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Rent collections are down in New York

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Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#361

Post by elktown »

throe939448 wrote: post #269
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?

You mean like in Sweeden, where you have to wait 20 years for assigned flat? Europe has no homelesness, because migrants are housed at hotels at great expense!

That's due to moving away from the government ensuring an adequate supply of rental units over the last decades. Intentional free market style policies.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#362

Post by leoedin »

klausa wrote: post #186
nikkwong wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.

Surely that's the case for all sorts of services we pay for. Renting a house is paying for a service. The money disappears and in return you get the service. A nice landlord (and by nice I mean - responsive to problems, following laws, empathetic to the tenant, trusting of the tenant etc) provides a better service than a bad one. Unfortunately you rarely know which kind of landlord you have until you move in.

I think it's fair to say that there are bad landlords, and that there are circumstances where landlords are exploitative. But that doesn't change the fact there are also circumstances where landlords provide a useful service to people. Buying a house isn't always practical - landlords should exist to provide a service to people who don't want long term financial commitments.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#363

Post by [deleted] »

kelnos wrote: post #313
alexashka wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Wow, way to not actually read what a person said, and then quote things and say they mean something that they don't. I get that you don't like the concept of people owning property and renting it to others, but maybe stop arguing in bad faith? Here's a hint: it's possible to be doing something for the money, but not only do it for the money. It's possible to operate a business, but also be a well-meaning person who t…

[deleted]

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#364

Post by hyuuu »

inigyou wrote: post #145
Loudergood wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/mega-property-inves...

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#365

Post by registeredcorn »

epsteingpt wrote: post #235
knowaveragejoe wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain more? What happened in Detroit in the mid 2010s, how did itreverse course after that?

Detroit was the hub of the auto industry. Outsourcing and foreign competition hollowed out the central city (which deliberately didn't have public transit) and left gigantic abandoned houses and skyscrapers throughout. There has been massive public investment and popular support to cause a revival of sorts in the city and is a success story. Go look at some photos from like 2010-2014.

How was the work outsourced around that timeframe? Do they no longer have an auto-industry at all in Detroit, or is it just greatly reduced?

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#366

Post by outime »

There's a limit to every city, and just building new infrastructure won't solve everything. It always lags behind demand and there are space constraints, budget constraints and countless other limitations.

At the same time, expectations keep rising for everyone (myself included): not wanting to spend one or two hours commuting to work, not wanting to live 45 minutes away from a large supermarket and not wanting to spend three hours or more just to meet friends or family among others. The problem is that it simply doesn't scale, and every country/city faces different challenges so there is no single universal solution.

I'm afraid the real discussion can't happen outside of small circles at this time because it'd involve highly controversial topics that much of the population in Western democracies (can only talk about what I know) isn't ready to confront. We have deeply ingrained ideas that are difficult to challenge so instead we'll probably watch cities fully collapse before anything.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#367

Post by BerislavLopac »

mentalgear wrote: post #359
maeln wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. So it is not simple. "Just build more" always comes up in those discussions, and while it does help (and has been proven to help), it is not the definite answer for the housing issues. Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move. Peo…

It would of course be a functioning state's responsibility to plan urban/city development and economic incentives to move there. Regarding the ownership vs renter housing debate: I think Singapore may be an excellent example of a state doing it's duty: affordable state-owned housing and people are distributed per housing per the national demographics so you also build social coherence vs ghetto-fication.

Singapore is a special case, since it doesn't really have any rural areas.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#368

Post by AnthonyMouse »

maeln wrote: post #352
digitaltrees wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. America has enough land. We could build new infrastructure, give people lots of land or build houses like we did in the 40s and 50s. Of the price of a house was brought down to 1x the annual salary of the median individual income some of these problems wouldn’t exist. We need to flood the system with investment and inven…

> The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. So it is not simple. "Just build more" always comes up in those discussions, and while it does help (and has been proven to help), it is not the definite answer for the housing issues. Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move. Peo…

> Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move.

If you build a city full of empty buildings in a place with minimal existing population like the Alaskan wilderness then obviously. But what if you double the housing stock in all the existing cities where people want to live?

> Ground space is limited, so one solution is to build more vertical, but it is costly and has its own limitation.

Extremely tall buildings can get pretty expensive, but moderate height buildings (e.g. five stories) have similar per-unit construction costs to single family homes. Meanwhile now count the number of places you can draw a 100 mile radius where the median height of the existing buildings is even that tall. It might literally be nowhere in the US.

Notice also the extent to which density can thwart the scarcity of land. You put a five story building with four units per story on a plot of land instead of a single family home and the contribution per unit of the cost of land has gone down by 95%.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#369

Post by [deleted] »

cyberax wrote: post #272
craftkiller wrote: post #119

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.

This is utter BS. Seattle is about 40% non-White. And has never been racist, or even had slavery (outside the Native population).

[deleted]

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#370

Post by CalRobert »

stahtops wrote: post #321
CalRobert wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, but it's easier to build quality mixed use development and walkable, bikable neighbourhoods when you don't have thousands of NIMBYs screaming down every proposal.

Pick your favorite place on the planet. Then tell me if 8 billion people can live there, and would it be the same place if they did? I know the answer to both of these questions, and so do you.

... I'm talking about building new cities, which seems like the exact opposite of what you're describing?

Anyway, as far what happens when you make renting impossible (or just de facto not financially realistic), in Amsterdam it led to a lot of rentals being sold. The people buying had roughly 2x the income of those renting, on average. So, I guess that's a good thing, if your goal is to evict lower income renters so people can buy a place more cheaply. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05cFv02pzY discusses this at length.

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