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Rent collections are down in New York

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Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#331

Post by kelnos »

halfxing wrote: post #234
pixelatedindex wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Totally wrong. A home has a lot of expenses beyond taxes, especially maintenance/upkeep. If the landlord just breaks even, where does the money to repair the roof come from? Also, providing housing is a service that should be done at market rates, and as an investment must yield a return to make sense. Or do you expect stock investments to yield nothing and just retain their value too? Should companies not raise thei…

> providing housing is a service that should be done at market rates

That's an opinion, not a fact. I don't share that opinion. Societies are healthier when people are housed, and when that housing is well-maintained. "Let the market decide" often doesn't get you that.

> an investment must yield a return to make sense

Agreed, but we can and should cap that return if not doing so leads to housing insecurity.

> There's a huge lack of financial literacy in some of these comments.

From you I'm seeing a huge lack of understanding about what capitalism is good and bad at.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#332

Post by lmm »

majormajor wrote: post #117
nradov wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> 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?

Because my money should be just as good as yours? Why should you get a huge discount just because of where you were lucky to be born? I'm not asking for a better deal than you, just fair competition between equals.

> 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.

For first 100, sure. Then they'd complain about the newcomers changing the character of the place and ban new buildings. The same thing happens everywhere, you can't route around it by starting your own new city because as soon as you've built any kind of community you have the same NIMBY problems as every other city.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#333

Post by kelnos »

inigyou wrote: post #147
toast0 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure: it's morally valid to evict someone who violates any legally-enforceable provision in the lease agreement they signed.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#334

Post by kelnos »

dwroberts wrote: post #274
nradov wrote: 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.…

> They end up having the opposite effect by making property owners less willing to rent out to anyone. Yes, good! Then they will sell their bloody housing stock and people can BUY them instead

That assumes that everyone who wants housing can afford to buy it rather than rent it. It also assumes that everyone who wants housing even wants to buy it.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#335

Post by kelnos »

inigyou wrote: post #149
itake wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So it's better that huge corporate landlords own all the rentable housing stock?

You seem to be assuming that if we, say, just made renting illegal, everyone would a) want to own a home, and b) have the finances necessary to do so. That's not the case.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#336

Post by lmm »

archagon wrote: post #225
ekelsen wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> 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.

But we don't. Everyone who works in the city is paying the costs, while the lucky few who moved in decades ago are the only ones who get the benefit. If everyone got to pay the same level of rent then I'd maybe support it, but there's nothing "collective" about the people who got here quicker protecting themselves while pulling the ladder up behind them.

> 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."

It's got nothing to do with profit; if there are x homes and y>x people who want to live in them, either you give them to the x highest bidders, or you unfairly screw some people over. Rent control is one form of option B (there are others).

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#337

Post by kelnos »

itake wrote: post #79
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…

I think you’re leaving details out of your story. If the landlord wants to make a few bucks, then they keep their good tenants (lowers vacancy rate, keeps repairs low, etc). Kicking out good tenants cost landlords money.

And yet many landlords kick out good tenants, and take the risk that a new tenant that's willing to pay 30% more turns out to be a bad one.

Not sure why you're surprised: this sort of thing has been widespread for years in cities (like SF) where demand outstrips supply.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#338

Post by dominicrose »

alexjplant wrote: post #2

> “There is a subset of people, maybe the smallest subset, who are literally making a choice not to pay rent, and we don’t do well with acknowledging that but there is a subset for whom that is the case,” [...] Others bristle at the notion that some tenants are not paying rent just because they may be able to get away with it. These people absolutely exist. To pretend that they don't is willful ignorance. They are, h…

Someone I know rented a flat in Draguignan to a "friend" of a "friend". After some time he stopped paying the rent and bought alcohol instead. It was a tiny rent but it lasted for a long time. She didn't have a mortgage on it but still I don't think I would be that patient as a landlord.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#339

Post by kelnos »

itake wrote: post #126
majormajor wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 shou…

> Why should anyone be forced to leave just because someone richer wants to move in? This triggers my other frustration: empty nesters. They continue to live in great 3-4 bedroom homes that are amazing to raise a family in (near job centers, plenty of bedrooms, tight community, near good schools). This forces people like myself to spend 85+ minutes in a car (away from my family, friends etc) everyday while I drive pa…

Many of those grandmas would love to move to a smaller house or apartment in their neighborhood, but paradoxically cannot afford to do so. Blame the system, not the individual who has to make rational decisions for themselves within it.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#340

Post by dwroberts »

CalRobert wrote: post #310
dwroberts wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They end up having the opposite effect by making property owners less willing to rent out to anyone. Yes, good! Then they will sell their bloody housing stock and people can BUY them instead

"Sorry bud, I know you just wanted a place to live while you went to college in this city but if you're not ready to buy a house we don't want you here"

If all the properties owned by career landlords were returned to be sold, the value (and price) of property would go down.

This idea that ubiquitous rental (which is normally at obscene prices any way) makes cities more accessible to live in is nonsense. Landlords are creating the problem that they state they are fixing

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