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Rent collections are down in New York

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Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#401

Post by arwineap »

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.

A lease is a contract that both parties have agreed to. If the tenant breaks that contract, it should be terms for eviction. If the landlord breaks that contract, the tenant should be free to break the contract and move.

If the tenant does something criminal, sure, that's up to the police.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#402

Post by arwineap »

inigyou wrote: post #382
toast0 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure there's lots, but lease says no X, tenant insits on doing X seems like a reasonable thing to evict about, but not a reasonable thing to ask the police to adjudicate. At least as long as 'no X' is a reasonably moral thing to restrict. So no pets, no working on cars in the parking lot, no smoking, no loud noises/no more than N police noise complaints, etc. At least my moral code allows one to form a contract t…

Why is it moral to restrict random stuff in a rental contract? Would no programming be moral to you?

Pets, and car maintenance can both damage the property. Noise in the quiet time disrupts other tenants

Does programming cause property damage or impact other tenants?

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#403

Post by AdrianB1 »

th0raway wrote: post #300
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…

America already has plenty of cities that aren't doing very well, and aren't getting migration, so new cities aren't going to help. There's plenty of cheap housing inventory in the US, just not in the places where the jobs are.

I guess many jobs don't want to be in the places where very cheap housing exists. What is the point of earning SV money and live in a bad neighbourhood?

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#404

Post by AdrianB1 »

kdheiwns wrote: post #392
ponector wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Detroit had tons of extra housing. Why have people people fled to other cities? There is no easy fast solution to this. Just build more housing will not solve complex issues. Not saying there should not be more construction, though.

Some cities are desirable. Some are not. New York is a city that people all around the world want to live in. Detroit is the opposite.

> New York is a city that people all around the world want to live in I don't know anyone that wants to live in NY. I would not move there for a 7 figure salary. I think some opinions in this discussion are based on old realities from 50 years ago, no longer accurate.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#405

Post by bell-cot »

mapt wrote: post #396
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…

Tax property values. We could talk about the merits of Georgeism but honestly let's set that aside - conventional property taxes are sufficient here. Most of Manhattan apparently has cough ), they're a tiny fractional "decommodification" of property as asset, because the money collected from the owners is spent on the residents. Most of this money passes through directly into higher rents, and we shouldn't care about…

> Most of Manhattan apparently has While NYC has never lacked for rot and corruption, those really aren't needed - or even particularly useful - for something like this.

As soon as you've got any sort of law / regulation / status quo that benefits a class of well-to-do people, there will be intense pressure to maintain that situation. Vs. the opposition - honest reformers, idealists, the poor, whoever - even if they're far more numerous, just never seem to have the zeal / focus / attention span / whatever to correct the problem.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#406

Post by BoxFour »

fny wrote: post #222
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.

I can and do put some blame on Adams here, but I don’t think the story is ineptitude or corruption, at least on this issue. I think his administration mostly chose to prioritize the long-term housing supply problem, even if that meant more short-term pain for tenants.

He had a pretty good "Abundance-style" agenda IMO: City of Yes didn’t go far enough, but passing it at all was a big deal in NYC land-use politics. Various tax policies like 485-x are at least serious long-term attempts to restart housing production, even if the details are debatable.

> He dramatically expanded housing vouchers

This is being extremely charitable to Adams. The big CityFHEPS expansion was vetoed by Adams and the city council overrode him. The Adams administration was clearly skeptical of short-term tenant-side relief.

You can see that in simple things like his rent board appointees: Adams-era boards approved rent increases every single year. I'm not saying that's bad and it's in-line with his general view of housing as a supply-side problem. He inherited a system coming off years of freezes and very low increases under BDB, so some correction was necessary.

But overall when given the choice, he did choose to inflict a bit of short-term pain for a longer-term view.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#407

Post by CPLX »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #404
kdheiwns wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some cities are desirable. Some are not. New York is a city that people all around the world want to live in. Detroit is the opposite.

> New York is a city that people all around the world want to live in I don't know anyone that wants to live in NY. I would not move there for a 7 figure salary. I think some opinions in this discussion are based on old realities from 50 years ago, no longer accurate.

There must just be 8 million of us that haven't figured out how to leave, huh?

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#408

Post by chadgpt3 »

CalRobert wrote: post #308
Plasmoid wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually know what Vienna did? Because the overwhelming number of people who reference the city basically just repeat a few dubious talking point about restricting rent.

Have a massive empire and then lose it resulting in a capital city with surplus housing?

That was Berlin several decades ago. The gap has closed now and it's just another city.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#409

Post by saalweachter »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #368
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…

> 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…

> 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.

100 miles? My dude, that is a circle from Poughkeepsie to the tip of Long Island. Forget one-story single-family housing, there is farmland in that circle. There are hundreds of square miles of state parks in that circle.

If people were willing and able to commute that distance you could easily quintuple the housing stock in that area building nothing but one story SFH.

Manhattan itself has a median height of 4-5 stories; the outer boroughs bring that down to 2-3, because commuting from Far Rockaway to midtown is already a schlep.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#410

Post by chadgpt3 »

vachina wrote: post #294
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…

It’s fascinating that America can be the world’s superpower(?) and yet huge swathes of society still live in unstable conditions like this.

That's what it usually takes. To be a superpower, the government has to extract a lot from the citizens. Russia is an even more extreme case.
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