Eviction notice downloads soar after federal moratorium ends • Hacker News Board

Re: Eviction notice downloads soar after federal moratorium ends

#211

Post by vladgur » Wed, Jan 19, 2022, 10:21 PM UTC

q1w2 wrote: post #38

HarryHirsch wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing that the pandemic is very much ongoing, despite the government pretending the opposite. At my institution, the semester is starting. We are serving the lower income bracket (read nursing school). Enrollment is down 20 %. This is going to have long-term consequences.

The number of nurses that are willing to quit so they aren't required to get the vaccine is insane, and I think that might be what is driving the enrollment reduction.

define insane: 1%? 5%? 50%?

Re: Eviction notice downloads soar after federal moratorium ends

#212

Post by thegrimmest » Wed, Jan 19, 2022, 10:23 PM UTC

notch656a wrote: post #209

thegrimmest wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your premise still doesn't make any sense. There are far more people who can be trusted not to cause massive property damage to their own homes (which they will then be liable for) than can be trusted to proactively work to repay a mortgage. It's a lot easier not to destroy value than to create it. Mind you, many people do cause significant damage to the spaces they rent. This being among the most frequent complaints…

You have to _proactively_ work to pay rent. Someone financially struggling does not have an easier time paying rent on a 700k home than mortgage on a 100k home, that doesn't even make sense to make an argument on the proactive payment difference. Merely not paying rent is a damage to a landlord who still has to maintain a property that the unpaying renter enjoys, so we can't argue that merely not damaging the home av…

Just because the tenant doesn't pay rent, it doesn't meant he landlord doesn't have to pay his mortgage. Mortgages aren't given to people who don't have the capital reserves to withstand loss of rental income. The main differentiating factor between a landlord and a tenant is risk of default. If you are appraised to have a risk low enough for a bank to tolerate, you get a mortgage. If not, you don't. What's wrong with this process?

If you don't pay rent you are (supposed to be) evicted in short order and replaced with someone who does pay rent, specifically to avoid damaging the landlord as you describe.

> the monetary expected loss through negligence or crime on 700k home should be greater than that on 100k home

But that's not what we're talking about. The risk of significant damage through negligence by a tenant on a 700k home is much lower than the risk that same tenant would default on a 100k mortgage. That's the whole point.

Re: Eviction notice downloads soar after federal moratorium ends

#213

Post by thegrimmest » Wed, Jan 19, 2022, 10:29 PM UTC

maxmamis wrote: post #210

thegrimmest wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you saying that people should not be allowed to.. accumulate capital? It's a bit of a radical thing to suggest. How did the landlord get the money to afford the building in the first place? Say he was a high-ranking professional or a successful entrepreneur and he used the capital he earned to buy a building - what's immoral here exactly?

it’s only “radical” from the narrow perspective of the last few hundred years of western capitalism. > Say he was a high-ranking professional or a successful entrepreneur and he used the capital he earned to buy a building - what's immoral here exactly? he’s using his capital to extract more wealth from those with fewer resources than himself. (that’s also how he accumulated the capital in the first place — but that’…

> last few hundred years of western capitalism.

"Capitalism" is just liberty + private property. The idea of a free class of citizens has been around for millenia, and the idea of private ownership of property has been around for longer. Property owners and tenants have existed since the dawn of agrarian civilization.

The radical innovation of the last few centuries was the private, limited liability corporation, but that's not really the problem here is it?

> he’s using his capital to extract more wealth from those with fewer resources than himself.

As every living thing competing with other living things in an environment of material scarcity has done since life began.

Re: Eviction notice downloads soar after federal moratorium ends

#214

Post by notch656a » Wed, Jan 19, 2022, 10:41 PM UTC

thegrimmest wrote: post #212

notch656a wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to _proactively_ work to pay rent. Someone financially struggling does not have an easier time paying rent on a 700k home than mortgage on a 100k home, that doesn't even make sense to make an argument on the proactive payment difference. Merely not paying rent is a damage to a landlord who still has to maintain a property that the unpaying renter enjoys, so we can't argue that merely not damaging the home av…

Just because the tenant doesn't pay rent, it doesn't meant he landlord doesn't have to pay his mortgage. Mortgages aren't given to people who don't have the capital reserves to withstand loss of rental income. The main differentiating factor between a landlord and a tenant is risk of default. If you are appraised to have a risk low enough for a bank to tolerate, you get a mortgage. If not, you don't. What's wrong wit…

>Just because the tenant doesn't pay rent, it doesn't meant he landlord doesn't have to pay his mortgage

Precisely! Not paying rent is a damage to the landlord. You're destroying value. So we can't say you aren't damaging anything if you just don't damage the house.

>The main differentiating factor between a landlord and a tenant is risk of default. If you are appraised to have a risk low enough for a bank to tolerate, you get a mortgage. If not, you don't. What's wrong with this process?

Nothing. I'm pointing out how idiotic it is for someone to be trusted with a 700k house who can't be trusted with 100k mortgage.

>But that's not what we're talking about. The risk of significant damage through negligence by a tenant on a 700k home is much lower than the risk that same tenant would default on a 100k mortgage. That's the whole point.

That's not the entire calculus. The risk to the landlord is that the tenant won't pay or that the tenant will destroy the house. The difference is a land owner has even less incentive to destroy their own house and even less incentive to fail to pay up his/her own mortgage. The risk to the bank is that both you won't pay AND after they seize the property they can't recoup all the damages of non-repayment / lost interest and the principle. This is even more magnified when comparing a 700k rental property to a 100k mortgage. You can't just compare risk of damage to rental house to risk of default.

Having collateral is a much more enviable position IMO and the fact that someone who owns a house has a real interest in protecting it just doubles down on this tipping of the balance to preferring to be a mortgage provider over a landlord in dealing with potential tenant/mortgagee of equal risk.

>The risk of significant damage through negligence by a tenant on a 700k home is much lower than the risk that same tenant would default on a 100k mortgage. That's the whole point.

How much damage does the bank really have on someone who holds mortgage on 100k house, defaults, and then the bank takes the house and flips it for now even more money? It can't be that much more than the landlord who rather than having something to seize just outright loses the rent on a 700k house and now can't pay their own mortgage. I'd much rather be in the bank's position here.

If you can make rent on a 700k house, you can make mortgage on a 100k home. If you don't pay, the home will be taken away (and probably sold for more than you bought it for in this economy), while if you don't pay rent the landlord is out mortgage payments with quite possibly no asset he can seize from you.

This all goes back to my point. "Someone who can't be trusted with 100k [sic: mortgage] shouldn't be entrusted to inhabit a house worth 700k."

Re: Eviction notice downloads soar after federal moratorium ends

#215

Post by notch656a » Wed, Jan 19, 2022, 11:21 PM UTC

thegrimmest wrote: post #208

danaris wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landlords do not offer a service. They hoard housing, making it scarce, thus forcing others to rent it from them if they want to be housed. If we outlawed the practice, landlords would have to sell their properties, significantly increasing the number of residential units on the market, and thus reducing the price and making it much more likely that someone living paycheck to paycheck would be able to afford a mortga…

Housing doesn't just grow on trees. It's capital-intensive to produce. Capital that needs to see a return on investment, since it doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are a certain class of people that simply cannot be relied on to pay a mortgage. These people still demand housing, so are served by the renters market. If you force every landlord to sell their housing, you're basically punishing them for investing. Since…

I'm not a fan of eliminating landlords, but I can easily and trivially see a system how housing is built and provided without landlords or mortgage providers. The old Latin American way: you buy each brick when you can afford it. Unfortunately the imbeciles in government would have an aneurism: "NOO!!! you can't just buy bricks and stack them without a special stamp on a piece of paper!!!! How else can I buy my next new Prius without your tax money?"

I lived for months out of a tent, and virtually the only reason I don't now is because of the retarded CPS / child abuse regulations in US let petty bureaucrats arbitrarily decide what adequate housing is. The US has insane building codes and zoning regulations that make housing way less affordable than it could be to build with a working man's cash.

Re: Eviction notice downloads soar after federal moratorium ends

#216

Post by notch656a » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 12:09 AM UTC

adolph wrote: post #24

cletus wrote: post #19

I'm all for providing a social safety net in exactly the way the US doesn't. Housing (aka shelter) is a key part of that but the way the US does this is completely backwards. The government saying you can't evict someone is basically telling people they don't have to pay rent anymore regardless of need . Rent control is the same way: you can't raise the rent regardless of need . So these programs don't really help pe…

It is odd that there was an eviction moratorium but not a tax moratorium.

.gov is licking its lips at the increased property taxes they'll get after massively inflating asset prices by printing wheelbarrows of new cash.

Re: Eviction notice downloads soar after federal moratorium ends

#217

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 12:39 AM UTC

blululu wrote: post #188

alxjrvs wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically, eliminating the concept of "landlord" would come hand-in-hand with eliminating the idea of real estate being privately "owned". None of these ideas are particularly popular amongst land-owners.

Hyper-capitalist Singapore provides public housing to about 80% of citizens. It’s a pretty functional system. You can have landlords and private land owners but they need to provide more value than a default. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

[deleted]

Re: Eviction notice downloads soar after federal moratorium ends

#218

Post by thegrimmest » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:48 AM UTC

notch656a wrote: post #215

thegrimmest wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing doesn't just grow on trees. It's capital-intensive to produce. Capital that needs to see a return on investment, since it doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are a certain class of people that simply cannot be relied on to pay a mortgage. These people still demand housing, so are served by the renters market. If you force every landlord to sell their housing, you're basically punishing them for investing. Since…

I'm not a fan of eliminating landlords, but I can easily and trivially see a system how housing is built and provided without landlords or mortgage providers. The old Latin American way: you buy each brick when you can afford it. Unfortunately the imbeciles in government would have an aneurism: "NOO!!! you can't just buy bricks and stack them without a special stamp on a piece of paper!!!! How else can I buy my next…

Even in the Latin American way, surely there are people who can afford more than one house, and decide to rent out the surplus? But I agree that regulatory overhead in housing construction is very high, and this contributes to the cost of housing.

The favelas in Latin America, whose property are they actually built on?

Re: Eviction notice downloads soar after federal moratorium ends

#219

Post by thegrimmest » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 2:52 AM UTC

notch656a wrote: post #214

thegrimmest wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because the tenant doesn't pay rent, it doesn't meant he landlord doesn't have to pay his mortgage. Mortgages aren't given to people who don't have the capital reserves to withstand loss of rental income. The main differentiating factor between a landlord and a tenant is risk of default. If you are appraised to have a risk low enough for a bank to tolerate, you get a mortgage. If not, you don't. What's wrong wit…

>Just because the tenant doesn't pay rent, it doesn't meant he landlord doesn't have to pay his mortgage Precisely! Not paying rent is a damage to the landlord. You're destroying value. So we can't say you aren't damaging anything if you just don't damage the house. >The main differentiating factor between a landlord and a tenant is risk of default. If you are appraised to have a risk low enough for a bank to tolerat…

> I'm pointing out how idiotic it is for someone to be trusted with a 700k house who can't be trusted with 100k mortgage.

But this happens all the time when people rent anything. You can rent a Lambo, doesn't mean you can afford to buy one. Trusting someone not to destroy something while the use it isn't the same as trusting them to pay you the full value of it upfront.

Otherwise it seems like you're suggesting there's a missed opportunity to grant mortgages to financially unstable people. Isn't that what caused the 2008 financial crisis?

> Someone who can't be trusted with 100k [sic: mortgage] shouldn't be entrusted to inhabit a house worth 700k.

But they are and it works just fine.

Re: Eviction notice downloads soar after federal moratorium ends

#220

Post by joshspankit » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 3:41 AM UTC

taftster wrote: post #163

ratsmack wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>out of any news sources, the comments here continue to be mostly grounded and reasonable, not hyperbolic and dramatic. Unfortunately, somber and stoic news does not have the monetary return from advertising revenue that most news organizations seek. News has become more of an entertainment endeavor rather than one for disseminating information on the state of current affairs. It also seems that the NPR and BBC have…

I agree, as others have said in this post/thread, advertising seems to be at least some of the cause of the problem. But it doesn't seem any other economic model works, sadly. I'm curious about your comment about NPR and BBC. Granted, it seems like they have moved more towards the stupidity that we're describing. But not as much as the traditional news networks, in my opinion.

I genuinely feel that CNN’s choice to go for 24hr ad-supported news was the majority of the reason they can no longer be trusted to be objective.

When your news runs on ads you’ll optimize for ad watch time and not integrity.