I feel the same way about rent control. It's not fair for society at large to make property owners eat the cost or the lost potential income alone. I am aggressively pro rent control and pro eviction moratorium during the pandemic, but I am for a (progressive) tax to fund these programs. It's just unfair to make yourself feel good by supporting these programs when you don't have any skin in the game.
I'm not naïve though, I know that if you raise taxes to fund these programs as a society as opposed to a property owner having to fund it alone, those programs will lose their popularity. This is a case where most people's support for these programs is literally all talk. And yes, some property owners are scum and/or large corporations and people will game the system. But then you address that with oversight with teeth.
I hope that eventually we will return to more predictable police power and broad taxation, as described by this quote: “The Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that private property shall not be taken for a public use without just compensation was designed to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole” (Armstrong v. United States https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/364/40/).
Another option would be a social housing program to buffer evictions and provide human rights (food and shelter are one, there's absolutely no discussion about this) to those in most difficulty.
Of course this approach will be met with howls of criticism about market distortion, having something to do with "social(ism)", and removing incentives to work hard.
Most buyers factor in Rent Control when buying the building, and so many end up using the Ellis Act (in CA) to get rid of the tenants.
We are not talking about naive buyers anymore who are blindsided by rent control.
Rent Control might be the only reason some middle class investors can afford to become landlords? Most rich guys don’t want the hassle of an Ellis Act eviction.
They just build luxury condos that only rich people can afford. (My world is San Francisco. In a more fair world, no one should tell a man what he can do with his property, but the world is not fair. Poor people don’t get many breaks.)
While I’m on my box—Sausalito is feverishly trying trying to rid Richardson Bay of Anchor-outs using underhanded tactics. They are targeting the poor people as usual. The only bright side is the victims moved to Dunphy Park because they didn’t know where to go. Sausalito tried to remove them, but someone filed a temporary restraining order with the courts.)
> It's just unfair to make yourself feel good by supporting these programs when you don't have any skin in the game.
The worst part about rent control is that there is zero accountability. Politicians pat themselves on the back for "lowering" prices without actually solving the underlying problem. The problem will only get worse over time until it becomes unbearable.
What is the moral basis of rent? Rent is by definition differentiated from service provision in that it is simply the use of a legal right to extract an income.
I don't see a moral basis, so I don't see how anything that impacts the interests of renters can be unfair. Bad on pragmatic level, perhaps, but not a moral one.
I don’t understand how a waiter and a home-care provider can afford to buy a rental property that is apparently worth charging $80,000/yr in rent. I’m in the wrong business!
[edit: to be clear, this is tongue in cheek, though the circumstances where a bank made this loan seem unusual to me]
By being extremely frugal. Did you read the part of the article where the owner does not live in the house. The owner lives in a "cheap studio apartment nearby with their two young daughters". That is how!
Double 3/1 duplexes in Queens go for about $1M; the monthly payments on this are about $5200/month [1]. Each unit will rent for about $2700/month [2][3], so you're making a profit of about $200/month and paying down the principal steadily. You just need to cover a $200K down-payment. Minimum wage in NYC is $15/hour, so a two-earner couple working 40-hour weeks makes about $60K/year; it could be up to $90K if they each have work 12 hour days, as many Chinese immigrants do. Live in a 1BR apartment and you're spending about $15K/year on rent, maybe $25-30K/year on all expenses. You can save up for that down payment in about 4 years.
I don't have too much sympathy for them because the risk of being unable to find a tenant and hence unable to make your mortgage payment is precisely why not everybody levers up as much as possible to buy a rental property. But that's how the numbers work out. Most people on HN could probably do it, if they had the savings habits and risk tolerance of that couple.
FOMO? Leverage? I have a couple of anecdotal stories I know personally: a friend of a friend working in a jewelry store recently purchased a Manhattan condo as an investment that brings in around $3,000 in monthly rent.
A few years ago I was visiting Vancouver and living in an AirBnB (private room in a house) when prices were dropping, and the owner (a school teacher) was crying about how over-leveraged she was with her million-dollar-plus house, and how she was trying to get sell it, even at a loss.
Clearly some landlords are getting hurt due to some tenants taking unethical advantage of the situation. But I think we need to wait to draw broad conclusions until this can be systematically analyzed at the macro level, rather than doing so from the one-off anecdotes in the article.
Landlords are part of the financial system. Deciding landlords must take the loss on rent so that their tenants can be safe is sensible health and social policy during the acute uncertain phase of the pandemic last year. That uncertainty is now gone.
If the government wants to house people in rental properties indefinitely, then the government can pay to do so at the prevailing market rates.
The sad part is how politicians and organized groups are seemingly afraid to change their direction for fear of voter retribution. Comparing datasets across states and regions, it is not entirely clear to me which had the most effective policies. I would like to see an official CDC report that identifies which policies worked and which did not. I don't think we're going to see a report - because it would become an instant political hot potato.
Eviction moratoriums in 2021 - a full year after the start of the crisis are nonsensical. Individual owners such in the article will eventually lose their properties to deeper pockets - further entrenching wealth disparity.
"On September 4, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a national eviction moratorium that is currently set to expire at the end of March."
The CDC issued a moratorium?
"Won says her tenant owes her more than $80,000 in back rent. ... But we did find that the father in the family is currently employed in the construction industry, and that the tenants are renting a second apartment in a house in Queens Village, where they've also stopped paying rent and owe $12,000 to the couple that owns the house, who are also Chinese immigrants."
So they're renting two apartments and not paying for either?
It's weird that Reason didn't manage to contact any of the renters. I wonder how much effort they put in? Or I wonder if it is a hit-piece?
>"Those are part of the costs of being a landlord," Weaver responds.
No they aren't. Landlords want to at least cover their costs. If they lose out on rental income they are forced to raise rents to compensate their loss. This will mean higher rents and a subsidy for dishonest squatters. The idea that you can make housing cheaper by making it a bad investment is hilarious. If constructing new housing is a bad investment for landlords then nobody will provide housing as a service. Everyone will have to buy their own house or condo.
>"In public housing, people are paying 30 percent of their income," Weaver told Reason. "What I am envisioning is a world in which housing is owned by a collective and people are paying 30 percent of their income in order to live in their housing. If your income is zero, you pay zero. If your income is $500,000 a year, you're paying 30 percent of that."
What makes her think that rich people can't afford to hide their income? It wouldn't surprise me if they could just start a company and simply keep the funds inside the company and only pay out as much as necessary. This is way too easy to game and the ROI is insane. If you earn 500k you would end up with 350k so by engaging in tax shenanigans you could increase your income by 40%. Who's insane enough to not do that?
>When asked how the federal government could afford such a program, Weaver told Reason that it could "print" the money.
No, the way the federal government will be able to afford such a program is by providing housing at cost. Subsidies aren't the right answer and outright printing money isn't it either. If you really wanted such a program you would spin it as a jobs program first with the additional housing as a bonus. By lowering unemployment you increase the number of people who can afford to pay rent. So it's a win win situation. The slow acting benefit of additional housing would take years to have an effect.
> No they aren't. Landlords want to at least cover their costs. If they lose out on rental income they are forced to raise rents to compensate their loss.
Costs don't dictate prices, the market dictates prices.
Nobody is going to pay $50 for a quart of milk just because it cost you that much to produce it.
unless there is data pointing to abuse like this being widespread, I think the alternative of evicting those who can't pay rent in pandemic is still a greater sin
It's kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, isn't it?
I feel like the stimulus cheques should have been made out exclusively to people who:
1. lost a job
2. suffered a wage cut
3. suffered a significant loss of revenue
Number 3 would include landlords and freelancers. I'm one of the lucky people for whom the pandemic increased savings (by decreasing spending), so I don't think it's appropriate that I received two (!) stimulus cheques. I've donated one to Wikipedia and the other to a couple of local charities, but I'm sure there's a smarter way to redistribute that money...
But is the second-wave of the economy coming roaring back so that people have jobs to go to in order to pay rent behind us in nearly all datasets in the United States?
Or would those people still be thrown out onto the street with no housing?
Because if there's anything we need to be doing in the United States, particularly on the West Coast, it's bringing more people to homelessness.
We should look forward and choose the best policy for the situation we have at hand, not look backwards with relief that it is getting better.
I don't mean that as an argument in favor of rent control or eviction moratoriums, it is an argument in favor of using the best basis for policy decisions.
I'd rather see the government just hand landlords money vs throwing people who may just be getting back on their feet into disarray. There has to be some point where things go back to normal, but we are at a point where 2 months from now is basically certain to be a better time to do it than right away.
Abraham buys land in Genesis: "For the full price let him give it to me in your presence as property for a burying place." Gen 23:9. Private property contract law is nothing new. My thought is how many of these landlords will end up turning to more nefarious means to make ends meet? It seems when the legal system fails people inevitably turn to vigilantism.
I think this goes beyond simple overleveraging. For landlords, an aspect of their risk mitigation was the ability to have legal recourse for non-paying tenants:
> Weaver ... says the eviction moratorium is just a "pause" because it doesn't mean that "the landlord can never collect the rent."
> In practice, though, collecting rent money will be extraordinarily difficult after the moratorium is lifted. The case backlog in housing court could mean that landlords will wait years for their cases to be heard, and recovering large sums of money is difficult under the best of circumstances.
> Owners say that having almost no legal recourse when their tenants don't pay their rent was not part of the deal when investing in real estate. Landlord groups around the country have sued on the grounds that halting the judicial process that allows them to retake their property violates their due process rights.
I think it was reasonble for landlords to assume that, in the worst case, they may not be be able to find a renter but would at least have the ability to live in the house themself. Now they can't even do that.
As Hasan Minhaj pointed out, the result of thousands of minor landlords going bankrupt will be the further consolidation of the industry into large commercial landlords (which are worse).
You could make the exact same point towards the renters who were banking on their job to pay the rent. One is called a mortgage while the other is called rent.
Do you also find it hard to sympathise with people who are trying to escape the trap of poverty? If I made assumptions about your circumstances, would I be surprised?
I really don't understand why we insulate landlords from investment risk so much. At the end of the day they can sell the place to mitigate their losses. What recourse could renters have?
This is why I really like Vienna’s housing policy. They have half a million affordable housing units which are very nice. They’ve removed the private profit motive and speculation on land value that drives up housing prices. And if they needed to put a hold on rent collection, it would be the government that suffered the loss rather than private owners.
I'm really struggling to find sympathy with the landlords in this situation.
From multiple angles:
1. Landlords already serve no real market function. They're middlemen - literal rent-seekers that offer no real service to their tenants. And somehow I'm supposed to feel bad for them?
2. The bulk of the housing shortages throughout the US (and other developed nations, for that matter) derives directly from the treatment of real estate as an investment rather than, you know, merely space to live/work/play. People buying homes (particularly low-density ones, mind you!) as "investments" are the perpetrators of that shortage, not somehow the victims; not only do they consume an outsized portion of the housing supply, but they have a vested interest in benefiting from the effects of that constrained housing supply, and therefore will logically do everything in their power to continue to constrain it because it pushes their property values higher.
3. If real estate is to be treated as an investment, then the risks of that investment must be acknowledged. Why should I feel differently about landlords who burned their savings on rental properties than I would about people who burned their savings on, say, GameStop stocks or some cryptocurrency pump-and-dump?
Like, if anything the renter demanding $12k from the landlord has a point. The very notion of land ownership externalizes opportunity costs on everyone else in a given area, specifically because land is finite / in fixed supply and therefore land ownership is definitionally zero-sum (one person's ownership of land is at the exclusion of others). Landlords are long overdue to internalize these externalized opportunity costs - specifically, through a land value tax (possibly supplemented with a flat income tax starting above some threshold; Milton Friedman was a proponent of this combined tax scheme), the proceeds of which would fund programs like UBI and single-payer healthcare to make up for those opportunity costs.
I feel for these landlords only in the sense that they're newcomers to this country hoping to find opportunities to better themselves and secure their financial future, and I hope they - alongside the rest of their fellow Americans - can get some much-needed financial support. That doesn't mean they're somehow the "good guys" in this story just because they're poor immigrants.
----
And to be clear, the delinquent renters/squatters certainly ain't the "good guys" in this story, either. Refusing to pay anything for the space one inhabits - especially when one has the means to do so - also externalizes opportunity costs onto other renters (who are now excluded from that unit despite their willingness and ability to pay for it). I might disagree strongly with the morality of a landlord extracting rent, but refusing to pay rent entirely is not the way to go about fixing that. Rather, the fix is in actually correcting the circumstances that led to this situation - namely, by forcing the internalization of externalized opportunity costs, and by replacing landlords with housing cooperatives.
I have a friend who has lived in the same place for 20 years and has built a family there. They've never missed rent and have been excellent tenants, but nevertheless they're being pushed out and the property is being sold to developers. The developers are trying to intimidate my friend and hoping he doesn't know his rights and just leaves quietly - typical prisoner's dilemma final game betrayal that many property managers pull on people.
Were it not for the eviction moratorium my friend's family would have to up-end two decades of their life during a pandemic when none of them are vaccinated and one is immunocompromised, while juggling kids and trying to find a job. I understand there are some people taking advantage of these circumstances by not paying rent, but the fact is a lot of people are in pretty dire circumstances right now without many options.
Obviously this situation is also terrible for the people highlighted in this piece too and I feel for them - they worked hard and built something from nothing, and highlighting their story is important. I'm of two minds about what to feel about the broader context though, as non-residence real estate is ultimately an investment which carries risks, including unforeseen risks like pandemics. We learned quite recently in the 2008 recession that over-leveraged real estate is a systematic risk, and whether its a pandemic or a financial crisis, it's prudent that investors be able to manage a shock of at least 12 months without rent. Even absent external circumstances, a pipe could burst or another maintenance nightmare could emerge that would make an investment property uninhabitable for a long time.
Its very unfortunate that the US has such an investment-oriented view of residential real estate. In times like these, that approach pits people against each other rather than brings us together to better manage the crisis. Housing insecurity is an awful thing to have to deal with, and if everything is simultaneously quantified into 'how much am I going to make/lose', the fabric of society is going to tear.
All the land in the Bay Area was stolen from indigenous peoples as part of a pogrom of genocide. Many other areas in the United States have a similar issue. Until reparations are paid to the people who were here first, I have zero sympathy for so called "land owners".
Is it much exaggeration to say the message from the far left and from the establishment to those who staked all their capital on one or two rental properties is tough sh!t?
Investing in real estate is like investing in anything else: you're taking a risk and you can, in fact, lose money. Sounds like some of these landlords were irresponsible and didn't understand that before staking all their capital
Cea Weaver, who is used as a foil and whose perspective is unfairly maligned in this article, is basically 100% correct. Landlordism should not exist. Housing is a human right and should not be an investment commodity.
> Emergency policies enacted in times of crisis are prone to becoming permanent, which some members of the #CancelRent movement say is the goal.
This is a good thing. The COVID crisis has exacerbated the huge inequalities in housing in the US, and now is a better time than ever to fix things.
So, if I own an apartment / house / room, I can't go and have a contract with another person willing to take on that contract and live in my place by the agreed rules beforehand?
[+] [-] bigmattystyles|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yonran|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eecc|5 years ago|reply
Of course this approach will be met with howls of criticism about market distortion, having something to do with "social(ism)", and removing incentives to work hard.
[+] [-] hellbannedguy|5 years ago|reply
We are not talking about naive buyers anymore who are blindsided by rent control.
Rent Control might be the only reason some middle class investors can afford to become landlords? Most rich guys don’t want the hassle of an Ellis Act eviction.
They just build luxury condos that only rich people can afford. (My world is San Francisco. In a more fair world, no one should tell a man what he can do with his property, but the world is not fair. Poor people don’t get many breaks.)
While I’m on my box—Sausalito is feverishly trying trying to rid Richardson Bay of Anchor-outs using underhanded tactics. They are targeting the poor people as usual. The only bright side is the victims moved to Dunphy Park because they didn’t know where to go. Sausalito tried to remove them, but someone filed a temporary restraining order with the courts.)
[+] [-] imtringued|5 years ago|reply
The worst part about rent control is that there is zero accountability. Politicians pat themselves on the back for "lowering" prices without actually solving the underlying problem. The problem will only get worse over time until it becomes unbearable.
[+] [-] pasabagi|5 years ago|reply
I don't see a moral basis, so I don't see how anything that impacts the interests of renters can be unfair. Bad on pragmatic level, perhaps, but not a moral one.
[+] [-] tomg|5 years ago|reply
[edit: to be clear, this is tongue in cheek, though the circumstances where a bank made this loan seem unusual to me]
[+] [-] watsocd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostrademons|5 years ago|reply
Double 3/1 duplexes in Queens go for about $1M; the monthly payments on this are about $5200/month [1]. Each unit will rent for about $2700/month [2][3], so you're making a profit of about $200/month and paying down the principal steadily. You just need to cover a $200K down-payment. Minimum wage in NYC is $15/hour, so a two-earner couple working 40-hour weeks makes about $60K/year; it could be up to $90K if they each have work 12 hour days, as many Chinese immigrants do. Live in a 1BR apartment and you're spending about $15K/year on rent, maybe $25-30K/year on all expenses. You can save up for that down payment in about 4 years.
I don't have too much sympathy for them because the risk of being unable to find a tenant and hence unable to make your mortgage payment is precisely why not everybody levers up as much as possible to buy a rental property. But that's how the numbers work out. Most people on HN could probably do it, if they had the savings habits and risk tolerance of that couple.
[1] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/17520-Baisley-Blvd-Jamaic...
[2] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/131-19-134th-St-South-Ozo...
[3] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/180-05-90th-Ave-FLOOR-1-J...
[+] [-] samspenc|5 years ago|reply
A few years ago I was visiting Vancouver and living in an AirBnB (private room in a house) when prices were dropping, and the owner (a school teacher) was crying about how over-leveraged she was with her million-dollar-plus house, and how she was trying to get sell it, even at a loss.
[+] [-] imgabe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daniel-thompson|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] testfoobar|5 years ago|reply
If the government wants to house people in rental properties indefinitely, then the government can pay to do so at the prevailing market rates.
[+] [-] tryptophan|5 years ago|reply
I don't want to be "systematically analyzed" to determine if wrongs done to me are "acceptable".
That sort of thought is a path that leads straight to tyranny.
[+] [-] ceejayoz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] testfoobar|5 years ago|reply
Eviction moratoriums in 2021 - a full year after the start of the crisis are nonsensical. Individual owners such in the article will eventually lose their properties to deeper pockets - further entrenching wealth disparity.
[+] [-] mcguire|5 years ago|reply
The CDC issued a moratorium?
"Won says her tenant owes her more than $80,000 in back rent. ... But we did find that the father in the family is currently employed in the construction industry, and that the tenants are renting a second apartment in a house in Queens Village, where they've also stopped paying rent and owe $12,000 to the couple that owns the house, who are also Chinese immigrants."
So they're renting two apartments and not paying for either?
It's weird that Reason didn't manage to contact any of the renters. I wonder how much effort they put in? Or I wonder if it is a hit-piece?
[+] [-] imtringued|5 years ago|reply
No they aren't. Landlords want to at least cover their costs. If they lose out on rental income they are forced to raise rents to compensate their loss. This will mean higher rents and a subsidy for dishonest squatters. The idea that you can make housing cheaper by making it a bad investment is hilarious. If constructing new housing is a bad investment for landlords then nobody will provide housing as a service. Everyone will have to buy their own house or condo.
>"In public housing, people are paying 30 percent of their income," Weaver told Reason. "What I am envisioning is a world in which housing is owned by a collective and people are paying 30 percent of their income in order to live in their housing. If your income is zero, you pay zero. If your income is $500,000 a year, you're paying 30 percent of that."
What makes her think that rich people can't afford to hide their income? It wouldn't surprise me if they could just start a company and simply keep the funds inside the company and only pay out as much as necessary. This is way too easy to game and the ROI is insane. If you earn 500k you would end up with 350k so by engaging in tax shenanigans you could increase your income by 40%. Who's insane enough to not do that?
>When asked how the federal government could afford such a program, Weaver told Reason that it could "print" the money.
No, the way the federal government will be able to afford such a program is by providing housing at cost. Subsidies aren't the right answer and outright printing money isn't it either. If you really wanted such a program you would spin it as a jobs program first with the additional housing as a bonus. By lowering unemployment you increase the number of people who can afford to pay rent. So it's a win win situation. The slow acting benefit of additional housing would take years to have an effect.
[+] [-] heavyset_go|5 years ago|reply
Costs don't dictate prices, the market dictates prices.
Nobody is going to pay $50 for a quart of milk just because it cost you that much to produce it.
[+] [-] ausbah|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] topspin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omginternets|5 years ago|reply
I feel like the stimulus cheques should have been made out exclusively to people who:
1. lost a job
2. suffered a wage cut
3. suffered a significant loss of revenue
Number 3 would include landlords and freelancers. I'm one of the lucky people for whom the pandemic increased savings (by decreasing spending), so I don't think it's appropriate that I received two (!) stimulus cheques. I've donated one to Wikipedia and the other to a couple of local charities, but I'm sure there's a smarter way to redistribute that money...
[+] [-] jacknews|5 years ago|reply
Why should banks expect payments to continue as if nothing happened when large parts of the economy have been forced to close?
[+] [-] testfoobar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] techsupporter|5 years ago|reply
Or would those people still be thrown out onto the street with no housing?
Because if there's anything we need to be doing in the United States, particularly on the West Coast, it's bringing more people to homelessness.
[+] [-] maxerickson|5 years ago|reply
I don't mean that as an argument in favor of rent control or eviction moratoriums, it is an argument in favor of using the best basis for policy decisions.
I'd rather see the government just hand landlords money vs throwing people who may just be getting back on their feet into disarray. There has to be some point where things go back to normal, but we are at a point where 2 months from now is basically certain to be a better time to do it than right away.
[+] [-] chub500|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heavyset_go|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ha5u|5 years ago|reply
> Weaver ... says the eviction moratorium is just a "pause" because it doesn't mean that "the landlord can never collect the rent."
> In practice, though, collecting rent money will be extraordinarily difficult after the moratorium is lifted. The case backlog in housing court could mean that landlords will wait years for their cases to be heard, and recovering large sums of money is difficult under the best of circumstances.
> Owners say that having almost no legal recourse when their tenants don't pay their rent was not part of the deal when investing in real estate. Landlord groups around the country have sued on the grounds that halting the judicial process that allows them to retake their property violates their due process rights.
I think it was reasonble for landlords to assume that, in the worst case, they may not be be able to find a renter but would at least have the ability to live in the house themself. Now they can't even do that.
[+] [-] weswpg|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1030&v=MPFPBzr7FgY&feature=y...
[+] [-] bigmattystyles|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RupertEisenhart|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reanimus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TaylorAlexander|5 years ago|reply
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl...
[+] [-] nerdponx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellowapple|5 years ago|reply
From multiple angles:
1. Landlords already serve no real market function. They're middlemen - literal rent-seekers that offer no real service to their tenants. And somehow I'm supposed to feel bad for them?
2. The bulk of the housing shortages throughout the US (and other developed nations, for that matter) derives directly from the treatment of real estate as an investment rather than, you know, merely space to live/work/play. People buying homes (particularly low-density ones, mind you!) as "investments" are the perpetrators of that shortage, not somehow the victims; not only do they consume an outsized portion of the housing supply, but they have a vested interest in benefiting from the effects of that constrained housing supply, and therefore will logically do everything in their power to continue to constrain it because it pushes their property values higher.
3. If real estate is to be treated as an investment, then the risks of that investment must be acknowledged. Why should I feel differently about landlords who burned their savings on rental properties than I would about people who burned their savings on, say, GameStop stocks or some cryptocurrency pump-and-dump?
Like, if anything the renter demanding $12k from the landlord has a point. The very notion of land ownership externalizes opportunity costs on everyone else in a given area, specifically because land is finite / in fixed supply and therefore land ownership is definitionally zero-sum (one person's ownership of land is at the exclusion of others). Landlords are long overdue to internalize these externalized opportunity costs - specifically, through a land value tax (possibly supplemented with a flat income tax starting above some threshold; Milton Friedman was a proponent of this combined tax scheme), the proceeds of which would fund programs like UBI and single-payer healthcare to make up for those opportunity costs.
I feel for these landlords only in the sense that they're newcomers to this country hoping to find opportunities to better themselves and secure their financial future, and I hope they - alongside the rest of their fellow Americans - can get some much-needed financial support. That doesn't mean they're somehow the "good guys" in this story just because they're poor immigrants.
----
And to be clear, the delinquent renters/squatters certainly ain't the "good guys" in this story, either. Refusing to pay anything for the space one inhabits - especially when one has the means to do so - also externalizes opportunity costs onto other renters (who are now excluded from that unit despite their willingness and ability to pay for it). I might disagree strongly with the morality of a landlord extracting rent, but refusing to pay rent entirely is not the way to go about fixing that. Rather, the fix is in actually correcting the circumstances that led to this situation - namely, by forcing the internalization of externalized opportunity costs, and by replacing landlords with housing cooperatives.
[+] [-] npunt|5 years ago|reply
Were it not for the eviction moratorium my friend's family would have to up-end two decades of their life during a pandemic when none of them are vaccinated and one is immunocompromised, while juggling kids and trying to find a job. I understand there are some people taking advantage of these circumstances by not paying rent, but the fact is a lot of people are in pretty dire circumstances right now without many options.
Obviously this situation is also terrible for the people highlighted in this piece too and I feel for them - they worked hard and built something from nothing, and highlighting their story is important. I'm of two minds about what to feel about the broader context though, as non-residence real estate is ultimately an investment which carries risks, including unforeseen risks like pandemics. We learned quite recently in the 2008 recession that over-leveraged real estate is a systematic risk, and whether its a pandemic or a financial crisis, it's prudent that investors be able to manage a shock of at least 12 months without rent. Even absent external circumstances, a pipe could burst or another maintenance nightmare could emerge that would make an investment property uninhabitable for a long time.
Its very unfortunate that the US has such an investment-oriented view of residential real estate. In times like these, that approach pits people against each other rather than brings us together to better manage the crisis. Housing insecurity is an awful thing to have to deal with, and if everything is simultaneously quantified into 'how much am I going to make/lose', the fabric of society is going to tear.
[+] [-] sep_field|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jackfoxy|5 years ago|reply
Also Carroll Quigley, mentor of Bill Clinton, expressed shocking disdain toward the bourgeoisie in Tragedy and Hope. https://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Hope-History-World-Time/dp/09...
Is it much exaggeration to say the message from the far left and from the establishment to those who staked all their capital on one or two rental properties is tough sh!t?
[+] [-] content_sesh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerdponx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] door100|5 years ago|reply
> Emergency policies enacted in times of crisis are prone to becoming permanent, which some members of the #CancelRent movement say is the goal.
This is a good thing. The COVID crisis has exacerbated the huge inequalities in housing in the US, and now is a better time than ever to fix things.
[+] [-] whitepaint|5 years ago|reply
So, if I own an apartment / house / room, I can't go and have a contract with another person willing to take on that contract and live in my place by the agreed rules beforehand?