| ▲ | naturalmovement 3 hours ago |
| There's entire Reddit communities of these people where they encourage and validate their shitty behavior. With some of the stories I've read, you'd have to be positively insane to be a small-time landlord these days, especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone. Go watch Pacific Heights with Michael Keaton for a fictionalized account but this stuff absolutely happens every day. I saw one recently where the renter has not paid rent for six years and is unable to be evicted. It made national news. So where does that leave the industry? You eventually push out the mom and pop landlords by making the regulations so insane it only leaves behind the large corporate property management companies and their army of lawyers. Who will collude and drive rents up. It's a vicious cycle and these cities are not helping one bit. |
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| ▲ | nradov 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Tenant "protection" laws are the type of idiocy that economically illiterate progressive politicians always produce. They end up having the opposite effect by making property owners less willing to rent out to anyone. The only effective way to protect tenants is to set public policies that encourage new housing development. When there is a housing surplus, the laws of economics force landlords to treat tenants well. Build more housing! |
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| ▲ | woodruffw 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | There's an economic floor for the price of housing: the amortized cost of the building and its maintenance, plus taxes and overhead imposed by governments, utilities, mortgages, etc. In other words: even in a plentiful housing market, there will always be someone who struggles to pay rent (including transiently), because a rational housing market can't offer $0 rents. Tenant protection laws exist to protect that person from a landlord who would otherwise be incentivized to throw them onto the street. | |
| ▲ | senectus1 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | sure because a property owner is going to not rent out a property and just take the month on month hit for having an empty property. They'll either rent it or sell it. There is a middle ground, just need to find that point. | | |
| ▲ | nradov an hour ago | parent [-] | | Apparently you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the rental market. Landlords in cities with strong tenant protection laws will absolutely leave a unit vacant for months until they find someone with a high income ratio and credit score. This leaves poorer people stuck with no options. |
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| ▲ | rationalist 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I have friends and coworkers that want to have rental properties, and I advise them it's not worth it. I don't want to be in a position where I have to pay more to fix damages than I collectected in rent if I accidentally rent to deadbeats. Or in a position where I have to provide services to someone not paying me. One of those friends has parents that rented out their old house to deadbeats at the top of the housing market instead of selling it. Those deadbeats have been nothing but trouble and yet my friend still wants to be a landlord. Somehow the idea of owning rental properties became a pervasive notion in the U.S. |
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| ▲ | jen20 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you think the Reddit communities of tenants are bad, you should try reading the Reddit communities of landlords (at least the UK ones). |
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| ▲ | mc3301 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah.... So many bad tenants. So many bad landlords... So many weird laws protecting and hurting both. What if we shifted to a different system? | | |
| ▲ | weakfish an hour ago | parent [-] | | The question that many do not want to think about. We (as a society (referring to all Western Liberalism, not just the US)) are so thoroughly convinced that Liberal Democracy is the End of History, and it's the 'flawed but best,' as many say, but refuse to imagine something better. It's puzzling that a system that is supposed to reward creativity and genius like capitalism limits it's inhabitants in their imagination when it comes to how one might structure society. I don't claim to have the answer, and _no,_ my issues with Liberal Democracy/Capitalism don't mean I'm a communist / socialist / thing-people-don't-like. | | |
| ▲ | nradov an hour ago | parent [-] | | What would you like us to imagine? So far everything that we've tried at scale other than liberal democracy and capitalism has inevitably led to war, famine, and genocide. Western liberalism appears to be the only system that empirically works. Some would claim that "socialism with Chinese characteristics" works better, but if you look below the surface prosperity in first-tier cities the actual economic situation is rather grim and the human rights situation is horrific. | | |
| ▲ | margalabargala 31 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Arguably, benevolent dictatorships tend to be the best. Singapore is a good example. The trouble is making a system that can guarantee the "benevolent" part in the longer term. |
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| ▲ | poopdick 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | 8note 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This is a bit of an intentional result, no? the goal is for peoppe to own the places they live in |
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