“ There is a reason so many people identify as liberal. Making rules by which you yourself don't have to life is fucking awesome.”
Like banning abortion knowing that if your high school age daughter or mistress gets knocked up you can just fly her to NYC? That kind of liberal rule making?
The Penn Station plan is just a handout to developers and would make the whole area even worse. Why don’t they actually build more platforms at Penn Station? That would be of greater benefit.
“ But “just” building luxury apartments is not the policy I’d support.”
Personal anecdote - while looking for a place a few years ago shitholes were asking top dollar. Then they built a new luxury building with a pool, gym, yadda yadda and suddenly the shitholes were no longer asking top dollar.
It’s a huge problem that people don’t see how a new luxury building makes the less nice building a little cheaper which makes the even less nice building even cheaper and on down the line.
“ The solution, as I see it, is to build more housing of all types.”
But that’s not how it works economically. The new luxury building makes the slightly less nice building a little cheaper which makes the even less nice building even cheaper on down the line until units in older buildings become affordable.
I think it's good to build housing of all types, but I don't want to be the person who has to answer the activists complaining that the apartment with below average rent is of below average quality.
Section 8 is unavailable in San Francisco and surrounds. You have to win a lottery to get on the WAITING LIST. It takes literally years. I suppose that’s one way to solve whatever the perceived problem is.
I have long been shocked that the City isn't a major landlord.
The projects should be slowly torn down, and replaced with solid, well engineered, middle class housing, and then the former inhabitants of the projects should be mixed in with affordable house, so the poor are not being warehouses in unfit housing.
It would seem an obvious first step is that before building new homes for new people, we should be building new homes for the people that are already there.
New York City public housing stewardship is a sad story. Years ago, when Deblasio announced the billion dollar PLUS fixes for NYCHA roofs, I found a Real Deal New York (or a similar pub) story about roof repairs on apartment buildings; I was able to calculate that a luxury condo in Soho was getting a better rate on a per square foot basis on their roof replacement than the city was getting on all those flat top NYCHA buildings that don't seem like a very complicated replacement.
My brief encountering-YIMBY-culture story: A few years ago I went to a happy hour organized by a YIMBY group in my neighborhood in Austin. I'm totally on board with the need for more development in our neighborhood, and often frustrated by the anti-development ethos of our official neighbors association. BUT after that one happy hour I swore off that crew forever. Generally pleasant people, but they were total ideologues when it came to development. At the time the city was engaged in a battle over whether or not to sell a public golf course to developers for housing. I'm not even a golfer, and it wasn't in our neighborhood, but it seemed apparent to me that a public golf course is a public good that, at a minimum, shouldn't be turned over to developers without a lot of thought. The response i got from the YIMBY crew was totally dismissive. They couldn't even seem to grasp my point. There were a few other things like this. I really am pretty hardcore pro-development, but as with all politics, you can't be dumb about how you go about advocating for big changes to housing infrastructure in people's neighborhoods. It's really personal for people.
I would agree if the question was about developing a new golf course now. This is a course that's been there since 1924, one of the city's six public courses.
At the more general level, cities provide all sorts of recreational spaces for people -- libraries, parks, basketball courts, soccer fields, etc. I agree that it wouldn't make sense to build a new golf course now, for a host of reasons. Maybe it made sense in 1924 (when, among other things, land in Austin was much cheaper). But building new courses is one thing. Tearing up a century old course is a totally different thing. Maybe the right decision still, but in my opinion not an easy one.
If it’s one of six, I’m still not seeing the problem with developing it for housing in a city with a need for housing. I try to listen and read Freddie and other YIMBY hostile people with an open mind, but your arguing about saving the SIXTH public golf course over building places for people to live.
That feels like it proves too much. “Do we really need this many parks and playgrounds? There’s a perfectly good swingset across town!”
One of the big challenges with YIMBYs is that they’re asking people to give up real benefits of living in a particular place. I know a golf course may seem silly, but aren’t we always chiding people for not going outside and exercising? Everything that’s good about living in a place could always be torn up for more housing — parks and bike paths and beaches and tennis courts and sculptures and fountains and memorials and planetariums and botanical gardens and zoos. Everybody eventually draws a line where they say “no, NOW quality of life factors will prevail over squeezing in more people or lowering rents” — and I don’t see a particularly strong moral case for drawing it in any particular place.
But isn't Freddie's whole point that if you want to win political arguments about developing more housing, you have to take seriously people's emotional attachments to their neighborhoods and their fears of change? If you want to WIN a political fight, you can't simply say that there's no seeing eye to eye. You actually have to figure out how to persuade enough people to win.
Well, I think characterizing things as “emotional” is a tad dismissive. What we’re talking about are values, and I see, for example, a lot of YIMBYs in this thread justifying pro-tenant laws on the grounds that “home” and the attachment to one’s home are important values that have to be taken into account. Which is fair! But then it’s also fair to take into account that many Austinians seem to value a particular kind of recreational land use. And talking about “efficiency” isn’t that helpful, since one can always be more efficient by becoming more brutal. (Say, by eminent domaining all single family homes and turning the land into socialized housing.)
Yes, but I'd say a public golf course is very high on the patrician scale of what population is taking advantage of it. Likely to be one of the first things in the chopping block compared to everything else you mentioned.
I don’t entirely disagree, but at the same time, a basketball hoop can be erected practically anywhere, so practically anybody can do basketball even if the city doesn’t provide it. But it’s impossible to set up your own golf course. So if we eliminate public golf courses we diminish access for anyone who can’t afford the private ones in tony suburbs. Maybe “low-to-middle-income-people should be able to play golf” is low on our list of values and priorities. That can be okay. But it seems like a value that Austin has embraced.
I have never seen a YIMBY group that advocates for building housing in a public park, beach or botanical garden. Smells like a Straw Man to me.
In SF we advocate for multi-family on parking lots, warehouses and existing single family zoned neighborhoods. Sure, NIMBYs like you oppose us with "quality of life" concerns. We get it, you don't want to have to compete over parking.
We disagree with you and think that the quality of life will be improved if new construction happens. More people leads to more tax revenue, more walkable neighborhoods, better city services including mass transit and a host of other benefits to existing residents. And a huge improvement of the quality of live of for those who can now share our city.
You are a NIMBY and I am a YIMBY and there isn't a lot we will see eye to eye on. I understand your arguments and disagree with them. If you want, I can explain your position in detail, as I used to be a NIMBY too.
Or, as I said, everybody draws lines. You draw the line somewhere other than where the people of Austin choose to. Okay. But if you won’t tear up that park or demolish that botanical garden, you are a NIMBY. You just have a different threshold. Which is fine! But then I don’t take your sniping at someone else’s NIMBYism very seriously. You’re just one step removed from the same position.
Well but this is my point. I think there's a good discussion to be had about developing the course for housing, but it should be an actual discussion, not just a quick calculation about which course provides more utility and then a contemptuous dismissal of the people who lose in that calculation. People care about the course because they play on it and have strong emotional connections to it. They care because it's an attractive part of their neighborhood. And so on. And there actually is such a thing as a character of a neighborhood, although that is also a dodge that NIMBYs use to fight all development. Again, I'm not saying the YIMBY side loses in this discussion, but that people have real reasons for wanting their local public golf course to stay, and it's neither democratically appropriate nor politically wise to just dismiss them out of hand.
I don’t see this differently than any other debate. Some people feel like eating GMOs is unnatural and dangerous. Some people feel like gay people getting married is weird. Why should people who feel like neighborhoods should never change have more weight placed on their arguments than people who don’t like change in the food supply or family structures? In yeh end, yes, I will not waver from yeh idea that society meeting the basic needs of its citizens with food, healthcare and shelter matters much much more than people’s nostalgia.
I didn't say they should get MORE weight. I said they are legitimate actors in the political discussion, and a) should be treated with respect as fellow members of our democracy, and b) should be recognized as potential obstacles to achieving the political end you want to achieve. Also worth saying that reducing their perspective to "nostalgia" is, IMO, a mistake. For one thing, it's not nostalgia. It's actually attachment to playing golf in the present, and to the way their neighborhoods looks and feels right now. More importantly, the history of big shifts in infrastructure development is rife with disasters and unintended consequences. The idea that we simply and easily know what's best is hubris. We can have well thought through ideas, but it's always wise to pay attention to what people who live in a place think and feel about where they live. It doesn't have to be determinative, but it shouldn't be ignored.
I mean a public golf course does seem like a huge indulgence. It's a sport that uses a lot of land for very few people, unlike basketball or tennis or something.
I'm trying to be as clear as possible, but seem to be failing. People are very, very attached to public golf courses. They have been positive public goods for generations. In this case the course has been a thing people have loved for almost a century. Housing costs have only been a real issue or Austin for a decade or two. It may be the case that it's time to develop some of this land as housing, but it should never be a simple thing to just destroy a beloved public good. And that's not even taking into account the politics of it, which are super complicated. So an approach that just says "housing more efficient, golf is an indulgence, high water use, case closed" is just a dead end politically and democratically. Make the argument in a way that takes people's concerns seriously, try to persuade people, look for potential trade-offs (maybe defenders of the golf course could be persuaded to support zoning code changes in exchange for leaving their golf course alone), etc. Do actual politics.
One of the things that non-New Yorkers notice about NYC is the lack of open space. OK Central.Park, but for a lot of people it’s a long way off. Golf courses benefit more people than just golfers. A golf course is a big area dedicated to grass, trees, bushes, and the occasional human being walking around. There are factors that don’t answer to mechanical analysis.
Yes, a golf course is a very inefficient use of space compared with, say, a public park with a variety of uses (jogging trails, a children's playground, a place for people to have a picnic, etc.)
The other question is whether the city is getting a good deal. These conversions tend to involve a lot of backroom negotiation and inherently hard-to-price tracts of land, as well as city investments and costs in connecting it and integrating it with existing city services. There’s a lot of potential for incompetence or actual corruption, or for unexpected costs to fall on the city.
I’d still be in favor of the conversion as a goal, but you don’t have to love golf courses to start off skeptical.
Fair enough. I don't want to read too much into my one anecdote. It was just consonant with what Freddie was writing about, and given that I was a potential recruit to the cause, it was a on a very small scale a missed opportunity. I'd say Freddie's experience, as a long time housing activist, should count for much more than mine.
It's hard enough to develop new market rate housing in New York, but trying to fix social housing and subsidized housing at the same time just seems unrealistic. Maybe YIMBYs are just being pragmatic.
Explain to me why length of stay in an apartment or house grants you legal rights to it as if you were the owner? You get all of the upside and none of the downside, like having to pay to replace the water heater, roof, stairs, maintain the yard, shovel snow, etc. It's quasi-ownership rights without the owner getting the benefit of the takings clause. Tenants = sainted martyrs and landlords = evil parasites. Is this the best you have to offer, really?
I'd love to hear from people who've been landlords and can you tell about awful tenants, including Section 8 tenants. There's never a fulsome, thoughtful discussion about this. I remember having a discussion with a man on the bus who was Brooklyn born and raised for generations (not yuppie, SJW Brooklyn, but working class Brooklyn and worked in the construction industry) and he told me he had inherited a building and would accept Section 8 tenants because he wanted to give people a chance. He was rewarded with tenants using Section 8 against him (I forget the terminology but I think tenants would cook up frivolous complaints that triggered audits by the housing authority). The process was the punishment and it meant that he couldn't collect the rents to pay the bills (I assume they were in an escrow account but I'm not sure). He vowed he would let the building be empty before allowing Section 8 tenants again.
Tenants quasi-ownership rights to apartments leads to an inefficient use of apartments as people in oversized units continue to stay there while larger families are stuck in smaller apartments.
Exactly. Landlords neglect their responsibilities all the time. If you know your rights, you can go through a long legal process that might lead to him addressing the issue months later. But you're not compensated for the issues, and you can't break your lease to leave. I've never gotten a dime of my security deposits back without a fight.
If you are arguing for a better arbitration process I think that's something both sides could support. But if you are arguing for stupid shit like rent controls that I will continue to oppose.
I bought a duplex in San Francisco in the early 00s which is now worth triple what I paid for it and my tenants have been paying the entire cash flow including repairs for at least a decade. And this is in a rent controlled building that has the original tenants downstairs. It certainly was not a losing proposition for me, it was in fact the second best financial decision of my life.
This highlights an important complexity in discussions of landlord/tenant rights. Very small, private landlords are governed by the same laws as very large landlords who own multiple multifamily properties. They’re often dealing with different issues day-to-day and don’t have an internal apparatus to handle everyday administrative and legal tasks.
This is why most federal and many state tenancy laws include significant carve-outs for smaller landlords, to prevent them feeling forced out of the market by laws focused on big corporations. Even working-class landlords, who certainly do exist, get a break by virtue of being property owners.
I've lived in several apartments, and I've noticed a huge difference between big companies and "guy who owns a building" situations. The companies fix things. They have a process for submitting requests and a staff to handle them.
Small landlords are a nightmare. I had one who would just send his elderly father, who barely spoke English, for every single problem, and that was about as effective as you'd expect. When I had problems with appliances, he said my "husband" should fix them. When the building got bed bugs, he sent his dad with a can of Raid.
I’ve found that small landlords want to be treated like small business owners until it comes time to regulate them like small businesses. Then suddenly they’re providing a charitable service out of the goodness of their hearts and all these rules are treating them like criminals.
While I agree, other countries have lease terms that guarantee the ability to renew the lease indefinitely and limit rent increases. It’s not own your own home or be at constant risk of not having the lease renewed or the price increased dramatically.
Some argue that this is a better system as it prevents so much excess capital being tied up in residential real estate.
So you would have longterm tenants put on the street or relocated to distant neighbourhoods where they have no social connections? Maybe solyent green would serve your vision for the future.
Seems as though all he is saying is that there are people on both sides of this equation and both can be taken advantage of. Maybe not treat it as a cartoon with a mustache twirling villain on one side and a salt-of-the-earth good guy on the other.
I have no idea. But treating landlords like criminals doesn't seem to be the way.
Or, let me approach it differently, you seem to care about this issue. Have you invested your life savings in low income housing for the less fortunate? If not, why not?
I have helped out in various ways and voted for policies that protect tenants. My experience as a frequent renter in the past was that about half the time I had to move was because of unscrupulous or uncaring landlords.
I don't mean this flippantly. Why aren't you putting your money where your mouth is and becoming a landlord yourself? You could be the very caring and decent landlord you see as lacking. Why does this have to be someone else's job?
How is rent control "treating landlords like criminals"? Do you live in a place where landlords are thrown in jail or something? Can't they just sell their property or even not invest if they don't like the rules?
Thread OP is exactly the kind of condescension that Freddie complains about when you are trying to coalition-build. But thread OP is right that giving people the upsides of ownership without the downsides is a crazy policy.
Owning and renting each have risks. Owners risk being tied down and having their capital at risk. Renters risk not being able to claim the right to stay in the same spot for decades.
Society has to let people evaluate risks and face the risks and even face the consequences of the risks. All the attempts to shield homeowners from the consequences of buying beyond their means after the housing bubble popped only dragged the whole thing out for years.
“ Owners risk being tied down and having their capital at risk.”
Well, in his defense, the government does do a lot of homeowner bailouts. During the financial crisis, during COVID, during natural disasters. The public really doesn’t like people losing their homes.
And we won’t even get started on things like 30 year fixed rate mortgages with no pre-payment penalty not existing in a free market. They only exist due to government market intervention.
What constitutes a long-term tenant? 1 year? 3 years?
Tenants who cannot afford or do not want to pay the rent increase can move to a different dwelling or location. This is the reality of life, If you cannot afford something, you make do with something else.
The woman discussed in the article had lived in the apartment for forty years. Yes, a cutthroat approach to housing is advocated by some. Housing, like medicine and food, should not be dependent just on how much money you have.
Everything in life is dependent on how much money you have. This is reality.
Advocating for policies whereby tenants retain the right to indefinite leases with small increases in rent will make landlords be even more discriminating about who they rent to and will drive down the housing availability. People will rent to those they know and can "trust" or leave apartments empty.
Because the cost and social capital required for homeownership are profoundly prohibitive for many, yet we’d like to structure a world where people with children and jobs and complicated lives are not constantly living in fear of displacement because of market forces beyond their control.
Right, but the flip side of that is that overly strong tenant protections disincentivize the creation of rental housing in the first place.
To give just one data point — I used to own a house in a tier 1 American city. When I left that city, I had the choice of renting the house out or selling it to another owner-occupant. After mulling my options and thinking about local law, I chose the latter. It bummed me out, because by keeping the house for a decade or so I had the opportunity to see enormous growth in my net worth. But it was not worth it to me to rent the house out in an environment where, if my tenant was abusive, I would be stuck with a lengthy and cumbersome eviction process. Additionally, if I later decided to move back to that city and live in the house again, I could evict the tenant, but only if I paid rather substantial relocation costs.
For all these reasons, I decided not to rent my house out, and instead sold it to another well-off owner-occupant.
That’s very small scale, of course, but the same disincentives, it seems to me, apply to commercial developer-landlords, too. It’s more expensive and more of a hassle to provide rental housing in a place with strong pro-tenant laws… so why do it? Why not build a gas station or a mall instead?
I think scale matters in decision-making here. In your case, you were either going to have 0% problem tenants or 100% problem tenants (defined as requiring the lengthy, cumbersome eviction process). Even if you’ve got good odds of not having a problem tenant, if you end up with one it’s your entire investment. (This would be mitigated somewhat if you knew were going to stick to one-year-or-less leases, at least initially, and rent it out for many years with the good tenants offsetting the bad ones. Even then, if you draw a problem tenant as your first tenant, you’re in trouble.)
By contrast, a commercial developer landlord can expect some percentage of their tenants to be problem tenants but can spread the costs of that around to their other current tenants. This allows for a more predictable cost-income calculation at the outset of their investment, and (unless they’re horribly mismanaged) they will never be in the situation you risk of having 100% of their tenants be problem tenants.
Yes, that’s a very fair point. I assume there’s still some effect on the desirability and profitability of rental housing as an investment even at the larger end, but you’re probably right that the primary effect is in driving out small landlords like me.
Again, I think it depends on what scale you look at, only this case it’s individual vs. society. There are lots of folks who, faced with the same parameters as Chesterton’s Fence Repair Co., would choose to rent. It depends on their tolerance for risk, their estimate of the likelihood of getting a problem tenant, their perception of their ability to recover from a problem tenant, etc.
There’s a good chance that making the bet pays off for most such folks, providing additional income and a launching point to higher long-term prosperity. And some would, as feared, end up financially worse off.
Giant corporations will have an advantage in pretty much any field, and I don’t see why the landlord business would be any different. The role that tenant protections play in that advantage seems fairly low, and potentially offsett-able through other measures aimed at helping small-scale landlords if so inclined.
I hear what you're saying, but that's the nature of all consumer protections. They introduce the potential for consumer exploitation, which some- generally small- percentage of people will inevitably take advantage. But the alternative is allowing for a similar exploitation at the hands of people with accumulated or inherited wealth. Grenwolf did a better job than I could have in showing how it eventually works out in aggregate, if not in every scenario
As a point of argument, I don't think you can use your own fears about a potentially adverse hypothetical rental experience as a "data point." Doesn’t seem to rise to the level of empirically-verifiable data.
I mean, my fears literally removed one house from the rental market. N=1, but it is a point. Or you could see this as qualitative data about one potential landlord’s experience.
Or you can ignore it because we’re all just dogs on the internet. 🐕
My argument is that labor law is a balancing act, where you try to minimize the amount of exploitation on the part of the landlord while also minimizing the maximum amount of free-loading/moral hazard on the part of the tenant. Not every landlord is out to squeeze their tenants dry, just as every tenant is not out to skate obligation as much as possible. We can theorize all sorts of loopholes from each side, but the answer to how good of a balance you've struck will always ultimately become an empiric question: When the law is in place, are an unexpected number of people from either side of the fight, tenants and landlords, taking advantage of the system?
How you answer that is obviously going to depend on how you interpret peoples' actions and motives. But one thing it can't depend on (again, being an empiric question) is how you IMAGINE things might have played out in a given scenario, or how they COULD HAVE played out. You have to look at things as they actually happen. For instance, if I rented an apartment for 15 years without a lease, I can't really argue that my landlord was a slumlord because "he could have thrown me out at any time." Because - you know- he never did. In the same sense, I just don't think it makes sense for you to submit your worst-case-scenario fears about being a landlord to prove your point about the problems of tenant laws, because ultimately it's a counterfactual.
I think we’re talking about two different questions, though. It’s not a data point about the prevalence of abuse. It’s a data point about how the structure of the law affects landlords’ decision-making. And on that point it’s not hypothetical at all; it’s what happened.
> But the alternative is allowing for a similar exploitation at the hands of people with accumulated or inherited wealth.
You say this like it matters.
Saying that we want people to be able to raise their kids in one place for 12 years is a decent argument. Worrying about the wrong kinds of people being landlords isn't.
We want our justice system to be "swift, sure, and fair" and our eviction process should be the same way. People can drag it out for years, maybe, and when it finally hits it's like a surprise.
Yeah. I feel like I’d be more comfortable with stronger tenant stability protections if they came with correspondingly more funding for courts to deal with these issues specifically. (Or some kind of fast-moving binding arbitration.)
Selling it to someone else who wants to live there instead of having another absentee landlord who does not care about the community and only sees it as a source of profit seems like a win to me.
Sure. It depends on your priorities. That neighborhood will absolutely benefit from the presence of the rich guy who bought it from me, because rich people moving into mediocre neighborhoods tend to make them better. (They complain to the city about maintenance issues, call the cop on shady people, beautify their own yards…)
But my point was about the effect on affordable housing. And this was definitely a loss for affordable housing. I would have rented the house out for considerably less than my mortgage payment and far less than the new buyer’s payment. By making the decision I did I made that unit of housing about twice as expensive for the next person to live there.
If you would rent it out for less than the market rate, you are a generous person indeed. Over time, rents and mortgages tend to be the same. In a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that is not the case because people expect the value to increase. But for most areas it is a wash.
In the city of which I speak, rents are consistently well below mortgages — not least because of renter protection laws. This was a somewhat gentrifying area, although the big gains were already well in the past. But it still would have taken ten or fifteen years for rent to have caught up to the mortgage payment. Still, it could have been worth it to subsidize rent (because the land value would have increased significantly, too). But not if there’s the additional risk of a bad renter you can’t get rid of.
Yes and the burdens are also incredibly large. I know renters who rent because they don't want the obligation of paying a monthly mortgage and fronting the costs for repairs. They know if they lose their job, they can quickly leave and find cheaper rent. Both owners and renters have benefits and disadvantages. What tenants want is the benefits of ownership without the burdens. Would tenants rights supporters demand that tenants now be able to terminate their lease and stay in an apartment indefinitely because the owner would not be able to get another tenant paying the same amount because rents have dropped?
Always ends with the name calling. Definitely persuading me to your view now. :)
"Otherwise, they ARE parasites who provide nothing to society. We don’t need owners. We do need housing. By the grace of god or the cold, indifferent universe, I am now a homeowner."
Now you're being honest. Screw the landlords. Take their property. They are vermin who must be extinguished.
The difference between us I don't focus on the cold, indifferent universe and what it owes me or what I deserve but on how I can best position myself to persevere through hardship that I know is inevitably coming my way.
"Because the cost and social capital required for homeownership are profoundly prohibitive"
I agree that housing is expensive. The solution to that is to build more housing, and not put in stupid regulations that make it so people won't build (see rent control).
Also, if you want to own, then reduce your consumption and increase your savings. My wife and I moved in with my parents for a couple of years to save for a house.
I had an immigrant friend where FOUR families lived together for years as they bought each home and then paid it off so they could all own their own house.
If you want to make it happen you can. Just live WAY within your means
This is a fascinating topic. I've watched the drama unfold many times over many years, though in the S.F. Bay Area rather than New York. As a member of the evil ownership class (though not currently a landlord), my initial thoughts were like yours.
But I've changed my perspective a bit. Living in a place for a long time connects with some very basic human feelings, feelings that probably trace back to times when communities or tribes lived together for entire lifetimes. Those feelings can't just be dismissed because the current economic system says that owners should have all the rights. A left-leaning economic justification would be that your material circumstances are a combination of luck and timing, so you don't meaningfully "deserve" the ownership rights that you have.
Housing is complicated. There are strong instincts and emotions about one's community and home. "Home" is a big deal in the human mind and heart. It's not like crypto or other investments. You ignore that at your peril when working through these issues.
All true. But it takes two to tango. And I don't think abstract notions of fairness and decency will convince people to invest millions in new housing. There's going to have to be an incentive on the landlord side as well. Where that line is drawn? I don't presume to know, but seeing all these comments where only the tenant is considered and the landlord either ignored or villified has me scratching my head.
To get back to Freddie's point about achieving actual progress, I don't see how blaming everything on the landlord (and minimizing their rights to their own land) is going to lead to more housing. It has to be a balance where they are considered in good faith as well.
I would argue that most landlord/tenant laws were put in place by property owners to benefit the landlord side of the equation, and while years of tenant-rights work has been an attempt to equalize the balance, landlords interpret any push for tenant rights as an unfair attempt to tip the scale the other way. As I say below, you don’t have to add an individual moral dimension to this - most American laws were put in place to benefit property owners and there’s no reason landlord/tenant laws should be an exception.
This type of zero sum framing is particularly counterproductive. If the number of homes were more or less constant, then you might have a point. But the number of homes should not be constant! It should be exploding, but it’s not due to suffocating policy restrictions. Relax those restrictions and let them build. Giving tenants more supply and more options, and having landlords begging for their business is what gives tenants power, not these bitter fights that do little.
Yes, I understand your concerns. It seems to me that in the current economic climate, only big faceless corporations can afford to be landlords. They have economies of scale and can keep maintenance workers, accounting staff, etc., on the payrolls. I would not be a "mom and pop" landlord again, particularly not in California. In addition to the costs of maintenance, taxes, insurance, etc., you get vilified just for existing. I don't really like being vilified, and if I keep my investments in a Vanguard index fund, I find that I can simply not tell anyone and don't have to deal with all the grief.
But are big faceless corporations the best landlords from the tenant point of view? I think that's really an open question.
I think that is well said and gets at the point I was trying to make. I wouldn't want to be a landlord in California either. And that's a problem housing advocates need to confront, rather than just paint landlords as greedy and soulless. When you drive out everyone but fortune 100 companies, are you really making the progress you want to make?
Ironically, probably yes. Fortune 100 companies have investments and care about things like ESG and can be subjected to social media pressure, lawfare, political pressure, etc. The same number of apartment units held by a diffuse class of small-time landlords is much harder to target and sway.
By the numbers, most landlords are people who own only a few properties. It's a lot of work with not inconsiderable risks. They are not faceless corporations.
I said this in another post, but here in CA we have Prop 13, which freezes your property tax to the value of the property when you purchased it. I think that tying that to rent control might be a fair trade off. Want to gut the place, remodel, and charge three times as much? Perfect; enjoy your new tax bill. On the other side, we need laws to allow landlords to IMMEDIATELY jettison squatters or people demolishing the place and tenants who do destroy property should be ineligible for any further assistance.
One other thing would be rent control that is also fair to the property owner, so once the original renter moves out, the rent can go up, unless the new tenant is on the lease. So no keeping rent control for 3 generations in Manhattan so your wealthy grandkids can live on the cheap after their trip to an IvyLeague school. I’d like to make it easier to evict problem tenants, while severely penalizing landlords who try to evict tenants to dodge rent control, but even reading that sentence brings up nightmare images for fair implementation…
That's how San Francisco's rent control works: new tenants move in at market rate, then are locked to scheduled yearly increases as long as they remain. (Rent control in San Francisco only covers multi-family buildings built before 1979.) It seems like a better system than NYC's.
However, as you point out, Prop 13 is a *terrible* confounder. Even under SF's weak version of rent control landlords can (over time) align rent with land value, but their tax rate remains locked to the value when they or their grandparents bought the land. My preferred solution is that Prop 13 be entirely repealed for commercial and investment property, but your idea is interesting.
Yup. Prop 13 is bad every way that you look at it.
I don't think there's a *political* route to repealing it entirely - too many homeowners who don't want their taxes to go up. I do, however, think you could get together a constituency for eliminating its worst parts by excluding commercial / investment / rental properties, and second homes.
Very well said. It strikes me as so odd that those who claim to be communitarian don't seem to be interested in any of the things that actually make a community.
Feelings don't matter and neither does length of time. Someone can feel like they are a part of the community after living there only a year while someone who's been there 10 can basically be a recluse and not engage with the greater community.
Owners have all the rights because they have all the obligations, including the monetary ones. I am very tired of the "deserving" argument. What people deserve is irrelevant and it's not the job of government to even out the scales. What if a landlord bought the apartment building using the proceeds from a lawsuit after his son was killed by a drunk driver. Does he become more deserving than the tenant who has lived in the apartment for 7 years and feels like a part of the community? What are the criteria for being deserving? There are none. It's all thoughts and feelings, which is unworkable.
People who rent know the dwelling does not belong to them. Their expectations that they should have the legal right to live there indefinitely with small rent increases is unreasonable.
Do you believe there is no role for government in trying to fix unfair conditions? Do you oppose programs like Medicaid or the EITC or welfare/food stamps? I would consider all of those programs attempting to give people some of what they "deserve" but are unable to afford/procure for themselves for various reasons.
There are better ways and worse ways to improve people's conditions.
One of the absolute worst is to say "hey, third-party, you have a responsibility to take care of this problem" which creates a giant game of hot potato and everyone avoids being the third-party.
Another bad idea is to identify a scarce resource and then artificially increase demand for that scarce resource.
The null hypothesis is that we should just give people money. They can decide to spend that money bidding up a very scarce resource if that very scarce resource is valuable to them, but maybe they'd rather have an extra $400 to spend on food and transportation.
Yes they can. The Owner shouldn't have all the rights, for example, they should have to fix hazards (black mold etc).
But aside from that, any rights should be spelled out in the lease agreement after that it should be at will. The renter can leave when they want, and the landlord can raise rents, or kick them out when they want.
Which is why it's so maddening that socialists/communists/marxists like Freddie absolutely refuse to write down what the socialist/communist/marxist policy for allocating housing would be, if they ever took over.
Your snark-factor is dialed to 11, but you are right on.
Lenin was a murderous thug. More shopkeepers should be hanging from lampposts and trees. Kill of their family, too, including tiny kids, so that they do not grow up and seek revenge. Stalin did his best to eliminate the Kulaks and Wreckers. How many dissenters survived the Band of Brothers 1-6 in Cambodia?
Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, are great examples of the "functional systems" that are left in place after the initial murder, deportation and theft. The deportation, by the way, continues, only it's voluntary.
Vietnam and China are examples of at least delaying the inevitable collapse of communism by pivoting to capitalism, while keeping all the authoritarianism. There should be a name for that type of governance, eh? (The eh is in Canadian).
I would just say, here's a check at fair market value, you have to sell it to me (the gov). Here's also a list of available real jobs. Go make some working class friends. Have fun. This is now publicly owned housing.
And, the check will be zero, since there is no fair market value if there is no market. And, even if the check was for some non-zero amount, what would it "purchase" in a commie society? Nothing.
How about this- there should be checkpoints so the existing community can limit development the community doesn't want. Which is more or less what we have now and what YIMBYIES are trying to get rid of. Historic churches turned into condos, who exactly is for that?
If the owners of the "historic church" decide that it's God's will to replace the building with condos to provide housing for people, who am I to complain?
Because you will have no such limits on new development market rates, realize that these sorts of regulations would incentivize winding down these sorts of buildings if you try to freeze tenants in place using regulation against landlords. The buildings will be held at a low valuation until a landlord, probably some huge company, figures out how to empty them out and redevelop them at a market rate. Particularly if the municipality does not freeze the property tax rates on these regulated / tenant subsidized buildings.
1) Legally, it depends on location. See a lawyer, if you can afford it.
2) Morally, because age and longstanding residence create massive hardships on some tenants which don't otherwise exist.
But the answer to your broader complaint is that without tenant protections, tenants can be mistreated (in fact, even with tenant protections, tenants can be mistreated, but tenant protections do help). Those protections, like all protections (and all rights, for that matter) can be abused in various ways and it's a constant balancing act to get it right. I make no claim that any particular location has found the perfect balance, but it's a genuinely hard question.
ETA: I will say that though there's always a balance, my instinctive belief is going to be that though edge cases undoubtedly exist, structural systems are generally not set up for the benefit of poor renters.
I mean, this is true with any limitation. So, you'll notice a tendency to fire people right before they would start earning sick leave, or to keep people just below the full-time employee hour limits.
But it's fairly unlikely here as it would mean you'd have to fairly frequently evict good tenants (depending on how such a system were implemented).
ETA: Also, I expressly separated legal and moral arguments for a reason. Saying it is immoral to evict an elderly individual from the home they've lived in for 40 years doesn't mean that it should be illegal to do so. Merely that you are, in fact, a bad person if you do that in order to increase your profit margin [general 'you' obviously].
To answer your first question: I don’t think Freddie said that. There’s a difference between advocating for policies that allow renters to more easily remain in place/limit disruptive profit-maximization practices and “quasi-ownership.”
There is a vast class of people in this country who live with the constant knowledge that the person who owns the roof over their heads could upend decades of their life at any time and they would receive no recourse whatsoever, regardless of how much money they’ve made the landlord in that time. This is bad. It’s disrupting and horrible to lose a home you felt safe and secure and familiar in because of arbitrary market pressure. And, yes, this is not the result of landlords being somehow inherently, morally evil - but it is the result of enormous financial inequality between the property-owning and property-renting classes, and the fact that landlords’ financial motivations are to charge as much rent and perform as little maintenance as they can get away with, and to lobby against laws that would prevent them from doing this.
I am fully aware plenty of landlords are better than this on an individual level, but as a class they can hire lobbyists and lawyers and as a class tenants largely can’t, and it shows in whose interests the laws actually take into account.
Yeah, plenty of landlords could tell you about some real jerks they rented to. I’m a tenant lawyer - I could tell you about some real jerks I’ve represented. I also don’t find “but tenants don’t appreciate what I’m sacrificing to put a roof over their ungrateful heads!” a convincing narrative, and I hear it every single day of my life. I simply care more about the problems of the elderly woman on a fixed income whose home of 25 years will suddenly be financially unavailable to her one month to the next than for someone who, however tight the profit margins, has the wealth accumulated from owning multiple properties. Not everyone is that woman but I want everyone to have the same rights I want for her.
Again with the profits are bad belief. It's very interesting to me that people ascribe immorality to people wanting to make a profit but not people wanting to get as much money as possible from their employer or getting service as cheap as possible. Why is one good and the other bad? Do you overpay for goods and services because the seller is not making enough profit and you can afford it? Maybe we should move to a system where price is determining by the relative wealth of each person.
It is because these high falutin principles of yours cause grinding misery for humans on earth, hence we seek to balance interests of owners and renters. I see what you say as *actual* moralizing
Where did I say profits are bad? Lawmaking to always incentivize profit maximization at the cost of other goods like community cohesiveness and long-term tenant stability is bad.
How do you measure community cohesiveness? Tenants are transient and take advantage of market fluctuations to their benefit but want to deny this to landlords. When rents go down, people move or negotiate better lease terms, as they should. When rents go up, landlords increase rent or terminate the lease and get higher quality tenants.
Tenants are, by and large, stuck in place when they find somewhere decent to live. I don’t live in a big city - move-in costs and fees run an average of $1,500-$3,000 here. Inventory is at historical lows. This flexibility you imagine for people who rely on the rental housing does not exist for most people.
Also, when is the last time rents actually consistently, stably went *down*?
Also, what’s a “higher-quality” tenant? You mean “richer,” right? Just say “richer.”
I would love to see laws demanding a quicker return of security deposits. It takes too long in my opinion and I believe that would help tenants. Moving costs are sometimes prohibitive and that is a factor people take into account when deciding whether to move.
Few things go down in price long-term. I don't know why you'd expect rent to be any different. Rent is based on housing prices, mortgage availability, insurance costs and property taxes. All of these go up, up, up. The idea that rents must only increase by say 2-5% a year when other costs are soaring is unfair and unrealistic. When the pandemic hit and renters didn't have to pay, but landlords have to continue paying property taxes, fixing repairs and paying their mortgage, this was grossly unfair and unjust. I don't like exploitation no matter who is doing it. I know landlords whose tenants stopped paying because they could, even though they could afford it.
Yes. Making more money and/or having larger savings means you are less likely to not pay your rent if something bad happens, like you lose your job or take a pay cut or have your hours cut. Also, people with better credit, years at their job, no history of bankruptcy, criminal record, etc. If you were a landlord, would you take the higher quality or lower quality tenant? Please be honest.
I had to help my friend shovel shit out of his rental property a few years back. I have no idea if was from a dog or not but somebody was just letting it go all over the carpet in the living room.
A "higher quality" tenant might have used a toilet or forced his dog to go outside.
Note that in economics, rent is different from profit. Profit is assumed to include productive human activity. Rent, on the other hand, is _unearned_ income. It's the difference between the actual productive value of the property (as defined by what you would get for it if you sold it) and the amount you're renting it for.
Profit I'm fine with up to the point that profit-seeking causes other harm to society. But I'm more skeptical about rents.
So landlords don't earn their rent? Being a good landlord is work. You must maintain the property, respond to tenant complaints, resolve disputes and bear the risk of non-payment by tenants, even though you bear the entire financial obligation of the dwelling.
Not really! They could simply sell the property for its actual value.
When you delve into what they're getting rent for, it's really as a reward for tying up a bunch of capital into the building. But what they are getting paid for is way above the actual economic value of the property itself.
Like, it is what it is. It's the nature of the beast right now. But we shouldn't romanticize it.
I'm also right wing but I've got no patience for landlords. Consistently, they provide as little services as possible and have ALWAYS tried to take my security deposit unjustly. There is especially an epidemic of shitty landlords in college towns, where they in all cases try to fleece college students out of as much money as possible.
Landlords profit when they increase rent as much as possible and provide as little services as possible. Even Adam Smith doesn't like them.
"Do you overpay for goods and services because the seller is not making enough profit and you can afford it?"
I think a productive way of flipping that question is by asking, is an employer ever going to knowingly pay their employee //more// than the value that employee added through their labour?
"Maybe we should move to a system where price is determining by the relative wealth of each person."
That ends up sounding very similar to: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"!
I believe that in some countries, Finland comes to mind, the fine charged for things like traffic infractions, are very much tied to the amount of the person's income. There's a funny story out there about a famous Finnish NHL players who got caught speeding in his expensive sports car, and the ticket cost him something like $75K.
"There is a vast class of people in this country who live with the constant knowledge that the person who owns the roof over their heads could upend decades of their life at any time and they would receive no recourse whatsoever"
Which would also be the policy under socialism. The only difference is that it would be the gubmint that kicked you out.
(Any socialist who disagrees: please write down the actual housing policy that you propose. I'll wait.)
Because our host is a self-proclaimed socialist who writes from a socialist point of view, and I was also getting a marxist vibe from Sarah (to whom I was responding), e.g., "enormous financial inequality between the property-owning and property-renting classes", though on re-reading that was likely not a correct inference of her views.
"There is a vast class of people in this country who live with the constant knowledge that the person who owns the roof over their heads could upend decades of their life at any time and they would receive no recourse whatsoever"
This is exactly the same thing with at will employment. they can fire you at any time, you can quit at any time.
There's nothing wrong with that. It's a voluntary transaction. If you want more certainty, then get it in a contract/lease agreement,
also
"landlords’ financial motivations are to charge as much rent and perform as little maintenance as they can get away with"
This isn't true. Because when people leave an apartment it's a big hassle. You have to find a new renter, the place will usually sit empty for a period of time. etc.
My dad's side of the family owns some apartments, and they always charge below market to make sure that people can and do stay in there for the long haul.
That kind of stability comes with ownership, or some sort of vested right to occupy. People typically have to pay for this. How does that get done for your hypothetical elderly tenant?
I think that it matters because housing is part of the way we structure our communities, and it isn’t something people can go without. In this way it’s like healthcare and other basic necessities. You can’t apply a pure market strategy to it. Communities are stronger when people live stable lives, people are more able to plan for the future when they know how much they’ll be paying for rent next year and where they’ll be living, children are better educated and thrive when they have consistency in schooling. I think that people who decide to get into the business of making money through housing investment and lanlording should be subject ti some restraint in the interest of the community. Otherwise just buy a house to live in.
Then why should I care about something as amorphous as “neighborhood character”? If landlords can do whatever they want then so can developers. But what a lot of people seem to be arguing for is “I can do whatever I want with my property, the feelings of the people who rent from me don’t matter, but ALSO the person who owns the lot next door should absolutely be restricted from building a duplex because it would harm me financially and aesthetically.”
Sure people respond to incentives, but monetary ones are not the only one. Or people would not sacrifice themselves for their families, their communities and their countries all the time.
I knew a guy who had social housing tenants here in Ireland. They moved out after a while and he went in to check if anything needed maintaining, and found that they'd ripped the sinks off the wall, torn the wallpaper down etc. I'd be very surprised if that was a common occurrence though.
I don't really know if it's a common occurrence in the U.S., but I guarantee you that every landlord I've ever talked to claims to have had tenants like that. And that goes double for Section 8 tenants. How closely do the facts fit the narrative? I don't know, and I don't know if there's any good empirical evidence about it.
You are a capitalist and believe in absolute ownership rights. I do not. Rent control has many benefits, mostly in that it doesn't force people to move when the economic situation changes and it stabilizes neighborhoods. You think that this is immoral but I think it is practical and right.
We have a fundamental disagreement of philosophy and it won't be settled by discussion, at least the way you frame,
I am a landlord and do the best to treat my tenants fairly and not gouge them and be a good landlord. I also support rent control because the good outweighs the bad.
Rent control certainly has downsides as well. It leads to even worse housing scarcity, as it harms the incentive to produce more rental units. New residents to a city find it very difficult to get into a rent controlled unit, because there are just no units available. Either that or they have to illegally sublet from someone who already lives in a rent controlled unit. Also, it harms the incentive for owners to maintain let alone upgrade their properties, which causes whole neighborhoods to slowly decline into disrepair. Indeed, huge swaths of the Bronx were abandoned in the 60s and 70s as hundreds of thousands of rowhouses literally became rubble under rent control that started in the 1940s.
I am also a landlord and do my best to treat my tenants fairly and not gouge them. I oppose rent control because the bad outweighs the good. Rent control may appeal to an emotional sense of fairness, but it's important that we judge policy by anticipated results and not emotionally driven intent. Put in that frame, rent control is not right, nor is it practical. We need housing abundance, not more passion on the side that opposes basic economic reasoning.
Rent control does not reduce the incentive to produce more units if it is implemented properly. When new construction is being designed, the income stream 30 or more years out is not considered as part of the equation. In San Francisco, only buildings built before 1979 are included. You might argue that the threat of further regulations could impact the desire of people to invest in new construction but as far as I can tell this is not true. It's an informed decision that I gathered by talking to developers and city planners. Other regulations that are far more onerous are restricting supply. It is possible that the threat of further rent control extension might have a slight impact at the margins. There is probably some research on this.
The rest of this does not really seem like an argument that convinces me. Sure, landlords are not incentivized as much to invest in maintenance. That's not really a bug, it's a feature unless the buildings become uninhabitable, in which case we have a process to deal with derelict landlords. Buildings will filter down faster. And landlords can always sell their property. Your example of the Bronx is not really germane because cities all over the country were being emptied out in the 70s. Look at Detroit, Cleveland and St. Lous for more extreme examples. Look at San Francisco even, as the population declined over 20% from the 50s to 80s. It's not because or rent control, which was not enacted until 1979.
New residents are disadvantaged economically compared long term tenants, I agree with that. That is the tradeoff we have to decide we want to make when we decide if rent control is the right policy to implement. I don't suggest rent control at all times for all situations, I am not some grand policy expert nor to I pretend to be. But I know San Francisco and the Bay Area well and it would be an economic disaster for hundreds of thousands of people if rent control was abolished. It would cause a mass migration like something that happens in wartime and a dislocation of established communities.
Is rent control a "right"? No more than absolute property ownership is a "right". There are many restrictions on property owners. Rent control does not reduce the amount of housing produced. An economy of abundance produces housing for everyone, not just the fortunate few at the top of the economic latter, which is what we have now in most of our cities.
It’s an article of faith among Marxists that the landlord-tenant relationship is fundamentally exploitative. The idea that somebody owns something that someone else wants to use in exchange for money - Marxists just won’t accept that principle, particularly when it comes to housing.
It's not an article of Marxist faith. It's a passing familiarity with every landlord-renter relationship in the course of history, from serfdom to today. It's also literally every person's experience of buying a house, which requires time, money, propensity for risk, access to good lawyers, and a basic ability to recognize and call bullshit that so many people are just always going to lack.
There are almost no Marxists in America and the few that exist have no political power. So this seems pretty much like a Straw Man argument to me, unless you can point to something specific here with evidence.
Perhaps this would make sense in an argument about housing in Cuba or North Korea, but not here.
I happen to love my landlord and his wife. The fact that I have rent control in L.A. has allowed me to go to nursing school. I always hear the same argument from two different sides, which is either that the landlord is a greedy monster, or your side, which states that all tenants are essentially tornadoes looking for a trailer park to destroy. Neither is true in the vast majority of cases.
I moved into my rent controlled place a decade ago. Said place is in a great neighborhood and is OLD (Like some paint peeled and when I started scraping I was inhaling lead paint from the 50’s, lmao - I sealed it up repainted). The electrical system is made from paper mache and cat intestines and nobody who lives in the building cares; it’s worth the 10 yearly trips to the fuse box in the summer when I accidentally run the spin cycle of the washer with the microwave, toaster, or air conditioner. I love my landlord and, because of my behavior, I believe he feels the same.
Our building manager (6 units, but he was the de facto manager) and handyman type recently died. This coincided with me being faced with giant holes in the wall of the bathroom which was the result of a poorly-repaired flood from upstairs from a few years ago. My landlord and I agreed that he would pay for the materials and I would put it together. I found my new roommate re-caulking the shower as she claimed the last job was terrible. Around here we accept that the place is cheaper and that our landlord is mellow. It’s also understood that WE are to be mellow when it comes to minor stuff being fixed. I get my degree next year; I’m redoing the floors in here as a thank you.
Both the “All landlords are vultures” and “All tenants suck” are rarities in my experience. Most people have at least a decent relationship with their landlord or tenant and, at least in CA, the trade off for rent control is Prop 13, which means that your property tax on the building doesn’t go up until you sell it to somebody else. I think that’s fair. I also think sane rent control is fair in that your way of doing things is why terrible hordes of AWFLs are rolling into predominantly Latino and Black neighborhoods and basically killing a good neighborhood to make room for the bourgeois tastes of Starbucks-swilling White girls. Who cares how many families they displace?
Final note: I can see no better way to drum up anti-landlord sentiment than reading your stream of posts; I’m sure Freddie and other proponents of fair rental laws thank you. I love my landlord and I’m ready to go throw every last property owner into the gulag after reading your anti-tenant screeds; I think reading them would make virtually anybody vote for meaningful rent control laws. Thank you for that.
I used to be a landlord so I understand your viewpoint. However coming a City - Vancouver - that has seen endless densification and gentrification- Freddie has a point. I don’t know the answer but a City needs housing at many price points to be functional. In my neighborhood older homes that had been subdivided into affordable housing have been systematically knocked down and replaced with townhomes that cost over $2,000,000. But we keep hearing the mantra that we need more housing and it is good for the environment. We even coined the phrase “Eco-Density” - doesn’t that sound nice.
the sarcastic way i like to put it is "they should demand that their landlord evict them, so they can convert the building into a rent-controlled SRO with many times more units"
Is there any area of policy or activism that does not have a very online branch that acts just this way, though? It is easiest to opine at a high level of abstraction, without putting in time to get familiar with the particular or with what's been said before on the topic, and our open information environment means that anyone can do so in a fraction of a second. I agree with the ethic you're trying to encourage, and think it generalizes to just about any area of activism. That said, I think that engaged activists (as opposed to social media opiners) also need to grow up in the sense of accepting that message discipline is impossible in a large, populous, literate country where more people who "message" are going to be doing so half-assed at best than after doing the work to understand or to align with people who do.
I'm new to this intellectual argument, so pardon any ignorance.
Here's the question: Is the issue of foreign-owned real estate being talked about at all? In the current market, with the dollar strong and things uncertain, even more international elites will seek to park their wealth in the U.S., thereby driving up housing costs everywhere.
Is there anyone considering how to apply Denmark-like housing rules to the U.S.? (Denmark highly limits foreign ownership of residential real estate). Or attempting to make the real estate professionals abide by the Patriot anti-money laundering provisions from which they were exempt?
I'm holding on as a renter in Washington Heights (NYC) in a building that went condo and the apts have been bought by shady foreigners sight unseen. Renters are being shoved out and the new foreign, faceless owners have jacked up the rent to nose-bleed levels (or even worse, they sit empty, as safe-deposit boxes). I am one of the last Latinas left in the building. It's truly horrible. There are many suffering families.
Anyone who thinks that simply "building more" is the answer does not live here in the real world with me. There is basically unlimited international money waiting to buy real estate in America. As we build or convert more, more foreign dirty money, and local hedge-fund ("dirty" from a moral perspective) money, buys up more and more residential units...and, prices real people out.
Unless you deal with excess capital at the top of the food-chain, you will never ameliorate the housing crunch.
This is a key issue, that residential housing in desirable cities (New York, London, Vancouver, Sydney) has become a commodity for storing offshore wealth.
One partial solution (that I doubt will happen), is banning the ownership of residential property by corporations. Owner has to be a living person. That would cut out some of it (shell company trading). And with living-owner requirement, citizenship/residency rules could be applied.
Yes, agreed. But, banning all corporate investment is not easily feasible. A more achievable approach is to have corporations that buy real estate have to name the "beneficiary" for whom the real estate is being held, and that's where you can require residency (and tax paying!) stateside. And, this problem is not just in desirable cities. In Iowa, and elsewhere in the Midwest, foreign buyers are buying up both residential and commercial (even farms) real estate. We must remember the immigration law that allows anyone who wants a green card to buy one through "investments" (while not-wealthy "family petitions" wait in line for years). And, the green cards (including for the whole family) cost half as much in rural areas (250k vs. 500k, in investment). So, that incentive also needs to be tweaked. Like all demand and supply, immigration laws have figured out to charge less for rural investments-for-green-cards, thereby guaranteeing that the whole United States real estate market is up for sale in order to land a coveted American residency/citizenship for the whole brood of very wealthy foreigners.
This makes the real pay-off of owning American real estate even waaaay bigger than it appears on just the real estate transaction documents. Since for 250k a whole large family gets green-cards leading to citizenship -- with no long-term (over 5 years) requirement that they actually live here and pay taxes.
Basically, we sell American passports along with the title deed -- thereby raising the true value of real estate for foreigners. Unless economists and thinkers factor all this in, the blah blah back and forth is all theoretical musings with no long-term, real-life impact.
You would have to specify “large” or “public” corporations, since pretty much all business of any kind needs to be done through a corporation to protect individuals from liability and risking all their personal assets with every little thing they do. And even that might not work since there are some properties so big that restricting ownership to individuals might make it impossible for anyone to run them. Barring foreign ownership in some way makes sense though.
The countries that are looking into this are leaning towards real estate registries having to list who the ultimate "beneficiary" of the real estate is -- no matter the size of the corporation. To place limits on size is unwieldly (an apartment in New York can cost as much as a whole industrial farm). So, you can have a large team running the property, but the ultimate beneficiary, or beneficiaries if multiples/group (whoever is going to make money from its rental/sale, and gets to also use it) has to be named.
Do you have data that supports this? I'm involved with YIMBY activism in NYC. People always bring this up to me. I totally buy it in theory, but the estimates/data I've seen is that this is just a much, much smaller problem than people think it is, and to the extent it's a problem all the apartments are in one area on central park. I would be happy to be convinced it's a problem as it does seem somewhat solvable with public policy, but haven't seen anything remotely compelling
I'm not in the data business, but I know what's going on around me (north of 181 St & south of Dyckman). In my building condo conversion many of the apartments were bought by foreigners. The super and realtors take care of renting them out at market rate -- huge mark-up from our stabilized rents. And, the demographic make-up of the building changed drastically. They've figured out how to get rid of Latinos without incurring discrimination liability: they require very high salary and credit rating of the new renters. The new people are mostly White, working downtown. Originally we had several very young Chinese ladies who bought/lived in a few of the apartments (who could not have been able to afford the minimum 500k from just employment-- they were students -- so, parents?), but after Covid the Asians disappeared and White folks moved in to those apartments. The super mentioned two buyers who never even saw the apartments and paid cash: one from India and one from Italy, he said. He remembered the countries because he was shocked that "people so far away would pay cash without seeing the place." But, he was able to quickly rent them out for the buyers (have no idea what commission deal they have with the super/management).
I'm not denying that's happening or that it's bad. I would support policies to crack down on it. But I'm fairly certain it's a relatively small number of apartments compared to the NYC housing market.
We did the analysis in SF and it is something like 3% of new construction almost all of which has tenants. You can't buy a condo and "jack up the rent to the roof" as landlords can only charge market rates.
From the NYTimes in 2011: “In a large swath of the East Side bounded by Fifth and Park Avenues and East 49th and 70th Streets, about 30 percent of the more than 5,000 apartments are routinely vacant more than 10 months a year because their owners or renters have permanent homes elsewhere, according to the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey.”
And it is not just a Central Park problem: “Since 2000, the number of Manhattan apartments occupied by absentee owners and renters swelled by more than 70 percent, to nearly 34,000, from 19,000.”
"Anyone who thinks that simply "building more" is the answer does not live here in the real world with me. There is basically unlimited international money waiting to buy real estate in America."
That money still wants to get a return. If supply increases over demand then prices will drop.
Not really. You are assuming a hyper-rational market, where demand and supply operate in a clinical, textbook manner. That has not been the case with money, especially lately. Money pays a premium for safety. Look at Switzerland banking: the Swiss are able to pay negative interest rate for the "security" of having the Swiss hold your money. Same theory applies to American real estate: investors can just kept the property empty, no income necessary, for the "return" of safety, and the historical appreciation of the real estate asset realized at future sale.
Foreign investment in American real estate has fallen the past few years. Apparently it's not unlimited money if it's sensitive to price. Just build more isn't the answer to every question, it's just one thing we need to do because we've artificially constrained NYC housing for decades
The reason foreign real estate investment in the U.S. is down is, mainly, because of Covid-related restrictions in travel. Foreign demand fell even as prices initially decreased when Covid began, so it was not due to price sensitivity. Furthermore, China has instituted constraints on the out-flow of capital thereby greatly limiting, for now, demand from China.
Of course increasing supply is always a good thing when it comes to the price of anything. Agreed. Just saying increased supply alone is not going to fix this problem.
I don't see why "foreign investment" is supposed to be more scary than "domestic investment."
I'm all reminded of the episode of The Simpsons where they blamed the problem on illegal immigrants. Not because they were breaking things, or even existing in significant numbers, but because the illegal immigrants weren't in the room to defend themselves. Same thing with "foreign investment." Unfalsifiable boogeyman.
I'm not talking about poor immigrants and asylum seekers (Heck, I got here through political asylum!). I'm talking about millionaires/billionaires who fly in and out with shady funds. Many folks are appalled by the money laundering that is going on with "foreign" purchases. Given that the world is awash in "ill gotten gains" and the U.S. housing market is one of the world's largest money laundering methods, this is an obvious thing to fix in order to make prices more affordable to Americans. When people steal from their government funds (Haiti, Syria, etc.) or when people steal by nationalizing what belonged to the citizens (Russia, Venezuela, etc.) or when people deal in illegal trade (Latin American drugs, African elephant ivory, etc.), why should their money be laundered in American real estate? And help to drive up our housing prices?
Building more isn't the only answer but it helps lower rents for tenants, allows more people to live in desirable cities, reduces commutes, reduces global warming, increases the overall economy and has a host of other benefits. Building more is the only solution for shortage.
Almost no YIMBY believes that building more market rate housing is the *only* solution for needed housing. We also support more affordable housing, more shelters and navigation centers, more social housing and other development.
There is not an unlimited amount of dirty money waiting to buy real estate in America. That is a fallacy, Very little of new construction in SF is owned by foreigners and if it is, so what? As long as they rent it out, they just financed some new badly needed construction that someone can live in.
I'm all onboard with the need to do politics, but it's pretty clear to me that the politics are a second-order concern, and may be on the way to becoming a third. America has a housing shortage, which is making rents higher and taking purchase prices outside of the reach of many. The only people who win in that environment are those wealthy enough to pay cash or institutional investors who can raise lots of money. The only way out of this is too build more housing. Short of that, we're not even rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic; we're arguing over the seating plan and the deck slowly fills with water.
Maybe there's an acdelerationist case for not doing the obvious thing we need to do. But I'm highly skeptical that this is all going to lead to pitchforks and revolution and the social housing utopia. More likely, things are just going to get worse and worse, with the greatest pain being felt by those who have the least. Critiquing YIMBY culture doesn't change any of this. So, we should just make our decisions on how to proceed and be prepared to live with the consequences.
I agree 100% with this (and Mama Bear, and others), but Freddie's point stands: if we YIMBYs can't forego abrasive condescension, we're just getting in our own way. Democratic politics means that it's highly likely that:
- We won't get everything we want.
- What we do get won't come on the schedule we want.
- The price of getting what we want will be a modest (at a minimum) number of things we think are stupid and counter-productive.
It is in our interest to take anti-development concerns seriously, find areas of common interest, and think of ways to address those concerns.
Very good take on YIMBYism - it is good but has the problems you describe.
“Yes, we must increase supply, and over a long enough period and in general, more building will slow rental increases.”
Over the top YIMBYs ignore the point above and the long term nature of the challenge. This is a common disease - translating philosophy/talking points/big picture into reality.
What does anyone’s race have to do with anything? I’m sure you’re not channeling the New York Times with the “world ends poor and minorities hardest hit” bilge. So what is it?
The point is that (we) YIMBY's brought race into the conversation by focusing on certain fights while ignoring others. It's a hazard of trying to piggyback YIMBYing on social-justice oriented arguments, but it will just backfire in many envrionments.
Once again I can only speak for the west coast housing situation, not New York. And I wish you would consider that not everyone does live in New York. I assure you that YIMBYism is extremely strong in the midsized white-dominated cities and towns of California and the single moms on Facebook desperately looking for a rented room they can share with their 5 year old, or the students that are living out of their cars, just need somewhere to live. And the people most against building apartments for them are white homeowners whose million dollar plus home values have tripled in the past decade. There are way more people and than there were 30 years ago and not way more houses. It really is just arithmetic and I don’t see any other real solution, short or long term to house people for whom houses don’t exist. I’m not trying to be sneering, I am not trying to ignore other demographics in the anti gentrification debate, I am saying that the white homeowners are genuinely the dominant force in anti development where I live, and their line is “not everyone can afford to live here, too bad so sad, but the important thing is that this town stay the way it was when I bought my house in 1982 forever unchanged.”
FDB's point about the demographics of housing debates is equally if not more valid in California as it is in New York. It's the same anywhere where gentrification is an issue.
This is false, unless you mean "in large metro areas" (I'm not in a position to verify that, but it's plausible). In the small-to-medium sized towns across the country, especially highly desirable small college towns, the NIMBY demographics are very different from the situation Freddie describes in NYC.
I'm probably as ignorant about small-to-medium sized towns as you are about large metro areas, but my qualification was "anywhere gentrification is an issue". If there are minority communities threatened with displacement via rising rents and new development, then the demographics of the NIMBY/YIMBY debate are going to be a little more complicated than "racist white homeowners seeking to exclude long-suffering minorities from their neighborhoods".
Desirable small-to-medium-sized towns have the exact same dynamics that get wrapped up as "gentrification": rising rents, fears of displacement, and the sense that a neighborhood's character is at risk.
This is only true if you think the only places that matter are the largest cities. And frankly, the reason white professionals are moving to neighborhoods historically or most recently occupied by people of color is because white home owners are preventing development in the places they come from.
It’s not particular to white people, however the vast majority of homeowners in these areas I am referring to (midsized cities in California, particularly those with colleges) are white. The problem is exactly what you say: no one wants new housing next to them so they tend to build it where they can push it through — in neighborhoods of color like the one Freddie describes in his post. And as he points out, they often don’t want it either. Which is how we got in this mess of growing our population by the millions since the 80s and refusing to build housing for them.
Less zoning and environmental regulation. Environmental oversight is good and necessary, but the way it exists in California allows it to be weaponized to prevent any development projects at all in places like California. It’s being used right now to prevent my local university from building student housing on their campus in a town with a severe housing shortage.
New construction in California is not in "communities of color" it is in far flung exurbs like Tracy and Riverside. They might be pretty mixed race, but lots of whites live in them as well. They are full of working and middle class people of all races.
Ok, that’s fair and a good point. I completely concede that “communities of color” is often not the most accurate term for working class neighborhoods. Better to say that new construction is often in (multiracial) exurbs and what few new building projects occur in other places generally don’t happen in the upper class, whiter (not not always only white) neighborhoods.
“ There is a reason so many people identify as liberal. Making rules by which you yourself don't have to life is fucking awesome.”
Like banning abortion knowing that if your high school age daughter or mistress gets knocked up you can just fly her to NYC? That kind of liberal rule making?
“ Your example is highly theoretical.”
Huh? Conservatives love making rules they don’t have to abide by just as much as liberals. It’s not a partisan issue at all.
In theory? What is that supposed to mean?
The Penn Station plan is just a handout to developers and would make the whole area even worse. Why don’t they actually build more platforms at Penn Station? That would be of greater benefit.
"Convince her" to magically afford higher rent as it ratchets up each year?
“ But “just” building luxury apartments is not the policy I’d support.”
Personal anecdote - while looking for a place a few years ago shitholes were asking top dollar. Then they built a new luxury building with a pool, gym, yadda yadda and suddenly the shitholes were no longer asking top dollar.
It’s a huge problem that people don’t see how a new luxury building makes the less nice building a little cheaper which makes the even less nice building even cheaper and on down the line.
“ The solution, as I see it, is to build more housing of all types.”
But that’s not how it works economically. The new luxury building makes the slightly less nice building a little cheaper which makes the even less nice building even cheaper on down the line until units in older buildings become affordable.
I think it's good to build housing of all types, but I don't want to be the person who has to answer the activists complaining that the apartment with below average rent is of below average quality.
Section 8 is unavailable in San Francisco and surrounds. You have to win a lottery to get on the WAITING LIST. It takes literally years. I suppose that’s one way to solve whatever the perceived problem is.
Buying into this line of thought is what gets us Proposition 13 in California.
Things in life have risks and trying to get rid of a risk completely ends up destroying everything completely.
I have long been shocked that the City isn't a major landlord.
The projects should be slowly torn down, and replaced with solid, well engineered, middle class housing, and then the former inhabitants of the projects should be mixed in with affordable house, so the poor are not being warehouses in unfit housing.
It would seem an obvious first step is that before building new homes for new people, we should be building new homes for the people that are already there.
New York City public housing stewardship is a sad story. Years ago, when Deblasio announced the billion dollar PLUS fixes for NYCHA roofs, I found a Real Deal New York (or a similar pub) story about roof repairs on apartment buildings; I was able to calculate that a luxury condo in Soho was getting a better rate on a per square foot basis on their roof replacement than the city was getting on all those flat top NYCHA buildings that don't seem like a very complicated replacement.
Sounds like Vienna.
My brief encountering-YIMBY-culture story: A few years ago I went to a happy hour organized by a YIMBY group in my neighborhood in Austin. I'm totally on board with the need for more development in our neighborhood, and often frustrated by the anti-development ethos of our official neighbors association. BUT after that one happy hour I swore off that crew forever. Generally pleasant people, but they were total ideologues when it came to development. At the time the city was engaged in a battle over whether or not to sell a public golf course to developers for housing. I'm not even a golfer, and it wasn't in our neighborhood, but it seemed apparent to me that a public golf course is a public good that, at a minimum, shouldn't be turned over to developers without a lot of thought. The response i got from the YIMBY crew was totally dismissive. They couldn't even seem to grasp my point. There were a few other things like this. I really am pretty hardcore pro-development, but as with all politics, you can't be dumb about how you go about advocating for big changes to housing infrastructure in people's neighborhoods. It's really personal for people.
Why would a city be in the business of providing golf courses for hobbyists? Does that seem like a productive use of land?
I would agree if the question was about developing a new golf course now. This is a course that's been there since 1924, one of the city's six public courses.
https://www.austintexas.gov/department/lions-municipal-course
At the more general level, cities provide all sorts of recreational spaces for people -- libraries, parks, basketball courts, soccer fields, etc. I agree that it wouldn't make sense to build a new golf course now, for a host of reasons. Maybe it made sense in 1924 (when, among other things, land in Austin was much cheaper). But building new courses is one thing. Tearing up a century old course is a totally different thing. Maybe the right decision still, but in my opinion not an easy one.
If it’s one of six, I’m still not seeing the problem with developing it for housing in a city with a need for housing. I try to listen and read Freddie and other YIMBY hostile people with an open mind, but your arguing about saving the SIXTH public golf course over building places for people to live.
That feels like it proves too much. “Do we really need this many parks and playgrounds? There’s a perfectly good swingset across town!”
One of the big challenges with YIMBYs is that they’re asking people to give up real benefits of living in a particular place. I know a golf course may seem silly, but aren’t we always chiding people for not going outside and exercising? Everything that’s good about living in a place could always be torn up for more housing — parks and bike paths and beaches and tennis courts and sculptures and fountains and memorials and planetariums and botanical gardens and zoos. Everybody eventually draws a line where they say “no, NOW quality of life factors will prevail over squeezing in more people or lowering rents” — and I don’t see a particularly strong moral case for drawing it in any particular place.
But isn't Freddie's whole point that if you want to win political arguments about developing more housing, you have to take seriously people's emotional attachments to their neighborhoods and their fears of change? If you want to WIN a political fight, you can't simply say that there's no seeing eye to eye. You actually have to figure out how to persuade enough people to win.
Well, I think characterizing things as “emotional” is a tad dismissive. What we’re talking about are values, and I see, for example, a lot of YIMBYs in this thread justifying pro-tenant laws on the grounds that “home” and the attachment to one’s home are important values that have to be taken into account. Which is fair! But then it’s also fair to take into account that many Austinians seem to value a particular kind of recreational land use. And talking about “efficiency” isn’t that helpful, since one can always be more efficient by becoming more brutal. (Say, by eminent domaining all single family homes and turning the land into socialized housing.)
Yes, but I'd say a public golf course is very high on the patrician scale of what population is taking advantage of it. Likely to be one of the first things in the chopping block compared to everything else you mentioned.
I don’t entirely disagree, but at the same time, a basketball hoop can be erected practically anywhere, so practically anybody can do basketball even if the city doesn’t provide it. But it’s impossible to set up your own golf course. So if we eliminate public golf courses we diminish access for anyone who can’t afford the private ones in tony suburbs. Maybe “low-to-middle-income-people should be able to play golf” is low on our list of values and priorities. That can be okay. But it seems like a value that Austin has embraced.
I have never seen a YIMBY group that advocates for building housing in a public park, beach or botanical garden. Smells like a Straw Man to me.
In SF we advocate for multi-family on parking lots, warehouses and existing single family zoned neighborhoods. Sure, NIMBYs like you oppose us with "quality of life" concerns. We get it, you don't want to have to compete over parking.
We disagree with you and think that the quality of life will be improved if new construction happens. More people leads to more tax revenue, more walkable neighborhoods, better city services including mass transit and a host of other benefits to existing residents. And a huge improvement of the quality of live of for those who can now share our city.
You are a NIMBY and I am a YIMBY and there isn't a lot we will see eye to eye on. I understand your arguments and disagree with them. If you want, I can explain your position in detail, as I used to be a NIMBY too.
Or, as I said, everybody draws lines. You draw the line somewhere other than where the people of Austin choose to. Okay. But if you won’t tear up that park or demolish that botanical garden, you are a NIMBY. You just have a different threshold. Which is fine! But then I don’t take your sniping at someone else’s NIMBYism very seriously. You’re just one step removed from the same position.
Well but this is my point. I think there's a good discussion to be had about developing the course for housing, but it should be an actual discussion, not just a quick calculation about which course provides more utility and then a contemptuous dismissal of the people who lose in that calculation. People care about the course because they play on it and have strong emotional connections to it. They care because it's an attractive part of their neighborhood. And so on. And there actually is such a thing as a character of a neighborhood, although that is also a dodge that NIMBYs use to fight all development. Again, I'm not saying the YIMBY side loses in this discussion, but that people have real reasons for wanting their local public golf course to stay, and it's neither democratically appropriate nor politically wise to just dismiss them out of hand.
I don’t see this differently than any other debate. Some people feel like eating GMOs is unnatural and dangerous. Some people feel like gay people getting married is weird. Why should people who feel like neighborhoods should never change have more weight placed on their arguments than people who don’t like change in the food supply or family structures? In yeh end, yes, I will not waver from yeh idea that society meeting the basic needs of its citizens with food, healthcare and shelter matters much much more than people’s nostalgia.
I didn't say they should get MORE weight. I said they are legitimate actors in the political discussion, and a) should be treated with respect as fellow members of our democracy, and b) should be recognized as potential obstacles to achieving the political end you want to achieve. Also worth saying that reducing their perspective to "nostalgia" is, IMO, a mistake. For one thing, it's not nostalgia. It's actually attachment to playing golf in the present, and to the way their neighborhoods looks and feels right now. More importantly, the history of big shifts in infrastructure development is rife with disasters and unintended consequences. The idea that we simply and easily know what's best is hubris. We can have well thought through ideas, but it's always wise to pay attention to what people who live in a place think and feel about where they live. It doesn't have to be determinative, but it shouldn't be ignored.
I mean a public golf course does seem like a huge indulgence. It's a sport that uses a lot of land for very few people, unlike basketball or tennis or something.
Also water usage must be off the charts, especially in a place like Texas.
I'm trying to be as clear as possible, but seem to be failing. People are very, very attached to public golf courses. They have been positive public goods for generations. In this case the course has been a thing people have loved for almost a century. Housing costs have only been a real issue or Austin for a decade or two. It may be the case that it's time to develop some of this land as housing, but it should never be a simple thing to just destroy a beloved public good. And that's not even taking into account the politics of it, which are super complicated. So an approach that just says "housing more efficient, golf is an indulgence, high water use, case closed" is just a dead end politically and democratically. Make the argument in a way that takes people's concerns seriously, try to persuade people, look for potential trade-offs (maybe defenders of the golf course could be persuaded to support zoning code changes in exchange for leaving their golf course alone), etc. Do actual politics.
One of the things that non-New Yorkers notice about NYC is the lack of open space. OK Central.Park, but for a lot of people it’s a long way off. Golf courses benefit more people than just golfers. A golf course is a big area dedicated to grass, trees, bushes, and the occasional human being walking around. There are factors that don’t answer to mechanical analysis.
NYC has a lot of open space. There are parks all over Manhattan.
Yes, a golf course is a very inefficient use of space compared with, say, a public park with a variety of uses (jogging trails, a children's playground, a place for people to have a picnic, etc.)
The other question is whether the city is getting a good deal. These conversions tend to involve a lot of backroom negotiation and inherently hard-to-price tracts of land, as well as city investments and costs in connecting it and integrating it with existing city services. There’s a lot of potential for incompetence or actual corruption, or for unexpected costs to fall on the city.
I’d still be in favor of the conversion as a goal, but you don’t have to love golf courses to start off skeptical.
lol. sell the golf course. people need homes
They didn't. Which is the point. The politics of building new housing in already densely populated cities isn't easy, and requires a lot of savvy.
I totally agree but not sure a YIMBY meetup is the best place to find them in persuasion mode. They were right.
If you have a tactical disagreement about how to approach the politics, that seems very different from a conversation at a meetup *for* YIMBYs
Fair enough. I don't want to read too much into my one anecdote. It was just consonant with what Freddie was writing about, and given that I was a potential recruit to the cause, it was a on a very small scale a missed opportunity. I'd say Freddie's experience, as a long time housing activist, should count for much more than mine.
It's hard enough to develop new market rate housing in New York, but trying to fix social housing and subsidized housing at the same time just seems unrealistic. Maybe YIMBYs are just being pragmatic.
Explain to me why length of stay in an apartment or house grants you legal rights to it as if you were the owner? You get all of the upside and none of the downside, like having to pay to replace the water heater, roof, stairs, maintain the yard, shovel snow, etc. It's quasi-ownership rights without the owner getting the benefit of the takings clause. Tenants = sainted martyrs and landlords = evil parasites. Is this the best you have to offer, really?
I'd love to hear from people who've been landlords and can you tell about awful tenants, including Section 8 tenants. There's never a fulsome, thoughtful discussion about this. I remember having a discussion with a man on the bus who was Brooklyn born and raised for generations (not yuppie, SJW Brooklyn, but working class Brooklyn and worked in the construction industry) and he told me he had inherited a building and would accept Section 8 tenants because he wanted to give people a chance. He was rewarded with tenants using Section 8 against him (I forget the terminology but I think tenants would cook up frivolous complaints that triggered audits by the housing authority). The process was the punishment and it meant that he couldn't collect the rents to pay the bills (I assume they were in an escrow account but I'm not sure). He vowed he would let the building be empty before allowing Section 8 tenants again.
Tenants quasi-ownership rights to apartments leads to an inefficient use of apartments as people in oversized units continue to stay there while larger families are stuck in smaller apartments.
Exactly. Landlords neglect their responsibilities all the time. If you know your rights, you can go through a long legal process that might lead to him addressing the issue months later. But you're not compensated for the issues, and you can't break your lease to leave. I've never gotten a dime of my security deposits back without a fight.
Gross yet familiar! At my old place, they painted over orange peels and beetle carcasses in the pantry.
If you are arguing for a better arbitration process I think that's something both sides could support. But if you are arguing for stupid shit like rent controls that I will continue to oppose.
I bought a duplex in San Francisco in the early 00s which is now worth triple what I paid for it and my tenants have been paying the entire cash flow including repairs for at least a decade. And this is in a rent controlled building that has the original tenants downstairs. It certainly was not a losing proposition for me, it was in fact the second best financial decision of my life.
This highlights an important complexity in discussions of landlord/tenant rights. Very small, private landlords are governed by the same laws as very large landlords who own multiple multifamily properties. They’re often dealing with different issues day-to-day and don’t have an internal apparatus to handle everyday administrative and legal tasks.
This is why most federal and many state tenancy laws include significant carve-outs for smaller landlords, to prevent them feeling forced out of the market by laws focused on big corporations. Even working-class landlords, who certainly do exist, get a break by virtue of being property owners.
I've lived in several apartments, and I've noticed a huge difference between big companies and "guy who owns a building" situations. The companies fix things. They have a process for submitting requests and a staff to handle them.
Small landlords are a nightmare. I had one who would just send his elderly father, who barely spoke English, for every single problem, and that was about as effective as you'd expect. When I had problems with appliances, he said my "husband" should fix them. When the building got bed bugs, he sent his dad with a can of Raid.
I’ve found that small landlords want to be treated like small business owners until it comes time to regulate them like small businesses. Then suddenly they’re providing a charitable service out of the goodness of their hearts and all these rules are treating them like criminals.
Petite bourgeois
While I agree, other countries have lease terms that guarantee the ability to renew the lease indefinitely and limit rent increases. It’s not own your own home or be at constant risk of not having the lease renewed or the price increased dramatically.
Some argue that this is a better system as it prevents so much excess capital being tied up in residential real estate.
So you would have longterm tenants put on the street or relocated to distant neighbourhoods where they have no social connections? Maybe solyent green would serve your vision for the future.
Seems as though all he is saying is that there are people on both sides of this equation and both can be taken advantage of. Maybe not treat it as a cartoon with a mustache twirling villain on one side and a salt-of-the-earth good guy on the other.
And so what is the alternative for longterm, older, less fortunate residents?
Move to some cheap place in Florida like middle class homeowners do when they find themselves short of funds.
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/4127-Pinewood-Dr-NE-6_Palm-Bay_FL_32905_M61790-62845?ex=2942743080
He didn't say coastal Florida. The coast is a luxury good. BZC literally linked to a place available right now.
I have no idea. But treating landlords like criminals doesn't seem to be the way.
Or, let me approach it differently, you seem to care about this issue. Have you invested your life savings in low income housing for the less fortunate? If not, why not?
I have helped out in various ways and voted for policies that protect tenants. My experience as a frequent renter in the past was that about half the time I had to move was because of unscrupulous or uncaring landlords.
I don't mean this flippantly. Why aren't you putting your money where your mouth is and becoming a landlord yourself? You could be the very caring and decent landlord you see as lacking. Why does this have to be someone else's job?
How is rent control "treating landlords like criminals"? Do you live in a place where landlords are thrown in jail or something? Can't they just sell their property or even not invest if they don't like the rules?
The answer is ownership.
Thread OP is exactly the kind of condescension that Freddie complains about when you are trying to coalition-build. But thread OP is right that giving people the upsides of ownership without the downsides is a crazy policy.
Owning and renting each have risks. Owners risk being tied down and having their capital at risk. Renters risk not being able to claim the right to stay in the same spot for decades.
Society has to let people evaluate risks and face the risks and even face the consequences of the risks. All the attempts to shield homeowners from the consequences of buying beyond their means after the housing bubble popped only dragged the whole thing out for years.
“ Owners risk being tied down and having their capital at risk.”
Well, in his defense, the government does do a lot of homeowner bailouts. During the financial crisis, during COVID, during natural disasters. The public really doesn’t like people losing their homes.
And we won’t even get started on things like 30 year fixed rate mortgages with no pre-payment penalty not existing in a free market. They only exist due to government market intervention.
Yes, the end of my post was about attempts to shield homeowners.
And oh god I *hate* the 30 year fixed.
People believe a lot of things are fundamental human rights when they aren't and keeping the illusions going will get increasingly expensive.
What constitutes a long-term tenant? 1 year? 3 years?
Tenants who cannot afford or do not want to pay the rent increase can move to a different dwelling or location. This is the reality of life, If you cannot afford something, you make do with something else.
The woman discussed in the article had lived in the apartment for forty years. Yes, a cutthroat approach to housing is advocated by some. Housing, like medicine and food, should not be dependent just on how much money you have.
Everything in life is dependent on how much money you have. This is reality.
Advocating for policies whereby tenants retain the right to indefinite leases with small increases in rent will make landlords be even more discriminating about who they rent to and will drive down the housing availability. People will rent to those they know and can "trust" or leave apartments empty.
Because the cost and social capital required for homeownership are profoundly prohibitive for many, yet we’d like to structure a world where people with children and jobs and complicated lives are not constantly living in fear of displacement because of market forces beyond their control.
Right, but the flip side of that is that overly strong tenant protections disincentivize the creation of rental housing in the first place.
To give just one data point — I used to own a house in a tier 1 American city. When I left that city, I had the choice of renting the house out or selling it to another owner-occupant. After mulling my options and thinking about local law, I chose the latter. It bummed me out, because by keeping the house for a decade or so I had the opportunity to see enormous growth in my net worth. But it was not worth it to me to rent the house out in an environment where, if my tenant was abusive, I would be stuck with a lengthy and cumbersome eviction process. Additionally, if I later decided to move back to that city and live in the house again, I could evict the tenant, but only if I paid rather substantial relocation costs.
For all these reasons, I decided not to rent my house out, and instead sold it to another well-off owner-occupant.
That’s very small scale, of course, but the same disincentives, it seems to me, apply to commercial developer-landlords, too. It’s more expensive and more of a hassle to provide rental housing in a place with strong pro-tenant laws… so why do it? Why not build a gas station or a mall instead?
I think scale matters in decision-making here. In your case, you were either going to have 0% problem tenants or 100% problem tenants (defined as requiring the lengthy, cumbersome eviction process). Even if you’ve got good odds of not having a problem tenant, if you end up with one it’s your entire investment. (This would be mitigated somewhat if you knew were going to stick to one-year-or-less leases, at least initially, and rent it out for many years with the good tenants offsetting the bad ones. Even then, if you draw a problem tenant as your first tenant, you’re in trouble.)
By contrast, a commercial developer landlord can expect some percentage of their tenants to be problem tenants but can spread the costs of that around to their other current tenants. This allows for a more predictable cost-income calculation at the outset of their investment, and (unless they’re horribly mismanaged) they will never be in the situation you risk of having 100% of their tenants be problem tenants.
Yes, that’s a very fair point. I assume there’s still some effect on the desirability and profitability of rental housing as an investment even at the larger end, but you’re probably right that the primary effect is in driving out small landlords like me.
Exactly. This is what I was trying to say to JCA1, but you said it better.
Kind of a powerful argument that the only entities that should get into the landlord business are giant corporations. Is that really desirable?
Again, I think it depends on what scale you look at, only this case it’s individual vs. society. There are lots of folks who, faced with the same parameters as Chesterton’s Fence Repair Co., would choose to rent. It depends on their tolerance for risk, their estimate of the likelihood of getting a problem tenant, their perception of their ability to recover from a problem tenant, etc.
There’s a good chance that making the bet pays off for most such folks, providing additional income and a launching point to higher long-term prosperity. And some would, as feared, end up financially worse off.
Giant corporations will have an advantage in pretty much any field, and I don’t see why the landlord business would be any different. The role that tenant protections play in that advantage seems fairly low, and potentially offsett-able through other measures aimed at helping small-scale landlords if so inclined.
I hear what you're saying, but that's the nature of all consumer protections. They introduce the potential for consumer exploitation, which some- generally small- percentage of people will inevitably take advantage. But the alternative is allowing for a similar exploitation at the hands of people with accumulated or inherited wealth. Grenwolf did a better job than I could have in showing how it eventually works out in aggregate, if not in every scenario
As a point of argument, I don't think you can use your own fears about a potentially adverse hypothetical rental experience as a "data point." Doesn’t seem to rise to the level of empirically-verifiable data.
I mean, my fears literally removed one house from the rental market. N=1, but it is a point. Or you could see this as qualitative data about one potential landlord’s experience.
Or you can ignore it because we’re all just dogs on the internet. 🐕
My argument is that labor law is a balancing act, where you try to minimize the amount of exploitation on the part of the landlord while also minimizing the maximum amount of free-loading/moral hazard on the part of the tenant. Not every landlord is out to squeeze their tenants dry, just as every tenant is not out to skate obligation as much as possible. We can theorize all sorts of loopholes from each side, but the answer to how good of a balance you've struck will always ultimately become an empiric question: When the law is in place, are an unexpected number of people from either side of the fight, tenants and landlords, taking advantage of the system?
How you answer that is obviously going to depend on how you interpret peoples' actions and motives. But one thing it can't depend on (again, being an empiric question) is how you IMAGINE things might have played out in a given scenario, or how they COULD HAVE played out. You have to look at things as they actually happen. For instance, if I rented an apartment for 15 years without a lease, I can't really argue that my landlord was a slumlord because "he could have thrown me out at any time." Because - you know- he never did. In the same sense, I just don't think it makes sense for you to submit your worst-case-scenario fears about being a landlord to prove your point about the problems of tenant laws, because ultimately it's a counterfactual.
I think we’re talking about two different questions, though. It’s not a data point about the prevalence of abuse. It’s a data point about how the structure of the law affects landlords’ decision-making. And on that point it’s not hypothetical at all; it’s what happened.
> But the alternative is allowing for a similar exploitation at the hands of people with accumulated or inherited wealth.
You say this like it matters.
Saying that we want people to be able to raise their kids in one place for 12 years is a decent argument. Worrying about the wrong kinds of people being landlords isn't.
We want our justice system to be "swift, sure, and fair" and our eviction process should be the same way. People can drag it out for years, maybe, and when it finally hits it's like a surprise.
Yeah. I feel like I’d be more comfortable with stronger tenant stability protections if they came with correspondingly more funding for courts to deal with these issues specifically. (Or some kind of fast-moving binding arbitration.)
Selling it to someone else who wants to live there instead of having another absentee landlord who does not care about the community and only sees it as a source of profit seems like a win to me.
Sure. It depends on your priorities. That neighborhood will absolutely benefit from the presence of the rich guy who bought it from me, because rich people moving into mediocre neighborhoods tend to make them better. (They complain to the city about maintenance issues, call the cop on shady people, beautify their own yards…)
But my point was about the effect on affordable housing. And this was definitely a loss for affordable housing. I would have rented the house out for considerably less than my mortgage payment and far less than the new buyer’s payment. By making the decision I did I made that unit of housing about twice as expensive for the next person to live there.
If you would rent it out for less than the market rate, you are a generous person indeed. Over time, rents and mortgages tend to be the same. In a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that is not the case because people expect the value to increase. But for most areas it is a wash.
In the city of which I speak, rents are consistently well below mortgages — not least because of renter protection laws. This was a somewhat gentrifying area, although the big gains were already well in the past. But it still would have taken ten or fifteen years for rent to have caught up to the mortgage payment. Still, it could have been worth it to subsidize rent (because the land value would have increased significantly, too). But not if there’s the additional risk of a bad renter you can’t get rid of.
Yes and the burdens are also incredibly large. I know renters who rent because they don't want the obligation of paying a monthly mortgage and fronting the costs for repairs. They know if they lose their job, they can quickly leave and find cheaper rent. Both owners and renters have benefits and disadvantages. What tenants want is the benefits of ownership without the burdens. Would tenants rights supporters demand that tenants now be able to terminate their lease and stay in an apartment indefinitely because the owner would not be able to get another tenant paying the same amount because rents have dropped?
What a thoughtful and detailed post. Not.
You have to admit your comment has zero merit. It's purely an ad hominem attack.
Always ends with the name calling. Definitely persuading me to your view now. :)
"Otherwise, they ARE parasites who provide nothing to society. We don’t need owners. We do need housing. By the grace of god or the cold, indifferent universe, I am now a homeowner."
Now you're being honest. Screw the landlords. Take their property. They are vermin who must be extinguished.
The difference between us I don't focus on the cold, indifferent universe and what it owes me or what I deserve but on how I can best position myself to persevere through hardship that I know is inevitably coming my way.
"I said they should expect to work hard for the rent they collect, otherwise they ARE parasites"
The creation of the housing in the first place is the work. If you don't get a return from that the creation won't happen in the first place
What a Straw Man argument.
"Because the cost and social capital required for homeownership are profoundly prohibitive"
I agree that housing is expensive. The solution to that is to build more housing, and not put in stupid regulations that make it so people won't build (see rent control).
Also, if you want to own, then reduce your consumption and increase your savings. My wife and I moved in with my parents for a couple of years to save for a house.
I had an immigrant friend where FOUR families lived together for years as they bought each home and then paid it off so they could all own their own house.
If you want to make it happen you can. Just live WAY within your means
This is a fascinating topic. I've watched the drama unfold many times over many years, though in the S.F. Bay Area rather than New York. As a member of the evil ownership class (though not currently a landlord), my initial thoughts were like yours.
But I've changed my perspective a bit. Living in a place for a long time connects with some very basic human feelings, feelings that probably trace back to times when communities or tribes lived together for entire lifetimes. Those feelings can't just be dismissed because the current economic system says that owners should have all the rights. A left-leaning economic justification would be that your material circumstances are a combination of luck and timing, so you don't meaningfully "deserve" the ownership rights that you have.
Housing is complicated. There are strong instincts and emotions about one's community and home. "Home" is a big deal in the human mind and heart. It's not like crypto or other investments. You ignore that at your peril when working through these issues.
All true. But it takes two to tango. And I don't think abstract notions of fairness and decency will convince people to invest millions in new housing. There's going to have to be an incentive on the landlord side as well. Where that line is drawn? I don't presume to know, but seeing all these comments where only the tenant is considered and the landlord either ignored or villified has me scratching my head.
To get back to Freddie's point about achieving actual progress, I don't see how blaming everything on the landlord (and minimizing their rights to their own land) is going to lead to more housing. It has to be a balance where they are considered in good faith as well.
I would argue that most landlord/tenant laws were put in place by property owners to benefit the landlord side of the equation, and while years of tenant-rights work has been an attempt to equalize the balance, landlords interpret any push for tenant rights as an unfair attempt to tip the scale the other way. As I say below, you don’t have to add an individual moral dimension to this - most American laws were put in place to benefit property owners and there’s no reason landlord/tenant laws should be an exception.
Have you ever been a landlord?
This type of zero sum framing is particularly counterproductive. If the number of homes were more or less constant, then you might have a point. But the number of homes should not be constant! It should be exploding, but it’s not due to suffocating policy restrictions. Relax those restrictions and let them build. Giving tenants more supply and more options, and having landlords begging for their business is what gives tenants power, not these bitter fights that do little.
Yes, I understand your concerns. It seems to me that in the current economic climate, only big faceless corporations can afford to be landlords. They have economies of scale and can keep maintenance workers, accounting staff, etc., on the payrolls. I would not be a "mom and pop" landlord again, particularly not in California. In addition to the costs of maintenance, taxes, insurance, etc., you get vilified just for existing. I don't really like being vilified, and if I keep my investments in a Vanguard index fund, I find that I can simply not tell anyone and don't have to deal with all the grief.
But are big faceless corporations the best landlords from the tenant point of view? I think that's really an open question.
I think that is well said and gets at the point I was trying to make. I wouldn't want to be a landlord in California either. And that's a problem housing advocates need to confront, rather than just paint landlords as greedy and soulless. When you drive out everyone but fortune 100 companies, are you really making the progress you want to make?
Ironically, probably yes. Fortune 100 companies have investments and care about things like ESG and can be subjected to social media pressure, lawfare, political pressure, etc. The same number of apartment units held by a diffuse class of small-time landlords is much harder to target and sway.
By the numbers, most landlords are people who own only a few properties. It's a lot of work with not inconsiderable risks. They are not faceless corporations.
I said this in another post, but here in CA we have Prop 13, which freezes your property tax to the value of the property when you purchased it. I think that tying that to rent control might be a fair trade off. Want to gut the place, remodel, and charge three times as much? Perfect; enjoy your new tax bill. On the other side, we need laws to allow landlords to IMMEDIATELY jettison squatters or people demolishing the place and tenants who do destroy property should be ineligible for any further assistance.
One other thing would be rent control that is also fair to the property owner, so once the original renter moves out, the rent can go up, unless the new tenant is on the lease. So no keeping rent control for 3 generations in Manhattan so your wealthy grandkids can live on the cheap after their trip to an IvyLeague school. I’d like to make it easier to evict problem tenants, while severely penalizing landlords who try to evict tenants to dodge rent control, but even reading that sentence brings up nightmare images for fair implementation…
That's how San Francisco's rent control works: new tenants move in at market rate, then are locked to scheduled yearly increases as long as they remain. (Rent control in San Francisco only covers multi-family buildings built before 1979.) It seems like a better system than NYC's.
However, as you point out, Prop 13 is a *terrible* confounder. Even under SF's weak version of rent control landlords can (over time) align rent with land value, but their tax rate remains locked to the value when they or their grandparents bought the land. My preferred solution is that Prop 13 be entirely repealed for commercial and investment property, but your idea is interesting.
Prop 13 is a complete nightmare of a policy. It is everything you shouldn't do.
"All the problems of rent control except with homeowners as the beneficiaries" would be a good summary.
Yup. Prop 13 is bad every way that you look at it.
I don't think there's a *political* route to repealing it entirely - too many homeowners who don't want their taxes to go up. I do, however, think you could get together a constituency for eliminating its worst parts by excluding commercial / investment / rental properties, and second homes.
Very well said. It strikes me as so odd that those who claim to be communitarian don't seem to be interested in any of the things that actually make a community.
Feelings don't matter and neither does length of time. Someone can feel like they are a part of the community after living there only a year while someone who's been there 10 can basically be a recluse and not engage with the greater community.
Owners have all the rights because they have all the obligations, including the monetary ones. I am very tired of the "deserving" argument. What people deserve is irrelevant and it's not the job of government to even out the scales. What if a landlord bought the apartment building using the proceeds from a lawsuit after his son was killed by a drunk driver. Does he become more deserving than the tenant who has lived in the apartment for 7 years and feels like a part of the community? What are the criteria for being deserving? There are none. It's all thoughts and feelings, which is unworkable.
People who rent know the dwelling does not belong to them. Their expectations that they should have the legal right to live there indefinitely with small rent increases is unreasonable.
That's not really an argument, or even a point of view.
Well, if you want to post maybe you could put some meat in there.
Fan of Santa Claus I assume?
Do you believe there is no role for government in trying to fix unfair conditions? Do you oppose programs like Medicaid or the EITC or welfare/food stamps? I would consider all of those programs attempting to give people some of what they "deserve" but are unable to afford/procure for themselves for various reasons.
There are better ways and worse ways to improve people's conditions.
One of the absolute worst is to say "hey, third-party, you have a responsibility to take care of this problem" which creates a giant game of hot potato and everyone avoids being the third-party.
Another bad idea is to identify a scarce resource and then artificially increase demand for that scarce resource.
The null hypothesis is that we should just give people money. They can decide to spend that money bidding up a very scarce resource if that very scarce resource is valuable to them, but maybe they'd rather have an extra $400 to spend on food and transportation.
You know you can't convince deBoer and his socialist sycophants, don't you?
"Those feelings can't just be dismissed"
Yes they can. The Owner shouldn't have all the rights, for example, they should have to fix hazards (black mold etc).
But aside from that, any rights should be spelled out in the lease agreement after that it should be at will. The renter can leave when they want, and the landlord can raise rents, or kick them out when they want.
Which is why it's so maddening that socialists/communists/marxists like Freddie absolutely refuse to write down what the socialist/communist/marxist policy for allocating housing would be, if they ever took over.
Yeah, but we will be told that wasn't REAL socialism/communism/marxism, that REAL socialism/communism/marxism has "never been tried".
OK, fine. If it's never been tried, then WTF is it? Please write down the rules for it.
They will still need a rulebook, a set of laws. Which they don't have.
Your snark-factor is dialed to 11, but you are right on.
Lenin was a murderous thug. More shopkeepers should be hanging from lampposts and trees. Kill of their family, too, including tiny kids, so that they do not grow up and seek revenge. Stalin did his best to eliminate the Kulaks and Wreckers. How many dissenters survived the Band of Brothers 1-6 in Cambodia?
Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, are great examples of the "functional systems" that are left in place after the initial murder, deportation and theft. The deportation, by the way, continues, only it's voluntary.
Vietnam and China are examples of at least delaying the inevitable collapse of communism by pivoting to capitalism, while keeping all the authoritarianism. There should be a name for that type of governance, eh? (The eh is in Canadian).
I would just say, here's a check at fair market value, you have to sell it to me (the gov). Here's also a list of available real jobs. Go make some working class friends. Have fun. This is now publicly owned housing.
Now tell me who gets to live in the house the government just bought.
And, the check will be zero, since there is no fair market value if there is no market. And, even if the check was for some non-zero amount, what would it "purchase" in a commie society? Nothing.
How about this- there should be checkpoints so the existing community can limit development the community doesn't want. Which is more or less what we have now and what YIMBYIES are trying to get rid of. Historic churches turned into condos, who exactly is for that?
If the owners of the "historic church" decide that it's God's will to replace the building with condos to provide housing for people, who am I to complain?
The person living 200 yards away who doesn't think we need more 2M condos with historic charm.
So on the ledger of "who exactly is for that" we have
1) the owners of the "historic church"
2) the people who move in
Because you will have no such limits on new development market rates, realize that these sorts of regulations would incentivize winding down these sorts of buildings if you try to freeze tenants in place using regulation against landlords. The buildings will be held at a low valuation until a landlord, probably some huge company, figures out how to empty them out and redevelop them at a market rate. Particularly if the municipality does not freeze the property tax rates on these regulated / tenant subsidized buildings.
So, the answer to your question is:
1) Legally, it depends on location. See a lawyer, if you can afford it.
2) Morally, because age and longstanding residence create massive hardships on some tenants which don't otherwise exist.
But the answer to your broader complaint is that without tenant protections, tenants can be mistreated (in fact, even with tenant protections, tenants can be mistreated, but tenant protections do help). Those protections, like all protections (and all rights, for that matter) can be abused in various ways and it's a constant balancing act to get it right. I make no claim that any particular location has found the perfect balance, but it's a genuinely hard question.
ETA: I will say that though there's always a balance, my instinctive belief is going to be that though edge cases undoubtedly exist, structural systems are generally not set up for the benefit of poor renters.
> Morally, because age and longstanding residence create massive hardships on some tenants which don't otherwise exist
When you give special rights to people who've lived somewhere a long time or to old people, you create a fundamental disincentive to rent to them.
I mean, this is true with any limitation. So, you'll notice a tendency to fire people right before they would start earning sick leave, or to keep people just below the full-time employee hour limits.
But it's fairly unlikely here as it would mean you'd have to fairly frequently evict good tenants (depending on how such a system were implemented).
ETA: Also, I expressly separated legal and moral arguments for a reason. Saying it is immoral to evict an elderly individual from the home they've lived in for 40 years doesn't mean that it should be illegal to do so. Merely that you are, in fact, a bad person if you do that in order to increase your profit margin [general 'you' obviously].
This seems to assume that there’s something bad about increasing your profit margin. Where does this idea come from?
There's nothing inherently wrong with increasing your profit margin. There is something wrong with increasing your profit margin in this fashion.
A strong community is a public good, so we should consider the cost of breaking up a community when implementing policies.
To answer your first question: I don’t think Freddie said that. There’s a difference between advocating for policies that allow renters to more easily remain in place/limit disruptive profit-maximization practices and “quasi-ownership.”
There is a vast class of people in this country who live with the constant knowledge that the person who owns the roof over their heads could upend decades of their life at any time and they would receive no recourse whatsoever, regardless of how much money they’ve made the landlord in that time. This is bad. It’s disrupting and horrible to lose a home you felt safe and secure and familiar in because of arbitrary market pressure. And, yes, this is not the result of landlords being somehow inherently, morally evil - but it is the result of enormous financial inequality between the property-owning and property-renting classes, and the fact that landlords’ financial motivations are to charge as much rent and perform as little maintenance as they can get away with, and to lobby against laws that would prevent them from doing this.
I am fully aware plenty of landlords are better than this on an individual level, but as a class they can hire lobbyists and lawyers and as a class tenants largely can’t, and it shows in whose interests the laws actually take into account.
Yeah, plenty of landlords could tell you about some real jerks they rented to. I’m a tenant lawyer - I could tell you about some real jerks I’ve represented. I also don’t find “but tenants don’t appreciate what I’m sacrificing to put a roof over their ungrateful heads!” a convincing narrative, and I hear it every single day of my life. I simply care more about the problems of the elderly woman on a fixed income whose home of 25 years will suddenly be financially unavailable to her one month to the next than for someone who, however tight the profit margins, has the wealth accumulated from owning multiple properties. Not everyone is that woman but I want everyone to have the same rights I want for her.
Again with the profits are bad belief. It's very interesting to me that people ascribe immorality to people wanting to make a profit but not people wanting to get as much money as possible from their employer or getting service as cheap as possible. Why is one good and the other bad? Do you overpay for goods and services because the seller is not making enough profit and you can afford it? Maybe we should move to a system where price is determining by the relative wealth of each person.
It is because these high falutin principles of yours cause grinding misery for humans on earth, hence we seek to balance interests of owners and renters. I see what you say as *actual* moralizing
Where did I say profits are bad? Lawmaking to always incentivize profit maximization at the cost of other goods like community cohesiveness and long-term tenant stability is bad.
How do you measure community cohesiveness? Tenants are transient and take advantage of market fluctuations to their benefit but want to deny this to landlords. When rents go down, people move or negotiate better lease terms, as they should. When rents go up, landlords increase rent or terminate the lease and get higher quality tenants.
Tenants are, by and large, stuck in place when they find somewhere decent to live. I don’t live in a big city - move-in costs and fees run an average of $1,500-$3,000 here. Inventory is at historical lows. This flexibility you imagine for people who rely on the rental housing does not exist for most people.
Also, when is the last time rents actually consistently, stably went *down*?
Also, what’s a “higher-quality” tenant? You mean “richer,” right? Just say “richer.”
I would love to see laws demanding a quicker return of security deposits. It takes too long in my opinion and I believe that would help tenants. Moving costs are sometimes prohibitive and that is a factor people take into account when deciding whether to move.
Few things go down in price long-term. I don't know why you'd expect rent to be any different. Rent is based on housing prices, mortgage availability, insurance costs and property taxes. All of these go up, up, up. The idea that rents must only increase by say 2-5% a year when other costs are soaring is unfair and unrealistic. When the pandemic hit and renters didn't have to pay, but landlords have to continue paying property taxes, fixing repairs and paying their mortgage, this was grossly unfair and unjust. I don't like exploitation no matter who is doing it. I know landlords whose tenants stopped paying because they could, even though they could afford it.
Yes. Making more money and/or having larger savings means you are less likely to not pay your rent if something bad happens, like you lose your job or take a pay cut or have your hours cut. Also, people with better credit, years at their job, no history of bankruptcy, criminal record, etc. If you were a landlord, would you take the higher quality or lower quality tenant? Please be honest.
I had to help my friend shovel shit out of his rental property a few years back. I have no idea if was from a dog or not but somebody was just letting it go all over the carpet in the living room.
A "higher quality" tenant might have used a toilet or forced his dog to go outside.
Note that in economics, rent is different from profit. Profit is assumed to include productive human activity. Rent, on the other hand, is _unearned_ income. It's the difference between the actual productive value of the property (as defined by what you would get for it if you sold it) and the amount you're renting it for.
Profit I'm fine with up to the point that profit-seeking causes other harm to society. But I'm more skeptical about rents.
So landlords don't earn their rent? Being a good landlord is work. You must maintain the property, respond to tenant complaints, resolve disputes and bear the risk of non-payment by tenants, even though you bear the entire financial obligation of the dwelling.
Not really! They could simply sell the property for its actual value.
When you delve into what they're getting rent for, it's really as a reward for tying up a bunch of capital into the building. But what they are getting paid for is way above the actual economic value of the property itself.
Like, it is what it is. It's the nature of the beast right now. But we shouldn't romanticize it.
Its actual value is intimately tied to its rental value.
Nor should we romanticize the alternatives.
I'm also right wing but I've got no patience for landlords. Consistently, they provide as little services as possible and have ALWAYS tried to take my security deposit unjustly. There is especially an epidemic of shitty landlords in college towns, where they in all cases try to fleece college students out of as much money as possible.
Landlords profit when they increase rent as much as possible and provide as little services as possible. Even Adam Smith doesn't like them.
Because under a capitalist system profit //is// surplus labour...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFEzJovH2yo
"Do you overpay for goods and services because the seller is not making enough profit and you can afford it?"
I think a productive way of flipping that question is by asking, is an employer ever going to knowingly pay their employee //more// than the value that employee added through their labour?
"Maybe we should move to a system where price is determining by the relative wealth of each person."
That ends up sounding very similar to: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"!
I believe that in some countries, Finland comes to mind, the fine charged for things like traffic infractions, are very much tied to the amount of the person's income. There's a funny story out there about a famous Finnish NHL players who got caught speeding in his expensive sports car, and the ticket cost him something like $75K.
"There is a vast class of people in this country who live with the constant knowledge that the person who owns the roof over their heads could upend decades of their life at any time and they would receive no recourse whatsoever"
Which would also be the policy under socialism. The only difference is that it would be the gubmint that kicked you out.
(Any socialist who disagrees: please write down the actual housing policy that you propose. I'll wait.)
The person you responded to didn't mention socialism at all. Why did you bring it up?
Because our host is a self-proclaimed socialist who writes from a socialist point of view, and I was also getting a marxist vibe from Sarah (to whom I was responding), e.g., "enormous financial inequality between the property-owning and property-renting classes", though on re-reading that was likely not a correct inference of her views.
You are correct: I’m not a Marxist.
"There is a vast class of people in this country who live with the constant knowledge that the person who owns the roof over their heads could upend decades of their life at any time and they would receive no recourse whatsoever"
This is exactly the same thing with at will employment. they can fire you at any time, you can quit at any time.
There's nothing wrong with that. It's a voluntary transaction. If you want more certainty, then get it in a contract/lease agreement,
also
"landlords’ financial motivations are to charge as much rent and perform as little maintenance as they can get away with"
This isn't true. Because when people leave an apartment it's a big hassle. You have to find a new renter, the place will usually sit empty for a period of time. etc.
My dad's side of the family owns some apartments, and they always charge below market to make sure that people can and do stay in there for the long haul.
That kind of stability comes with ownership, or some sort of vested right to occupy. People typically have to pay for this. How does that get done for your hypothetical elderly tenant?
I think that it matters because housing is part of the way we structure our communities, and it isn’t something people can go without. In this way it’s like healthcare and other basic necessities. You can’t apply a pure market strategy to it. Communities are stronger when people live stable lives, people are more able to plan for the future when they know how much they’ll be paying for rent next year and where they’ll be living, children are better educated and thrive when they have consistency in schooling. I think that people who decide to get into the business of making money through housing investment and lanlording should be subject ti some restraint in the interest of the community. Otherwise just buy a house to live in.
Then why should I care about something as amorphous as “neighborhood character”? If landlords can do whatever they want then so can developers. But what a lot of people seem to be arguing for is “I can do whatever I want with my property, the feelings of the people who rent from me don’t matter, but ALSO the person who owns the lot next door should absolutely be restricted from building a duplex because it would harm me financially and aesthetically.”
Sure people respond to incentives, but monetary ones are not the only one. Or people would not sacrifice themselves for their families, their communities and their countries all the time.
I knew a guy who had social housing tenants here in Ireland. They moved out after a while and he went in to check if anything needed maintaining, and found that they'd ripped the sinks off the wall, torn the wallpaper down etc. I'd be very surprised if that was a common occurrence though.
I don't really know if it's a common occurrence in the U.S., but I guarantee you that every landlord I've ever talked to claims to have had tenants like that. And that goes double for Section 8 tenants. How closely do the facts fit the narrative? I don't know, and I don't know if there's any good empirical evidence about it.
You are a capitalist and believe in absolute ownership rights. I do not. Rent control has many benefits, mostly in that it doesn't force people to move when the economic situation changes and it stabilizes neighborhoods. You think that this is immoral but I think it is practical and right.
We have a fundamental disagreement of philosophy and it won't be settled by discussion, at least the way you frame,
I am a landlord and do the best to treat my tenants fairly and not gouge them and be a good landlord. I also support rent control because the good outweighs the bad.
Rent control certainly has downsides as well. It leads to even worse housing scarcity, as it harms the incentive to produce more rental units. New residents to a city find it very difficult to get into a rent controlled unit, because there are just no units available. Either that or they have to illegally sublet from someone who already lives in a rent controlled unit. Also, it harms the incentive for owners to maintain let alone upgrade their properties, which causes whole neighborhoods to slowly decline into disrepair. Indeed, huge swaths of the Bronx were abandoned in the 60s and 70s as hundreds of thousands of rowhouses literally became rubble under rent control that started in the 1940s.
I am also a landlord and do my best to treat my tenants fairly and not gouge them. I oppose rent control because the bad outweighs the good. Rent control may appeal to an emotional sense of fairness, but it's important that we judge policy by anticipated results and not emotionally driven intent. Put in that frame, rent control is not right, nor is it practical. We need housing abundance, not more passion on the side that opposes basic economic reasoning.
Rent control does not reduce the incentive to produce more units if it is implemented properly. When new construction is being designed, the income stream 30 or more years out is not considered as part of the equation. In San Francisco, only buildings built before 1979 are included. You might argue that the threat of further regulations could impact the desire of people to invest in new construction but as far as I can tell this is not true. It's an informed decision that I gathered by talking to developers and city planners. Other regulations that are far more onerous are restricting supply. It is possible that the threat of further rent control extension might have a slight impact at the margins. There is probably some research on this.
The rest of this does not really seem like an argument that convinces me. Sure, landlords are not incentivized as much to invest in maintenance. That's not really a bug, it's a feature unless the buildings become uninhabitable, in which case we have a process to deal with derelict landlords. Buildings will filter down faster. And landlords can always sell their property. Your example of the Bronx is not really germane because cities all over the country were being emptied out in the 70s. Look at Detroit, Cleveland and St. Lous for more extreme examples. Look at San Francisco even, as the population declined over 20% from the 50s to 80s. It's not because or rent control, which was not enacted until 1979.
New residents are disadvantaged economically compared long term tenants, I agree with that. That is the tradeoff we have to decide we want to make when we decide if rent control is the right policy to implement. I don't suggest rent control at all times for all situations, I am not some grand policy expert nor to I pretend to be. But I know San Francisco and the Bay Area well and it would be an economic disaster for hundreds of thousands of people if rent control was abolished. It would cause a mass migration like something that happens in wartime and a dislocation of established communities.
Is rent control a "right"? No more than absolute property ownership is a "right". There are many restrictions on property owners. Rent control does not reduce the amount of housing produced. An economy of abundance produces housing for everyone, not just the fortunate few at the top of the economic latter, which is what we have now in most of our cities.
It’s an article of faith among Marxists that the landlord-tenant relationship is fundamentally exploitative. The idea that somebody owns something that someone else wants to use in exchange for money - Marxists just won’t accept that principle, particularly when it comes to housing.
It's not an article of Marxist faith. It's a passing familiarity with every landlord-renter relationship in the course of history, from serfdom to today. It's also literally every person's experience of buying a house, which requires time, money, propensity for risk, access to good lawyers, and a basic ability to recognize and call bullshit that so many people are just always going to lack.
There are almost no Marxists in America and the few that exist have no political power. So this seems pretty much like a Straw Man argument to me, unless you can point to something specific here with evidence.
Perhaps this would make sense in an argument about housing in Cuba or North Korea, but not here.
I happen to love my landlord and his wife. The fact that I have rent control in L.A. has allowed me to go to nursing school. I always hear the same argument from two different sides, which is either that the landlord is a greedy monster, or your side, which states that all tenants are essentially tornadoes looking for a trailer park to destroy. Neither is true in the vast majority of cases.
I moved into my rent controlled place a decade ago. Said place is in a great neighborhood and is OLD (Like some paint peeled and when I started scraping I was inhaling lead paint from the 50’s, lmao - I sealed it up repainted). The electrical system is made from paper mache and cat intestines and nobody who lives in the building cares; it’s worth the 10 yearly trips to the fuse box in the summer when I accidentally run the spin cycle of the washer with the microwave, toaster, or air conditioner. I love my landlord and, because of my behavior, I believe he feels the same.
Our building manager (6 units, but he was the de facto manager) and handyman type recently died. This coincided with me being faced with giant holes in the wall of the bathroom which was the result of a poorly-repaired flood from upstairs from a few years ago. My landlord and I agreed that he would pay for the materials and I would put it together. I found my new roommate re-caulking the shower as she claimed the last job was terrible. Around here we accept that the place is cheaper and that our landlord is mellow. It’s also understood that WE are to be mellow when it comes to minor stuff being fixed. I get my degree next year; I’m redoing the floors in here as a thank you.
Both the “All landlords are vultures” and “All tenants suck” are rarities in my experience. Most people have at least a decent relationship with their landlord or tenant and, at least in CA, the trade off for rent control is Prop 13, which means that your property tax on the building doesn’t go up until you sell it to somebody else. I think that’s fair. I also think sane rent control is fair in that your way of doing things is why terrible hordes of AWFLs are rolling into predominantly Latino and Black neighborhoods and basically killing a good neighborhood to make room for the bourgeois tastes of Starbucks-swilling White girls. Who cares how many families they displace?
Final note: I can see no better way to drum up anti-landlord sentiment than reading your stream of posts; I’m sure Freddie and other proponents of fair rental laws thank you. I love my landlord and I’m ready to go throw every last property owner into the gulag after reading your anti-tenant screeds; I think reading them would make virtually anybody vote for meaningful rent control laws. Thank you for that.
I used to be a landlord so I understand your viewpoint. However coming a City - Vancouver - that has seen endless densification and gentrification- Freddie has a point. I don’t know the answer but a City needs housing at many price points to be functional. In my neighborhood older homes that had been subdivided into affordable housing have been systematically knocked down and replaced with townhomes that cost over $2,000,000. But we keep hearing the mantra that we need more housing and it is good for the environment. We even coined the phrase “Eco-Density” - doesn’t that sound nice.
Well said Freddie. Your forays here and in education are indispensable and why I support you.
the sarcastic way i like to put it is "they should demand that their landlord evict them, so they can convert the building into a rent-controlled SRO with many times more units"
Is there any area of policy or activism that does not have a very online branch that acts just this way, though? It is easiest to opine at a high level of abstraction, without putting in time to get familiar with the particular or with what's been said before on the topic, and our open information environment means that anyone can do so in a fraction of a second. I agree with the ethic you're trying to encourage, and think it generalizes to just about any area of activism. That said, I think that engaged activists (as opposed to social media opiners) also need to grow up in the sense of accepting that message discipline is impossible in a large, populous, literate country where more people who "message" are going to be doing so half-assed at best than after doing the work to understand or to align with people who do.
I'm new to this intellectual argument, so pardon any ignorance.
Here's the question: Is the issue of foreign-owned real estate being talked about at all? In the current market, with the dollar strong and things uncertain, even more international elites will seek to park their wealth in the U.S., thereby driving up housing costs everywhere.
Is there anyone considering how to apply Denmark-like housing rules to the U.S.? (Denmark highly limits foreign ownership of residential real estate). Or attempting to make the real estate professionals abide by the Patriot anti-money laundering provisions from which they were exempt?
I'm holding on as a renter in Washington Heights (NYC) in a building that went condo and the apts have been bought by shady foreigners sight unseen. Renters are being shoved out and the new foreign, faceless owners have jacked up the rent to nose-bleed levels (or even worse, they sit empty, as safe-deposit boxes). I am one of the last Latinas left in the building. It's truly horrible. There are many suffering families.
Anyone who thinks that simply "building more" is the answer does not live here in the real world with me. There is basically unlimited international money waiting to buy real estate in America. As we build or convert more, more foreign dirty money, and local hedge-fund ("dirty" from a moral perspective) money, buys up more and more residential units...and, prices real people out.
Unless you deal with excess capital at the top of the food-chain, you will never ameliorate the housing crunch.
This is a key issue, that residential housing in desirable cities (New York, London, Vancouver, Sydney) has become a commodity for storing offshore wealth.
One partial solution (that I doubt will happen), is banning the ownership of residential property by corporations. Owner has to be a living person. That would cut out some of it (shell company trading). And with living-owner requirement, citizenship/residency rules could be applied.
Yes, agreed. But, banning all corporate investment is not easily feasible. A more achievable approach is to have corporations that buy real estate have to name the "beneficiary" for whom the real estate is being held, and that's where you can require residency (and tax paying!) stateside. And, this problem is not just in desirable cities. In Iowa, and elsewhere in the Midwest, foreign buyers are buying up both residential and commercial (even farms) real estate. We must remember the immigration law that allows anyone who wants a green card to buy one through "investments" (while not-wealthy "family petitions" wait in line for years). And, the green cards (including for the whole family) cost half as much in rural areas (250k vs. 500k, in investment). So, that incentive also needs to be tweaked. Like all demand and supply, immigration laws have figured out to charge less for rural investments-for-green-cards, thereby guaranteeing that the whole United States real estate market is up for sale in order to land a coveted American residency/citizenship for the whole brood of very wealthy foreigners.
This makes the real pay-off of owning American real estate even waaaay bigger than it appears on just the real estate transaction documents. Since for 250k a whole large family gets green-cards leading to citizenship -- with no long-term (over 5 years) requirement that they actually live here and pay taxes.
Basically, we sell American passports along with the title deed -- thereby raising the true value of real estate for foreigners. Unless economists and thinkers factor all this in, the blah blah back and forth is all theoretical musings with no long-term, real-life impact.
You would have to specify “large” or “public” corporations, since pretty much all business of any kind needs to be done through a corporation to protect individuals from liability and risking all their personal assets with every little thing they do. And even that might not work since there are some properties so big that restricting ownership to individuals might make it impossible for anyone to run them. Barring foreign ownership in some way makes sense though.
The countries that are looking into this are leaning towards real estate registries having to list who the ultimate "beneficiary" of the real estate is -- no matter the size of the corporation. To place limits on size is unwieldly (an apartment in New York can cost as much as a whole industrial farm). So, you can have a large team running the property, but the ultimate beneficiary, or beneficiaries if multiples/group (whoever is going to make money from its rental/sale, and gets to also use it) has to be named.
Do you have data that supports this? I'm involved with YIMBY activism in NYC. People always bring this up to me. I totally buy it in theory, but the estimates/data I've seen is that this is just a much, much smaller problem than people think it is, and to the extent it's a problem all the apartments are in one area on central park. I would be happy to be convinced it's a problem as it does seem somewhat solvable with public policy, but haven't seen anything remotely compelling
I'm not in the data business, but I know what's going on around me (north of 181 St & south of Dyckman). In my building condo conversion many of the apartments were bought by foreigners. The super and realtors take care of renting them out at market rate -- huge mark-up from our stabilized rents. And, the demographic make-up of the building changed drastically. They've figured out how to get rid of Latinos without incurring discrimination liability: they require very high salary and credit rating of the new renters. The new people are mostly White, working downtown. Originally we had several very young Chinese ladies who bought/lived in a few of the apartments (who could not have been able to afford the minimum 500k from just employment-- they were students -- so, parents?), but after Covid the Asians disappeared and White folks moved in to those apartments. The super mentioned two buyers who never even saw the apartments and paid cash: one from India and one from Italy, he said. He remembered the countries because he was shocked that "people so far away would pay cash without seeing the place." But, he was able to quickly rent them out for the buyers (have no idea what commission deal they have with the super/management).
I'm not denying that's happening or that it's bad. I would support policies to crack down on it. But I'm fairly certain it's a relatively small number of apartments compared to the NYC housing market.
We did the analysis in SF and it is something like 3% of new construction almost all of which has tenants. You can't buy a condo and "jack up the rent to the roof" as landlords can only charge market rates.
From the NYTimes in 2011: “In a large swath of the East Side bounded by Fifth and Park Avenues and East 49th and 70th Streets, about 30 percent of the more than 5,000 apartments are routinely vacant more than 10 months a year because their owners or renters have permanent homes elsewhere, according to the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey.”
And it is not just a Central Park problem: “Since 2000, the number of Manhattan apartments occupied by absentee owners and renters swelled by more than 70 percent, to nearly 34,000, from 19,000.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/nyregion/more-apartments-are-empty-yet-rented-or-owned-census-finds.html
These figures have likely skyrocketed in Brooklyn and LIC in the last 10 years, too. It is not a small problem.
"Anyone who thinks that simply "building more" is the answer does not live here in the real world with me. There is basically unlimited international money waiting to buy real estate in America."
That money still wants to get a return. If supply increases over demand then prices will drop.
Not really. You are assuming a hyper-rational market, where demand and supply operate in a clinical, textbook manner. That has not been the case with money, especially lately. Money pays a premium for safety. Look at Switzerland banking: the Swiss are able to pay negative interest rate for the "security" of having the Swiss hold your money. Same theory applies to American real estate: investors can just kept the property empty, no income necessary, for the "return" of safety, and the historical appreciation of the real estate asset realized at future sale.
If you get a lot of people doing that the money won't be safe at all. You will lose your shirt
Foreign investment in American real estate has fallen the past few years. Apparently it's not unlimited money if it's sensitive to price. Just build more isn't the answer to every question, it's just one thing we need to do because we've artificially constrained NYC housing for decades
The reason foreign real estate investment in the U.S. is down is, mainly, because of Covid-related restrictions in travel. Foreign demand fell even as prices initially decreased when Covid began, so it was not due to price sensitivity. Furthermore, China has instituted constraints on the out-flow of capital thereby greatly limiting, for now, demand from China.
Of course increasing supply is always a good thing when it comes to the price of anything. Agreed. Just saying increased supply alone is not going to fix this problem.
> Foreign demand fell even as prices initially decreased when Covid began, so it was not due to price sensitivity.
I think that type of thing is quite hard for economists to suss out, but I guess everyone on the internet is a leading expert on everything.
I don't think anyone thinks increasing supply alone will fix every problem, it's just one major thing we absolutely need to do.
Hey, you never asked for my credentials (lol). Perhaps I'm trained in economics -- and law -- and have worked in this area...(I am and I have).
you literally started your comment thread with
> I'm new to this intellectual argument
and acted like you were just passing along anecdotal evidence. Now you're an expert in foreign investment in the housing market. okay liz sure
I don't see why "foreign investment" is supposed to be more scary than "domestic investment."
I'm all reminded of the episode of The Simpsons where they blamed the problem on illegal immigrants. Not because they were breaking things, or even existing in significant numbers, but because the illegal immigrants weren't in the room to defend themselves. Same thing with "foreign investment." Unfalsifiable boogeyman.
I'm not talking about poor immigrants and asylum seekers (Heck, I got here through political asylum!). I'm talking about millionaires/billionaires who fly in and out with shady funds. Many folks are appalled by the money laundering that is going on with "foreign" purchases. Given that the world is awash in "ill gotten gains" and the U.S. housing market is one of the world's largest money laundering methods, this is an obvious thing to fix in order to make prices more affordable to Americans. When people steal from their government funds (Haiti, Syria, etc.) or when people steal by nationalizing what belonged to the citizens (Russia, Venezuela, etc.) or when people deal in illegal trade (Latin American drugs, African elephant ivory, etc.), why should their money be laundered in American real estate? And help to drive up our housing prices?
> I'm not talking about poor immigrants and asylum seekers
Yes. It was an analogy. Someone not in the room is blamed, and they can't be disproven.
> and the U.S. housing market is one of the world's largest money laundering methods
Please explain why the US housing market is so different from the German housing market or Canadian housing market wrt money laundering.
Building more isn't the only answer but it helps lower rents for tenants, allows more people to live in desirable cities, reduces commutes, reduces global warming, increases the overall economy and has a host of other benefits. Building more is the only solution for shortage.
Almost no YIMBY believes that building more market rate housing is the *only* solution for needed housing. We also support more affordable housing, more shelters and navigation centers, more social housing and other development.
There is not an unlimited amount of dirty money waiting to buy real estate in America. That is a fallacy, Very little of new construction in SF is owned by foreigners and if it is, so what? As long as they rent it out, they just financed some new badly needed construction that someone can live in.
I'm all onboard with the need to do politics, but it's pretty clear to me that the politics are a second-order concern, and may be on the way to becoming a third. America has a housing shortage, which is making rents higher and taking purchase prices outside of the reach of many. The only people who win in that environment are those wealthy enough to pay cash or institutional investors who can raise lots of money. The only way out of this is too build more housing. Short of that, we're not even rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic; we're arguing over the seating plan and the deck slowly fills with water.
Maybe there's an acdelerationist case for not doing the obvious thing we need to do. But I'm highly skeptical that this is all going to lead to pitchforks and revolution and the social housing utopia. More likely, things are just going to get worse and worse, with the greatest pain being felt by those who have the least. Critiquing YIMBY culture doesn't change any of this. So, we should just make our decisions on how to proceed and be prepared to live with the consequences.
I agree 100% with this (and Mama Bear, and others), but Freddie's point stands: if we YIMBYs can't forego abrasive condescension, we're just getting in our own way. Democratic politics means that it's highly likely that:
- We won't get everything we want.
- What we do get won't come on the schedule we want.
- The price of getting what we want will be a modest (at a minimum) number of things we think are stupid and counter-productive.
It is in our interest to take anti-development concerns seriously, find areas of common interest, and think of ways to address those concerns.
Very good take on YIMBYism - it is good but has the problems you describe.
“Yes, we must increase supply, and over a long enough period and in general, more building will slow rental increases.”
Over the top YIMBYs ignore the point above and the long term nature of the challenge. This is a common disease - translating philosophy/talking points/big picture into reality.
What does anyone’s race have to do with anything? I’m sure you’re not channeling the New York Times with the “world ends poor and minorities hardest hit” bilge. So what is it?
The point is that (we) YIMBY's brought race into the conversation by focusing on certain fights while ignoring others. It's a hazard of trying to piggyback YIMBYing on social-justice oriented arguments, but it will just backfire in many envrionments.
“ YIMBY's brought race into the conversation”
I don’t really recall that.
I do. See Slow Boring's discussion on a related issues: https://www.slowboring.com/p/race-and-zoning
Matty is saying don’t use race.
Right, in response to a bunch of YIMBYs using race as an argument.
Once again I can only speak for the west coast housing situation, not New York. And I wish you would consider that not everyone does live in New York. I assure you that YIMBYism is extremely strong in the midsized white-dominated cities and towns of California and the single moms on Facebook desperately looking for a rented room they can share with their 5 year old, or the students that are living out of their cars, just need somewhere to live. And the people most against building apartments for them are white homeowners whose million dollar plus home values have tripled in the past decade. There are way more people and than there were 30 years ago and not way more houses. It really is just arithmetic and I don’t see any other real solution, short or long term to house people for whom houses don’t exist. I’m not trying to be sneering, I am not trying to ignore other demographics in the anti gentrification debate, I am saying that the white homeowners are genuinely the dominant force in anti development where I live, and their line is “not everyone can afford to live here, too bad so sad, but the important thing is that this town stay the way it was when I bought my house in 1982 forever unchanged.”
FDB's point about the demographics of housing debates is equally if not more valid in California as it is in New York. It's the same anywhere where gentrification is an issue.
This is false, unless you mean "in large metro areas" (I'm not in a position to verify that, but it's plausible). In the small-to-medium sized towns across the country, especially highly desirable small college towns, the NIMBY demographics are very different from the situation Freddie describes in NYC.
I'm probably as ignorant about small-to-medium sized towns as you are about large metro areas, but my qualification was "anywhere gentrification is an issue". If there are minority communities threatened with displacement via rising rents and new development, then the demographics of the NIMBY/YIMBY debate are going to be a little more complicated than "racist white homeowners seeking to exclude long-suffering minorities from their neighborhoods".
Desirable small-to-medium-sized towns have the exact same dynamics that get wrapped up as "gentrification": rising rents, fears of displacement, and the sense that a neighborhood's character is at risk.
This is only true if you think the only places that matter are the largest cities. And frankly, the reason white professionals are moving to neighborhoods historically or most recently occupied by people of color is because white home owners are preventing development in the places they come from.
It’s not particular to white people, however the vast majority of homeowners in these areas I am referring to (midsized cities in California, particularly those with colleges) are white. The problem is exactly what you say: no one wants new housing next to them so they tend to build it where they can push it through — in neighborhoods of color like the one Freddie describes in his post. And as he points out, they often don’t want it either. Which is how we got in this mess of growing our population by the millions since the 80s and refusing to build housing for them.
Kinda agreed. But why are the places like Texas where they are able to keep building new houses?
Less zoning and environmental regulation. Environmental oversight is good and necessary, but the way it exists in California allows it to be weaponized to prevent any development projects at all in places like California. It’s being used right now to prevent my local university from building student housing on their campus in a town with a severe housing shortage.
New construction in California is not in "communities of color" it is in far flung exurbs like Tracy and Riverside. They might be pretty mixed race, but lots of whites live in them as well. They are full of working and middle class people of all races.
Ok, that’s fair and a good point. I completely concede that “communities of color” is often not the most accurate term for working class neighborhoods. Better to say that new construction is often in (multiracial) exurbs and what few new building projects occur in other places generally don’t happen in the upper class, whiter (not not always only white) neighborhoods.
Gentrification is mostly an issue having to do with "the largest cities".
Tell that to people in Salinas, Watsonville and Gilroy, CA.
Define "mostly" . . .
Why should I define it? You are the one who used it!
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Now here is a real solution.
"Sleepless in Cincinnati" and "Pretty Ohioan," coming soon to a theater near you!
Maybe they could make a movie from "WKRP in Cincinnati"
Baby, if you've ever wondered...