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Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

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Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#41
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God no. They've been sitting on empty buildings for years. It's time for them to default on the underwater loans and let people actually put the wasted space to use. Every city in the US has a similar issue including the one near where I grew up and it's the weirdest most broken thing. I remember many times walking down streets flanked by empty buildings with homeless people sleeping outside.

Thats not how any of this works. The problem with a market is you have a rate that if something is below it its not profitable for people to live in a place. Idk why people blame the building owners. And people who do this are always people with perfectly good couches in their living rooms but would never let a homeless person sleep there, but want others to give up a entire building.

And then you want to give them my money, taken from me by force by the government.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#42
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the landlords didn't want to deal with loans then they should have paid cash for the properties. If the tenants didn't want to pay rent, they should not have signed leases. Why is it that tenants can get a break on their obligations but landlords can't? Why are tenants more deserving of help? Most landlords are not rich. They are providing a service to their tenants, who cannot afford to purchase buildings and w…

Over the course of a given rental, unless the property was purchased almost immediately before a real-estate crash or rental crisis, the amount of cashflow generated by a tenant will cover the majority of the volume required to generate equity in the property. In certain cases, the financing for commercial real estate, for instance, will literally substitute the credit rating of tenants for those of the landlords - b…

This ignores the fact that if there were such obvious financial incentives, then restaurant owners would simply just buy said properties.

'Property management' is a real thing and businesses don't want to necessarily own property.

Managing property is a service like any other - and rates for their goods are market based - just like any other market.

"If a landlord is rendered insolvent, they aren't even rendered destitute;" - ? why do you assume that? Property owners are often leveraged like many other businesses. If x% of their portfolio goes bust - they go bust.

There might be opportunities to make things a little bit more fair one way or another, but it's not rational to single out one form of business as being 'better or worse' than another.

What could be reformed is the fact that economic rent is not really valuable for society at large. 'Trading playing cards' benefits nobody, we should be investing in value creating operations.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#44
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God no. They've been sitting on empty buildings for years. It's time for them to default on the underwater loans and let people actually put the wasted space to use. Every city in the US has a similar issue including the one near where I grew up and it's the weirdest most broken thing. I remember many times walking down streets flanked by empty buildings with homeless people sleeping outside.

Thats not how any of this works. The problem with a market is you have a rate that if something is below it its not profitable for people to live in a place. Idk why people blame the building owners. And people who do this are always people with perfectly good couches in their living rooms but would never let a homeless person sleep there, but want others to give up a entire building.

[deleted]

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#45
post #3

Bail them out. We bailed out far worse in this lifetime for us to wince at this.

That money just goes straight to landlords. Henry George's time has come.

I don’t want restaurants with good locations to lose their spot, even if it means bailing out landlords.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#46
Subsidizing the restaurants without getting anything in return seems like a misallocation of capital.

Allowing 'creative destruction' on a massive scale is harmful to social stability and frankly just cruel. People didn't plan for it, because it is implied in our various social contracts that they don't need to(and that may be wrong, but this is not the time to fix that).

We should consider subsidizing the restaurants to continue to do what they do best: provide food. We need to meet in the middle and provide some assistance while still getting 'wealth'(desired goods and services in this case) but not fully subsidizing empty buildings and idle employees. The delivery or pick-up models work in a pandemic, but they fail to provide enough profit to keep businesses open. Let's bridge that gap.

This isn't the time to test out your ideologically pure political/economic/social theories. We need to be pragmatic and get our people and economy through this crisis.

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#47
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God no. They've been sitting on empty buildings for years. It's time for them to default on the underwater loans and let people actually put the wasted space to use. Every city in the US has a similar issue including the one near where I grew up and it's the weirdest most broken thing. I remember many times walking down streets flanked by empty buildings with homeless people sleeping outside.

Thats not how any of this works. The problem with a market is you have a rate that if something is below it its not profitable for people to live in a place. Idk why people blame the building owners. And people who do this are always people with perfectly good couches in their living rooms but would never let a homeless person sleep there, but want others to give up a entire building.

That would work in a normal market but the realestate market hasn't been allowed to correct because we keep bailing it out by having the fed buy up all the debt. This raises rent because it decreases the supply (people can just hold onto buildings as investments and not bother renting them out or wait for someone willing to pay something that should be above market value) and also raises inflation.

Let me explain it to you simply: The landlords made a bad investment, bailing them out forces everyone else to pay for it. In the "it's my property" sense it's identical to forcing someone to house homeless people (although the comparison still isn't the same because the landlords generally don't live in the buildings they're renting out.)

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#48
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God no. They've been sitting on empty buildings for years. It's time for them to default on the underwater loans and let people actually put the wasted space to use. Every city in the US has a similar issue including the one near where I grew up and it's the weirdest most broken thing. I remember many times walking down streets flanked by empty buildings with homeless people sleeping outside.

Thats not how any of this works. The problem with a market is you have a rate that if something is below it its not profitable for people to live in a place. Idk why people blame the building owners. And people who do this are always people with perfectly good couches in their living rooms but would never let a homeless person sleep there, but want others to give up a entire building.

The problem is that what is actually going on in NY - and many other markets - doesn't remotely resemble a properly functioning market: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdfmMB1E_qk

Re: Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

#50

What's really crazy is that movie theaters in this state aren't allowed to open, but still have to pay their property taxes (which will likely bankrupt them). I have no love for some of them, but bullshit is bullshit.

I thought it was obscene for some studios to charge upwards of $30 for their movie, and then not kick back some of that to theatres. It probably wouldn't take much to tide them over. They aren't running much in the way of expenses other than rent.

Would have been a great tag to their sales pitch. But it's like they don't even think about theatres.

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