81–90 of 122 posts
I find it hard to be sympathetic with people who chose to overleverage themselves with their investments.
I really don't understand why we insulate landlords from investment risk so much. At the end of the day they can sell the place to mitigate their losses. What recourse could renters have?
This isn’t market risk. This is govt fiat that is causing the financial troubles.
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> depicted as mostly working class. What "working class" person owns investment property in NYC? They amount of capital required to do that is so enormous that the article calling them "working class" is deeply misleading. They certainly aren't working class in the way that most NYC tenants are.
I love it. Too poor to invest in property? Working class. Have enough money to invest in property? No longer working class. It’s attitudes like this that prevent the working class from participating in the generation of wealth through capital. As soon as they dip their toe in, they’re now “rich” and get the rug pulled from under them.
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No amount of "working at it" is going to make you $80k as any restaurant employee.
I guess if you define yourself as only a "restaurant employee" and never consider doing anything else you might be right. The thing about humans is that they are flexible, adaptable, and creative and can do many different kinds of tasks. You don't get handed a random job by the job fairy and then that's the only thing you ever get to do for the rest of your life.
I don’t really get how this is possible. They should be able to take out a loan against the property to pay for any expenses, and just sell it at the end to pay off debts if they need to once this is over. They’re upset about lost income but not really struggling... Their net worth is just as high as a renter with a few hundred thousand in the bank. I would have a hard time feeling sorry for somebody in that position…
You’re assuming they own the property outright with no mortgage, which is pretty unlikely. If they have a loan already the bank might not want to loan them more money against the property in the current market. And if they sell it, to who? It’ll be at a massive discount right now and they might not be able to cover the amount they owe to the bank.
If they own property in New York City and were able to qualify for any sort of mortgage on a working class dual-income, then it's highly unlikely that they bought that property at any point within the last 30 years, in which case - if there was a mortgage - it should be long paid-for by now.
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What is the moral basis of rent? Rent is by definition differentiated from service provision in that it is simply the use of a legal right to extract an income. I don't see a moral basis, so I don't see how anything that impacts the interests of renters can be unfair. Bad on pragmatic level, perhaps, but not a moral one.
There would be a moral basis with a 100% land value tax or a property tax that approximates it. Without it, though, rent is partially a stream of income derived from labor (upkeep, management, construction) and partially a stream of income derived from a state granted monopoly over a parcel of 4 billion year old land. The moratorium is, in part, tacit recognition of this. Everybody knows that a large slice of rental…
No, it's quite simple. Being a landlord is being a business owner. You are providing a service and in exchange you get paid enough to make construction of housing worthwhile. Except, most landlords break even and only get paid in the form of building equity. It'll take decades to pay the mortgage off.
>The moratorium is, in part, tacit recognition of this. Everybody knows that a large slice of rental income is completely unearned - even landlords.
>Few would seriously believe that the sky high rental incomes derived from these is really earned, for instance
If nobody is paying for the house then there will be no house for you to live in. It's that simple.
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I love it. Too poor to invest in property? Working class. Have enough money to invest in property? No longer working class. It’s attitudes like this that prevent the working class from participating in the generation of wealth through capital. As soon as they dip their toe in, they’re now “rich” and get the rug pulled from under them.
I mean, the ownership of property - particularly land - and the use of that property to derive one's income is exactly what differentiates the working class from the ownership class. Landlords are pretty unambiguously in the latter; rent-seeking is not work.
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I guess if you define yourself as only a "restaurant employee" and never consider doing anything else you might be right. The thing about humans is that they are flexible, adaptable, and creative and can do many different kinds of tasks. You don't get handed a random job by the job fairy and then that's the only thing you ever get to do for the rest of your life.
Stop being glib. We are talking about a person whose job was stated in the article, not some hypothetical rags to riches tale.
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The moral basis comes from how the majority have agreed to structure society. A family isn't legally allowed to go to an unoccupied piece of land, start cutting down trees or making mud bricks into a shelter and stay there. We have divided up the land (a limited resource) into parcels of private ownership with government-enforced property rights. With that comes a moral responsibility to make sure that everyone can o…
moral basis comes from how the majority have agreed to structure society That’s more of a rationalization than a moral foundation. The land we’re talking about (in North America), in a lot of cases, was stolen by means of violent force from the indigenous people who lived here before the arrival of European settlers. If we’re going to call that a moral basis, then we’re back to arguing the account of Thrasymachus [1]…
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It is amazing what people can do when they work at it instead of demanding others give them stuff for free.
No amount of "working at it" is going to make you $80k as any restaurant employee.
One reason why the housing market is such a shitshow is that there is antagonism between both sides. Tenants hate landlords, landlords hate tenants. Nobody will ever consider doing favors because the other side betrayed them.
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I love it. Too poor to invest in property? Working class. Have enough money to invest in property? No longer working class. It’s attitudes like this that prevent the working class from participating in the generation of wealth through capital. As soon as they dip their toe in, they’re now “rich” and get the rug pulled from under them.
I mean, the ownership of property - particularly land - and the use of that property to derive one's income is exactly what differentiates the working class from the ownership class. Landlords are pretty unambiguously in the latter; rent-seeking is not work.
So some 50 year old blue collar dude who saves just enough to buy a duplex and live in half of it, but can’t stop working or he’ll starve, has suddenly been propelled from the working class into the lazy, cigar-smoking, top hat twirling capital class?