I’m in Hudson County across NY Harbor and I do the exact same thing, rehab places that are trashed and make them nice homes. My millennial tenants love me, I’m not “The Man” to them. I’m the guy who fixes the clogged sink and wishes them well when they move on to bigger and better things.
There is simply no difference between current practice and Rentberry regarding this. Applications have income required, and I run a credit report. I can’t speak for all landlords, but in both cases it’s more of a pass/fail than caring who’s got a better FICO by 25 pts, everyone knows that’s meaningless. And I have regularly rented to people with poor FICO, I look at the whole picture because I’m not a robot nor a heartless prick. A middle aged couple moving from FL had a medical bankruptcy and crappy credit. From speaking to them I knew they were fine, and they were. I’ve never rented using a broker, I want to meet and get a feel for my tenants. It’s served me and them well.
It’s capitalism. It’s disgusting and it exacerbates the problems of capitalism. What is the solution though? The only “market solution” I can see is someone offering a similar service for free. What’s better? an opaque solution where people rely on their personal networks to get housing that’s affordable? The housing market where I live is supremely messed up you either pay ridiculously high rents or you rely on essentially insider information and personal relationships to find a decent deal which is the sort of thing that allows systemic racism to go unnoticed.
Imagine the free market. High rents attract developers, who unrestricted by zoning and density laws risk their capital to build new housing to meet that demand. They keep doing till equilibrium is reached, the rents drop till building more is less attractive. This is what happens in most industries, high price results in more supply till equilibrium.
Jersey City is a test case for this. A city of 250k has 37k units in the construction pipeline. Some people think rents will drop, but others think being a small part of the NY Metro ecosystem will keep rents and sale prices up.
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.
Just ask any student about what housing looks like if you live within 5 miles of a major college campus. Rundown, overpriced, and good luck getting your landlord to fix anything within a reasonable time frame. One place I rented had a persistent water leak in the plumbing on the 2nd floor. It took the ceiling collapsing into the kitchen below 6 weeks after we first notified them, before the landlord repaired the leak (and the ceiling).
I can tell you that when I apply for an an apartment, it’s a $45 fee, nonrefundable, to pay for whatever credit checks and criminal history they decide to buy for that money. And if I want to apply to another place, it’s another 45 bucks down the drain, no refunds. The tenants union has tried to get these records transferable, so one fee could handle an entire house hunt, but the landlords union has fought this, tooth and nail. I suppose because reasons.
Assuming you live in SF or NYC it’s an artifact of man, not a law of nature. People here got hysterical when a “micro-unit” building was proposed with 87 340 sq ft units. TENEMENTS! CLOSETS! My 1st apartment in Manhattan was 250 ft. And I survived. This is what is needed, but codes calling for larger apartments and lower densities keep supply low. Most of Jersey City has a zoning that allows only 2 units and no higher than 35 ft on a lot. So a 50x100 lot gets 2 2-family houses with big expensive apartments that always get sold as condos. You could build a 4 story building with at least 16 smaller units on that lot. This is a big reason there’s no affordable housing being built.
You know what gets people complaining about high rent most hysterical? The thought of higher competition for street parking! So they’re against new buildings and density, the one thing that might lower their rent besides rent controls.
@anon32019413, nice to hear from NotDems out there that care for their fellow man if they’re past the fetal stage.
I hate that crap. It costs me $15 per person to run a credit and eviction check. I don’t run it till both the applicant and I are committed. If it doesn’t work out at that point, I eat the $15-30. It’s a small price in the big picture and allows me to keep my self respect.
See this is the kind of practice that I think this website supplants; you’ve accepted the renter on the basis of the person before you get all the numbers, with the option of rejecting them if it doesn’t pan out. Your currrent practice (which is pretty much he same as any landlord I’ve dealt with) reduces the incidence of bias.
I think a better, fairer site would 1) not use pictures of bidders and 2) not reveal critical financial information until an offer was tentatively accepted - perhaps replacing number with “qualified” for bids up to a certain level of income.
I was evicted from the share house that I was living in when I was 19 because we refused to pay rent for two weeks.
The reason we refused to pay that rent was because the kitchen, bathroom and backyard were foot-deep in overflowing sewage, and the landlord refused to do anything about it.
That house also had holes in the floorboards, a front door that was impossible to secure (in a high-crime neighbourhood) and a balcony that was a blatant deathtrap.
But that’s true for any free market. Equilibrium till factors fluctuate, then change till equilibrium again. The amplitude of fluctuation depends on the market, look at what happens with oil to see a pretty high rate of change.
That is a grossly oversimplified model played with by children who call themselves economists. The real world is egregiously more complicated than economists admit. The law of supply and demand doesn’t even hold water. At best it’s an attempt to generalize from the idea that how hard a thing is to get is one of the many factors people use to determine how valuable it is.
In the real world a free market for real estate leads to a condition where one person owns all the real estate and lives like a king on rent (if they don’t literally end up becoming the king). The data shows that capital flows towards capital and individuals who already have it accumulate more. Of course with real individual freedom we’d either kill that person or just tell them to fuck off, we’re not paying. “Free markets” mean lots of laws that allow people who have property to keep it and determine what will be done with it, without any laws that make sure people who don’t have property can get by. We need to strike a balance that everyone can buy into, not leave the free market to create disaffected masses.
Yes but in this period stagnation, cyclical downturns and recession occur. Keynes observed that the investment function in a purely free market economy is incapable of digging it’s way out without intervention. The ROI has to be greater than other available options for redevelopment to begin. The typical answer for this from pre-Keynesian classical econ essentially amounted to “the bottom has to be somewhere.”
Surely though in the real world you need more than a wing and a prayer when implementing housing policy, particularly so when confronted with crises. The bottom, in truth, is simply the maximum amount of suffering that the community can withstand, until it either collapses or demands action from government. Those collapsed cities are all over the Midwest, I grew up in one of 'em. Cities like [Akron] (http://www.ohio.com/news/local/new-report-diagnoses-akron-s-ailing-housing-market-prescribes-treatments-1.748011) are filled with long-decaying neighborhoods whose only hopes, so say the economists, hinge on things getting better elsewhere. There simply are no free market solutions for that. There is no free market solution for this.
I think it’s instructive to look at equilibrium in economics from another point of view- from actual natural law. Achieving equilibrium in thermodynamics requires a defined, closed system. Equilibrium in capitalism requires the same constraints, and everything outside of the system is an externality, and ignored. Which externalities are ignored depends on the question being asked, and how things are measured in relation to each other. Widespread abuse of statistical significance allows economists to build mathematically, intellectually plausible models which that often fail in describing material reality.
Students are usually slightly better off than low-income renters, but the problem remains the same: you need a place to live, and if your options are limited, landlords can do pretty much as they please and you can whistle for a remedy. #notalllandlords
Of course nothing is simple as a supply=demand equation, there’s far too many variables, but you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist as the basic layer either. Does anyone dispute low vacancy leads to high rents?
