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gregallan | 4 years ago

If housing becomes prohibitively expensive to people in need just because we hold landlords accountable for abusive actions, maybe we should consider a different way to allocate housing resources.

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AYBABTME|4 years ago

Sure, but I think this sort of grandstanding doesn't serve the conversation well. We're talking about realistic, incremental policy changes here. The kind of stuff that hopefully solves the problem at hand while limiting the blast radius of what could go wrong. Throwing away how property ownership works in most of the world would likely cause large scale shocks and I think it's disingenuous to suggest these kind of things in a conversation about municipal policies.

joe_the_user|4 years ago

Sure, but I think this sort of grandstanding doesn't serve the conversation well. We're talking about realistic, incremental policy changes here.

So we're saying that making it so tenants can't defend themselves against illegal evictions is going to increase the housing supply incrementally?

hash872|4 years ago

You are not accounting for bad faith actors who lie about the landlord's actions for their direct own financial gain. Living rent free in a property is saving a tremendous amount of money! Like, as a % of income it's probably more than the average person pays in taxes. The financial incentives to abuse the system are enormous

thriftwy|4 years ago

I own an apartment. I bought it. How are you going to "allocate" this "resource"? Just try me.

gruez|4 years ago

>How are you going to "allocate" this "resource"? Just try me.

Easy, by having the government send Men With Guns to confiscate it from you.

int_19h|4 years ago

One simple way that's already practiced in some places is to tax unoccupied residencies - and, ideally, use that tax to subsidize housing. And then you either live in your apartment yourself, or put it up as a rental under the terms required by the law, or you pay up.