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

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

#211

Post by scintill76 »

gfodor wrote: post #50

This person should be grateful they were able to live in a place in such high demand so cheaply due to unfair rent control laws. If a 4x increase in rent is bearable by the market then it's not a sign of landlord greed, it's a sign of a broken system. I'm sure if this person was offered the opportunity to make an extra 5k a month with little to no change in effort on their part they would do so and be offended if peo…

> If a 4x increase in rent is bearable by the market... it's a sign of a broken system

This person thinks the rent increase wouldn't actually be borne by the market. Maybe the landlord has no actual expectation of making that much, and setting the price so high is just to get rid of this renter. Whether that's an OK tactic is debatable I guess, but legal trickery around zoning laws and lying about prices sound like signs of a broken system too.

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

#212

Post by wpietri »

orangecat wrote: post #137
brandonbloom wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent control does not force landlords to keep renters ad infinitum. It protects tenants from price gouging. Landlords can impose rent increases far beyond fair market rents for new tenants because it's costly and inconvenient to move, but (in a sellers' market) cheap to replace tenants. This imbalance of negotiating power necessitates regulations. Now, you can argue that particular rent control laws are too aggressiv…

Landlords can impose rent increases far beyond fair market rents for new tenants because it's costly and inconvenient to move, but (in a sellers' market) cheap to replace tenants. The market rent is exactly what other potential tenants are willing to pay. Now, you can argue that particular rent control laws are too aggressive, or that the strategy for calculating bounds on rent increases cause excessive opportunity l…

> The market rent is exactly what other potential tenants are willing to pay.

You're not understanding the scam. Suppose you move in to a place and pay the then-market rent of $1000 a month. Let's further suppose that it cost you $2400 to move, plus a shitload of time and effort that you'd rather not repeat. If the next year the market price remains $1000/month, the landlord can still raise the rent on you because you'll be reluctant (and possibly unable) to pay moving costs again. The exact amount they can get away with depends on personal tolerance and your time value for money, but given how much moving sucks, in practice it's quite a bit.

> Or that the inability to charge market prices causes property owners to refuse to rent in the first place, thereby making housing problems even worse.

That is definitely a negative side effect, but not a huge one in practice. How many apartments can one person use? Who would really let an apartment building stand empty when you could be charging market rent? In San Francisco, pretty much nobody.

A bigger problem is that it might reduce the supply of new apartments. But that's also not a problem in SF because any building built after rent control was passed is not under rent control.

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

#213

Post by oconnore »

remarkEon wrote: post #195
Brian-Puccio wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wouldn't make the "let the landlord make more money" argument, I would be making the "rent control is a significant distortion of the market which hurts both renters and tenants in the long run" argument. Housing absolutely is a social priority, and while rent control is definitely a well intentioned attempted and addressing the issue, a more effective approach would be to build more - not restrict the price signal…

Vacancy decontrol = new construction can have whatever rent they want. So preventing a landlord from screwing over the current tenant does not prevent housing from meeting demand.

New construction does face many other issues, though. NIMBY's, parking regulations, zoning, etc.

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

#214

Post by mynameishere »

therealwill wrote: post #58

Here is the home: http://www.trulia.com/homes/California/San_Francisco/sold/71... Taxes are 11,043 with a value of 904,085. $2145 looks like an EXTREMELY low rent for a house of this size in San Francisco. (half of the rent is just property taxes.) The landlord was likely losing money keeping it rented at $2145 even if he owned it free and clear.

Looks like something worth exactly as much as a day's rental of bulldozers, excavators, and dump trucks. I'm not sure if San Franciscans are aware of how horribly they are being abused. Go somewhere else.

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

#216

Post by pingswept »

ghshephard wrote: post #182

I find it interesting that we can, with almost 95%+ success, determine who on these threads owns Real Estate in San Francisco, versus those who don't. There are admittedly some comments that are in the margins, but the number of false positives/negatives is probably pretty close to zero. In particular, those who rant about the evils of uncontrolled rental markets are 99% likely to not own real estate in San Francisco…

How can you verify your assumptions about whether or not a commenter owns real estate?

For example, do I own real estate in San Francisco? I think your chances of getting that right are pretty close to 50%.

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

#217

Post by thefreeman »

clarky07 wrote: post #128
will_hughes wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

All landlords aren't assholes, just the ones who try to force people out of their homes by jacking up rents to insane prices.

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

#218

Post by jusben1369 »

kemiller wrote: post #157
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,…

On strictly economic terms, I agree with you. The trouble with the plan you describe is that essentially guts neighborhoods. The very vibrant, interesting neighborhoods that draw people to San Francisco in the first place. By the time the correction occurs, the networks of lower-income people that tend to be the bedrock of the more interesting urban neighborhoods have been disrupted, often fatally. That ship may have…

The trouble though with this view is it always acts as though neighborhoods are static and unchanging. But any large City that's more than 100 years old sees neighborhoods rise and fall economically and/or change dramatically in a social sense over time. Sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better. When you "protect" these neighborhoods with artificial controls you just end up extorting all kinds of outcomes which are never healthy. The tenant on this FB post is like a Frog in slowly heating water with no sense of temperature. By the time she realizes what's happening it's too late and she's seriously stuck. If the rents in her area were going up 10 - 20% or more every year (and hers along with it) the shock would be less and she'd plan ahead to move.

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

#219

Post by wpietri »

escherize wrote: post #210
wpietri wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're missing is that housing is not a normal good. Sure, there is a housing marketplace, which can provide some correction. But houses are also homes. People are born in them. People die in them. They love them, they cherish them, they fight for them. There's a lot of truth in the saying, "Home is where the heart is." What you're missing in that scenario is the large number of people who are displaced not just…

I don't understand this argument. _Quality_ housing seems to me, to be a normal good, because when income increases the demand for such housing increases. Even crappy places in SF seem to be quality housing. Whether or not there are class issues, or your house is sentimental is irrelevant. Edit: typo

Apparently "normal good" is an economic technical term, and apparently you are using that technical definition here and not the normal use of "normal". I have no idea why you'd do that; as you point out, that technical term bears no relation to what I'm talking about.

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

#220

Post by mwetzler »

freehunter wrote: post #169
knorby wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived in Chicago before moving to SF a few years ago, and I can't imagine ever going back. There is an argument about jobs, people, and companies that's complex, but people pay so much for so little space because it really is that valuable. The weather is near perfect year round, the food/beer/wine is astounding, the landscape is glorious, and so on. Midwest winters, particularly as climate change is making them wo…

Is the weather, food/beer/wine, and landscape really that much better than Santa Cruz? Is it that much better than Raleigh? Or Austin? Or any other city that isn't San Francisco? Besides the benefits you might get from SF, let's be realistic: the city doesn't want you. It doesn't want any of you. The only benefit you're getting is the people who moved there just like you, and the city doesn't want them, either. If th…

A lot of what you are saying rings true, but you may be underestimating just how small San Francisco is and how large the tech entrepreneur population is here. The number of new companies being started here is what makes San Francisco feel special. There is no other city on earth where you can overhear someone's new business idea at the cafe, the bakery, a restaurant, and the subway. And the crazy thing is that no one rolls their eyes at these ideas like they would in Chicago. It's pretty bizarre, sometimes unsettling, sometimes wonderful. It wouldn't happen at this frequency in Santa Cruz or Raleigh, or even New York or Austin or Boulder.
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