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Rent collections are down in New York

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Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#221

Post by digitaltrees »

nikkwong wrote: post #108
teachrdan wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, do you consider yourself, with ~55 active tenants/leases, to be a "small landlord"?

Its spread across about ~ 6 houses. I'm definitely a small landlord. I deal with all tenant issues myself, handle all repairs, leases, and most importantly for me—maintain a healthy relationship (which has grown to many friendships). I use this term in contrast to a faceless, corporate landlord who owns larger apartment buildings. Small landlords and corporate landlords are nothing alike

55 isn’t small by definition and under the law. You may feel small because it’s just you, and you don’t realize how much you’ve accomplished or the asymmetric bargaining position that affords you but your perspective isn’t corresponding with reality.

That being said, I do think a system that tenant rights to be as abusive of legal process as we have in some states ends up hurting tenants themselves. I think our courts should move much faster so nonpayment is resolved faster. But I also think all landlords should be required to pay 20% of rent to a home building fund so that new housing actually gets built.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#222

Post by fny »

BoxFour wrote: post #98

> The uptick in rental delinquency isn’t new. It started six years ago It has nothing to do with Mamdani, for those of who don't want to bother to read. Most of this occurred under Eric Adams's watch. Anecdotally, I do think covid made people a lot more aware of how deeply backlogged the housing courts are. It seems like a lot of people (like the anonymous one in the article) realized they could not pay rent and avoi…

You can't blame Adams for delinquent payments. He dramatically expanded housing vouchers (the source of the budget crisis) which in theory should have reduced delinquency.

Moreover rents for affordable housing haven't kept up with inflation while benefits have.

Arm chair speculation like what's in the article won't suffice. People need to be surveyed and interviewed to get to the bottom of this.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#223

Post by mothballed »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #205
klausa wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I'm sure you're a nice person and a better landlord than many corporate landlords; and trying to do well. I'm genuinely glad you're trying, and helping your tenants when you can; but I think you've drunk a bit too much of your own kool-aid. From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.

I literally want to have a landlord. They provide a valuable service. I could afford to buy the places where I rent but actively avoid it. The idea that landlords don’t provide a valuable service is a kind of willful denial of reality.

Much of the land in New England / northeastern USA was apportioned to proprietors without any service rendered, plus squatting on grandfathered regulations that no one else can take advantage of. The actual improvement is a service, but commonly it's something like a shithole house where the physical manifestation of the improvement is like 10% of the real estate value.

In someplaces like Kansas where people actually mixed their labor with the land (homesteading) to claim it and then improved it and the title transferred in capitalistic exchange, landlords are basically 100% providing a service. But in New York very little of the "value" provided has anything to do with services and labor mixed with the land as someone like Adam Smith envisioned as value generation. It's largely just some proprietor being handed land in the 1600s with the wand of a King, taking the shit by violence, then making regulations out the ass with violence (to make their shithole house pretend to provide a more valuable 'service') and then exempting themselves via grandfathering and then people exchanging title for same. Their service is a legacy of beating the shit out of Indians with weapons and then the populace with government and then allocating the value to themselves.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#224

Post by anovikov »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #204
anovikov wrote: post #114

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.

> Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working. 1) Because screw you, that's horrible and you shouldn't do it. 2) Because all these digital key systems are horrendously insecure and much more open to thieves and crackers than than a plain old door key anyway.

(1) - what's horrible? renting out flats is a business. not paying the bills shouldn't be tolerated, ideally shouldn't be technically possible.

(2) is negated very simply - have both old door key AND digital security key which auto closes if there are unpaid bills for say more than 5 business days.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#225

Post by archagon »

ekelsen wrote: post #102
archagon wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can afford to live in my city. I’m living in it right now! The nice thing is that I don’t get pushed out by arbitrary economic fluctuations completely out of my control.

If only we could all get free protection from economic forces we don't control. That kind of insurance is usually pretty expensive. Why should you get it for free?

One, we vote for it, and there's far more renters out there than owners. Sorry.

Two, there are many "free protections" that are taken for granted at our stage of civilizational development. Should fire departments be privatized? Police? I'd argue that housing security is even more important than those. We bear the costs together so that our lives are collectively better.

Three, your entire framing is kind of bananas. Rent control is neither insurance nor expensive, but a cap on landlord profits. If anything, it's unbounded profiteering of basic necessities that's actually "expensive."

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#226

Post by digitaltrees »

nikkwong wrote: post #172
chirau wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I just try to be the landlord that I would want to have. I respond to my tenants quickly, always give them concessions, let them pay late, or at a discount when they’re struggling, referred them to work at my companies, etc, etc. it’s not all about the money, it’s also being a good member of the community, for me. This is in contrast to a corporate landlord where your $1500 disappears into a void every month.

That’s awesome. When I was growing up my parents were denied housing because they had too many kids and were almost homeless one time until a nice landlord of the same religion agreed to rent to us. Please take your responsibility seriously as it seems you do.

That being said there are “professional” tenants that try to scam the system to the detriment of landlords and other tenants. I would fully applaud resistance to their efforts to take advantage of the system.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#227

Post by mullingitover »

epsteingpt wrote: post #198

For those looking for the actual data. It's from 2024 - says nothing about the current situation. * ~37K affordable housing units (baseline) across ~400 projects * 89% rent collection rate (down from 90.6% in 2023) * That's 600 units that went 'delinquent' in 2024 - assuming a $24K 'base' rent (just a guess) that's $15M in lost rent. * Deeply troubled projects (that can't survive without this rent) are at 11% - seems…

> We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society

We tried cramming people from generational poverty into one place and it didn't go super great, therefore public housing as a concept must be the failure, and not our hilariously bad implementation?

Singapore, Austria, Finland, and even a number of mixed income public housing projects in the US have actually done quite well. The narrative that it's all inevitably going to turn into the worst examples is pretty worn out.

> The bigger problem is the bid up of asset prices - aka private equity and class warfare.

This is definitely true: housing can either be affordable or it can be a safe investment, never both. Really private equity moving in on the safe investment is a symptom of the problem: regulatory capture by the landed gentry resulting in strangulation of production which benefits a small group at the expense of the greater public.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#228

Post by halfxing »

inigyou wrote: post #141
naturalmovement wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Tha…

And how exactly do you "force" the deadbeat broke tenant that trashed your house to return it to its original condition?

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#229

Post by digitaltrees »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #205
klausa wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I'm sure you're a nice person and a better landlord than many corporate landlords; and trying to do well. I'm genuinely glad you're trying, and helping your tenants when you can; but I think you've drunk a bit too much of your own kool-aid. From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.

I literally want to have a landlord. They provide a valuable service. I could afford to buy the places where I rent but actively avoid it. The idea that landlords don’t provide a valuable service is a kind of willful denial of reality.

Maybe. But I had a landlord triple my rent in NYC because he wanted to sell the unit. I didn’t want to move but had no option.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#230

Post by throwaway27448 »

epsteingpt wrote: post #218
throwaway27448 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why we can't just copy another country's housing strategy. There are many countries in the world where housing is affordable, relatively high quality, and the homelessness rate is low. What are we doing that makes this problem so seemingly intractable? Why is our approach to public housing seemingly worse than any other approach in history?

A bit of a misnomer. Housing is, actually, extremely affordable across the US - just not in major cities. You can plunk $10-$20K and get land and a homestead in dozens of states. Agree with the other comment that overbuilding is a reasonable strategy, but if you look at Detroit downtown (mid 2010s) having an overbuilt downtown is bad too. It's a hard problem.

Well we didn't exactly divvy up either housing or employment rationally, so looking through history without state subsidies and development, we're going to see slums pop up where the jobs are. Or just massive homeless populations I guess.

China managed this quite well with the hukou system, which allegedly is going to be loosened over time, but that seems distinctly unlikely to be understood by the powers that be here in the US.

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