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Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

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Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#381

Post by rdm_blackhole »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #350
rdm_blackhole wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be hell? In France it can take years to evict people who stop paying rent. So now 90% of all rental contracts have an insurance for non-payments included in the contract. A few bad apples forced every other tenant to pay more in rent just because politicians decided that squatters had more rights than the owners. And god have mercy on your soul if you decide to take back what is yours when you get tired…

> now 90% of all rental contracts have an insurance for non-payments included in the contract. This is interesting. I never knew about it. I am surprised that it has never come up on HN before. In Japan, it is similar, but I don't know the history. (If I had to guess, it is probably related to the destroyed economy after the war.) If you have a "rich uncle" or work for a famous company, they can be your rental contra…

You also sometimes need a guarantor and you need a CDI (indefinite work contract) to be able to rent in the first place. If you are on a short term contract (1 year or less) or if you are a student or out of work, then good luck to you.

Then what happens in practice is that the owner will contract an insurance policy via the real estate agency that manages the rental property. As a result of this, in the end if the insurance company deems you to be too high risk, then they won't insure you and the owner will not take the risk to rent his dwelling without it even if they like you and want you to live in their rental.

So what we have is a de-facto rental market that is controlled by a few insurance companies who decide the fate of the tenants. The owner, the real estate agency don't really have much power in terms of decision.

For the owner it makes things easier, they don't really have to think too much. Their rent is guaranteed by the insurance company and for the real estate agency, they can always turn down "undesirable" tenants by claiming that the insurance company rejected their application.

The tenants most of the time have no idea about this stuff.

As you put it, it is a hidden tax on the tenants because the price of the insurance is now baked in the rent that is paid by everyone, good tenants or bad tenants alike. When I was working in RE 11 years ago, the insurance cost something like 2 to 3% of the monthly rent and then another 5 to 7% got paid to the real estate agency managing the rental.

Today, I reckon, after all the inflation from the past few years, most likely 15% of the rent is gone before the owner sees a dime each month. As you can imagine this is not a very good incentive to put your apartment on the market. And that is not even touching on the various rent control policies that have been rolled out in the last few years in certain cities which have exacerbated the rental crisis.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#382

Post by mschuster91 »

BrenBarn wrote: post #330
PaulHoule wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who owns a second house on a farm that has two rental units in it, I’m skeptical of attempts to expand ‘tenant rights’ in New York. I had a tenant who decided that he did not have to pay the rent, it took months of trying to reason with him, we hired a lawyer and went through the process which took several months, in the end the tenant stayed on a few months past what would have been the eviction date but…

The path forward from this is to stop trying to write laws that are wealth-neutral on these kinds of matters. Small mom-and-pop should be allowed to do many things that extremely wealthy landlords and/or corporations are not allowed to do. The penalties for violations should be ruinous for the wealthy and small for the non-wealthy.

> Small mom-and-pop should be allowed to do many things that extremely wealthy landlords and/or corporations are not allowed to do.

The problem is, then you end up with structuring/smurfing. It's already a common thing in real estate to have one LLC per each building in a development to prevent creditors from clawing money back from the actual developer corporation/fund, no need to entice this even more.

Besides, small landlords already are notorious for egregious violations of regulations. Creating effectively two classes of renters doesn't solve the problem, at all.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#383

Post by rayiner »

Braxton1980 wrote: post #375
rayiner wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voters don’t take campaign platforms at face value, they view them through their experience. People in California aren’t experiencing Democrats actually fixing housing. But they are seeing large employers like Google post stuff like: “Google is proud to be an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer .” (Google deleted that language from its website recently enough that it still shows up in the Google search…

How were they supportive? Specifically

> At the end of the day, the Biden administration built way more DEI departments than EV chargers

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#384

Post by Telemakhos »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #347
throw4847285 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a renter since I was born, and I have rented from both mom and pop landlords and bigger corporations, and I can tell you that whether or not the "small landlords" were good people or not, our financial interests were diametrically opposed. If I did not live in cities with good tenant protections, there would be no incentive whatsoever for the people who owned the place where I lived from providing basic ser…

> I would love to purchase a home, but even 10 years of a software engineering salary are not enough for that in NYC. Imagine a 1M USD studio apartment. Is 10% (100K USD) down payment feasible? Usually, banks are happy to lend 90% to people with good jobs and a good credit score.

If you’re paying a million dollars to own a studio apartment (essentially a hotel room), something has gone horribly wrong. That could be any number of things (inflation, insane property valuations, unreasonable demand for city life), but that same money could be spent very differently and go much further in a different location.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#385

Post by ReptileMan »

loglog wrote: post #358
ReptileMan wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The balance simple - renters have total rights as long as they pay on time and there is no damage on the property except normal wear and tear and 0 when when not paying. You as landlord can't say anything as long as the property is not damaged for the duration of the contract. You always renegotiate at market rates. There is no concept of squatting and evictions are fast. That's it. Works like a charm. No bullshits l…

"renegotiate at market rates" is extremely tenant-punishing, because the cost of moving for the tenant is much higher than the cost of finding a new tenant for a landlord. It becomes better if you remove the "renegotiate" part and couple the allowed rent increase to some index.

Yes picking carboard boxes from the store and stuffing them in the tiny US cars for a couple of blocks is a great cost.

If you as a tenant want to lock a rate - sign long term contract. Then a year or six months before expiring start renew talks. Don't forget that market also changes - you may be in a better position too.

Look - I support the idea of people owning their own homes and renting being the exception than the norm. But you can't solve housing shortage by making the market for whatever stock there is even more inefficient. The brejnevki in the soviet union were terrible quality wise, but they get the job done in providing shelter from the elements for the rapidly urbanizing country.

In East and South East Asia they are also quite proficient in building massive 30 stories high rises.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#386

Post by roenxi »

gotoeleven wrote: post #85
legitster wrote: post #46

I've grown a little bit more skeptical of what can realistically be achieved by the passive nature of YIMBY-ism. In Portland, they passed some radical new zoning laws a few years ago that allowed anyone, anywhere the ability to zone ADUs on their property. And the cost to get permits is almost nothing. I have lots of friends and family in the area with property. But not a single one has added an ADU. It seems like it…

It's not really surprising that places with the most onerous "tenants rights" regimes have the biggest problems with housing inventory. I wish the people enacting these laws understood that for every squatter or rent deadbeat you prevent a landlord from evicting, there's a hundred potential landlords that just say no thanks I'll just leave my property empty. https://www.pacificresearch.org/time-to-ask-why-so-many-san…

I'd guess that it is actually the other way around than you might expect. First there was an affordability problem so everyone was pushed into rentals, then the renters were a big enough political block to soft-seize the houses from the landlords.

So I'd anticipate places with tenants rights laws to associate with huge amounts of housing inventory while the incentives really catch up. Then the tenants get pushed to move somewhere else and the laws go away as the renting bloc loses numbers.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#387

Post by ReptileMan »

Braxton1980 wrote: post #354
ReptileMan wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works wonders for utilities and telcos. You stop paying your bills - your phone is dead, you have no internet and electricity in X days after skipping an invoice. Why should be leasing real estate any different?

Because they don't cut those off right away, especially electricity.

In my country they do. You have 2 weeks delinquency and that's it.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#388

Post by Gareth321 »

Braxton1980 wrote: post #371
TexanFeller wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people have memory that lasts longer than a goldfish’s. People remember the DNC and its politicians hyperfocusing on controversial social issues for the last decade to the exclusion of everything else. They remember Kamala’s fringe and cringe positions and statements from her California and 2019 campaigns and don’t believe she’s a proud gun owning moderate that just wants to make government work for us. Bonus…

>People remember the DNC and its politicians hyperfocusing on controversial social issues for the last decade to the exclusion of everything else. Republicans haven't?

If you have the time, I highly recommend this interview between Ezra Klein and Democrat strategist David Shor (https://youtu.be/Sx0J7dIlL7c?si=VCLdHs48Tsk63GqP). He goes into a lot of the details around the question you imply. Long story short, Republicans have done that, but also on the issues people actually care about. This has given them a large trust lead in topics like the economy, crime, immigration, the border, etc. If Democrats had also hyperfocused on kitchen table issues, they might have won. By the time Kamala was campaigning, it was far too late to convince everyone that she actually cared about important issues. She had four years to prove she did not.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#389

Post by Gareth321 »

Braxton1980 wrote: post #374
hayst4ck wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democrats are largely controlled opposition. If you ask where democratic power comes from, it comes from campaign donations by America's richest and most powerful people. Bloomberg ran for president under their banner, think about that. At minimum it communicates that the democratic platform is compatible with oligarchs. How are they supposed to wrangle corporate power, when that is exactly where their power comes fr…

>without challenging corporate power. Why would expect this in a capitalist country?

We challenge corporate power all the time in our capitalist nation of Denmark. Denmark beats the U.S. in ease of doing business (https://archive.doingbusiness.org/en/rankings). I'm always bemused by Americans who think no other country practises capitalism.

Re: Abundance isn't going to happen unless politicians are scared of the status quo

#390

Post by Gareth321 »

Braxton1980 wrote: post #377
lotsoweiners wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being anti woke/DEI does not mean you oppose civil rights. Plenty of African Americans and other minorities dislike woke/DEI. They don’t want to be thought of as a diversity hire but still enjoy their rights to vote and use the same bathrooms as their white peers.

Just to be clear, what's the definition of "woke"?

In brief, “woke” means having awakened to having a particular type of “critical consciousness,” as these are understood within Critical Social Justice. To first approximation, being woke means viewing society through various critical lenses, as defined by various critical theories bent in service of an ideology most people currently call “Social Justice.” That is, being woke means having taken on the worldview of Critical Social Justice, which sees the world only in terms of unjust power dynamics and the need to dismantle problematic systems. That is, it means having adopted Theory and the worldview it conceptualises.

Adherents like Ibram Kendi argue that the only solution to historical racism is present day racism (Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019), p. 19). In other words, the "woke" believe in applying institutionalised racism and other forms of discrimination to realise a world in which outcomes are perceived to be equal. As this method and goal are antithetical to Enlightenment and democratic principles, there is a large contingent of people who oppose woke ideology.

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