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Rent collections are down in New York

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Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#521

Post by saalweachter »

vel0city wrote: post #519
digitaltrees wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm actually inclined to believe it was a typo for 10 mile radius.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#522

Post by halfxing »

lovich wrote: post #248
halfxing wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't invoke a "mon and pop situation renting out a spare unit" idea, that's your own that you're projecting on my comment. I did say that they are a small landlord, and I stand by it given that a large landlord is several orders of magnitude larger than them. If in your world that's only a label you want to give someone renting out a single spare unit, then so be it. I disagree.

> mon and pop situation renting out a spare unit > small landlord Those are effectively synonymous to me. The line in the sand that definitively makes you not a small time landlord is if you earn enough from rental income after expenses to make as much as the average job's income. If you disagree I will need you to define what "small time landlord" means to you then so we can figure out the gap in our understanding.

"Small" is a word indicating that quantitatively relative to other things, it is less, i.e. Very Small According to [1] (Doorloop, 2026), Greystar manages 823,581 units as the largest landlord. The 10th largest landlord is WinnCompanies with 120,855 units. These are "very large" to me. If we make a generous curve then a large landlord has 10% of those units, so somewhere in the 10,000 unit range, a medium landlord 10% of that or 1,000 units, a small landlord 10% of that or 100 units, and a very small landlord has the last interval of 1-10 units. Hence, 55 units is somewhere between very small and small.

[1] https://www.doorloop.com/blog/largest-property-management-co...

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#523

Post by mrguyorama »

dgoldstein0 wrote: post #301
CPLX wrote: 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…

If your purchasing power is cut in half because you lost your manufacturing job and had to replace it with running a cash register, but the cost of toys also dropped in half (but not things like food and housing, which doubled in price), are you actually better off?

No.

Average Americans are poorer now than they were before they could buy everything at Walmart. As long as housing continues to be a "Line must go up" investment, Americans will continue to become poorer as more and more of their income has to be directed to housing.

The price didn't even fall that much. One look at Temu and friends should disabuse you of the notion that we are actually getting things for "Cheap". Usually it just means product quality was drastically reduced thanks to millions spent on "value engineering", so that your new products don't last long enough to put you out of business.

Sure is great that GE can now reliably predict the lifespan of parts in their washing machines so they never make the mistake of gasp overspeccing a component so it lasts a lifetime!

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#524

Post by rayiner »

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…

I suspect the answer is two-fold:

1) Pass legislation to ban the fed from pulling interest rates below 2%. The unprecedented ZIRP completely fucked up asset values and it will take decades to unwind it.

2) In cities, the government should own all the land and owners of properties should hold only a long-term lease. This will allow the government to control land use and upzone density while ensuring private building owners have skin in the game to actually build and maintain dwellings.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#525

Post by rayiner »

digitaltrees wrote: post #497
saalweachter wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 distanc…

But if you design the city correctly around self contained neighborhoods that are no more than a 15 minute walk no one has to commute that far.

This makes no sense. People want to commute to the best job they can get, not the one that happens to be in their neighborhood. And people aren't going to move neighborhoods when they move jobs, especially with spouses and kids who have jobs and schools in the existing place.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#526

Post by AnthonyMouse »

saalweachter wrote: post #409
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 distanc…

> 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.

That's kind of the point. Notice that housing demand is recursive.

The area you're talking about is NYC metro. If you draw a 100 mile radius around Manhattan then Poughkeepsie is inside it. Is someone going to live in Poughkeepsie and commute to Manhattan? Probably not. Is someone going to live in Poughkeepsie and commute in the direction of Manhattan? Absolutely. Which in turn recursively alleviates housing pressure in that direction. More housing in Poughkeepsie frees up existing housing in Peekskill, more availability in Peekskill frees up existing housing in Yonkers, lots of people are willing to commute from Yonkers to Manhattan.

And both "100 miles" and the NYC metro area (the highest population density metro area in the US) are far extremes. The point is that even that would improve affordability if it was the only option. Meanwhile in reality there are single family homes that could be 5 story buildings in Yonkers, if it wasn't prohibited by zoning.

> 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.

If you actually did that, would housing affordability improve? Yes it would. It's in fact what's slowly happening on its own when the better alternatives are banned; it's why housing in Manhattan isn't twice what it is now. But that's sprawl. Sprawl sucks. People pay less for housing but have 60 minute commutes. Why do that by adding far away single family homes instead of adding medium-height buildings closer to where people work?

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#527

Post by rurp »

alexashka wrote: post #473
Applejinx wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an open source developer. To me, it tracks that people can have other motivations and balance those with money/survival and all. What nikkwong is saying is, you can want to do well, have social obligations, take action to serve the community and not just your own benefit, and even want to do so because you sleep better and have nicer interactions with people as a rule. That tracks, I believe it, that's what I do.…

I'm sure some slave owners were 'nice people'. Still slave owners, right? But I treat my slaves better than everyone I know and I only have half a dozen! I don't only have slaves for profit! Slave owners in the south were actually far more likely to be better people than today's landlords because they had far less choice but to compete with other people who engaged in slavery than landlords of today. The 'only' straw…

Good lord, renting a property to someone who voluntarily signs a lease is equivalent to slavery?! Give me a break.

I will say you're doing an excellent job of backing up OPs post. There absolutely are people with an unhinged view of reality who will aggressively try to screw over people they think are in the "wrong" group.

Arguing that poor people never try to abuse the system is some serious ivory tower BS.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#528

Post by digitaltrees »

CPLX wrote: post #371
dgoldstein0 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought that as well. But the benefits of cheaper goods when manufacturing is shift elsewhere comes at the cost if the future innovations that follow manufacturing. American businesses forget that happening to the British when we took over manufacturing for England. Now China and Mexico have innovations we lack because their engineering has access to the assembly lines and see where innovations need to happen.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#529

Post by mrguyorama »

arwineap wrote: post #393
baby wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lefty tenant here. I def. stopped paying my rent a few times until my landlord fixed their shit or agreed to stop scamming me. Last time I did it I signed a lease for a year, with 2 months of advance notice if I decided to leave (in the UK). I told them 2 months before the end of my lease, and they told me I had to wait for the end of my lease, then wait 2 months, and then I could be out. I just stopped paying rent,…

> I def. stopped paying my rent a few times until my landlord fixed their shit In most municipalities, this is OK so long as the thing that needs to be fixed is a habitability issue. Heat, water, etc > One day he showed up at my place (with soup who was coming to fix something) and tried to enter. I told him to stay out. ??? You wouldn't let him solve the issue you stopped paying for? How do you justify that?

The issue he stopped paying for was an explicit rejection of their tenant rights, and fixing a separate issue doesn't fix that.

Re: Rent collections are down in New York

#530

Post by mrguyorama »

pjc50 wrote: post #357
jandrewrogers wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I anecdotally know of a few cases in Seattle where tenants with high incomes that could easily pay just don't. There is a subculture that actively encourages this type of behavior and the laws are setup such that there are almost no consequences for it. I've also met people who bragged about doing it. While rare, it is still common enough that it has become a real problem and has become socially acceptable in some ci…

> corrosive to the social contract What we see is iterated prisoner's dilemma. Enough people have had their landlords play "defect" against them (rent rises in excess of wage inflation, evictions, failure to do maintenance, intrusion) that the public have started playing "defect" against the landlords. Same as in a lot of American public life.

Also like, objectively the courts are on the side of evictions. They have lots of practice and your local PD will be happy to help. The process works just fine.

Most places have a pretty clean eviction process: You provide a very short notice, 14 days for non-payment, and then get a court hearing.

If landlords are upset that it takes a long time to get to a court date, sorry, get in line with the rest of us who can't get basic Justice because the US doesn't fund public services, which the court is.

Like what do you expect, that we just throw people out onto the street on your word? Do you not see how obviously that will get abused?

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