Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rent collections are down in New York

politico.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 594 posts

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#111

Post by pixelatedindex »

nikkwong wrote: post #106
pixelatedindex wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from maybe being a little more flexible on evictions, none of the other reasons seem problematic. For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate? The giving tenant three month rent thing is for a very small circumstance - for example huge rent increases if the tenant income is low, condo remodeling, etc. The wo…

This is an insanely bad take. > For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate? You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house. If you're a building owner, there are reasons that you might want to be able to have freedom of choice in choosing who you have live in your building. When the g…

> You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house. If you're a building owner, there are reasons that you might want to be able to have freedom of choice in choosing who you have live in your building.

That’s basically discrimination? Make a strict selection criteria, that’s fine. The city also has affordable housing for people who don’t qualify. You set what works for you, why do you care if it’s too strict?

I am not acting like there is an oligopoly, but not having tenant protections means tenants are at the mercy of shitty landlords. And there are a TON of them. Am I not supposed to have any rights, and the landlords gets to do whatever they want? Free market doesn’t mean regulation free.

Edit: you said “We should be creating incentives and making it easy for individual homeowners to become landlords (at least in Seattle) if we want the paradigm to improve.” - what do you propose? What about landlords who don’t want housing built because they like owning a scarce asset? What kind of rights do you think tenants should have?

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#112

Post by bombcar »

pixelatedindex wrote: post #95
naturalmovement wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's entire Reddit communities of these people where they encourage and validate their shitty behavior. With some of the stories I've read, you'd have to be positively insane to be a small-time landlord these days, especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone. Go watch Pacific Heights with Michael Keaton for a fictionalized account but this stuff ab…

Doesn’t help that the landlords want to squeeze the renter for what they are worth. It’s weird to me that shitty landlords are normalized but shitty tenants get a (rightfully) bad rap. These laws become the way they are because landlords brought it upon themselves for the most part - they’re keeping assets that have massively increased in price and want to extract more and more out of the tenant. If you have a home t…

Rental prices stay surprisingly steady even when house prices go insane - compare similar apartments/houses in major expensive cities and cheaper ones.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#113

Post by majormajor »

itake wrote: post #90
archagon wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty simple. There’s a tech boom or similar, a bunch of rich workers move in, rents go up. Landlord spikes rent by 30% to take advantage. You can see this happening in r/sanfrancisco today, for non-rent-controlled units.

Sf is kinda a mess. Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave (locking up more housing, reducing supply, forcing everyone else to pay more), thus continue to discourage rent controlled tenants from moving since moving means even higher prices. The property tax situation in SF is a mess. SF also requires a lot of expensive regulations (earthquake proofing, renovation permits, rising California insurance costs,…

> Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave (locking up more housing, reducing supply, forcing everyone else to pay more), thus continue to discourage rent controlled tenants from moving since moving means even higher prices.

This is disingenuous. In the absence of rent control (or prop 13 for property owners) you famously get a situation where tenants ALSO can't afford to leave... but have to anyway.

Why should anyone be forced to leave just because someone richer wants to move in?

You don't have to support someone being unable to evict people who don't pay to believe that there should be limits on how much landlords (or the state, in the case of prop 13) should be able to force current residents to leave just to make a quick buck.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#114

Post by anovikov »

Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working.

Also perhaps there should be a new field for startups (yes i'm aware of 'proptech' but there has to be more than that), that will collect dirt on tenants to threaten them with legal consequences unless they pay.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#115

Post by bombcar »

verall wrote: post #96
itake wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me (and others in this thread). I have a 5 bedroom house that I rent out 2 rooms, but not interested in accepting more people unless they are friends or have a very high income. At my home’s peak, we had 6 adults living there, now its at 50% capacity.

How many high income individuals want to share a house with 5 strangers?

It's surprisingly common in places like SF, and near popular colleges.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#116

Post by itake »

verall wrote: post #96
itake wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me (and others in this thread). I have a 5 bedroom house that I rent out 2 rooms, but not interested in accepting more people unless they are friends or have a very high income. At my home’s peak, we had 6 adults living there, now its at 50% capacity.

How many high income individuals want to share a house with 5 strangers?

Apparently not many hence the empty house.

In SF and Seattle during hiring booms, a lot of young workers move to the city with no social connections, so they start their new life in hacker houses to kickstart their friend group.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#117

Post by majormajor »

nradov wrote: post #93
archagon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you own your own house? Are you rich? I’ve known acquaintances who got de facto evicted without warning just because their landlord decided to make a few extra bucks. Were that to happen to me, I would not be able to rent in my current city at all due to the recent influx of wealthy tech workers. (Read: extremely high rents with ridiculous income requirements.) Fortunately, my city has robust tenant protections an…

It sounds like you're living in a badly governed city. Have you considered voting for politicians with an abundance agenda? Or moving to a city with more intelligent housing policies such as Dallas?

NIMBYism and single-family zoning are alive and thriving in Dallas; what Dallas has is this thing called a huge-fucking-flat-prairie all around it that means Frisco, Addison, etc, have been able to add to the low-density car-centric sprawl and help keep prices down some.

(But even then, plenty of Dallas residents have been upset in the past decade by what happens to rental prices when a bunch of higher-income folks move to town!)

One wonders why the people who don't want to have to leave a city like San Fransisco just cause some other people have more money than them and want to raise their rents out of their reach are the ones who should move to Texas. Why shouldn't the would-be newcomers just be the ones go to all those cookie-cutter new developments?

If you jumped back in time 20 years ago and were able to ensure that YCombinator, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, and other high-paper-valuation companies, and they all had imported their from-out-of-town high-income-or-equity-leveraging employees to McKinney, Texas, not much materially would prevent those companies from still doing what they did. But people who already lived in SF or on the peninsula but didn't own much land there would have a materially better standard of living due to their costs not running away from their existing incomes. And the Texas burbs happily would've built a shit-ton of houses and apartments for the startup workers, because of the aforementioned giant quantities of near-empty land. Greenfield businesses for greenfield real-estate. Much better fit than force-transforming cities.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#118

Post by bombcar »

cherry_tree wrote: post #63
rationalist wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have friends and coworkers that want to have rental properties, and I advise them it's not worth it. I don't want to be in a position where I have to pay more to fix damages than I collectected in rent if I accidentally rent to deadbeats. Or in a position where I have to provide services to someone not paying me. One of those friends has parents that rented out their old house to deadbeats at the top of the housing…

Landlords typically have insurance coverage for damage by tenants, including lost rent.

This form of insurance is exceeding expensive and exceedingly rare. Large buildings self-insure (by having a ton of doors) and small landlords don't want to pay it.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#119

Post by craftkiller »

nikkwong wrote: post #106
pixelatedindex wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from maybe being a little more flexible on evictions, none of the other reasons seem problematic. For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate? The giving tenant three month rent thing is for a very small circumstance - for example huge rent increases if the tenant income is low, condo remodeling, etc. The wo…

This is an insanely bad take. > For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate? You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house. If you're a building owner, there are reasons that you might want to be able to have freedom of choice in choosing who you have live in your building. When the g…

> You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house

We already tried that. It turns out that people are racist, so now we need laws to protect against that. It sucks for all the decent non-racist folks but the alternative of not having those protections was far worse.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#120

Post by naturalmovement »

DanHulton wrote: post #103
cyberax wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are such people. I have a unit in Seattle that sits empty because I don't want to risk getting stuck with such tenants. In Seattle, you can't: 1. Evict people from November to April (it's "winter"). 2. Evict people with schoolchildren during the school year. 3. Run background checks on prospective tenants. 4. You _must_ rent to the first qualifying tenant. 5. You must offer 3 months in rent as compensation if y…

Nothing on that list sounds like a particular hardship. Your "Oh, and" is unfortunate and ought to be addressed, but then again, that was intended as your cherry-topper, not your main course. This is people's _homes_ we're talking about here, not a baseball card where privileging the owner is without too much consequence. If you lack the empathy to understand why this is a special case, maybe don't be a landlord.

Actually landlords have a reasonable expectation you don't turn _their home_ into a crack house and no one should be forced to rent to scumbags.
Post reply on HN