31% Can’t Pay the Rent: ‘It’s Only Going to Get Worse’

You miss-read me. First of all, I did not suggest any answer. I suggested that people put more thoughtfulness into their analysis.

What I am saying is that there really is no one person to "suck it up". The furloughed school cafeteria worker is going to take a double hit because the public employee retirement system probably holds REITs.

Scapegoating landlords is the tactic of leftest South American dictators. Landlords are middlemen, earning a return on providing housing liquidity. They take on short-term risk in the form of their tenants potential inability to pay, and long-term risk in the form of long-term loans collateralized by their properties. The system doesn't work unless someone is willing to take on that risk profile. Stop scapegoating landlords.

Risk is a limiting factor on chasing profit. The risk isn't the other side of a coin with profit. There are lots of different limiting factors on chasing profit; more supply may simply be unavailable, there may be barriers to entry, natural monopolies, regulation, etc. Risk (capital and human time) is one among many.

Do you want an explanation of why I believe you don't know what you're talking about? Okay, fine.

Define viable.

Let's go with "within financial means without incurring significant non-financial hardship".

You mean a dwelling place that protects you from the elements well enough that they won't even be in the top 50 ways you'll be likely to die statistically?

This is a ridiculous definition, and it almost doesn't make sense to respond to the rest of your post as a result.

You want to start name-dropping debating fallacies? This one is called a "strawman"..

Homeless shelters take care of that and there are other options in between.

This might be wrong even under your absurd definition of a viable alternative to renting. In 2017, assault homicides were between the 20th and 7th most common way to die in the USA [0].

Violent assaults (although not necessarily resulting in death) are so common in NYC homeless shelters that the city restricted its definition of a "critical incident" in order to keep these numbers low [1].

There were 62,679 homeless people in shelters in January 2020 [2]. In 2017 and 2018, there were 675 critical incidents in homeless shelters; let's assume that's 337 a year, and let's assume that only 1/4 are violent crimes (the rest being drug and weapon possessions), meaning about 84 violent crimes in shelters a year. So that's 84 / 62,679 = around 0.13% violent crime rate in homeless shelters. The NYC population in January 2019 was around 8.3 million. There were 3,865 violent crimes in January 2019 [3]. So that was 3,865 / 8,300,000 = around 0.05% violent crime rate. So violent crimes, according to my back-of-the-envelope estimates, were 2.6 times more likely in homeless shelters than in the general population.

And if we expand beyond just "death" as the only negative outcome, it's a general fact that homeless shelters can be just as dangerous as living in the street, if not moreso [4] [5] [6].

But let's expand into my definition of viable. If you know anything about a homeless shelter or homelessness, you know that being homeless in general, and living in a shelter specifically, does incur several forms of significant non-financial hardships. So, no, homeless shelters are not a viable alternative to renting an apartment. And the only way you can argue otherwise is if you don't know what you're talking about.

As for businesses - I know plenty of multi-million dollar businesses that have no need for a brick and mortar, but the business angle isn't even an argument - there's never a need for anyone to create a business, there's only incentive and the incentive is high enough that people freely choose to pay rent for businesses that require a physical location.

I'm not talking about multi-million dollar businesses. So let me clarify.

Find me a deli, local drugstore, or local clothing store that doesn't need a storefront. The alternative is some kind of currently-nonexistent delivery-only society. Likewise, find me a wholesaler that doesn't need a warehouse. I don't even know how this would work. Maybe you can explain it to me; otherwise I have to conclude that you don't know what you're talking about.

0: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_06-508.pdf 1: https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/violence-redefined-nyc-... 2: https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-ho... 3: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p0204a/nypd-citywide-cri... 4: https://www.westword.com/news/reasons-why-denvers-homeless-s... 5: https://thecity.nyc/2019/11/nyc-homeless-shelter-chaos-drive... 6: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/10/nyregion/homeless-shelter...

Implicit in the criticism of landlords is that the majority of this long term loan is for an arbitrary asset valuation created by artificially low interest loans. Most of the cost of real estate is not in the building or upkeep itself, which is why everyone worries (or hopes) that real estate values will drop when the debt treadmill slows. Like NYC taxi medallions, it's an overfinancialized setup that taxes real production for the sake of the financial industry.

So yes, looking at the individual landlords they are indeed working to fill a market niche. But looking at the emergent system taken as a whole, it's preposterous.

If you know more than others, share some of what you know so we can learn.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Alternatively, it's always an option not to post. Whatever you choose, please follow the site rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html