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Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

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Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#111

Post by jeffbee »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #110
jeffbee wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they very much do. The voter turnout gap by housing tenure is about 20 percentage points (e.g. 70% turnout for owners and 50% for renters). Also the voter registration gap is massive because many renters are not eligible to vote or face hurdles registering due to lack of permanent address. Finally, the people who would benefit from new housing construction in a place like San Francisco are often registered to vo…

And lower income people are far more likely to be renters than landowners. Lower income jobs are less likely to provide time off to vote. Even if mail-in voting is allowed such low-income jobs are also less likely to provide time off to attend city council meetings or public hearings or other such things.

Yup. Census data shows that non voters with incomes less than $20k/year give transportation issues as the reason in 8% of cases, but only 0.1% of people with incomes over $100k give this reason.

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#112

Post by MonkeyMalarky »

luckylion wrote: post #68
dionidium wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the thing I always say about the people who complain about tech workers and gentrification in a place like San Francisco is like, look, if you can't figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that's really on you. What a gift! Any city would be lucky to have that "problem." You have to actively work to make that a negative (by, say, refusing to a…

Especially for a city that is explicitly progressive, why the "all rapid change is bad, it must take decades or centuries, otherwise it's not natural" approach? Germany's large cities have similar issues where they don't want to start building new districts because it'd be artificial and not naturally grown building by building. And it's better to have rents double every 10 years, apparently. I don't get the "why", b…

Quickly throwing up cheap mass housing without also organically growing the services and rest of the community is how you get food deserts and ghettos though. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, just pointing out where it's gone wrong in the past and why people may be hesitant to try again.

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#113

Post by deathanatos »

twblalock wrote: post #26
deathanatos wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's "covering risk", and there's tenant lock-in. I have no problem with requiring a tenant to rent for a year, to prevent quick turnover and the risk and costs associated with that. But multiple landlords now have all had the same policy: the lease will never go month-to-month, basically. You can , but e.g., for my current lease, it costs ~60% more to go month to month. This creates bizarre pay-off points, and gr…

I was renting until just a few years ago and I never had a lease longer than 12 months, and it was actually difficult to find one longer than that. I'm not sure where you live, but in a lot of places, a landlord refusing to allow a lease to go month-to-month is illegal.

The term of the lease isn't materially longer than 12 months. (Mine actually is >12 mo, but not by a whole lot.) But at the end of the (say) 12 months, you sign the next lease, for another (say) 12 months, or move out. (The rent invariably goes up, at this point.)

It's at those individual lease boundaries that I (rather technically) have the opportunity to go month-to-month, if I want to be bled dry.

My note about it being a 3+ year lease is the total time we've rented, consecutively. That the lease is broken into separate segments by the contract is an implementation detail, when discussing recovering the costs of / managing the risk of short-term tenants. I'm not a short term tenant, after having been here for that long.

> a landlord refusing to allow a lease to go month-to-month is illegal.

That's news to me! I've never lived in such a place, and boy would that be nice. A cursory Google search indicates that, in my jurisdiction, "allows the landlord or tenant to end a month-to-month lease at any time, as long as they give 30 days' notice". The state I lived in previously is the same.

(This is where the nuance of "what the lease actually says" meets the "how it is implemented".) Technically, my lease becomes month-to-month at the end of its lease period. To my landlord, not signing a new lease would result in (their, legally speaking) 30 days notice to move out. (They've made this somewhat apparent to us in the past, as they tend to not send out the new terms soon enough and then get antsy when they're not signed.) They want the increased rent, and it appears they'll get it from me, or the market.

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#114

Post by mrguyorama »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #46
akavi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about SF in particular, but nationwide, yes, renters turn out to vote at a far lower rate than homeowners[0] (67% vs 49%) [0] https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/renter-voting-prefere...

> nationwide, yes, renters turn out to vote at a far lower rate than homeowners Wider than I expected. Thank you. Asking because in New York, renters turn out, and that drives policy outcomes. (They’re also less likely to think supply and demand is a myth.)

By and large, poorer people vote less than wealthy people. It is harder to vote in america as a poorer person in many areas, arguably on purpose.

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#115

Post by danaris »

aorloff wrote: post #83
deathanatos wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's "covering risk", and there's tenant lock-in. I have no problem with requiring a tenant to rent for a year, to prevent quick turnover and the risk and costs associated with that. But multiple landlords now have all had the same policy: the lease will never go month-to-month, basically. You can , but e.g., for my current lease, it costs ~60% more to go month to month. This creates bizarre pay-off points, and gr…

Requiring a full year lease, instead of month-to-month, is the landlords only option under just cause eviction. Otherwise the landlord is essentially a non-party to the lease (the rent board and tenant dictate the future terms).

That sounds like something that's true in particular jurisdictions, but probably not nationwide...

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#116

Post by majormajor »

zozbot234 wrote: post #89
fnimick wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the people who complain about tech workers and gentrification in a place like San Francisco The people who are complaining about this are not the same people who are restricting housing access. A similar dynamic happens in Boston, where people are resentful of gentrifiers, and I can't blame them. They're not the ones voting to block housing, it's the already rich people in the area who do that.

Yes, they are. What do you think "anti-gentrification activism" boils down to, in practice? Build more and drive prices down? Of course not, the activists will conveniently tell you that this makes gentrification worse ! Which totally defies economic logic: there's only so much demand in the world for places like Manhattan!

> Which totally defies economic logic: there's only so much demand in the world for places like Manhattan!

How much demand "in the world" to live in Manhattan do you think there is?

The more the price drops, of course, the demand will go up. So how much "in the world" at both current prices and also if, say, prices went down by 5%? 10%? 50%? 75%? I think there's enough currently-unmet demand to keep the prices from falling far even if you add supply.

(You can also increase demand by building. This is the goal of every property developer ever, after all. To make it worth more than it was when they found it.)

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#117

Post by HDThoreaun »

nickpinkston wrote: post #87

There's also a good argument that rent/housing affects more of our broader lives than anything else - often called "The Housing Theory of Everything". https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e... If you're interested in helping the housing problem across the US, I encourage you to check out: YIMBY Action who does local activism across the US, and particularly active in SF Bay Area and CA. https://y…

LVT now. Truly the solution to all our economic problems.

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#118

Post by CogitoCogito »

nradov wrote: post #102
CogitoCogito wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, just average people, who built the community over time into something desirable, that were promised with zoning laws that it would be the type of community (single family homes, etc) that they wanted, and that then dedicated the majority of their lifetime earning power to purchase a home there. No one was promised that the zoning laws wouldn't someday change. Maybe what's really needed is a complete repeal of p…

You are welcome to put a repeal of Proposition 13 on the next ballot. All it takes is a $2000 fee and some signed petitions. https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/ballot-measures/how-qualify...

Frankly that's a waste of time. People are are all too happy not paying their fair share of taxes and will fight hard to preserve that inequity. The clearly correct approach is for the state to continue its current path of overruling local zoning ordinances and to allow increases in density against the will of local homeowners.

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#119

Post by jonas21 »

fnimick wrote: post #86
xxpor wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's both. There's an unholy alliance between the two.

Why would renters want property values (and therefore rents) to go up due to a lack of supply?

They don't. But getting people to understand supply and demand is hard. Getting them to blame visible changes in the neighborhood (e.g. fancy new apartment buildings going up) is easy.

Re: Rising rent, not poverty, is the real driver of homelessness

#120

Post by danaris »

jrockway wrote: post #30
anonuser123456 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? They don’t like money?

What is the path to profitability you see? They pretty much have to gut rehab the building to add kitchens and bathrooms, in an economy where loans are pretty expensive. Is that competitive with people selling existing move-in ready housing stock in a down market? Do you want to be the first person to sign a contract in one of these conversions? (Not to mention the usual "new construction" taxes that are seller-paid…

Unless you're referring to something besides the baseline interest rate (in which case you might need to clarify, as it's non-obvious why it would be the case), loans aren't "pretty expensive" now: they were "absurdly cheap" for the last decade.

Setting your baseline during the post-financial-crisis period of permanent zero interest rates is not particularly realistic.

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