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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”

#491

Post by tizzdogg »

clarky07 wrote: post #117
IgorPartola wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine someone going through this trouble instead of just asking. It is a dick move, for sure. I just don't see GGP's point about making this specific action illegal as the solution. Seems to me that it would the just complicate things and in the end negatively affect everyone.

We only see one side here. perhaps they did ask nicely, and the renter said no.

It is fairly standard practice in San Francisco for landlords to offer high tens of thousands of dollars to renters for them to move. I have a friend who paid a tenant $60k to move out. This allows them to avoid the complications and restrictions of the Ellis act or owner move-in (notably restrictions on condo conversion).

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

#492

Post by kelnos »

harryh wrote: post #350
kelnos wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The not-asshole thing to do is to continue making your current profit. Or hell, raise it a little, but not enough to make it financially untenable for your current tenant to live there. You think it's ok to do something that will benefit your bank account but will simultaneously force someone to move out of their home? Enriching yourself at the expense of others is an asshole move, to me at least.

What about the other person who really wants to move to SF, is willing to pay more than your current tenant, but now can't because there is so little other supply available the market price on those is through the roof? Do we just not care about that person?

If that person's ability to move to SF hinges on someone else getting kicked out of their home and city, then no, I don't care about that person.

But I'd rather be able to care about both people. I'd rather SF's planning process wasn't so idiotic that it's impossible to build at the rate we need to in order to house everyone who wants to live here, at whatever economic level. I'd rather that rent control hadn't helped to foster a culture of NIMBYism that causes all new projects to get shot down, drastically scaled down, or at best delayed several years.

The main priority in getting ourselves out of this housing crisis should be to build like crazy, and accept that neighborhoods will change, and the city will change. Once we've done that, and demand has stabilized, we can do things like eliminate or drastically scale back rent control, or at least make it more sane. But for now I believe it's necessary to avoid screwing people over.

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

#493

Post by jsprogrammer »

prawn wrote: post #467
jsprogrammer wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Because that is generally the law. Typically with a 30 day notice of termination required from the tenant. 2) The reason for the law is that people should not be thrown out of their homes on the whims of a second or third party.

The law as it pertains to these contracts or all residential tenancy contracts in the US? Are 3-, 6- and 12-month leases common? All the residential arrangements I know of here in Australia would be 6- or 12-monthly. Gives a tenant some certainty, but also enables a property owner to move back in, sell, redevelop, etc.

The law as it pertains to rent-controlled jurisdictions.

All lengths are common, though 12-month is perhaps the most common. In rent-controlled jurisdictions, when a lease expires it converts to a month-to-month tenancy where the owner may only evict for good cause (failure to pay rent, gross negligence, illegal activities, etc), but a tenant must provide 30 days notice of intent to abandon.

Often an owner is allowed to require a lease extension be signed, only if the extended lease is materially identical to the current lease except in expiration date (including length of the lease).

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

#494

Post by Daishiman »

IgorPartola wrote: post #433
impendia wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rent goes down. The market has corrected itself and all is well. What am I missing? You're missing the fact that rent won't go down -- at least not by much, because living in San Francisco will remain desirable for enough people who are willing to pay very high rents. Only the very wealthy, or those who bought in a long time ago, would be able to live in San Francisco. Of course, this is increasingly the case anywa…

So the SF is just a very expensive place to live. So is NYC, Tokyo, and London. Whether you consider these outcomes acceptable or not, it seems they are inevitable. By keeping rent control, you are actually leading people into believing they can afford to live in a place that is poised to prove them out one way or another. I personally cannot fathom why one place can be son much more expensive than another. Sure, the…

> I personally cannot fathom why one place can be son much more expensive than another. Sure, there is a price differential, but is SF really that much better than Brimingham, or Durham, or Albany?

If you're a certain type of person, yes. Miles better.

You have rows and rows of blocks catering to specialty commerces, astounding, world-class food for ridiculously reasonable prices that can't be obtained anywhere else, a huge amount of access to employers and jobs that are also nonexistant outside of a few large cities. You don't need car ownership; you're trivially close to international airports, and the cultural scene is, once again, not available in smaller cities.

Having spent almost all my life in large cities, the suburbs are just terrible boring, even if your place to live is 5x bigger.

Obviously if you like the outdoors that situation may be very different, but not all suburbs and small cities have access to outdoors recreation, and not all big cities are that far away from excellent parks.

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

#495

Post by ultrasaurus »

tptacek wrote: post #434
ultrasaurus wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Mission street in my neighborhood alone there are at lease 3 large lots with derelict buildings on them and they've been that way for years. There are quite a few other smaller parcels on Mission and smaller streets. If we want to take housing seriously, let's start with a law that says "If the building is abandoned for 5 years, you lose it, it becomes housing."

Unless SF eliminates its insane height restrictions, the very few buildings that would be repurposed in this fashion would immediately become $4000 apartments.

It's a few drops in the bucket, yes -- but if we can't even bring ourselves to turn derelict buildings into housing, it's hard to claim that we're serious about solving the problem.

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

#496

Post by jsprogrammer »

brc wrote: post #282
jsprogrammer wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By definition, profit is extracting more than the 'worth' of something.

No, profit is arranging a voluntary transaction where both parties where both parties trade something they value less for something they value more. Where did all this 'profit is evil' talk come from anyway? This is a site dedicated to startups and tech talk, and all of a sudden we have activist student slogans passing for comment?

The term is a bit ambiguous. You are referring to profit, the concept. I am referring to profit, the concrete measurable (ie. revenue - cost).

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

#497

Post by tizzdogg »

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…

I actually know a few homeowners in San Francisco in this situation right now. They have extra units in their building (which is also where they live), and choose to leave it vacant rather than deal with the hassle of rent control. They do not need the income and would rather not bother with possibly getting a tenant who never leaves. It's not economically rational, but people are not always rational, especially when dealing with their homes.

The building I live in is also in the situation currently where a unit is being left vacant in anticipation of a condo conversion in a couple years.. San Francisco has a very complicated condo conversion law but part of it is that during conversion some existing tenants have to be offered lifetime leases which can never be increased. Leaving units vacant is a rational way of dealing with that.

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

#498

Post by conanbatt »

swatow wrote: post #450
bbarn wrote: post #441

The reason this article is trending at the top of HN is the reason this person is going through this. The idea that great start-ups must exist on an 47 sq mile piece of land with utterly mediocre weather (the literal definition of mediocre, that is - one many of us love, myself included) in perfect coexistence with a quaint aging population below the poverty line, drug addicts, and the last generation that sought to…

I think people go to San Francisco for the 20-30 year old girls, not the aging population or drug addicts.

Nobody moves to San Francisco looking for girls.

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

#499

Post by kelnos »

EpicEng wrote: post #340
kelnos wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Deciding that you need a fatter paycheck at the expense of a renter who can't afford your desire -- yes, desire, not need -- for more money... yeah, in my book that makes you an asshole. Any rent increase that isn't tied to an increase in costs (sure, maybe plus a few percent for profit) or a CPI/inflation increase is just greed, plain and simple. Put another way: landlords who are al…

So, unless I'm in it to only make as little money as possible for me to have a reasonably comfortable existence (by some standard you have set), I'm a greedy asshole. I disagree. I want to be rich someday. I want to retire at 50 and travel the world, eating at overpriced restaurants along the way. I want to leave some wealth to my children. That's why I bust my hump working a day job as well as building assets in my…

I was too harsh, and for that I apologize. I more care about the level of the increases: a landlord can certainly pull in more profit with a modest rent increase that doesn't break the tenant's bank (and that's likely even a higher increase than current rent control laws allow). The OP's rent is about to become over 4x what it once was. I certainly won't deny that the cost of owning a property will tend to go up, but it sounds to me like most of that rent increase will end up being pure profit.

I want to be rich someday, too. But I don't want to be rich knowing that I directly made the lives of other people harder in doing so. I don't think wealth and capitalism has to be a zero-sum game; I don't believe that for me to become richer, someone else must become poorer.

All this is precisely why we don't have absolute property ownership rights. We as a society have collectively agreed that land is a limited, public asset, and we're willing to allow people to own it, and receive some benefits from the state, but also have to follow some rules that serve the public's interest... like not kicking people to the curb out of greed. If you own land, then you should know this already: it's not "yours" in the absolute sense. It's an investment, to be sure, but your return on that investment can be limited by law in some cases. This is just one way in how that shakes out.

I'm sorry that doesn't jive with your political/world outlook, but that doesn't make me a bad person. There are pros and cons to any economic system, but apparently capitalism is not for you.

I'm not going to try to define "good person" or "bad person", but I will say that the idea of evicting someone from their home (and sometimes city) because their landlord sees dollar signs in their eyes is just reprehensible to me. That doesn't put me at odds with capitalism; I think that just makes me human.

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

#500

Post by kelnos »

mod wrote: post #488
kelnos wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rentals are for a limited time by definition. If you're going to trot out an absolutist term like "by definition", I'd like to inform you that "limited time" is by no means a condition for being defined as "rent": http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/rent I know that sounds a bit pedantic and splitting hairs, but if you're going to base your argument on re-defining what words mean... that's a bit of a problem.

"A bit" is an understatement. You're overtly, obnoxiously pedantic when you reference a single dictionary and ignore common usage, particularly in this thread. Yes, I know, that sounds harsh, but "doing your homework" is a necessary precondition for being a pedant. Check another dictionary and it's part of the definition: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/rent (verb, 2) In common use, it's always in conjunction with a…

Touché, though I don't agree with you on the "common usage" bit. People do in fact "rent (a home) forever", and from what I've gathered it's not that uncommon, at least for cases where "forever" is a person's adult life span.

Even considering the temporary case, what does "temporary" mean? 1 year? 2? 5? 10? Where's the cut-off where you've rented for "too long" and it's ok to be kicked out of your home? Even if you can pick a number for that yourself, I hope you can agree that others might have different numbers, and that the selection of such a number is somewhat arbitrary.

I think the fact that all of this is a problem proves the point that people do expect to be able to rent a home for some value of "forever" (or even some value of "temporary") that is larger than a landlord's profit motive would allow.

Look, if I want to rent a power saw from a hardware store that offers rentals, me keeping that saw for a long time isn't a problem, assuming I'm continuing to make payments[1]. If the hardware store finds there are more people wanting saws, and they're running out, they'll just buy more; there's a ready supply. The same thing doesn't work for housing because land is a limited public resource. In SF's case it's even more limited due to the arbitrary new-construction planning process and disappointing level of NIMBYism in the city that means we can never keep up with demand, Mayor Lee's housing initiatives notwithstanding. This is why real property law doesn't give absolute power to the owner of that property. There are rules. You can't discriminate based on protected classes, for one. Rent control is another rule. The Ellis act is yet another. These rules aren't perfect, but they do tend to protect people who would otherwise be at the short end of a very unpleasant landlord-tenant power dynamic.

[1] It might be stupid for me to do so, financially, since I'd fairly quickly pay more than the cost of a new saw, but let's assume that, like housing in SF, the cost of a new saw is several hundred times the cost to rent it. This also serves to point out that owning a house is financially impossible for many people, while renting -- up until recently -- was much more doable.

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