Live data from Hacker News

Rent collections are down in New York

politico.com

141–150 of 594 posts

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why should landlords have that expectation? I think the default case should be that when someone rents a space they have freedom to do what they want with that space until they stop renting it, and then when they stop renting it they must be forced to return it to its original condition.

Did you know in Australia it's normal to give your landlord a tour of your house every 3 months to prove you haven't broken it? That's completely ridiculous.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#142
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but your comment suggested you'd be unable to afford market rent.

I can afford to live in my city because my landlord isn’t able to tack an extra $2000 to my rent due to the sudden influx of AI bros.

Pity the boonyman who was afforded no such luxury

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#143
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the rental market. Landlords in cities with strong tenant protection laws will absolutely leave a unit vacant for months until they find someone with a high income ratio and credit score. This leaves poorer people stuck with no options.

Vacancy tax. No one should have the right to buy multiple, rentable homes and keep them unused in the middle of a housing crisis. It’s sociopathic.

So in the Netherlands, For many years any property left vacant and unused dor more than a year could be legally squatted.

it forced landlords to keep their properties on the market and insured full usage of the severely limited available housing stock

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you force people to have someone in their house that they don't want, they are not going to rent their house out. This will lead to less units on the market. Your point about racism is fair, but I don't think the answer is a solution that reduces rentable units on the market.

Okay, sell it to someone who will live there then. You're not a saint for taking a unit someone wants to buy and forcing them to rent instead.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#145
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…

I don't understand why you wouldn't sell and invest elsewhere in this case.

Apparently, even with all these rules designed to damage the profitability of landlords, being landlord must be extremely profitable as they keep doing it.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How is renting different from hiring in that regard? Nobody would consider requiring employers to hire the first qualified candidate, but at the same time, we don't allow employers to discriminate on the basis of race. Why couldn't the same law apply to residential leasing?

Are we sure that law is working as intended? Or are employers simply not admitting to factoring race into the decision? It is next to impossible to prove a candidate was rejected on the basis of race, especially when you can legally reject someone for not being a "culture fit" on the team.

I'd also argue the stakes are higher when leasing, so landlords will be less likely to take a chance on a race they don't like. Most jobs in the US are at-will employment so you can be fired at any time for almost any reason, but evicting a tenant can be a long process.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#147
post #84
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tenant "protection" laws are the type of idiocy that economically illiterate progressive politicians always produce. They end up having the opposite effect by making property owners less willing to rent out to anyone. The only effective way to protect tenants is to set public policies that encourage new housing development. When there is a housing surplus, the laws of economics force landlords to treat tenants well.…

Tentant protection laws are always a matter of degree. Requiring a process in order to evict tennants is a good thing. If the process is unsatisfyable or extremely lengthy, I don't think it's a good thing anymore. There should be a way to get destructive and severely disruptive tenants out in a hurry. Ordinary breach of contract things (failure to pay rent, problematic behaviors that violate the lease but aren't an i…

Is there any morally valid reason to evict a tenant other than nonpayment of rent? For bad behavior that should be between them and the police, not you.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I anecdotally know of a few cases in Seattle where tenants with high incomes that could easily pay just don't. There is a subculture that actively encourages this type of behavior and the laws are setup such that there are almost no consequences for it. I've also met people who bragged about doing it. While rare, it is still common enough that it has become a real problem and has become socially acceptable in some ci…

It's not rare. I repeat. It's not rare. I am a landlord in Seattle with ~55 active tenants/leases. Let's just say that I know of many landlords in the circles I run in that have absolutely stopped renting to leftie types because they've had so many issues over the last few years with many of them over litigating everything; and deciding not to pay rent over the smallest non-issues, or just not paying rent at all. I c…

What exactly do you mean by "well meaning small landlord"?

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#149
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an economic floor for the price of housing: the amortized cost of the building and its maintenance, plus taxes and overhead imposed by governments, utilities, mortgages, etc. In other words: even in a plentiful housing market, there will always be someone who struggles to pay rent (including transiently), because a rational housing market can't offer $0 rents. Tenant protection laws exist to protect that pers…

Yeah… these laws for private landlords to subsidize housing for other families. If you only have 1 rental property and your tenant doesn’t pay, that’s a 100% loss of revenue while your family personally bears the cost of supporting this other family. Whereas corporate landlords can absorb these losses by raising rents on 100 doors to cover the families that refuse to pay

Don't rent it then. All these laws are designed to make being a landlord hell so that people won't be landlords.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I anecdotally know of a few cases in Seattle where tenants with high incomes that could easily pay just don't. There is a subculture that actively encourages this type of behavior and the laws are setup such that there are almost no consequences for it. I've also met people who bragged about doing it. While rare, it is still common enough that it has become a real problem and has become socially acceptable in some ci…

It's not rare. I repeat. It's not rare. I am a landlord in Seattle with ~55 active tenants/leases. Let's just say that I know of many landlords in the circles I run in that have absolutely stopped renting to leftie types because they've had so many issues over the last few years with many of them over litigating everything; and deciding not to pay rent over the smallest non-issues, or just not paying rent at all. I c…

Honest question - how do you know a potential tenant is “leftie type”?
Post reply on HN