Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is kind of the difference between owning and renting.
Ask someone who's been evicted by foreclosure. Say, by way of robosigning.
Foreclosure... for not paying your bills? Not seeing the point.
“Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”
411–420 of 628 posts
Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”
#412Earlier 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,…
Transaction costs. Moving is not free: at a minimum, there are search costs to find a new apartment and moving costs to pack all your stuff up and move it around. Very often, there are also storage needs, and if you move non-locally, there are jobsearch and job termination costs, recruiting costs by their employers, relocation costs, etc. Many of these are externalities - they're born by people who are not party to t…
If you are an employer in SF and your employees are getting priced out and moving away, maybe you are not paying enough. If you cannot afford to pay more, it isn't your employees that are being priced out, it's you. Move to any other area with lots of talent and 1/10 of the cost of living, or face this problem again and again.
Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”
#413Earlier 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…
You can use the same argument for any good or service. Tear something away from a person and you can absolutely traumatize them. It can be a teddy bear for a little kid, a car for an adolescent, your laptop, you get the idea. You can't legislate life into some gentle state. It is what it is. You can, however, smooth out the bumps. Unfortunately, rent control does the exact opposite. It creates stupidity like this. Wh…
Sane argument for free-form enterprise. Trauma enterprises are from a gross gap legal sanitizer function that forces markets to change. Tearaways you can take from logical systems that try to sense problems with random, arbitrary math(tied) category .
Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are you aware that you just defined turning a profit as an asshole move? Perhaps you want to rethink your definition. Nowhere did I say that, and I'll thank you to not put words in my mouth. Actually, interestingly, you've now also defined profit as a zero-sum game across society. For some to be enriched, others must falter and be brought lower. If that's what profit is, then yes, I do believe profit is an asshole…
> Actually, interestingly, you've now also defined profit as a zero-sum game across society. For some to be enriched, others must falter and be brought lower. OK. What nuance of your stated position did I mistake? In what way do you make a profit and enrich yourself without it coming at the expense of another? Bear in mind that trading something of yours for money from someone else is very literally a trade taking pl…
Not when prop 13 caps are generally higher than rent control caps.
I don't believe we're talking about rent control here, or at least not exclusively. The original article is about someone's rent increasing by over 400%. I can't imagine how that could be justified by cost increases on the landlord's side.
I'm not arguing that the current system of rent control and property tax increase limits is working properly and is the best way to do things.
At any rate, you're re-framing the argument here to try to make me look bad. Your original question asked about landlords making 10x of their existing profit. If the landlord is already making a profit (which was the premise of your question), clearly they're not having issues making money in a rent-control+prop 13 environment. There are many multipliers between 0x and 10x, and I would argue that the responsible multiplier in order to maintain non-asshole status is well below 10... and even well below 1... but certainly greater than 0.
Just to be clear, though, to reiterate my initial point and make my position clear: if you're making a $500 profit off a $2000 monthly rental, and decide that you can and should make $5000 (a 10x increase in profit) by raising the rent to $7000, if that's at the expense of the renter's ability to pay... yes, it is my opinion that you're an asshole. That is the original question you asked, and that's the question I answered.
Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can use the same argument for any good or service. Tear something away from a person and you can absolutely traumatize them. It can be a teddy bear for a little kid, a car for an adolescent, your laptop, you get the idea. You can't legislate life into some gentle state. It is what it is. You can, however, smooth out the bumps. Unfortunately, rent control does the exact opposite. It creates stupidity like this. Wh…
You can't legislate life into some gentle state. So you don't believe laws against crime? You can use the same argument for any good or service. None of the things you mentioned have the universality of a home, which strikes almost everyone, regardless of demographic. Those who aren't adversely affected by not having a home are notable for being extreme outliers. As wpietri said, housing is not a normal good.
A better way for him to have put it would have been: "Just like the Indiana state legislature can't by statute declare pi to be 3.14, San Francisco cannot repeal the law of supply and demand".
Rent control or not, the law of supply and demand still applies; it just expresses itself in more dysfunctional and unproductive ways.
That's the problem with rent control. Reasonable people can disagree about whether the public policy goal of getting people affordable housing trumps the rights of property owners. But they can't disagree about how many digits are in pi, or about whether rent control works. It doesn't work. It harms everyone in the market except for a lucky subset of tenants.
Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”
#416I 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…
The news isn't about the legality of the rent increase - it's clearly legal - it's about the sanity of a world (or rather a city) in which this happens, and of the people who choose to live there.
Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
Transaction costs. Moving is not free: at a minimum, there are search costs to find a new apartment and moving costs to pack all your stuff up and move it around. Very often, there are also storage needs, and if you move non-locally, there are jobsearch and job termination costs, recruiting costs by their employers, relocation costs, etc. Many of these are externalities - they're born by people who are not party to t…
If you are an employer in SF and your employees are getting priced out and moving away, maybe you are not paying enough. If you cannot afford to pay more, it isn't your employees that are being priced out, it's you. Move to any other area with lots of talent and 1/10 of the cost of living, or face this problem again and again.
SF is expensive, but not 10x so compared to other American cities. If you do move to a place like Manila, you might not be able to find the talent you need.
Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”
#418Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only there were some way for humans to survive on water!
In all seriousness though, I'm fairly certain that a repurposed cruise ship turned luxury condo building anchored off the coast with a free, regular speed boat shuttle could be a profitable business given the bonkers prices in SF proper.
Some cities actually do stuff like that. You can can anchor large, cheap boats in Paris on the Seine (you pay a rent for that of course,but its much cheaper - closer to a parking spot).
Then these boats are made into single apartments. They're larger than most apartments in fact. There is electricity and water included, the only thing you need to get wirelessly is internet (which is rather easy).
Re: “Your monthly rent .. shall increase from $2145 to $8900”
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. It's not bearable by the market. $2145 is low but market rate is nowhere near $8900 for a place like this; not even half that. This is clearly an attempt to force the tenant out with an inflated rate. I'm not going to comment on either sides rights here but this rate is not simply "what the mar…
Can we really even say what "market rate" is anymore?
Good question, but the maps and figures released by the rental companies usually put it in the $3000-some range, plus or minus depending on area.