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Rent collections are down in New York

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371–380 of 594 posts

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#371
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It happened over a longer period obviously, and what happened is the US adopted a failed industrial policy that saw our core manufacturing base shipped to China for the benefit of Wall Street and the financial sector.

Globalization wasn't a loss for all of America - the benefit of shipping manufacturing overseas was that the resulting imports were cheaper than producing domestically. After all if they weren't, people would've preferred to buy domestic. So it was a net win for the consumer via cheaper goods, but came at the expense of Detroit, Pittsburgh and other "rust belt" cities & communities. We're still grappling with the con…

It wasn’t a net win for the consumer. The consumer is now much worse off than before and our country is weaker.

It was just a mistake to allow ourselves to be ruled by the financial sector.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#372
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 jus…

> Because my money should be just as good as yours? You have more money than me, so you deserve to take my place? That’s pure entitlement and leads to cities comprised entirely of millionaires.

This assumes the supply of housing can't increase.

What mechanism do you propose instead for allocating scarce housing?

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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

This is true, the prices do drop. In Amsterdam at least it meant low income renters getting evicted so that people with roughly 2x their income could buy their former homes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t05cFv02pzY is an interesting discussion of this.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#374
post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Similar things in lots of countries. There are villages in Italy and Spain with near-zero housing prices. The qualifier that needs added is "housing in commute range of jobs ". Stoke on Trent was selling houses for £1 with improvement grants attached! https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/stoke-shows-why-selling-...

And of course if 'jobs' becomes 'there is nothing a person can do that can't be more efficiently done by hiring AI more cheaply, plus you get to treat AI completely differently because AI is not a person' that complicates matters very much.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#375
post #366

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 sp…

What makes you think our current cities are anywhere close to the limit you propose?

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#376
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nah, having 6 buildings(not houses, if were being precise with terminology here) with multiple units in each, is not a small time landlord. If you can live entirely off the rental income then you are a full time landlord and can at best claim that you aren't a large corporate landlord, but you don't get to invoke the idea that you are some sort of mom and pop situation renting out a spare unit, which is what people a…

I'm the OP—just chiming in, I can just hardly live off the rental income I make, but its a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE. Yes what I am is not analogous to someone renting out a few extra rooms. I just think my experience is analogous to that of a small time landlord in that I know each tenant very well and we have good relationships—and I manually handle each part of their tenant experience. To add more de…

That's a telling detail. How many 'big time landlords' are in the position of living in one of their 25 bedroom units? I'm going to skip the 'share a bedroom' 'cos that might well mean something otherwise desirable. In the best case scenario I too would be sharing a bedroom, but it wouldn't be my best case scenario to be in a 25 unit building unless it was quite large and well built.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#377
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why's that anything to do with you. Call the cops.

"I had a problem, and I thought, 'I know, I will call the cops!' Now we have two problems."

When the people is your car got stolen, you have two problems

When the problem is lower class people are playing music too loud, the cops will solve it one way or another.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#378
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then housing couldn't be used as retirement savings and the economy would collapse immediately

A creative solution! What if we rethought what "retirement savings" is and should be?

Impossible because you'd have to convince everyone to give up theirs

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#379
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I'm rich, and I want to live in SF dagnabbit, and how dare the (checks notes) existing residents of SF vote to block me from taking one of their apartments that I obviously deserve to live in more than they do because I'm rich?

By that logic, we should let the Ohlone tribes underbid all existing residents. They too are just rich assholes who displaced those that were rightfully there before them.

Are they there right now? Then they're covered by rent control laws.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#380
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was aggravated by modern city planning with it's separation of function that left these new districts with no third spaces, barely any shops and large spaces of 'no man's land' between buildings. In classics European cities there were shops on street level and dense blocks that generated demand for those. The post war developments followed the 'high rise in the park' concept, lots of greenery and parking lots be…

High rises were far from being the only, or even the dominant model for social housing in Europe. Different plans such as low rises, semi-detached houses and single homes also got implemented.

Those are even worse - you need a certain density for urban life, otherwise you'll just create large empty spaces that belong to no-one, so nobody feels responsible for them.
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