Most times your land lord won't let you make anything nicer. They basically want the place to degrade around you so that they can low key force you to leave causing you to abandon your rent control.
Most renters shut out of energy-saving upgrades – study
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Re: Most renters shut out of energy-saving upgrades – study
#22Could be solved with more free markets. What a funny phenomenon this is: "reluctance to make even basic upgrades" -- landlords don't care because they have too much market power and aren't even attempting to compete with each other. Imagine if car makers didn't bother with fuel efficiency because buyers had almost no choice and any car is better than nothing. We'd say that market isn't functioning well. Perhaps the p…
You're exactly right and the economics of it are pretty well studied. I know quite a few people in real estate, they're always eager to upgrade their property (read: make it more valuable) because then they can make more money. If their price is capped, though, they just don't make the investment. Rightly so, but at the end of the day, the renter is the one getting ripped off by the politician he voted for because the rent was too damn high.
Just let people create value and trade.
PS: Sad that you're getting downvotes for a thoughtful, polite comment, too. Downvotes are for hiding idiocy and meanness, not viewpoints that you disagree with.
Re: Most renters shut out of energy-saving upgrades – study
#23Could be solved with more free markets. What a funny phenomenon this is: "reluctance to make even basic upgrades" -- landlords don't care because they have too much market power and aren't even attempting to compete with each other. Imagine if car makers didn't bother with fuel efficiency because buyers had almost no choice and any car is better than nothing. We'd say that market isn't functioning well. Perhaps the p…
High efficiency apartments are actually kind of normal in newer more expensive rentals. Its the lower end rental properties that landlords think it doesn't make sense investing in; the rent increases that would come a long with the upgrades just wouldn't make sense for the market they are going for.
Re: Most renters shut out of energy-saving upgrades – study
#24[flagged]
A landlord is a parasite by definition, since they don't produce anything, and charge money for producing nothing. But they perform important functions in our society, like providing housing. Even though landlords don't actually produce housing, without landlords there would be no housing and that would suck.
Re: Most renters shut out of energy-saving upgrades – study
#25Could be solved with more free markets. What a funny phenomenon this is: "reluctance to make even basic upgrades" -- landlords don't care because they have too much market power and aren't even attempting to compete with each other. Imagine if car makers didn't bother with fuel efficiency because buyers had almost no choice and any car is better than nothing. We'd say that market isn't functioning well. Perhaps the p…
Available rentals are still priced according to their relative value. If most landlords have newly updated units on the market for $2000/month and someone tries to rent a similar unit untouched since 1970 for $2000/month, that unrenovated unit is going to sit on the market for a very, very long time.
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Re: Most renters shut out of energy-saving upgrades – study
#26Could be solved with more free markets. What a funny phenomenon this is: "reluctance to make even basic upgrades" -- landlords don't care because they have too much market power and aren't even attempting to compete with each other. Imagine if car makers didn't bother with fuel efficiency because buyers had almost no choice and any car is better than nothing. We'd say that market isn't functioning well. Perhaps the p…
Deregulation led to Enron. Next bright idea?
Re: Most renters shut out of energy-saving upgrades – study
#27Could be solved with more free markets. What a funny phenomenon this is: "reluctance to make even basic upgrades" -- landlords don't care because they have too much market power and aren't even attempting to compete with each other. Imagine if car makers didn't bother with fuel efficiency because buyers had almost no choice and any car is better than nothing. We'd say that market isn't functioning well. Perhaps the p…
Rent control also causes this because they get no additional value from better units.
Re: Most renters shut out of energy-saving upgrades – study
#28Could be solved with more free markets. What a funny phenomenon this is: "reluctance to make even basic upgrades" -- landlords don't care because they have too much market power and aren't even attempting to compete with each other. Imagine if car makers didn't bother with fuel efficiency because buyers had almost no choice and any car is better than nothing. We'd say that market isn't functioning well. Perhaps the p…
Cars are regulated for efficiency though, CAFE for instance.
Appliances sort of are also, just that they only apply to new appliances that can be sold in your locality/state.
Re: Most renters shut out of energy-saving upgrades – study
#29There is always going to be an adversarial relationship between landlords and renters. Make no mistake: that we allow this to happen is state violence. Why? Because we are allowing individuals and corporations to deny housing to people by raising prices to make it unaffordable. We even allow them to collude [1].
The only solution to this that demonstrably works is for the state to provide a significant amount of housing to keep the private secotr honest [2].
Everything else is just propping a system that steals from the poor to give to the already rich.
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
Re: Most renters shut out of energy-saving upgrades – study
#30[flagged]
>They buy a property, rent it out, then use it as collateral for another rental.
I'd like to know which lenders allow you to do this, given a standard mortgage starts at 20% down and needs to be paid down from there. Unless you're committing mortgage fraud you can't exceed whatever initial leverage you started out with.