81–90 of 173 posts
Someone is probably a lot less likely to trash/destroy something they own / are in the process of owning.
Imagine if there was far less rental and much more liquid stock of housing units in markets?
What if everyone who was renting now could actually "buy" livable housing at that same level of rent; rather than lining the pockets of others?
A $180k townhouse can rent for $1600/mo but a $1.8m McMansion isn’t going to rent for $16,000/mo.
The economics of this has to do with marginal utility mainly and nothing to do with exploitation.
There’s also the calculation of fixed rental costs which derive a larger portion of the monthly payment the lower the payment gets. If management costs are $100 per month that’s 10% of a $1,000/mo rent.
Finally, there are costs like interviewing, turnover, payment risk, eviction risk, legal costs, damage exceeding security deposit risk, and trying to factor this in can dwarf the underlying carrying cost of the property. Some of these are likely to be inversely correlated with property value.
Ctrl+F "exploit", appears 24 times in this 13-paragraph article. > "Defining exploitation as being overcharged relative to the market value of a property" The ratio they've based their narrative on is called GRM (gross rent multiplier): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_Rent_Multiplier GRM is one of many factors when analyzing investment options. Other important factors include appreciation and expenses (maintena…
Of course they have an agenda, but I think it's much less nefarious than some think -- it's that they think housing insecurity is a major problem in the United States with knock-on effects in education, health, and household wellbeing. Of course it is a complex issue on how to address this — what mixture of regulation and free market solutions best serves people -- and I think the authors land in a position that is m…
Rather, a bunch of people have incomes that are below or precariously close to the carrying and maintenance costs on the cheapest possible shelter. You can tell that this is a poverty problem and not an inequality problem because the situation is worse, not better, if everyone falls down to that level. (Example: we might be legitimately better off in a world where no one is a billionaire, because billionaires have access to outsized political power that can harm other people. Money in politics is an inequality problem. I don't think you can say we're better off in a world where no one can securely afford good housing).
And if we look at places in the world that deal more successfully with such low economic productivity, one of things you'll find is a regulatory bar for "minimum viable shelter" that's more in line with what people living there can afford.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... are not maintained ... Section 8 housing must be maintained to minimum standards which are well defined. If not, the renters can report the facilities for being deficient.
That’s not a contradiction. The minimums are low enough to qualify as a dump.
It’s a well known fact that as property value rises the yield on rental income decreases. A $180k townhouse can rent for $1600/mo but a $1.8m McMansion isn’t going to rent for $16,000/mo. The economics of this has to do with marginal utility mainly and nothing to do with exploitation . There’s also the calculation of fixed rental costs which derive a larger portion of the monthly payment the lower the payment gets. I…
Plumbing is cheaper in a cheap small house with simple layout vs. Sprawling multi-level house.
Size of grounds (and expected level care) to maintain are different.
It goes on and on, but the gist is that the total net on a cheap house (ie. houses in cheap areas) is going to be more for the same level of investment.
I don't even see how this is unexpected or controversial!
I'd say that's the standard actually. Landlords steal whatever they like, including deposits, because with most of these situations the tenants are too busy finding the means to continue existing to have any to spare for litigation. I am not surprised by how many HN commenters seem to still have their rents sorted by their parents. Landlords are predominately thugs.
Kind of like how policemen will shoot who they want to, right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>An an interesting aside, these individuals are almost all involved with close-knit religious groups to which they contribute great deals of capital. Before an edit, the above comment referred to "close-knit religious groups" surrounded by triple parentheses[0]. These are used by white supremacist and anti-Semitic posters to denote or refer to Jews. They are not, to my knowledge, an idiom commonly used in any other c…
If you had just left the issue alone then everyone would assume his comment was referring to malevolent Christians. As a Jew I find it disappointing that you have chosen to echo the antisemitism he was smart enough to retract from the discourse. These ways of thinking need to be censored and entirely destroyed. Delete your comment immediately.
I'd say that's the standard actually. Landlords steal whatever they like, including deposits, because with most of these situations the tenants are too busy finding the means to continue existing to have any to spare for litigation. I am not surprised by how many HN commenters seem to still have their rents sorted by their parents. Landlords are predominately thugs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19470846 and marked it off-topic.
I'd say that's the standard actually. Landlords steal whatever they like, including deposits, because with most of these situations the tenants are too busy finding the means to continue existing to have any to spare for litigation. I am not surprised by how many HN commenters seem to still have their rents sorted by their parents. Landlords are predominately thugs.
Most landlords steal and are thugs. Also most HN commenter's rent is paid by their parents. Did you actually have these thoughts or did you read them in some sort of "Angsty Teen Thoughts" handbook?
Can confirm, I work for a company that helps landlords finance the purchase and repair of rental properties. In certain very LCOL urban areas around NYC and Philadelphia, we have individuals with tens of millions of dollars of property spread out among ~$150k buildings. They inspect their portfolio with armed bodyguards, and they very often own other businesses in the same neighborhoods that throw off money in small…
Funny how we have two fresh accounts posting in this discussion, one of which insists that the study authors must have an "agenda", and another of which gives an "aside" that exploitative slumlords "are almost all involved with (((close-knit religious groups)))". Sounds like the ruling class is a bit agitated that we're noticing what's going on, and wants to misdirect our attention.