
I let the soup in.
> corrosive to the social contract
What we see is iterated prisoner's dilemma. Enough people have had their landlords play "defect" against them (rent rises in excess of wage inflation, evictions, failure to do maintenance, intrusion) that the public have started playing "defect" against the landlords.
Same as in a lot of American public life.
Also like, objectively the courts are on the side of evictions. They have lots of practice and your local PD will be happy to help. The process works just fine.
Most places have a pretty clean eviction process: You provide a very short notice, 14 days for non-payment, and then get a court hearing.
If landlords are upset that it takes a long time to get to a court date, sorry, get in line with the rest of us who can't get basic Justice because the US doesn't fund public services, which the court is.
Like what do you expect, that we just throw people out onto the street on your word? Do you not see how obviously that will get abused?
As someone who also lives in Seattle, I'd be curious to see any verifiable citations to such a wild claim
There are such people. I have a unit in Seattle that sits empty because I don't want to risk getting stuck with such tenants.
In Seattle, you can't:
1. Evict people from November to April (it's "winter"). 2. Evict people with schoolchildren during the school year. 3. Run background checks on prospective tenants. 4. You _must_ rent to the first qualifying tenant. 5. You must offer 3 months in rent as compensation if you decline to renew the lease. 6. The maximum rent increase is capped.
Oh, and eviction process takes about 1.5 years now because the courts are overloaded and the tenant can use procedural tricks to drag out the process.
If you want names, this case made newspapers: https://wealthandpoverty.center/2025/02/11/the-bellevue-squa...
Apart from maybe being a little more flexible on evictions, none of the other reasons seem problematic.
For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate?
The giving tenant three month rent thing is for a very small circumstance - for example huge rent increases if the tenant income is low, condo remodeling, etc. The wording is: “landlords who issue a housing cost increase of 10% or more (within a 12-month period) must pay relocation assistance if the affected household earns 80% or less of the Area Median Income and chooses to move.”
Maximum rent increase being capped also makes sense - I’ve been hit with 15-20% rent increases with no choice but to move.
It seems like you don’t like the tenant having any rights, and you want to impose your will upon them.
Are you also wanting a company to have to hire the first qualifying candidate and immediately stop all hiring? That is nonsensical. A landlord and a tenant should be free to contract as both parties wish.
Does this "first tenant" rule not incentivize people to apply immediately, sight unseen, and then they just eat the credit check fee on the apartments that they end up not choosing? Or maybe they can even bail before the credit check is done, if they can see all of their candidate apartments in that time, or at least do see the one they applied for and decide they don't want it?
> Does this "first tenant" rule not incentivize people to apply immediately, sight unseen
Is that a bad thing? Presumably that means they liked something about your rental. Happened a ton during COVID.
> Or maybe they can even bail before the credit check is done, if they can see all of their candidate apartments in that time
I highly doubt this happens in practice. It can be like $50 per application easy - renters are in general cost conscious. I certainly only put down the fees on apartments I’m serious about (usually two max). Why waste money?
This is an insanely bad take.
> For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate?
You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house. If you're a building owner, there are reasons that you might want to be able to have freedom of choice in choosing who you have live in your building. When the government forces you to choose the first applicant who meets your selection criteria, your selection criteria becomes incredibly strict—720+ credit score, makes 4x the rent, etc. Especially when evicting a bad tenant becomes basically impossible, landlords work even harder to vet candidates, meaning there are a lot of false negatives that aren't offered housing. Seriously, you can't evict a tenant just because its winter? You know how many people take advantage of that — read my sibling comment in my thread. I myself in Seattle have dealt with multiple tenants who have done this so they could have free rent as their lease expired. What do you think this does to my tenant selection process? I up the bar.
> Maximum rent increase being capped also makes sense - I’ve been hit with 15-20% rent increases with no choice but to move.
You act like there's an oligopoly that dictates rent prices from their mountaintop that we all have to abide by. We live in a free market, and small landlords compete with large buildings for tenants. Creating these types of caps just makes the system less efficient — focuses efforts on the false pretense of tenants rights rather than the true equalizer like building more housing. And honestly, it just drives small landlords out of the market who can't handle it. This just leaves corporate landlords who are certainly less tenant friendly and will further this tenant vs landlord arms-race. We should be creating incentives and making it easy for individual homeowners to become landlords (at least in Seattle) if we want the paradigm to improve.
I've lived in properties with no form of rent control whatsoever. Landlords issuing 10%+ rent increases is awful. it denies you the stability that's granted by fair/consistent rent increases. It erodes the community fabric by having a revolving door of tenants who live there 1-2 years before leaving.
I do agree that we should focus on other remedies such as building more. However, even in a market with ample housing, I'm not convinced that some Landlords would still just as happily take the 'I bet they'd rather a 10% rent increase than deal with the hassle of moving' gamble.
Most of the people I've met who are anti rent control/stabilization usually don't have the pleasure of a landlord who has decided to engage in such tactics. Almost always they argue from some place of guaranteed housing safety.
this is an issue that applies to people making 30k and also people making 300k.
I like the approach Finland took when it abolished rent control in the 1990s. Basically, you are not allowed to chain fixed-term leases indefinitely. If the actual intent is that the tenant stays until further notice, the lease agreement must reflect that.
Now, if you have an indefinite lease, the landlord can't increase the rent, unless the basis for the increase is already in the agreement. Typically the rent is tied to a measure of inflation, and the landlord chooses once a year if they should make the increase.
That's actually fine, but the people who oppose rent control would probably not accept that because that's basically the system (give or take) that already exists in places where rent control already exists.
My ex also had a lease that stipulated automatic 5% increases, until they made him sign a new agreement mandating the non-negotiated increase would be 7.5% instead.
NYC has a particularly spectacular brand of hostility towards tenants (the latest trend I've seen is, instead of broker fees, absorbent move in/move out fees paid to property managers).
You could sign a longer lease and get the stability you desire. Negotiate a five year lease and stability is yours.
None of the landlords I’ve rented from wanted to do that. Sample size of like 8.
I've done it multiple times. Everytime I wanted to do it, it was possible.
If you offer to sign a 5 year lease at current prices, then yeah, can see why they might not go for that.
I would definitely take it, personally. I have never increased rent on any of my tenants in Seattle, ever. I've had some tenants for 7 years+.
> You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house
We already tried that. It turns out that people are racist, so now we need laws to protect against that. It sucks for all the decent non-racist folks but the alternative of not having those protections was far worse.
If you force people to have someone in their house that they don't want, they are not going to rent their house out. This will lead to less units on the market. Your point about racism is fair, but I don't think the answer is a solution that reduces rentable units on the market.
What alternative solution to housing-related racism would you suggest?
The one that actually exists? Have you never heard of the HUD fair housing initiatives programs? You hire a white actor and a black actor with the same job, income, credit, etc and if a landlord consistently refuses to rent to the black actors, you sic the DoJ on them for violating the Fair Housing Act
Nope, I hadn't heard of that. Neat. I see two problems though:
1. I can see this being effective against larger landlord that will have many units available every year, ensuring that adequate testing can be performed. But on smaller landlords with only a few units, it seems like it'd be hard to test. (for example, you get rejected from an apartment. The landlord rents it out to someone else. You file a FHIP complaint, but the landlord no longer has any units available so they cannot test.)
2. It seems like this is largely driven by complaints? If I was rejected from an apartment, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to glean whether or not it was based on race.
Re #2: I feel like people of the kinds of races that often get discriminated against have pretty decent radar when it comes to figuring out why they were rejected.
Okay, sell it to someone who will live there then. You're not a saint for taking a unit someone wants to buy and forcing them to rent instead.
How is renting different from hiring in that regard? Nobody would consider requiring employers to hire the first qualified candidate, but at the same time, we don't allow employers to discriminate on the basis of race.
Why couldn't the same law apply to residential leasing?
Are we sure that law is working as intended? Or are employers simply not admitting to factoring race into the decision? It is next to impossible to prove a candidate was rejected on the basis of race, especially when you can legally reject someone for not being a "culture fit" on the team.
I'd also argue the stakes are higher when leasing, so landlords will be less likely to take a chance on a race they don't like. Most jobs in the US are at-will employment so you can be fired at any time for almost any reason, but evicting a tenant can be a long process.
>t is next to impossible to prove a candidate was rejected on the basis of race
It is possible to prove a company is disproportionally one or the other when making the claim. Of course when an industry has far less applicants or members of a certain group that's to be expected but still. Consequentially I've heard of some pretty blatant race based selection especially in the US. It's just that that selection ends up excluding white people (or east asians) A while ago I even discussed with a hr person here on hn who was defending their hiring of that sort with the most flowery wording about 'just giving priority' or 'reaching out to members of their prefered group specifically' fist if all they get is not the desired group.
This is utter BS. Seattle is about 40% non-White. And has never been racist, or even had slavery (outside the Native population).
If you think there aren't any racist landlords in Seattle (or any particular place), then I have a bridge I'd like to sell you...
Having a large non-white population is not a protection against race-related discrimination.
Of course there are racist people in Seattle. But they are not a significant part of the population.
> You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house. If you're a building owner, there are reasons that you might want to be able to have freedom of choice in choosing who you have live in your building.
That’s basically discrimination? Make a strict selection criteria, that’s fine. The city also has affordable housing for people who don’t qualify. You set what works for you, why do you care if it’s too strict?
I am not acting like there is an oligopoly, but not having tenant protections means tenants are at the mercy of shitty landlords. And there are a TON of them. Am I not supposed to have any rights, and the landlords gets to do whatever they want? Free market doesn’t mean regulation free.
Edit: you said “We should be creating incentives and making it easy for individual homeowners to become landlords (at least in Seattle) if we want the paradigm to improve.” - what do you propose? What about landlords who don’t want housing built because they like owning a scarce asset? What kind of rights do you think tenants should have?
Yes, discrimination based upon characteristics that aren't immutable is perfectly fine and something we do every day. I discriminate against my neighbor who invited me over drinks in favor of my best friend who invited me to his birthday. I discriminate against the potential hire who doesn’t have experience in this line of work in favor of the person who’s a nationally renowned expert. I discriminate against a tenant with a history of failing to make rent in favor of someone who consistently provides payment every month. People are different and valuing one over another in specific contexts is hardly scandalous. It only becomes a proble if you decide to discriminate against someone based upon immutable characteristics such as their race, sex, national origin, etc. because you’re not treating them as an individual.
I get where you’re coming from, but none of them are scarce inelastic resources. The work one especially doesn’t feel like discrimination.
It’s also very different - you’re hiring someone to do a job for you, vs wanting someone who’ll pay rent on time and not destroy the property. A mediocre employee vs an excellent employee can make any huge difference to a business.
That’s not the case with renters - if person A and person B both pay on time and don’t trash the place then they are quite fungible.
> if person A and person B both pay on time and don’t trash the place then they are quite fungible.
Based on those two sole criteria, no, they aren't. Person A might call weekly about trivial matters that they should be taking care of themselves (lightbulb burned out, oven needs cleaning, refrigerator water filter needs replacement, etc.), while person B just takes care of things and doesn't bother the landlord.
Yeah but you can’t eat your cake and have it too. Part of renting is responding to complaints. If you don’t want to do that then you shouldn’t be renting.
I had a landlord ask me “you’re not going to call me for basic things right?”. I’m paying you money, I’ll call you whenever I want. Didn’t rent from him. You can tell me do it yourself but why would I put money into someone else’s property?
This is such binary thinking. People have different ways of interacting with people. Some people are easier to deal with than others, and that was the parents' point, not that they never want to respond to reasonable complaints.
Landlords should provide well maintained housing and respond to reasonable complaints, and tenants should be swiftly evicted if they don't pay rent or destroy the unit they're living in. That's fair to both sides.
Your experience as a renter is not the same as the experience of a landlord. If you've been on your first job for a month and you pinky swear to pay rent on time and the next candidate has been on their job for 3 years then I'll take that candidate every time. It's a risk calculation. You are more likely to lose your job than the other candidate, and when you do and can't pay rent anymore and won't leave then that is a very expensive problem for me.
The same goes for savings, credit score, and other factors. These are not nearly as fungible as you seem to think.
If everyone did that then how’s the person with a new job able to get a home? They might not all do it but it severely affects choices.
You also have more capacity to absorb a short vacancy in case this person is to lose their job. Can’t derisk your way out of everything.
It sounds like you never had to deal with shitty landlords, or didn’t really struggle too much in life.
> If everyone did that then how’s the person with a new job able to get a home?
That's exactly my point. If the regulations weren't so insane and burdensome (see other posters' points on not being able to evict promptly for nonpayment, for example) then the person with the brand new job would be able to quickly rent a home because it's not an undue risk for a landlord.
You can't ask landlords on the one hand to open their home to anyone, and on the other hand deny them the right to remove tenants that don't hold up their end of the bargain. Do you not see how that's completely unfair?
> You also have more capacity to absorb a short vacancy in case this person is to lose their job.
That is not a universal truth. Landlords have debt service/mortgage payments, taxes, maintenance, insurance and other payments. Especially smaller landlords actually do not - at all - have the capacity to absorb a vacancy or (even worse) a non-paying tenant.
> Can’t derisk your way out of everything.
Yes, but unduly moving risk from one party (tenant) to the other party (landlord) is certainly not the way to go either. If I just take your car and you don't have any recourse to get it back for 6+ months because the courts are backlogged and everyone else goes "well, you have a car, so you must be wealthy, what are you complaining about?" how would that make you feel?
> That’s basically discrimination?
Discrimination is fine, as long as the discrimination is not based on protected classes. If I were a landlord, I'd discriminate against people who act like assholes, for example, regardless of their ability to pay the rent, my rationale being that an asshole will likely be a problem tenant. And that I just don't enjoy dealing with assholes. Not sure "no assholes" is a reasonable thing to list on an official rental advertisement.
> It seems like you don’t like the tenant having any rights, and you want to impose your will upon them.
No. Have you heard the phrase: "justice delayed is justice denied"? I want this rule to apply to _everyone_.
Also I would agree with all those rules with one addition: unpaid rent should not be discharged during bankruptcy.
The fact that you cannot evict your tenant until they get a court hearing IS the system providing justice. It's ensuring that a landlord can't just throw you out on a whim, and you have to figure out housing until you get a court to say "Actually you weren't allowed to throw out that tenant" and have to deal with evicting the new tenant who was moved into your unit and also get you back into it.
It sure seems funny that it's only "Injustice" when it hurts the landlord, because apparently landlords aren't allowed to read the history of before we had these kinds of things.
If you are upset that court takes forever now in the US, congratulations, join the rest of us. You are not special in that regard.
I don't understand why you wouldn't sell and invest elsewhere in this case.
Many people do. I certainly never wanted anything to do with that rental market when I had a vacant condo.
The unintended consequence is that there are closed rental networks that never advertise and only rent to vetted people with reputation on the line. These often have cheaper rents than publicly advertised rental properties because the risk of bad tenants has been reduced.
It turns the public rental market into an adverse selection phenomenon. Over time, the best tenants have access to cheaper better rentals that are never even visible to the average rental tenant.
Apparently, even with all these rules designed to damage the profitability of landlords, being landlord must be extremely profitable as they keep doing it.
It's not. Seattle is losing small landlords left and right. Instead, people are selling houses to large management companies that can spread the risk across multiple units.
People who have just one unit are usually not renting it for mega-profits but to cut their losses. It's moving due to a job with the mortgage underwater or slumping market so selling would incur a heavy loss or you want to come back and live in the house eventually, or inheriting a house where you'd like to move but unable at the moment due to job or family circumstances.
Even if you don't live in the house it still costs money in taxes, maintenance, and possibly mortgage so renting it would offset that. Having someone living in the house would also reduce maintenance costs. However, if renting can cost you more money at the end due to tenant protections, it would be wise to take a fixed loss of keeping the house empty than try your luck on rental market. Landlords with multiple units can price the risk into the rent so they can come ahead but with just one unit your risk-adjusted rent will be way out of the market.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/mega-property-inves...
I bought the unit from my neighbor as he was moving out. It's a townhouse, so I share a wall with that unit.
To be fair, _some_ anti-landlord laws are relaxed in this case, but not enough to make the worst-case scenario reasonable.
I explicitly bought in Lynwood so I’d have the option to rent out my house and avoid king county
Nothing on that list sounds like a particular hardship. Your "Oh, and" is unfortunate and ought to be addressed, but then again, that was intended as your cherry-topper, not your main course.
This is people's _homes_ we're talking about here, not a baseball card where privileging the owner is without too much consequence. If you lack the empathy to understand why this is a special case, maybe don't be a landlord.
Actually landlords have a reasonable expectation you don't turn _their home_ into a crack house and no one should be forced to rent to scumbags.
> _their home_
It's not their home.
They can't walk in, wipe their shoes on the hallway rug, make a pot of coffee, use the bathroom, turn on the TV, and take a nap on the couch. At least not without their tenant's invitation.
When they chose to rent out the house they yielded some of their property rights. The old landlord argument that "it's my house I should be able to XYZ" doesn't hold water.
So do other nearby tenants who aren't crack users.
It may be the landlord's house, but it's not their home. A home is something you live in.
Why should landlords have that expectation? I think the default case should be that when someone rents a space they have freedom to do what they want with that space until they stop renting it, and then when they stop renting it they must be forced to return it to its original condition.
Did you know in Australia it's normal to give your landlord a tour of your house every 3 months to prove you haven't broken it? That's completely ridiculous.
And how exactly do you "force" the deadbeat broke tenant that trashed your house to return it to its original condition?
Keep their deposit
A deposit doesn't even cover the legal fees to evict a tenant (which can be north of $10,000 between lawyer, filing fees, and so on).
Add to that loss of rents for multiple months (while the landlord has to pay mortgage, insurance, taxes) and damages to property, and now you're asking a landlord to pay tens of thousands of dollars of their money.
$600,000 asset vs a $3000 deposit
It’s not like they don’t have insurance (they do) to cover the cost of damages.
No. There is no insurance in the world that covers the cost of eviction, loss of rents, or intentional damage/vandalism.
Throwing around general statements like these when you don't actually know about the topic doesn't help the conversation.
I researched this. And there are no insurance companies in WA that offer these kinds of products for landlords.
Renters insurance primarily covers damage to _their_ property and only some narrow cases of damage to the unit (e.g. fires, flooding, etc.). A deadbeat tenant also will likely not be paying for insurance past the first month.
To give you some perspective, the eviction process costs around $20000 right now in legal fees. And you'll need to pay them, because the commie "housing justice" redistributionists know all the procedural tricks to delay and derail the process. Even in the best case, you're looking at a year of delay, and it can be more than 2 years for people with children. So that can be $100k+ of loss.
No insurance company is going to assume these kinds of risks without sky-high premiums.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/seattle-area-landlord-tr...
One news article mentioned he worked in the medical field and when he was approved to move in, his income was $300k+).
The state actually ended up helping cover the lost rent and paid for the tenant’s legal bills for fighting the eviction.
https://www.discovery.org/a/nightmare-tenant-in-bellevue-con...
He said “anecdotally”. In any case, I was wondering that if I know a friend who does this, how could I ever present a verifiable citation for it? You may have to rethink your ask.
Sure, but the comment upthread could provide evidence that "it is still common enough that it has become a real problem".
Anecdotes aren't usually admissible as evidence, is the thing
https://www.discovery.org/a/nightmare-tenant-in-bellevue-con...
I’m on phone but if you search “Kim Seattle landlord” you can get more details of various articles on the situation.
That is such a sad article.
Okay. I can anecdotally tell you that user jandrewrogers does not know of any cases in Seattle where tenants with high incomes that could easily pay just don't. Our anecdotes cancel each other out.
> how could I ever present a verifiable citation for it?
There would likely be at least one (1) report of such a wild claim due to how wild it is. We wouldn't need anecdotes!
I only know of one https://komonews.com/news/local/twitter-shutdown-seattle-off...
I mean, Elmo's SpaceX is busy lying about being "In Redmond" too (they're in Redmond Ridge, a significantly more rural area about 6 miles away)
> They are, however, indeed a "small[est] subset" to quote the gentleman in the article.
The numbers don't have to stay small because this behavior is not generated independently in a population. Multiple people may become aware of it by talking to each other, social media, forums, some crazy news event that refers to it, etc. All of the sudden a lot more people decide they can do it as well and tell their friends.
I am not defending it or saying one side is right or wrong just that when it comes to things like this there may be a different model at play on how this behavior is generated.
There's entire Reddit communities of these people where they encourage and validate their shitty behavior.
With some of the stories I've read, you'd have to be positively insane to be a small-time landlord these days, especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone.
Go watch Pacific Heights with Michael Keaton for a fictionalized account but this stuff absolutely happens every day.
I saw one recently where the renter has not paid rent for six years and is unable to be evicted. It made national news.
So where does that leave the industry? You eventually push out the mom and pop landlords by making the regulations so insane it only leaves behind the large corporate property management companies and their army of lawyers. Who will collude and drive rents up. It's a vicious cycle and these cities are not helping one bit.
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!
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.
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.
I'm sure there's lots, but lease says no X, tenant insits on doing X seems like a reasonable thing to evict about, but not a reasonable thing to ask the police to adjudicate.
At least as long as 'no X' is a reasonably moral thing to restrict. So no pets, no working on cars in the parking lot, no smoking, no loud noises/no more than N police noise complaints, etc. At least my moral code allows one to form a contract that restricts such thing and that when one party refuses to honor a (reasonable) contract, the other party should be able to require the breach be mended or the contract be ended, and that some breaches can't be mended.
Some things that might not be stated in a lease but would also be reasonable to evict for could include no interfering in the quiet enjoyment rights of neighbors, no storing of dangerous goods, no causing dangerous/unsafe situations.
Why is it moral to restrict random stuff in a rental contract? Would no programming be moral to you?
I don't see why that would be an immoral restriction.
I don't think it's a reasonable restriction, but unreasonableness doesn't make it immoral. At the same time, if you make an agreement not to program in a rental and then you program, shouldn't you need to stop or leave? I might have moral concerns about how one enforces a restriction against programming, it's probably intrusive
Now, if your question is no programmers and/or no overnight guests who are programmers and/or you can have six tenants in the unit, but no more than three who are unmaried programmers... Then my moral compass is pointing towards no. Restricting the practicing of a profession on premesis seems fine, descriminating against the practitioners is ick.
Pets, and car maintenance can both damage the property. Noise in the quiet time disrupts other tenants
Does programming cause property damage or impact other tenants?
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.
A lease is a contract that both parties have agreed to. If the tenant breaks that contract, it should be terms for eviction. If the landlord breaks that contract, the tenant should be free to break the contract and move.
If the tenant does something criminal, sure, that's up to the police.
Sure: it's morally valid to evict someone who violates any legally-enforceable provision in the lease agreement they signed.
Ah so yoyre stuck in the Kohlberg stage where follosing the law is the highest priority
[dead]
Tampering with smoke detectors
Not all bad behavior meets the threshold of police intervention.
Here's a nearly-strawman-but-definitionally-valid example: a landlord may want to remove a tenant who's being unusually hard on the place and accelerating the wear-and-tear. Could be serious enough that paying the tenant to go away would be cheaper than the cost to remediate the damage accrued over the length of the contract.
That's bad. Now everyone who lives in a home (which is everyone) is required to guess what the average amount of wear and tear is, instead of abiding by the contract.
There's common lists ... Check out Appendix 5C and 5D of this HUD publication [1]
[1] https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/hsg-06-01gapp5guid.pdf
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.
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
Don't rent it then. All these laws are designed to make being a landlord hell so that people won't be landlords.
So it's better that huge corporate landlords own all the rentable housing stock?
You seem to be assuming that if we, say, just made renting illegal, everyone would a) want to own a home, and b) have the finances necessary to do so. That's not the case.
So, you would like there to be less housing, which makes housing more scarce and raises prices on everyone else?
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…).
Maybe the lesson is just to not be so overleveraged.
If grandma pays 90% less taxes than me (prop13), where is the leverage?
If grandma bought the the house in 1990 and property values have risen faster than wages and inflation, where is the leverage?
If grandma is under insured, either due to the insurance company not updating coverages with inflation or no insurance bc she isn’t required to, where is the leverage?
The leverage I am talking about is being a landlord where most of your cash flow is dependent on one or a handful of tenants reliably paying rent. Maybe it would have been better to not be a single owner of a fourplex, but to go in with 20 other people on ownership of an underlying llc of that fourplex, and invest in another 19 similarly structured fourplex llc's. Same investment but de risked due to spreading it across some 80 people paying rent vs just four people. Or you can just put that money into REITs where now its what several hundred or maybe thousands of people in the tenancy pool you are investing in.
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.
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.
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-s...
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.
How many high income individuals want to share a house with 5 strangers?
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.
It's surprisingly common in places like SF, and near popular colleges.
In Amsterdam it led to them getting sold
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.
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
> 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
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.
"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"
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
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 is an interesting discussion of this.
> 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.
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.
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.
And yet many landlords kick out good tenants, and take the risk that a new tenant that's willing to pay 30% more turns out to be a bad one.
Not sure why you're surprised: this sort of thing has been widespread for years in cities (like SF) where demand outstrips supply.
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.
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.
> Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave
They have exactly as much freedom to leave as they would without rent control. They _choose_ to stay because rent control has made it advantageous to stay. The way you phrased it implies you're suggesting this is a bad thing for renters but that is strictly a positive. Without rent control they'd have zero affordable options, with rent control they have 1 affordable option. Woe to the inhabitants of rent controlled apartments with their golden handcuffs.
Rent control drives up rent prices for everyone.
So yes, if you have rent control in a city, it would create an environment with zero affordable options.
Obviously it does not drive up the rent price of the person who is paying less rent. That's the whole point. The residents of SF have voted to prevent you from taking their apartments, so if you don't want to bid very competitively for an already empty apartment, you'll just have to take an apartment somewhere else.
> 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.
This is disingenuous. In the absence of rent control (or prop 13 for property owners) you famously get a situation where tenants ALSO can't afford to leave... but have to anyway.
Why should anyone be forced to leave just because someone richer wants to move in?
You don't have to support someone being unable to evict people who don't pay to believe that there should be limits on how much landlords (or the state, in the case of prop 13) should be able to force current residents to leave just to make a quick buck.
> Why should anyone be forced to leave just because someone richer wants to move in?
This triggers my other frustration: empty nesters. They continue to live in great 3-4 bedroom homes that are amazing to raise a family in (near job centers, plenty of bedrooms, tight community, near good schools). This forces people like myself to spend 85+ minutes in a car (away from my family, friends etc) everyday while I drive past all these amazing empty homes.
Yes, if you’re not using the space efficiently, GTFO and let people have the space! Let dad have more time with his kids. Let the tech bro that created 10m jobs and have more time with his wife and kid. Let people burn less fossil fuels to get to work.
Rent-controlled/prop13 grandma needs to find another place to live for the next generation.
Someone living alone in a rent controlled unit paying below market rates is much “richer” than a family of 4 paying 5x more cramped into a 2 bedroom apartment.
Many of those grandmas would love to move to a smaller house or apartment in their neighborhood, but paradoxically cannot afford to do so. Blame the system, not the individual who has to make rational decisions for themselves within it.
Maybe you could offer a trade. Swap your home for theirs and pay them some rent for it.
AFAIK, you're not allowed to sublease a rent-controlled unit.
If they own their home, many old people made their bag and aren't interested in being landlords in retirement.
Then I suppose you'll have to pay them to move out and then pay market rent for their unit.
It sounds like you're living in a badly governed city. Have you considered voting for politicians with an abundance agenda? Or moving to a city with more intelligent housing policies such as Dallas?
NIMBYism and single-family zoning are alive and thriving in Dallas; what Dallas has is this thing called a huge-fucking-flat-prairie all around it that means Frisco, Addison, etc, have been able to add to the low-density car-centric sprawl and help keep prices down some.
(But even then, plenty of Dallas residents have been upset in the past decade by what happens to rental prices when a bunch of higher-income folks move to town!)
One wonders why the people who don't want to have to leave a city like San Fransisco just cause some other people have more money than them and want to raise their rents out of their reach are the ones who should move to Texas. Why shouldn't the would-be newcomers just be the ones go to all those cookie-cutter new developments?
If you jumped back in time 20 years ago and were able to ensure that YCombinator, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, and other high-paper-valuation companies, and they all had imported their from-out-of-town high-income-or-equity-leveraging employees to McKinney, Texas, not much materially would prevent those companies from still doing what they did. But people who already lived in SF or on the peninsula but didn't own much land there would have a materially better standard of living due to their costs not running away from their existing incomes. And the Texas burbs happily would've built a shit-ton of houses and apartments for the startup workers, because of the aforementioned giant quantities of near-empty land. Greenfield businesses for greenfield real-estate. Much better fit than force-transforming cities.
> One wonders why the people who don't want to have to leave a city like San Fransisco just cause some other people have more money than them and want to raise their rents out of their reach are the ones who should move to Texas. Why shouldn't the would-be newcomers just be the ones go to all those cookie-cutter new developments?
Because my money should be just as good as yours? Why should you get a huge discount just because of where you were lucky to be born? I'm not asking for a better deal than you, just fair competition between equals.
> And the Texas burbs happily would've built a shit-ton of houses and apartments for the startup workers, because of the aforementioned giant quantities of near-empty land.
For first 100, sure. Then they'd complain about the newcomers changing the character of the place and ban new buildings. The same thing happens everywhere, you can't route around it by starting your own new city because as soon as you've built any kind of community you have the same NIMBY problems as every other city.
> Because my money should be just as good as yours?
You have more money than me, so you deserve to take my place? That’s pure entitlement and leads to cities comprised entirely of millionaires.
This assumes the supply of housing can't increase.
What mechanism do you propose instead for allocating scarce housing?
The accord you’re proposing is “I deserve your spot because I have more money than you, and we’ll just build more housing later to get you back in.” You can see why I’m not going to go for that as a renter and voter.
> What mechanism do you propose instead for allocating scarce housing?
The one that we’re in the middle of talking about? Rent control.
You can do that, but now it's just "I was here first" which eventually turns in to "I'm old" (after all, young people were not there first, by virtue of not existing when rent control was enacted), which doesn't seem fair either.
To be clear, the full solution I would like is rent control plus lots of new housing construction, using whatever incentives are necessary. I do not begrudge old people "taking up space" in a city they've called their home for most of their lives; in fact, I think it adds a lot to a city's character. I'd like to think that someday I'd be able to retire in my favorite city as well.
Nothing against old people but when the city gets greyer and greyer because young people can't move in and old people stay in 3+ bedroom homes it's not great.
> 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.
If you can't afford to live in your city, what distinguishes you from the people in the boonies? Why should they be relegated to the boonies while you successfully game the system?
I can afford to live in my city. I’m living in it right now! The nice thing is that I don’t get pushed out by arbitrary economic fluctuations completely out of my control.
If only we could all get free protection from economic forces we don't control.
That kind of insurance is usually pretty expensive. Why should you get it for free?
> If only we could all get free protection from economic forces we don't control.
> That kind of insurance is usually pretty expensive. Why should you get it for free?
Protecting its constituents from the whims of out-of-town money seems like an excellent purpose for a local government. Especially if some of that money wants to move in so badly that it can be very profitably taxed!
Why shouldn't local government try to serve its constituents like that?
Because I'm rich, and I want to live in SF dagnabbit, and how dare the (checks notes) existing residents of SF vote to block me from taking one of their apartments that I obviously deserve to live in more than they do because I'm rich?
By that logic, we should let the Ohlone tribes underbid all existing residents. They too are just rich assholes who displaced those that were rightfully there before them.
Are they there right now? Then they're covered by rent control laws.
I mean… you said it, not me.
Why shouldn't everyone get everything for free that can be provided for free? Forcing other people to pay a cost because you paid a cost is just sour grapes.
It can’t be provide for free, that’s the point. Mitigating risks has costs that you are ignoring. Those costs aren’t cheap and someone has to pay for them.
What's the cost? Is there some reason productive economic activity can happen only if rich people are allowed to steal SF?
Except it's not free. It's free to you but not others.
One, we vote for it, and there's far more renters out there than owners. Sorry.
Two, there are many "free protections" that are taken for granted at our stage of civilizational development. Should fire departments be privatized? Police? I'd argue that housing security is even more important than those. We bear the costs together so that our lives are collectively better.
Three, your entire framing is kind of bananas. Rent control is neither insurance nor expensive, but a cap on landlord profits. If anything, it's unbounded profiteering of basic necessities that's actually "expensive."
> there are many "free protections" that are taken for granted at our stage of civilizational development. Should fire departments be privatized? Police? I'd argue that housing security is even more important than those. We bear the costs together so that our lives are collectively better.
But we don't. Everyone who works in the city is paying the costs, while the lucky few who moved in decades ago are the only ones who get the benefit. If everyone got to pay the same level of rent then I'd maybe support it, but there's nothing "collective" about the people who got here quicker protecting themselves while pulling the ladder up behind them.
> Three, your entire framing is kind of bananas. Rent control is neither insurance nor expensive, but a cap on landlord profits. If anything, it's unbounded profiteering of basic necessities that's actually "expensive."
It's got nothing to do with profit; if there are x homes and y>x people who want to live in them, either you give them to the x highest bidders, or you unfairly screw some people over. Rent control is one form of option B (there are others).
> If everyone got to pay the same level of rent then I'd maybe support it, but there's nothing "collective" about the people who got here quicker protecting themselves while pulling the ladder up behind them.
I'm very sympathetic to this sort of framing, but I don't think that's happening here. Or if it is, then pulling up the ladder is a pretty reasonable, rational thing to do when you're protecting against other people climbing that ladder and throwing you back down to the ground.
I moved to my city less than three years ago, not ten. I was not “lucky” to get my rent-controlled apartment: just had some foresight and was diligent in my search. My rent is high, but not as egregious as what the recent AI migrants are paying. (New upstairs neighbors are literally paying $2000/m more than we are for the same floor plan.) Thankfully, I have no fear of getting kicked out of my home due to a sudden rent spike, so I can focus on building a life.
None of this seems egregious to me. Yes, existing residents are prioritized over new residents. This feels like an obvious tradeoff if you want to maintain community and QoL. The alternative is prioritizing the rich — landlords and wealthy renters alike. I do not want to live in a city where money has the final say.
> New upstairs neighbors are literally paying $2000/m more than we are for the same floor plan.
> None of this seems egregious to me.
Enough said. I wonder if it would feel egregious if you were the one paying $2000/m more.
My upstairs neighbors have very well-paying jobs that allow them to move to the city in the midst of an AI boom. (When I moved here, I was in a similar boat.) They are not infuriated or offended by the rent they have to pay. And I've also had neighbors that payed thousands less in rent than me. (I was happy for them.) Everyone knows the rules when they move to my city; it's just not a big deal unless you're completely self-absorbed.
The alternative is that half my street gets ousted whenever a tech boom happens. What a horrible way to live.
> The alternative is that half my street gets ousted whenever a tech boom happens. What a horrible way to live.
Or maybe if the pain was more evenly distributed you'd vote to legalise more housing. Not being able to live in a street like yours is just as horrible for those of us who didn't luck into arriving there earlier, we're just out of sight, out of mind.
No, not getting to live on my street is not "just as horrible" as getting kicked to the curb with pets and/or dependents and losing your entire lifestyle and community without warning or recourse.
(But again, I am 100% for building more housing using any incentives available. This is orthogonal to having robust tenant protections.)
> not getting to live on my street is not "just as horrible" as getting kicked to the curb with pets and/or dependents and losing your entire lifestyle and community without warning or recourse.
Come off it, no-one's talking about kicking people out on the curb instantly. I'm all for processes and reasonable notice periods. But ultimately if you're not willing to pay what it costs to live where you do, yeah you should be pushed out for someone who will, rather than the rest of us subsidising you even as we're forced to cram into shared rooms miles away from our jobs.
> This is orthogonal to having robust tenant protections.
How can it be? How will residents know or care that their city doesn't have enough market-rate housing, that market-rate homes are too expensive, when they're not exposed to that market-rate price? Ever if they support building more housing in theory, they're absolutely going to object to it anywhere near them. It's not a coincidence that cities with rent control consistently build fuck all, that the few cities that have managed to actually build some homes over the past few years are in places like Texas.
Sounds like folks who don't like rent control should move to Texas, then. Market forces and all.
Anyway, you can get mad at this policy all you want, but the bottom line is this: renters don't like getting priced out of their homes and far outnumber landowners. They will vote for rent control as the economy starts to squeeze them.
Maybe more effort should be put into thinking of ways to incentivize housing construction rather than getting fruitlessly angry at social policy.
(Also, as a rent-controlled renter, I'd love more housing to be built near me. I don't think I've ever met any renters who feel otherwise. Most of the actual NIMBYs seem to be owners, not renters. As for how would they know that more housing is needed? Um, by reading the news and talking to people? It's a constant topic of conversation in SF.)
> Maybe more effort should be put into thinking of ways to incentivize housing construction
A properly functioning housing market is a way to incentivise housing construction.
> Also, as a rent-controlled renter, I'd love more housing to be built near me. I don't think I've ever met any renters who feel otherwise. Most of the actual NIMBYs seem to be owners, not renters. As for how would they know that more housing is needed? Um, by reading the news and talking to people? It's a constant topic of conversation in SF.
Everyone talks a good game about supporting more homebuilding, yet somehow SF never builds any homes.
But again, you will not get rid of rent control by getting mad about it. Renters literally do not care; they need housing security first and foremost. They will not vote for their own evictions just for the promise of lower rent many years in the future.
As for housing, we’re working on it: https://sfyimby.com/2026/06/formal-application-for-bernal-he...
> you will not get rid of rent control by getting mad about it. Renters literally do not care; they need housing security first and foremost. They will not vote for their own evictions just for the promise of lower rent many years in the future.
Maybe stories of massive, immediate increase in housing supply in places that scrapped rent control will change their minds. Maybe appeals to fairness will work. It's certainly got no worse chance of working out than trying to build houses in San Francisco, which smart, motivated people have been trying very hard to do for decades to no avail.
Ah, tyranny of the majority, the best form of government.
If there’s not enough supply to meet demand you have to ration by some means.
I’ve seen money, place of birth, sexual favours, lottery, length of tenure as options to ration. What do you think the best way is?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your comment suggested you'd be unable to afford market rent.
I can afford to live in my city because my landlord isn’t able to tack an extra $2000 to my rent due to the sudden influx of AI bros.
Pity the boonyman who was afforded no such luxury
Are AI bros infesting the boonies now
Doesn’t help that the landlords want to squeeze the renter for what they are worth. It’s weird to me that shitty landlords are normalized but shitty tenants get a (rightfully) bad rap.
These laws become the way they are because landlords brought it upon themselves for the most part - they’re keeping assets that have massively increased in price and want to extract more and more out of the tenant.
If you have a home that’s paid off your expenses are basically just property taxes, maybe they should do what they can to keep good tenants instead of chasing profits.
> These laws become the way they are because landlords brought it upon themselves for the most part
These laws seem quite unrelated to the problems.
There needs to be laws to protect the renter against bad landlords and there needs to be laws to protect the landlord against bad tenants.
Nowhere there it implies there should be insane laws that make no sense. Such as creating a system where someone can skip paying rent for many years and continue to live there.
Landlords need laws that hold their feet to the fire to maintain the properties to a livable standard (the state/county should define) and fulfill any other obligations of the lease. At the same time there need to be laws that force the renters to pay on time and not destroy the property. It's not a case of one or the other.
I’m not denying any of that. If you don’t pay rent it makes sense that you’re evicted. This is completely okay with me, and the city should change their rules around it.
The issue is that housing is a necessity, and the relationship isn’t an equal one. A landlord can usually absorb vacancy, repairs, or a bad investment decision; a renter can’t easily absorb losing their home or a sudden 20% rent increase.
> a renter can’t easily absorb losing their home or a sudden 20% rent increase
Right, so let's pass laws (where not already in place) that prevent sudden eviction (e.g. nobody should be able to be evicted if they are a few days late or even a few weeks) and prevent sudden 20% rent increases.
No need to pass laws that prevent eviction for years. We can solve all these problems without causing other problems.
the obvious middle ground is preventing eviction until a new tenant is found. if you owe 3 months of back rent your landlord can put up your apartment but you can stay there as long as nobody takes it. if you pay back your debt they have to cancel the listing and keep your lease. that way theres less empty apartments and homeless people putting pressure on support systems.
> the obvious middle ground is preventing eviction until a new tenant is found.
Not sure that's obvious (is it done that way anywhere?), but it is an intriguing idea.
On the positive side it does decrease the inefficiency of places sitting empty while a tenant is found, which is good.
On the downside, it kind of goes back to being a sudden eviction, since the current tenant can't predict when a new one will be found, so whenever it happens they'll have a short-notice to move out.
Also, unfortunately there exist people who will take this time to destroy the place, making it un-rentable, to perpetuate staying there. Need to handle this edge case somehow.
People who want to rent a flat want to tour it first, this makes sense. But in your situation the tenant in arrears has an incentive to make the unit look uninhabitable preventing it from renting.
Additionally, if they are behind on rent, the deposit will not be enough to handle both.
Rental prices stay surprisingly steady even when house prices go insane - compare similar apartments/houses in major expensive cities and cheaper ones.
Sure but the rent will follow the increased purchase price. They also don’t go down, or at least they’re extremely sticky.
They're limited by what people will pay - and "techbro" cities have people with insane salaries willing to fork over big bucks. But there are similarly expensive areas that don't support the income necessary, and there often you find huge rental inversions.
I'm not sure what you mean by "squeeze the renter," but it's hard to find any person that invests substantial money (risk) in a business that doesn't want to maximize profits and charge what the market will bear.
Laws became the way they are because policy created a housing shortage, and renters are a bigger voting block than landlords.
I look at it this way: housing is a basic human necessity. Structuring it as a standard business is a detriment to society. Sure, being a landlord is a business, but the whole "maximize profits" thing and "charge what the market will bear" thing should not be allowed for housing.
And the free market shouldn't apply to private property because...?
Free market doesn’t mean no regulations / rules / laws / protections. Of course all rentals are on a free market.
Nonsense. We came up with a name for those terrible landlords they are called slumlords. NYC even has a whole website dedicated to them: https://www.landlordwatchlist.com/
Totally wrong. A home has a lot of expenses beyond taxes, especially maintenance/upkeep. If the landlord just breaks even, where does the money to repair the roof come from?
Also, providing housing is a service that should be done at market rates, and as an investment must yield a return to make sense. Or do you expect stock investments to yield nothing and just retain their value too? Should companies not raise their prices for goods? Do you realize that this also means that you would never get a salary increase? Are you never asking for a raise because you'd be "chasing profits" for yourself?
There's a huge lack of financial literacy in some of these comments.
Homes do have a lot of expenses but it depends on when you bought your home. If you have a cheap mortgage then rents can quite easily cover repair costs. Landlords also minimize the maintenance costs by cutting costs wherever they can. I also never said they shouldn’t make money - they absolutely should, otherwise nobody would want to be a landlord.
But, I think you are overly harsh and your comparisons misplaced. Homes are quite inelastic and a necessity for everyone. They are very unique category of assets. Financial impacts to a landlord vs a renter is also quite lopsided - a landlord has far more “financial padding” to account for macroeconomic shocks compared to a renter, so you end up with some protections in case of sudden job loss. They have morphed into something worse now, but the intent makes a lot of sense.
Repair costs are hugely jagged: Sometimes you have a few months with no repair, and then a huge sewer/roof/electrical repair, so rents need to account for that.
> I also never said they shouldn’t make money - they absolutely should, otherwise nobody would want to be a landlord.
Correct, and that is why it is so important that the housing asset class remains competitive with alternative investments. If you force the return of housing to be less than other investments at the same risk level, it reduces investment in housing and in return creates more scarcity and higher rents, exactly what some of the people here seem to want to avoid yet don't understand that the policies they're arguing for is causing.
> Homes are quite inelastic and a necessity for everyone.
Yes, but homes in a particular location are not. If you want to live in Manhattan you have to be able to afford to live there. You don't get to claim living in Manhattan is a necessity for everyone and that therefore prices there must accommodate your financial circumstances.
> a landlord has far more “financial padding” to account for macroeconomic shocks compared to a renter
That is not universally true since smaller landlords typically have a pretty big mortgage to service for a long time. They don't have the flexibility to just not pay just because a tenant decides not to pay. A house is not easy to sell in an economic downturn and may even be underwater.
> providing housing is a service that should be done at market rates
That's an opinion, not a fact. I don't share that opinion. Societies are healthier when people are housed, and when that housing is well-maintained. "Let the market decide" often doesn't get you that.
> an investment must yield a return to make sense
Agreed, but we can and should cap that return if not doing so leads to housing insecurity.
> There's a huge lack of financial literacy in some of these comments.
From you I'm seeing a huge lack of understanding about what capitalism is good and bad at.
I am also for housing all people and for all housing to be well maintained. As a societal issue our government should provide housing where needed though, including paying for (via our taxes) reasonable housing where someone can't afford it.
However, to force a private party to provide a service at non-market rates to another private party doesn't seem right to me, and as I mentioned in other comments, causes a decrease in housing (and therefore makes the problem worse rather than better).
> an investment must yield a return to make sense > Agreed, but we can and should cap that return if not doing so leads to housing insecurity.
Again, if you cap the return, you cause a redirection of investment in housing to other asset classes, and effectively reduce housing. Your stated goal is in direct conflict of your desire to cap the return.
> There's a huge lack of financial literacy in some of these comments. > From you I'm seeing a huge lack of understanding about what capitalism is good and bad at.
How so? Feel free to elaborate.
I have friends and coworkers that want to have rental properties, and I advise them it's not worth it.
I don't want to be in a position where I have to pay more to fix damages than I collectected in rent if I accidentally rent to deadbeats. Or in a position where I have to provide services to someone not paying me.
One of those friends has parents that rented out their old house to deadbeats at the top of the housing market instead of selling it. Those deadbeats have been nothing but trouble and yet my friend still wants to be a landlord.
Somehow the idea of owning rental properties became a pervasive notion in the U.S.
Landlords typically have insurance coverage for damage by tenants, including lost rent.
It’s hard for new landlords. People that bought houses to rent compete against property owners of paid off homes or people with 3% mortgages.
Tacking on optional insurance products on a property that’s already in the red further encourages landlords to push up rents prices.
Well yeah, it's also hard for any random person to start an oil conglomerate having to compete against ExxonMobil
Maybe people shouldn't be buying homes for the purpose of renting them then?
This form of insurance is exceeding expensive and exceedingly rare. Large buildings self-insure (by having a ton of doors) and small landlords don't want to pay it.
Depends on the country I guess, but in France it's about 3% of the rent.
For that price they will pay you the rent if the tenant is not paying, and take care of the getting paid by the tenant.
If landlords don't want to pay that, then they accept the risk of having to deal with a tenant who doesn't pay.
It might be more common in Europe, I've never seen it in the US (but maybe some property managers offer that as part of their 5-10% cut of the rent).
Wage theft is the number one form of theft in the USA at around $15 billion. Hopefully you advised your friends to avoid working for wages as that is the number one way to be ripped off by deadbeats in the USA.
Somehow the idea of working for wages became a pervasive notion in the U.S.
https://www.denver7.com/news/national-politics/the-race/wage...
The way to handle this, which no one seems to be willing to face, is to make laws that are not wealth-neutral. If you are a mom-and-pop landlord (with a relatively low net worth), your should have more leeway in dealing with tenants. If you are a large landlord, you should have very little. Couple this with ruinous penalties (e.g., full forfeiture) for attempting to hide the true beneficial ownership of the property.
In many locations, this exists in practice - especially if you rent parts of a building that you reside in (one half of a duplex or 1/4th of a quadplex, etc).
In some cases, anti-discrimination laws don't even apply.
If you think the Reddit communities of tenants are bad, you should try reading the Reddit communities of landlords (at least the UK ones).
Yeah.... So many bad tenants. So many bad landlords... So many weird laws protecting and hurting both.
What if we shifted to a different system?
Then housing couldn't be used as retirement savings and the economy would collapse immediately
A creative solution! What if we rethought what "retirement savings" is and should be?
Impossible because you'd have to convince everyone to give up theirs
The question that many do not want to think about. We (as a society (referring to all Western Liberalism, not just the US)) are so thoroughly convinced that Liberal Democracy is the End of History, and it's the 'flawed but best,' as many say, but refuse to imagine something better.
It's puzzling that a system that is supposed to reward creativity and genius like capitalism limits it's inhabitants in their imagination when it comes to how one might structure society.
I don't claim to have the answer, and _no,_ my issues with Liberal Democracy/Capitalism don't mean I'm a communist / socialist / thing-people-don't-like.
It's not Liberal Democracy that is the problem but a society where all of the slack has been optimized out, every extraction maximized, every infraction forever a scarlet letter on an individual, zero stability but constant crisis inflicted on individuals. There is no room in modern day America for people in the margins. Society needs to make a place for them and a path out of constant crisis, or the homeless problem will continue to grow.
Another hidden issue in the USA is many households are dependent on contributing income from a retired/disabled/working past retirement age elderly parent/family member. Those people are going to start passing in mass, and a lot of households will become even less resilient.
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What would you like us to imagine? So far everything that we've tried at scale other than liberal democracy and capitalism has inevitably led to war, famine, and genocide. Western liberalism appears to be the only system that empirically works. Some would claim that "socialism with Chinese characteristics" works better, but if you look below the surface prosperity in first-tier cities the actual economic situation is rather grim and the human rights situation is horrific.
Arguably, benevolent dictatorships tend to be the best. Singapore is a good example.
The trouble is making a system that can guarantee the "benevolent" part in the longer term.
Make an argument, beyond one city (if it's true there - Singapore might be better off, on some of the best real estate in the world, with free elections)? All the most free, wealthy, safe, creative, innovative societies in the world are democratic.
And on what basis does some dictator get to tell others what to do? OK, I am the dictator and I'm telling you to give me 10% of your income and never post this nonsense in HN again. :)
There are a lot of values there that.you're presenting as though "this is what society should be" when it's actually "this is what liberal democracy thinks society should be". So obviously we have a foregone conclusion.
Plenty of societies happily trade away one or more of those values for other values.
That's not an argument: You don't specify which values, don't address my argument, and just repeat an old trope of dictators and their apologists with no support.
> Plenty of societies happily trade away one or more of those values for other values.
Which ones? Let's hear some evidence.
People around the world strongly embrace and defend their freedom, including self-determination; the idea that it's not universal (in any meaningful sense) has little support. It's embraced wherever people have the opportunity in Europe and N. America, in East Asia, in China (Taiwan, and also Hong Kong until it was taken from them), S. America, SE Asia, South Asia, a variety of places in Africa, ... you can see the mass protests in Iran, the Arab Spring, etc.
And rationally, again, why should you or anyone else tell me what to do? On that basis, why can't I just as well tell you or them what to do?
Human rights' universality is essential - without it, it's just people fighting for power. That's why it's so important, and that's why those who want to control others try to attack the universality.
Democracy isn't freedom. It's quite easily possible for a democracy to be non-free (many current examples) or for a non-democracy to be free (not as many).
We're really splitting hairs, for no purpose other than to avoid the point.
You'd better start standing up for freedom instead of toying with oppressors. Nobody will do it for you.
Btw you’re replying to different people
As I said in my original comment, I don’t have an answer. I refuse to believe though that the only options that exist are the ones already tried. Do you really think in the couple thousand years of history, we’ve exhausted every viable option when liberal democracy is only an incredibly recent invention?
If everything but liberal democracy and capitalism lead to war, famine, and genocide, and we're currently trying capitalism and it's not working, then maybe it's time to try liberal democracy
> especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone
The problem is that there will always be more voting renters than voting landlords. So in a purely democratic system, policies which favor renters at the expense of landlords will always be supported.
And that said, some renter protections are definitely needed, because there is a subset of landlords that engage in flat out illegal behavior.
Deposit withholding, making illegal demands, illegal renter selection practices, etc.
Imho, that tends to be concentrated in the "1-5 unit" landlord range, because those landlords are usually (a) not lawyers & (b) treat their properties like pets instead of a business.
> The problem is that there will always be more voting renters than voting landlords. So in a purely democratic system, policies which favor renters at the expense of landlords will always be supported.
I don’t know about that… the voting landlords (NIMBYs) sure make it a point to reduce development “to preserve their neighborhood character”.
You're conflating landlords with property owners as a whole. There are a lot more people who own and live in their home than there are landlords. Homeowners are less likely to favor pro-landlord legislation than landlords themselves, and many may even strongly support pro-renter legislation (like myself, though I agree some of the pro-renter legislation certainly goes too far).
The NIMBY "character of the neighborhood" phenomenon has nothing to do with landlords; that's a homeowner thing.
Landlords might be anti-development because a constrained housing supply means higher rents, but that's something else entirely. And if NIMBY homeowners magically stopped being NIMBYs tomorrow, we wouldn't even bother talking about NIMBYs anymore, because NIMBY landlords wouldn't have enough political power to matter.
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This is a bit of an intentional result, no?
the goal is for peoppe to own the places they live in
Why should that be a goal?
To discourage rent seeking behaviour?
Because every human being needs shelter?
Having shelter is not the same as owning real estate.
In my city, and I assume many others, there's an informal landlord's group that shares lists of problem tenants to avoid renting to. While problematic, I wonder if it's made any impact.
Usually this is handled with credit reports right? It’s only when the state forbids landlords from demanding credit reports that informal networks are necessary.
In general as a tenant you can only get away with not paying rent once (until eviction happens, no one will ever rent to you again without federal or state assurances), and as a landlord you will only skip the credit report requirement once (because your first tenant is going to be a deadbeat who screw’s you).
In cities with excessive tenant protection laws, sometimes landlords will negotiate agreements with deadbeat tenants in which the tenant agrees to leave and the landlord doesn't report anything to the credit bureaus.
Credit reports do not have a section for "plays music loudly" or "secretly smokes by the bathroom window".
They can have a section of public records if anything rises to the level of filing with the courts.
And for things that don't arise to that level, but would still be massive red flags for prospective tenants?
Why's that anything to do with you. Call the cops.
"I had a problem, and I thought, 'I know, I will call the cops!' Now we have two problems."
When the people is your car got stolen, you have two problems
When the problem is lower class people are playing music too loud, the cops will solve it one way or another.
Someone I know rented a flat in Draguignan to a "friend" of a "friend". After some time he stopped paying the rent and bought alcohol instead. It was a tiny rent but it lasted for a long time. She didn't have a mortgage on it but still I don't think I would be that patient as a landlord.
i occasionally come across some of the forums and online groups of landlords and the things they have to deal with, particularly in cities with strong protections for the tenants and its interesting to watch the perspectives.
on one hand i feel for some of the landlords who have to deal with some of the very real slacks who go out of their way to be difficult tenants.
on the other we’re talking about homes, by this i mean to stress home over investment. i think we’ve made a terrible mistake in incentivizing people to use homes as an investment. it should be difficult to evict someone from their home, and it should be risky and a pain in the ass to use someone else’s home as an investment.
i feel bad for _some_ of the landlords but from a larger societal perspective we’re going to look back at incentivizing so many people to invest as a landlord as a massive mistake.
The landlord can divest themselves of the property. It's also ok if people lose money on investments. I don't think you have to feel especially bad for landlords.
> It's also ok if people lose money on investments.
The more likely it is for landlords to lose money on the housing provided, the more rents will go up to account for that risk premium. It's no different than risk-return calculations for any other investments such as stocks.
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They're being evicted from their home, but from the landlord's property. It would be the landlord's home if the landlord lived there, but they don't, because they're renting it to the tenant.
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All slack has been removed from society. All pricing has been maximized. Every interaction capitalized. Every point of extraction extracted from.
People living in these situations now live from crisis to crisis. Not paying rent/dealing with the consequences is just another on the list. At some point people just become numb. Modern society at the peripherals is not sustainable. There will always be people in the peripherals, but society is now structured to require middle class type stability as the bottom baseline for an individual to survive.
and the middle class is being destroyed
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/11/on...
And yes, it's inflation adjusted
https://fortune.com/2026/06/22/1-in-3-young-adults-living-wi...
I wonder how record numbers of adults living with parents impacts household income as now addition income earners.
Has been. You could've said that 10 years ago, but it's completely gone now. People you think are middle class are probably just upper lower class.
> We have to consider what the unintended consequences are of public policies or practices where there are no immediate consequences for someone who falls behind on rent
> Many [landlords] say they don’t actually intend to evict anyone, but that filing these cases is the most expedient way to get emergency rental aid from the city.
Economics in one easy lesson: incentives matter.
While that is certainly true, it's a very narrow view disconnected from the reasons for the policies. The most likely explanation for more people not paying their rent is that even fixed rents have become increasingly unaffordable because other costs have risen faster than wages. So yes, people are "choosing" not to pay rent because the consequences of not paying the rent lag substantially behind the consequences of not eating or buying gas. But it's an absolutely rational decision. FTA:
>...plenty of economic indicators suggest worsening financial duress for people already struggling. Costs are going up faster than wages, and inflation that took hold after the pandemic has proven painfully persistent.
>plenty of economic indicators suggest
> — and no one's sure why
Now that i saw the framing, i am looking differently on the discussion here. The smalles troublemakers are more news worthy than broad economic factors behind us all, so you dumb down your headline...
There's a limit to every city, and just building new infrastructure won't solve everything. It always lags behind demand and there are space constraints, budget constraints and countless other limitations.
At the same time, expectations keep rising for everyone (myself included): not wanting to spend one or two hours commuting to work, not wanting to live 45 minutes away from a large supermarket and not wanting to spend three hours or more just to meet friends or family among others. The problem is that it simply doesn't scale, and every country/city faces different challenges so there is no single universal solution.
I'm afraid the real discussion can't happen outside of small circles at this time because it'd involve highly controversial topics that much of the population in Western democracies (can only talk about what I know) isn't ready to confront. We have deeply ingrained ideas that are difficult to challenge so instead we'll probably watch cities fully collapse before anything.
What makes you think our current cities are anywhere close to the limit you propose?
It sounds like an ad-hoc rent strike. Not a great sign for an economy.
If history teaches anything, it's that people are so afraid of striking they only ever do it when the alternative is death.
Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working.
Also perhaps there should be a new field for startups (yes i'm aware of 'proptech' but there has to be more than that), that will collect dirt on tenants to threaten them with legal consequences unless they pay.
Every day I doubt why I even bother reading this site. Then anovikov reminds me why. It's so I can keep on top of the creativity/depravity my fellow engineers are capable of.
Good idea. Also a robot drone should come and sell your stuff on eBay.
> Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working.
1) Because screw you, that's horrible and you shouldn't do it.
2) Because all these digital key systems are horrendously insecure and much more open to thieves and crackers than than a plain old door key anyway.
(1) - what's horrible? renting out flats is a business. not paying the bills shouldn't be tolerated, ideally shouldn't be technically possible.
(2) is negated very simply - have both old door key AND digital security key which auto closes if there are unpaid bills for say more than 5 business days.
> Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners has an excellent scene where something like this happens to a kid down on his luck.
and in cyberpunk 2077 there are neon signs above each apartment door indicating rent payment status, gotta bring public shaming into it too. This is the future our loyal soldiers for capitalism fight for on this platform in every thread lol.
Gotta use collective punishment to create collective enforcement. Make it so when a sign is red, police storm that block like in half-life 2. Then people who let their signs turn yellow will be ostracized until they fix it.
Given the absence of other data, I’d say the lack of consequences is the driver.
https://www.macrotrends.net/4694/new-york-city-area-unemploy...
NYC even before covid was renter friendly and difficult to evict, so things must have taken quite the turn.
Which sucks because—and the essay doesn’t specify—rent stabilized apartments remain one of the few ways for lower income to make it into the middle class.
It’s not all pleasant (mice and cockroaches measured in inches) but it’s what allowed me to save, invest, and get out.
the article said asset managers claimed rent collections went from 94% to 89% - wow such a drop! they fail to highlight that these assets are theirs to own indefinitely!
Your employer should pay you 5% less then they are legally obligated to. See how flippant you are then.
People can't afford to live and food comes before paying your landlord? Economy is fucked right now. Income inequality pushes any gains into the hands of the wealthy.
And frankly, more and more people are willing to stuff their landlord if they feel their landlord isn't holding up their end of the deal.
When people can simply get away with not paying rent, what sort of sucker would pay rent?
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"The uptick in rental delinquency isn’t new. It started six years ago, when the pandemic flung the city’s economy into chaos and plunged low-income New Yorkers into dire financial straits. But even as the city has rebounded, rent collection rates in affordable housing remain short of pre-pandemic levels. As costs balloon, landlords say insufficient rental income is threatening their ability to stay afloat."
It started 6 years ago, before he was mayor.
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The pandemic didn't end when Mamdani was elected. The economic impact from the pandemic is going to be felt for decades.
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I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of low-income people who are delinquent on their rent have no clue who Cea Weaver is. Nor is there any kind of organized rent strike occurring. Do you live in NYC?
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What a strange remark, both the 'no way' as well as the ad-hominem related to the odd choice of a 'democratic socialist' as mayor for NYC. There was a time when people with differing political opinions could get along outside of the realm of politics but this has been made impossible by people who react like you just did here.
The reason why nobody gets along with you has literally nothing to do with your "differing political opinions" and everything to do with the fact that I have to tell you that.
Why do you think nobody gets along with [me] and what is it that you assume gives you such insight into other people's life? Take a mirror, have a good look at it and notice that the problem is staring right at you.
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We've banned this account.
Don't register accounts to post vile comments like this. We don't care what the source is; we care about the insinuation and the agenda, and everything it pattern-matches with. We've already banned a previous account of yours for one of the most egregious comments ever seen here. Please stop wasting everyone's time.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48623195 and marked it off topic.
The question raised by the article isn't why people don't pay their rent; it is why the number of people not paying their rent has increased. Occam's Razor suggests that the most likely reason is also the simplest one: that prices have risen much faster than wages, making even fixed rents less affordable.
Put the skull calipers down
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What in the world does conspicuous consumption by race have to do with TFA?
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I agree with the skull calipers comment, you came out of left field with the race shit and all benefit of the doubt for dog whistles left a few years ago
Social housing in the West is rewarding the bad habits of the people under the pretext that they need help. Every social housing place a like wound in the city and normal residents run away from those areas. People revolt when they hear of any plans to setu0 a social housing building in their locality.
Why this happens? That's because, the housing problem give the opposition a weapon to use against the ruling party, constantly hitting out and winning the sympathy of people. The incumbent administration has no other choice except pouring money into social housing and show that they are doing something to address the issue. No one cares about the actual fall out of this philosophy.
Just one of the evils of vote bank politics.