California Approves Statewide Rent Control • Hacker News Board

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#871

Post by heyoni » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 3:35 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #866

heyoni wrote: post #794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP and my apartments are actually new developments benefiting from these breaks.

Missing the forest for the trees.

I'm not sure you even know my opinion on rent control from this interaction. You asked a very specific question:

> is the scourge of housing markets, forcing rents up for everyone and preventing new construction.

The tax abatements obviously fuel new construction and bring in a new class of rent control to NYC. Is that a good thing? Or a bad thing?

I don't claim to know, but this type of apartment definitely filled a need for myself and others who want decently managed apartments without worrying about spontaneous jumps in rent (i.e. if Amazon had moved out here). And obviously, we're not the crowd of people totting around kids, barely making ends meet but at the end of the day, I still have to go to work to pay rent or I'm screwed with the rest of them...so it's nice to at least know that my taxes (tax breaks) bought me some stability.

PS: these buildings are also required to set aside a number of units for lower income residents, which again, I'm happy to pay taxes towards.

Anyway, what was your point?

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#872

Post by manfredo » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 3:35 PM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #618

manfredo wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing cannot be both affordable and and a good investment. The definition of a good investment is a piece of property that has a price that increases over time. The nature of exponential growth means that eventually housing will become unaffordable if it is perpetually a good investment. Society's expectation that housing is a good investment results in people taking on significant debt to buy increasingly expensiv…

You’re conflating “an investment” with “an exponentially growing investment”.

A good investment is an exponentially growing investment. Any investment with consistent year over year growth % is growing exponentially. Any investment that does not grow exponentially will eventually be outpaced by inflation and is thus not a good investment.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#873

Post by PorterDuff » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 3:36 PM UTC

Now that I think of it, I wonder why the larger employers in the South Bay don't build dormitories. Given a strong tendency to hire people fresh out of school (or nearly so), I would think that a great big dormitory on the company campus might be just the thing. It removes housing as an issue for a new hire, ties them more closely to the company (quit, you have to find an apartment), and they can spend their evenings shooting Nerf darts and shopping at the GoogleGrocery and the GoogleCoffeeShop.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#874

Post by kshacker » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 3:39 PM UTC

robbiemitchell wrote: post #861

The Bay Area desperately needs ~6-story units in every urban area and near every public transit stop.

Along with 6 story units, we need better commute. The challenge is that the developers and cities lie and say hey we can add housing but we do not need to improve roads, and even if we improve roads, we will improve it just a tiny bit.

Please travel from Sunnyvale Saratoga starting at 101 at the north end to 85/DeAnza at the south end at 5-6 PM every day and see how long it takes to travel 6 miles. Unless you live here and know it already, you will be surprised.

But when it comes to selling housing, the developers, one example being of the vallco mall owner, somehow gets their way without any indication that their project will benefit the city, and thus rightly gets overturned at the ballot. [ And this is from someone (me) who failed to buy a house in Cupertino and now lives elsewhere.]

Anyways the way to build 6 story buildings can not be by making the living worse for everyone who already lives there. Much worse.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#875

Post by chipotle_coyote » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 3:47 PM UTC

Fjolsvith wrote: post #832

mratzloff wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the tenant happy when you increased it? Increasing rent 12% in one go effectively kicks out most tenants. A smaller annual increase will give them time to adjust to market conditions and choose over a longer period whether or not to move and to save up to do so. You are doing no one any favors except short-term renters who never get an increase. In other words, your so-called benefit is actually a detriment to lo…

> Was the tenant happy when you increased it? Increasing rent 12% in one go effectively kicks out most tenants. No, the market kicked out most tenants. The tenant should be expected to also monitor market prices for their rental and know automatically when they're getting a deal or when to expect an increase.

If I own a house or an apartment complex, my costs are relatively fixed -- that is, after all, the primary argument for owning rather than renting -- which means that if I am leasing that house or units in that complex to someone else, there is nothing requiring me to raise rents to keep up with "the market" rather than merely keeping up with my own actual costs. I can choose to make the same absolute amount of net income year after year. If "the market" is increasing faster than inflation and property tax, I can choose to take advantage of that.

"The market" is not an entity with its own volition, and speaking of it as if it were obscures the reality that it's comprised of individuals and collectives making individual or collective choices about what to charge and what to pay.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#876

Post by streb-lo » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 3:54 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #634

phil248 wrote: post #138

I'm shocked at the ideological fervor here and the fact that virtually no one seems to have looked at the details of the actual bill. This is nothing like the rent control ordinance in SF that has caused $3000 units to get stuck at $500 rents. That will never happen under this law. The allowable increases are so much higher than "normal" rent control laws that any given unit will catch up to market rates in a matter…

At a basic level I would not have any issues with these laws if they also limited expenses. In other words, if you are going to use force to limit income then landlords ought to have the right to limit expenses proportionately. For example, make tenants responsible for wear and tear on the property, just like you pay for mileage on a rental car and are responsible for damages. As it is, they are using force to limit…

No one should own 10, 20, or 100 units of housing.

When people finally realize that, there will be hell to pay.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#877

Post by busterarm » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 3:54 PM UTC

heyoni wrote: post #871

busterarm wrote: post #866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing the forest for the trees.

I'm not sure you even know my opinion on rent control from this interaction. You asked a very specific question: > is the scourge of housing markets, forcing rents up for everyone and preventing new construction. The tax abatements obviously fuel new construction and bring in a new class of rent control to NYC. Is that a good thing? Or a bad thing? I don't claim to know, but this type of apartment definitely filled a…

I guess the sarcasm missed you completely.

I didn't care about your specific opinion on rent control because you didn't express one, I'm saying that your comments to give counter-evidence to what I was saying didn't even have any context in the discussion and will be used as fuel for the anti-regulation people that I said don't know what they're talking about.

You basically injected a non-sequitur into the discussion and are using it to start an argument, which is silly, because I believe rent regulation is a necessary evil.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#878

Post by silexia » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 3:54 PM UTC

verelo wrote: post #834

bhauer wrote: post #21

I am a landlord in Oregon, but not California. The curious, although ultimately predictable, outcome of the new rent control measure in Oregon is that while I have historically had an arrangement with my property management to be restrained in annual rent increases, they are now advising a default annual increase of the maximum allowed (7 percent before inflation). This is because larger adjustments cannot be made if…

In Ontario the rent control is even worse. It’s set by the landlord tenant board at a number near inflation, this year it’s 2.2%, the last few it’s been 1.8%. Similarly, i tell my tenants that they should expect the minimum increase yearly as i cannot make up for any lost increases nor can i make larger increases if something about the economics of the house changes. The real issue here is the cost to provide housing…

This is really bad policy... Treating the symptom while making the root problem worse.

The core issue is there is not enough good housing for everyone in California.

The real solution is to greatly loosen building regulation and make getting permits much faster and easier statewide. Then entrepreneurs will double or triple the housing supply and drop the costs of renting or buying a home by 80%. You could see rents go from $2500 per month in LA to $1000 a month or less.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#879

Post by ryan_lane » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 3:55 PM UTC

refurb wrote: post #517

irq11 wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rent control laws in SF aren’t even as bad as HN comments would have you believe. Rent control doesn’t apply to new construction in SF. It also allows a regulated annual increase, and rent automatically jumps back up to market upon a number of different conditions - not the least of which is that the owner can push you out to renovate the building! HN commenters are usually just repeating stuff they heard somewhe…

Rent control in SF really is that bad. Rent increase limits are 60% of CPI, so it can’t even match inflation. If your costs go up (utilities) or you want to do capital improvements, good luck getting the rent board to approve a pass through. Want to prevent other people than the tenant from moving into a 1 bedroom? Tough, can’t say no to that, it just has to be under 3 people. Want to move into your own house? Sure,…

A lot of what you're saying in here is blatantly incorrect or misleading. Water is frequently covered in utilities, but other utilities generally are not. Leases are very specific on the number of people in a unit for rent controlled apartments and is one the few things a tenant can be evicted for. The board frequently approves pass throughs. Increases tend to be higher than inflation.

If you lease out your house and you want to take back ownership, yeah, you need to pay out the tenant and that's completely fair. You're upending another family's lives, and they may not be able to afford to stay. You're paying them moving costs and covering a period of time of adjustment for them. If you think this is unfair, you have poor morals.

Also, for good measure: fuck the landlords.

Re: California Approves Statewide Rent Control

#880

Post by rhacker » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 4:00 PM UTC

We absolutely need more ways to buy a house without all the rigamarole that causes a buyer to sell at 20% more a year later. Banks and real estate agents already force most people into selling at much higher. What if there was a special kind of property that's good at in-and-out ownership, low friction moves like rentals. Get rid of the bank and agent fees. Build it into the lien.

Startup idea anyone. The demand would be high.