“Gentrification” is what happens when a previously low-income area becomes more attractive to wealthier occupants, often displacing the former residents. I’m not accusing a person of “gentrifying,” I’m saying it’s what’s happens to be going on, for whatever reason, in my hypothetical neighborhood.
Basically, I don’t see a moral difference between a landlord saying “I rented you this place for $X, and I know you can only afford $X, but I think I can get $2X for it, so I’m evicting you on a pretext,” and “I know you can only afford $X, but I’m raising your rent to $2X and evicting you next month for non-payment.”
I was very explicitly blaming the landlord, not the renters. If the previous owner tossed a well-behaved low-income family out on the curb so he could sell it to you, then he’s a douchenozzle, not you.
So what is your solution? The government sets the allowable rents in order to keep them from climbing? If so, why does anyone own a rental building? What’s their incentive if there is a government mandate to keep rents artificially low?
Right now, the common situation for these older buildings is “it is low as long as someone doesn’t move, then it can be reset to current market.” This is the bastard solution that no one likes (see article) but which has been a bandaid on the situation.
For people who actually buy these buildings, they’re putting 20% down on a million dollar plus property (probably quite a bit more than a million dollars at this point), paying for upkeep and maintenance, and the taxes, as well as dealing with renters and the issues that arise. (This is not a “woe is me” but a mention of the reality.) If someone can’t even get enough in rents to pay the mortgage and taxes, why would they buy? If they can just about do so but can’t afford to maintain the building, how does anyone win there either?
The rhetoric driven activists want to portray this as “evil tech workers pay more rent and steal homes” or “rich speculators buy homes and price people out of them” but it is a lot more complex than that. That was the entire point of the whole, long, article.
But no one is arguing against you here. Who is? Has someone said that either of these is ok here?
The way San Francisco (and Berkeley) rent control works, you can’t even do the second scenario. The first scenario only happens if you go out of business (Ellis Act), move in as the owner, or a couple of other limited circumstances. You’re sort of constructing a straw man with this above.
If I bought the house and moved in, the old owner doesn’t need to toss out anyone. Owners are always allowed to tell tenants to leave if they, the owners, are moving into their own building. You could rent a house 30 years and it gets sold to a new party and that new party can take possession and move in. Legally, they’re supposed to stay in, not turn around and rent it, or they can be sued.
A human is under a moral obligation to treat other humans decently, within the limitations of his or her circumstances. Do unto others, etc. I realize this is a radical idea and I am probably some sort of Communist or something. (Moral obligations are of course completely unrelated to legal obligations.)
I know that landlords are humans and have human problems. If a landlord needs to raise the rent to make ends meet and feed his family, that’s a shame, but he’s gotta do what he’s gotta do. If he “needs” to raise the rent so he can get his third Lexus, he’s an asshole, not that that’s going to stop him. I rather doubt that the majority of established SF landlords are suffering under the yoke right now.
I asked you a hypothetical question, out of curiosity. I know SF has rent control, but my area doesn’t, so that situation is possible here. You appeared to misunderstand what I intended by the question, so I attempted to phrase it (and my position) more clearly.
Okay. If you bought a home out from under a well-behaved 30-year renter and kicked them to the curb, and there were no extenuating circumstancess, you’re an asshole. Sorry, that’s the way it is. Having money and the backing of law gives you power, but it doesn’t make you right.
Why would I be an asshole? I bought a house for me and my family to live in. Do we not get to live in our home that we bought now? Why does it matter if someone else lived there for 30 years? Do they get to stay forever even if the building changes hands and the new owner wants to move in? At what point is the owner allowed to possess their own home to live in it (note, I’m not talking about renting it out here and neither are you)?
This is why owner move ins are always legal, even in rent control cities.
The problem with never raising your rent is that the valuation on your property doesn’t freeze just because the tenants have not changed. Property taxes are tied to valuation, and even with Prop 13 you will be losing more and more money to taxes every time the assessment goes up. Eventually rents have to go up or you get taxed to death.
Now that’s not to say you have to track the meteoric rates in the Market, but the market rates are a symptom, not a cause. They’re going up because there are more people looking for houses than there are ones available, and they’re willing to fight to find some place to live. Without building more housing or making the city unattractive to new residents, the rates are doomed to go up regardless.
Rent control in San Francisco allows annual increases for precisely that reason. They’re simply controlled.
I had some landlords who didn’t use the maximum possible increase each year because it was higher than their increase in taxes (although there was no market based reason for them to not do so), and I had others who didn’t bother passing on any increases for years at a time because it wasn’t worth their time to put out the paperwork.
Granted, one might lump some of these as being approximately the same area: San Francisco and Mountain View, for example. Still, I count fifteen states, two provinces, and the District of Columbia. The Austin article you link says there are no other Google offices in that part of the country; presumably the Dallas office has opened since that article was written, back in 2009.
I try not to get involved in online discussions about this because I live in SF and although controversial, I’m kind of tiring of this discussion, but after I Ctrl+F the discussion without finding “inequality,” “wall street,” or “venture capital(ism)” I figured I’d chime in.
I’m a non techie living in San Francisco. Although it’s easy to scapegoat the tech crowd, it’s not entirely their fault. The tech industry we have is essentially an investment opportunity for the FIRE industry. Venture capital is really just a wing of finance, an industry which extracts massive amounts of wealth from the economy and consolidates it. FIRE is part of the reason San Francisco has a ton of low-wage earners, few middle income earners, and this new crop of extremely wealthy (tech industry) earners. If the US had an equitable economy that rewarded the public employees to teach the techies’ children the same way as it rewarded the folks who write programming for candy crush, etc, rent would still be high in Sf (it always will be) but no workers of a particular industry would have the ability to so drastically over-pay for important UTILITIES, such as housing.
