Rent collections are down in New York • Hacker News Board

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#511

Post by halfxing » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

pixelatedindex wrote: post #446

kelnos wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if person A and person B both pay on time and don’t trash the place then they are quite fungible. Based on those two sole criteria, no, they aren't. Person A might call weekly about trivial matters that they should be taking care of themselves (lightbulb burned out, oven needs cleaning, refrigerator water filter needs replacement, etc.), while person B just takes care of things and doesn't bother the landlord.

Yeah but you can’t eat your cake and have it too. Part of renting is responding to complaints. If you don’t want to do that then you shouldn’t be renting. I had a landlord ask me “you’re not going to call me for basic things right?”. I’m paying you money, I’ll call you whenever I want. Didn’t rent from him. You can tell me do it yourself but why would I put money into someone else’s property?

This is such binary thinking. People have different ways of interacting with people. Some people are easier to deal with than others, and that was the parents' point, not that they never want to respond to reasonable complaints.

Landlords should provide well maintained housing and respond to reasonable complaints, and tenants should be swiftly evicted if they don't pay rent or destroy the unit they're living in. That's fair to both sides.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#512

Post by MisterTea » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:34 PM UTC

phil21 wrote: post #466

hdgvhicv wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a landlord can charge 1200 instead of 1000 why wouldn’t they? They’ll charge the maximum they can get away with, costs are irrelevant Two landlords, one with a mortgage, one without, will charge the same amount for the same property.

> If a landlord can charge 1200 instead of 1000 why wouldn’t they? They’ll charge the maximum they can get away with, costs are irrelevant This is rarely true. Only universally true for large corporate landlords where there is an entire corporate structure maximizing every dollar due to personal incentives put in place by executives/ownership. Small landlords (yes, even those with 6 buildings) are almost never min/ma…

>Small landlords (yes, even those with 6 buildings) are almost never min/maxing rent like this. They are optimizing for other things like time investment and hassle factor. And even doing the right thing.

Yup. Have a single residential in a otherwise commercial building in NYC. They pay ~50% market for a spacious 3 BR for a number of reasons; mainly because we have known them for a long time and they struggle with health issues so we never really raised them. Charging them market would put them on the street. They can afford the 50%, live nicely, and the commercial tenants pay market which pays for the building with a little leftover. If they ever move we will certainly charge more but I see no reason to gouge like others.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#513

Post by CalRobert » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:40 PM UTC

archagon wrote: post #509

CalRobert wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do that, but now it's just "I was here first" which eventually turns in to "I'm old" (after all, young people were not there first, by virtue of not existing when rent control was enacted), which doesn't seem fair either.

To be clear, the full solution I would like is rent control plus lots of new housing construction, using whatever incentives are necessary. I do not begrudge old people "taking up space" in a city they've called their home for most of their lives; in fact, I think it adds a lot to a city's character. I'd like to think that someday I'd be able to retire in my favorite city as well.

Nothing against old people but when the city gets greyer and greyer because young people can't move in and old people stay in 3+ bedroom homes it's not great.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#514

Post by toast0 » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:46 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #504

bizzletk wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all bad behavior meets the threshold of police intervention. Here's a nearly-strawman-but-definitionally-valid example: a landlord may want to remove a tenant who's being unusually hard on the place and accelerating the wear-and-tear. Could be serious enough that paying the tenant to go away would be cheaper than the cost to remediate the damage accrued over the length of the contract.

That's bad. Now everyone who lives in a home (which is everyone) is required to guess what the average amount of wear and tear is, instead of abiding by the contract.

There's common lists ... Check out Appendix 5C and 5D of this HUD publication [1]

[1] https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/hsg-06-01gapp5guid.pdf

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#515

Post by tmnvix » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 6:49 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #395

tmnvix wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't always have to consider the apparently very fragile and fickle motivations of investors. Social housing can and has worked very well in many cases.

Seems like a non sequitur? If you want people to be able to live in a place without paying rent, please just outright gift that to them and make that official policy. That may or may not be good policy, but at least it's honest. But if the deal that people agreed to is to pay rent, then the courts should also enforce that. You can get from one regime to the other, by eg buying out the landlords or outright expropriat…

Not a non sequitur. I was responding to this specifically:

> In the longer one, you need building and renting out shelter to be reasonably profitable, so that people do it.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#516

Post by cyberax » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 7:05 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #318

cyberax wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you think there aren't any racist landlords in Seattle (or any particular place), then I have a bridge I'd like to sell you... Having a large non-white population is not a protection against race-related discrimination.

Of course there are racist people in Seattle. But they are not a significant part of the population.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#517

Post by digitaltrees » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 7:13 PM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #503

digitaltrees wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But yet people think the heart of Paris, Rome or even Hong Kong are wonderful. Build the neighborhoods correctly and beautifully and the city can continue indefinitely

The Paris metro area (Aire d'attraction des villes) is only ~7,300 square miles, with the city proper only being 41 square miles. They're talking 31,400 square miles of essentially Paris proper. So imagine the city of Paris, but stretched about 766x. If you want to include the whole metro area, then ~4.3x Hong Kong is ~431 square miles. So about 73 Hong Kongs. But not really, because only ~25% of that area is actuall…

Just because the scale doesn’t exist today doesn’t mean it can’t exist or wouldn’t be desired if built.

500 years ago people would have thought any of the cities described were impossible.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#518

Post by cyberax » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

pixelatedindex wrote: post #451

arwineap wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$600,000 asset vs a $3000 deposit

It’s not like they don’t have insurance (they do) to cover the cost of damages.

I researched this. And there are no insurance companies in WA that offer these kinds of products for landlords.

Renters insurance primarily covers damage to _their_ property and only some narrow cases of damage to the unit (e.g. fires, flooding, etc.). A deadbeat tenant also will likely not be paying for insurance past the first month.

To give you some perspective, the eviction process costs around $20000 right now in legal fees. And you'll need to pay them, because the commie "housing justice" redistributionists know all the procedural tricks to delay and derail the process. Even in the best case, you're looking at a year of delay, and it can be more than 2 years for people with children. So that can be $100k+ of loss.

No insurance company is going to assume these kinds of risks without sky-high premiums.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#519

Post by vel0city » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 7:17 PM UTC

digitaltrees wrote: post #517

vel0city wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Paris metro area (Aire d'attraction des villes) is only ~7,300 square miles, with the city proper only being 41 square miles. They're talking 31,400 square miles of essentially Paris proper. So imagine the city of Paris, but stretched about 766x. If you want to include the whole metro area, then ~4.3x Hong Kong is ~431 square miles. So about 73 Hong Kongs. But not really, because only ~25% of that area is actuall…

Just because the scale doesn’t exist today doesn’t mean it can’t exist or wouldn’t be desired if built. 500 years ago people would have thought any of the cities described were impossible.

> doesn’t mean it can’t exist or wouldn’t be desired if built.

I never said anything contrary to that. I'm just saying it would be wild to see a metro area that size with that high of average development.

The above commenter suggested:

> It might literally be nowhere in the US.

It's definitely not a thing in the US. It's almost certainly not a thing in Europe either, but I'm open to being proven wrong there. It might exist in China, I haven't looked. A 100mi radius circle is massive in area. Pies are squared, if you get my point.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#520

Post by youre-wrong3 » Mon, Jun 22, 2026, 7:21 PM UTC

bluebarbet wrote: post #399

youre-wrong3 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Because HDBs are not owned by the government.

Yes. Because "social housing" is a general term that implies subsidization and affordability rather than any one specific ownership model.

No. Social housing is government owned and rented. Singapore is government built and sold. Singapore is a tiny island with little space. The government has to control what is built where and avoids it turning into Hong Kong slums.