“Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900” • Hacker News Board

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#121

Post by bigiain » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 1:25 AM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #24

vertex-four wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they think it's unfair, they could just... not rent their buildings out. There's plenty of buildings in the US that don't come under rent control laws that they could buy and rent out.

Landlords have the right to change their mind when it comes time for lease renewal. You're arguing that landlords should be forced to always rent their property to the same tenant once they begin. That's how ownership, not rental, works. Rentals are for a limited time by definition.

On the other hand, the owner of this building would have benefitted from the intended effect of rent control on the price of the property when they bought it. There's no doubt that a rent controlled apartment building would fetch less at sale time than a non-rent-controlled equivalent.

Sure, landlords "have the right to change their mind", but only within the legal/regulatory framework in which they've chosen to invest.

But hey, "Uber, but for residential rentals". There's clearly _some_ people who'd benefit from doing end-runs around the rules by which everybody _else_ plays...

(Just think for a minute about how surge pricing for apartment rentals in SF would look... All the "locals" moving out to Oakland or Pleasanton while WWDC or Google IO is on, and moving back in again during Burningman...)

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#122

Post by jsprogrammer » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 1:26 AM UTC

harryh wrote: post #99

jsprogrammer wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when do people have a moral obligation to anything? I didn't claim a moral obligation. It is the market's prerogative to demand justification for a seller's price.

I think it's pretty clear in this situation that the justification is "We don't want to rent our house to you anymore so we are raising the price to a point where you will move out."

That was not stated in this notice.

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#123

Post by pcwalton » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 1:26 AM UTC

jrs235 wrote: post #79

tmurray wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

property taxes are capped in CA, so the landlord's costs are essentially fixed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%2819...

Does California have income tax?

Yes.

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#124

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 1:26 AM UTC

This would be an excellent time to:

1. Contact a tenants-rights attorney.

2. Familiarize yourself with housing law and mediation.

In San Francisco, the latter is covered under the San Francisco Rent board: http://sfrb.org/

The former can be located via the San Francisco Tenants' Union: http://www.sftu.org/

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#125

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 1:26 AM UTC

brandonbloom wrote: post #94

agorabinary wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property owners took a risk by purchasing property, just as anyone does purchasing shares of a public company for instance. The value of your asset can go up and you find yourself in an advantageous position (a seller's market as you put it), or prices can fall and recurring buyers (like renters) are at the advantage. Rent control only distorts the market and is unfair to everyone.

1) Landlords can diversify their properties, renters only get one. Everyone needs to live somewhere, nobody needs to be a landlord. 2) You've missed my point about moving costs. Even when the market favors renters, the lease renewal negotiation favors landlords. This is because moving costs time and money payable to third parties. As a result, the landlord can charge higher rents for renewals than they can for new le…

[deleted]

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#126

Post by cma » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 1:26 AM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #53

WalterSear wrote: post #26

I just don't see the news here. It's totally legal, and done all the time: it's why people lease houses rather than go month to month. It's not a reflection of the market in SF. This happens everywhere a landlord who isn't getting on with their month-to-month tenants and want them out, for whatever reason. It happened to me in 2005. It's not a necessarily a reflection of anything outside of the personal situation of…

They converted the other unit in the building to storage (after hassling that tenant out). I don't think it's anything like 'isn't getting on', the landlord wants to convert the building to some other use and simply doesn't care about the tenants, which isn't the same as finding them disagreeable or whatever (one imagines they might want to do something like sell it as a private home).

You really think they will keep it as storage? Once the remaining tenant is out they will renovate everything and rent both units again.

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#127

Post by maxharris » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 1:26 AM UTC

Brian-Puccio wrote: post #27

Lewisham wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's sort of obnoxious and should be illegal to force landlords to keep renters ad infinitum just because. That hardly seems fair to the landlord, no?

The idea behind limiting the landlord's profit is that many believe that it is more important for people to be able to afford housing than for others to make larger profits through, literally, rent-seeking. It's not just because, it's a social priority. Kinda like the comment the other day on HN that was something along the lines of "I don't see why we need the gov't regulating water prices, why can't the free market…

It's not just because, it's a social priority.

How does this legitimize it? A group that votes to dictate what I can do with my property might be doing it by the letter of the law, but that doesn't make it morally right. If I've earned something (e.g., I've gotten it legitimately through trade, as opposed to theft or fraud), that means I've poured some part of my life into earning that thing. Apart from issues where criminality is involved (theft, fraud, etc.), no life should be subject to the arbitrary dictates of any group.

Each of us should be free to make the most of our lives, as best as each of us can. Some of us will achieve more, others less. And there's no getting around that, because no two people can ever be the same in every respect.

To be clear, I am pro-equality in one fundamental respect: we should strive to be equal before the law.

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#128

Post by clarky07 » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 1:26 AM UTC

will_hughes wrote: post #91

IgorPartola wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, how much can you restrict the property owner? What if the other unit needed to be knocked down for a reason other than to get rid of rent control? Would it be OK for the law to tell the owner to fix it some other way? What if both units were destroyed in a natural disaster and a new structure had to be built from nothing? Is that still rent-controlled? Also, is rent control even a good idea? In the short term,…

> What if the other unit needed to be knocked down for a reason other than to get rid of rent control? Let the owner give adequate notice to vacate (where I live it's 60 days notice without cause). But the rent-control limitation stays on that land parcel for some period of time after a new building is constructed on the site. Don't want to rent it? No problems. > Newly moved in renters realize that they are paying 1…

Why are all landlords assholes again? Why is making a profit evil? Do you sell your services for half of what they are worth just to be nice?

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#129

Post by tfigment » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 1:27 AM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #60

mcpherrinm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's sort of obnoxious and should be illegal to force renters to leave their homes just because. That hardly seems fair to the tenant, no?

For at least the past thousand years, the bedrock principal of law has been "restraints on alienation of property are generally considered invalid". That is, property owners are free to do what they want with their property. Another is: Your rights cannot exceed those of who you got them from (IE tenants cannot have greater rights to land than landlords) Tenants are tenants for a reason. The whole point of ownership…

Rent control is in play here I believe to prevent price gouging. Some companies are not very moral/ethical when it comes to tenants. I would argue that the fairer thing (when Rent Control is in place) for owners might be that they can discontinue the contract when it expires but they also forfeit the right to rent that unit for a period of time (like 6 mo or 1 yr). Owners have some right to reclaim the property for own use but then are discouraged from flipping the unit and just reusing it the same way with different people.

When I rented in Boston from operating companies, they always increased rent the maximum allowed every opportunity allowed. This encouraged a lot of churn in the area I lived which I don't think was good for the area. I also had a lot of problems with them never fixing appliances so I moved out. When I started renting directly from personal owners and allowed to go month-to-month then we were both happy and the owners generally never increased rent unless when their costs also increased.

Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”

#130

Post by jlebar » Mon, Mar 16, 2015, 1:27 AM UTC

Brian-Puccio wrote: post #27

Lewisham wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's sort of obnoxious and should be illegal to force landlords to keep renters ad infinitum just because. That hardly seems fair to the landlord, no?

The idea behind limiting the landlord's profit is that many believe that it is more important for people to be able to afford housing than for others to make larger profits through, literally, rent-seeking. It's not just because, it's a social priority. Kinda like the comment the other day on HN that was something along the lines of "I don't see why we need the gov't regulating water prices, why can't the free market…

> not to mention supply/demand doesn't work for something with fairly inelastic demand

lolwut?

The free market works pretty OK for gasoline and food (taken as a whole; obviously specific foods are elastic). When was the last time you heard people clamoring for price controls at the grocery store?

Even more to the point, the free market works just fine for housing in the vast majority of the US that does not have any form of rent control.

That so many units in SF are rent controlled is a huge part of the problem here. It reduces the incentives for landlords to maintain properties (the OP specifically cites these problems) and makes it difficult-to-impossible for people in rent-controlled units to move (again, cited by the OP). It also significantly reduces the supply of housing in SF, driving up market-rate rents. Eventually the market-rate rents are so much higher than the rent-controlled rents that landlords have a strong incentive to pull stunts like what's happening here.

The other big part of the problem is that so many people seem to think that the solution to all their economic problems is more regulation. What we're seeing in SF is not a failure of the free market, but rather the failure of an over- and ineptly-regulated market.