This may be a somewhat different kettle of fish from housing, but we have several malls with property going vacant, while new buildings are going up next door, and tenants are moving from the old commercial properties into the new. At least one mall has had significant ongoing vacancies for several years, so it doesn’t look like the property owners are having any type of fire sale to entice new tenants in. It’s commonly known that, while you frequently can get a good deal on your first rental term, after the initial lease, your rent often jumps up by 20% or more. You don’t actually need a storefront unless you are dealing with physical product; someone who provides only a service (say, yard care) can actually operate out of a van or online. Supply and demand are even more elastic for storefronts than housing, but around here, you generally don’t get any ongoing discounts unless you are willing to rent in a less desirable area. I see no way that bidding for a commodity as necessary as a place to live can do much besides hurt tenants.
You got that right! Most people forget that renting out a place is a business, and that business must make money to survive. Pricing a property too high means that it doesn’t rent as fast. Just because I’m not getting rent doesn’t mean that I don’t have to pay my fixed costs of taxes, insurance, upkeep, and mortgage. Property only gains in value when it sells (hopefully). The whole point of having assets is NOT to sell them! When landlords don’t make money, the property goes downhill, which means it’s worth less. The community also goes downhill, because nobody cares. Real property is unique in that you can’t just call up your broker and instantly sell for market rate. It’s a big, expensive commitment, and my money is on the line. I buy trashed places, put my own sweat equity into them, and then provide a nice, safe home for somebody. I make sure that any maintenance is taken care of right away. All of my tenants appreciate that, but they also know that I can turn on a dime if I don’t get the rent on time.
Amen sister!
Are you sure you have cause and effect in the right order here, though? And rent control and development restrictions are very different efforts with very different interests behind them. It seems a little disingenuous to lump them together.
I don’t think that’s forgotten nearly as often as the fact that housing doesn’t have to be a for-profit business, doesn’t have to be the business anyone chooses to go into, and that without the product offered by this business, people are on the street, lending a rather uncomfortable “natural” power imbalance to landlords. Your situation may vary, but #notalllandlords and all that…
That IS funny, but the crazy man does touch on something important: work has to make sense to the individual, has to be a source of useful identity.
Otherwise it’s a waste of human potential.
While they have different interests, they interact to create extremely low vacancy rates. Development restrictions alone create communities where young people can’t live in the nice suburb where you grew up because there are no small rentals at all, since density and multifamily homes are prohibited by the zoning. Rent control alone inhibits development of rentals of any kind, unless they are exempt from the control, in which case they are almost always luxury.
Jane Jacobs wrote about how buildings normally follow a life cycle from luxury to low rent as they got older and decayed. It’s just the way it went. Rent control locked this cycle up, keeping the middle class where they were because there was no new middle class rentals, and thus created a shortage of this trickle down lower class housing in some areas. White flight eased this problem, but it has come back with the return of the middle class to cities with rent controls.
Does this still sound as reasonable? Should we be confiscating food from farmers?
Are there bad landlords? Absolutely! But tell me, HMSGoose, do you work for free? Would you go into the office, year after year, for no money? And do a great job? There’s lots of not-for-profit housing, and public assistance for those that can’t afford regular housing. It’s just not what most folks aspire to, it’s what they want to move away from. Take away the profitability from landlording, and you’re going to have to build lots more projects so that people have a place to live. Nobody disparages people that are good at chasing a ball around for making a profit at that, and they provide no tangible assets for the community!
I think the point others are making is that this system is that is not symmetrical or transparent, it favors the landlords. And my pint was that while ultimately the data (if released) may show active discrimination that could easily be hidden behind data like credit scores and salaries (which are flawed and biased) or by other factors that a landlord might say are just personal preference, like who the applicants employer is.
As I said (I think in a different thread), a true frictionless system would require transparency and rationality. Neither of those exist.
Id love to know where in the US there’s lots of nonprofit housing available for those who can’t afford better. The waiting list where I live average 6 years.
And while - in theory- renters are paying the landlord for their services, in practice a landlord can let tgese services slide for a very long time before atrending to them, since they usually cost money, and theres always another, more desperate renter waiting to apply.
While I don’t follow how a salary figure can be biased, I also don’t follow how this is more liable to discriminatory practice than normal. A landlord can collect multiple applications and then tell the ones he didn’t pick that he received a qualified application before them and he went in that order. The landlord has all the information and the applicant has none, unless he’s staked out the rental and video’d the showings.
That’s only true in areas of low vacancy. In much of the country landlords value their tenants since vacancies are costly even if you can get exactly the same rent.
Salaries and credit scores are inherently biased, the result of discrimination in the workplace and other financial inequities. As for the discrimination, I do think it will make it easier for someone who intends to discriminate, but perhaps more disconcerting would be the unconscious bias that the system perpetuates.
I do. I think we should nationalise it and cap their wages.
I took it to mean per capita income, which is so obviously biased it’s not even funny. Black and Latina women, for example, bring home almost half that of white men. They also have significantly less access to credit, at a much higher cost.
Credit scores can be arbitrary, but salary is what it is, how much money you make, which is the best indicator of your ability to pay the rent. It’s really pretty simple regardless of externalities, you’re looking for that minimum level, not who has the most. It’s rare that you get someone very overqualified in income applying, they would usually be looking at more expensive places appropriate to their income. I don’t follow your reasoning re discrimination at all.
They interact, but don’t collude, and in fact the people behind them are often in conflict. I acknowledge a crossover of long time residents who want their view and also want their rent stabilized, but generally speaking rent control is a cause of working people, and anti-development (especially anti-low-income-friendly-development) often comes from a privileged position.
That’s just the way it went under a certain set of market-based circumstances. The shape that “life cycles” take on don’t develop in a vaccuum. Any time “trickle down” enters the conversation, it’s usually an unsustainable model being described.
I don’t remember going full Stalin in any of my comments…But there are a lot of anti-gouging rules, subsisdies, and controls on the prices of staple foods. Food pricing is highly regulated, and yes, IMHO, should be even more. And though you don’t say it outright, the use of “farmers” as the noun does rhetorically skirt the realities of the shape and scale of agricultural industry…
Nope, I work for a nonprofit, and am paid decently well, though I rely on rent stabilization to live anywhere near my job. I have a small child, and am feeling the pinch of my tiny 1 bedroom on the first floor next to the subway tracks. I long ago missed the opportunity to afford a 2 bed in my rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Around here rent is stabilized at about twice what I can afford.
I personally do, quite often. I can definitely tell you, I appreciate your contribution to society far more than a sportsballer.
I’ll go out on a little bit of a limb here and say that it sounds like you’re renting houses to individuals/families. this is a far different market from an overheated, crowed urban center. In Brooklyn, apartments disappear in hours. I wouldn’t put the same regulatory structure onto a rental in a place that didn’t need it.
I think lots of people disparage that and plenty are disgusted by how much money is invested in that even if they don’t disagree with it on principle. Maybe the majority of people don’t, but you aren’t here discussing rental housing with the majority of people, you are here discussing it with a bunch of commies.
I’m curious, what metrics should a landlord be able to use to screen tenants? It’s hard to think of anything that doesn’t have potential for abuse, but there has to be some ability to make sure that a tenant can pay the rent, is going the pay the rent, and is responsible enough to take decent care of the place and not make the neighbors miserable.
Ah but you see the way the site works is that the landlord gets to know your salary, not simply whether or not you make enough to cover the rent. So it’s not a pass/fail test anymore the way that renting an apartment usually is (or at least as I remember it); instead of a landlord saying “you can have the apartment if you can show that the rent is less than 30% of your gross income” it becomes a situation where the landlord can look and see that, for instance, on an apartment costing $1000 a month with two applicants, one making $60,000 a year and the other making $70,000, one is “more qualified” than the other. Or a credit score of 725 vs 750. Is one really more qualified? Or can they both afford the apartment and both have acceptable credit scores?
And as @wait_really suggested, there is historical bias in salaries and credit scores, resulting in de facto discrimination.
But if if you allow landlords to freely increase rents with no rules then you price people out of the housing market, both as renters and as homeowners, so we would still need more public housing.
Landlords own property, and logically they can use that property to make a profit, but does that mean they can make a profit at the expense of the community? Does the landlord’s right to make money outweigh the tenant’s right to shelter?
Profit is perfectly fine by me, but price gouging is not.
Note the “places without housing crises” part-- in places with housing crises you can bet this site exacerbates the problem. I know I can find cheap rent in extremely rural areas, but the 2-hour commute to the city where my job is would subtract any benefit from that; lowering rents where there is less demand doesn’t even things out.
It’s true in urban and first-ring suburban areas in the post-industrialized cities of the Great Lakes, in areas of both high and low vacancies, because of the way subsidized housing works for both the landlord and tenant.
There are long waiting lists for Section 8 housing assistance and units, as @anon47741163, pointed out earlier, and many slumlords who know that there is very little actual oversight about the property’s fitness for human habitation. We have a neighborhood problem with out-of-town landlords and Section 8 renters, with some fault going to each side for hindering the rest of the neighborhood’s efforts to clean the place up. And I’ve seen this repeated in many neighborhoods in my city, and heard of it happening on many other cities.
When you’re a low-income renter, you’re in a precarious position. If you have an uncaring or exceptionally mercenary landlord, it can come crashing down around you with little or no warning.
Unless you are financially secure, or have housing provided to you, having decent shelter IS weaponized.
