Biden is going to announce a national rent cap. 😂
It’s like no one in that admin ever took a basic Econ course. Either that or at this point they’re just throwing populist crap at the wall trying to win votes.
Absurd.
@voltronic @Smersh the "slum lords" (i.e. the real estate and housing industry) are extremely wealthy and influential donors, who have donated to the campaigns of and fund superpacs that get Democrats (and Republicans, of course) elected.
Rent and home ownership is now insanely expensive and getting worse, and the entire industry is rampantly corrupt and unethical.
I doubt the Democrats have any intention of really reeling in rents. Too many big donors would turn on them.
@voltronic @Smersh But since the "invisible hand of the market" apparently wants rent or home ownership to be too high for people to afford, we need to do _something_ to make housing accessible.
To begin with, the whole "housing crisis" is completely artificial. It's been deliberately created by shady investors and their bought politicians. We have 7 times as many empty homes in the US as there are homeless families.
It's an election year. Democrats will _pretend_ to want rent caps.
@Smersh A basic Economics course in this country typically seems to be about teaching people that Capitalism is fine and that poverty is just nature's way of saying you're not valuable.
What actual research on the effects of rent caps and rent control are we going to refer to, rather than economic _philosophy_ (i.e. superstition).
Of course, what am I thinking? Nobody in the Biden admin knows about or would do rent control effectively anyway. As you say, it's likely a ploy to get votes.
@Smersh Every time someone suggests doing _anything_ that will help people who are struggling with rent or health care or safety, we're told that it is naive or "against economics 101" for that to happen.
Why?
Why do you think rent control is bad? I'm not saying it's good. I'm just wondering why everyone is so well-trained to assume that anything that might _help_ someone is the province of the naive, who "don't know how the economy works."
@Smersh
I know how our economy works. It creates artificial scarcity to enforce control and slavery so an elite can benefit. Do we like that?
@AskTheDevil yes. Thus why creating even more artificial scarcity is stupid.
Rent control literally leads to higher rents, this has been shown time and again. The only solution to lower rents is to increase supply of housing.
@Smersh If rent control is what leads to higher rents, then why do people in rent-controlled apartments end up homeless or paying much higher rent if they lose them, plus everyone else's rent goes up, but without rent control, everyone's rent goes up anyway?
People need houses. We keep building houses only the wealthy can afford, and they're not.
Whatever we have done has not worked, but rent control has kept people out of the gutter.
What do you propose instead? If you could set policy?
@AskTheDevil @Smersh
Sorry to step in...
But question...
Most of the scarcity of apartments in cities like NYC are currently due to corporate holdings of apartments to sell on AirBnB? They but up available housing then three false scarcity raises everyone else's rent...
Same with housing... Blackrock and other private equity are driving the housing scarcity...
Standard economic ethos doesn't play well during such huge conglomerates of wealth and monopolies?
https://jacobin.com/2024/05/single-family-homes-rentals-wall-street
@InvaderGzim do not trust Jacobin with anything economics related. Corporate owned single family homes are less than 1% or something of all homes in the US. I agree single family homes should probably have to be titled in the name of a person, but it's not really a problem yet.
The easiest way though is to undo whatever is holding back housing. We have dollar menu food, mass market clothes and soon will have cheap cars again -- we absolutely need to do that with housing!
@Ironworker229 whoa, yours have walls!
@Smersh Pretty bad-ass /s. But when you speak of dollar menu housing, this is what came to mind.
@InvaderGzim @AskTheDevil
@Ironworker229 think more, mass made pre-manufactured ones. Either modular or double-wide style. Doesn't necessarily work in city centers but we've got lots and lots of land to use.
@Smersh I'm curious re: the pricing of these mass made units of which you speak and the costs of the land and utility (power, sewer, gas, etc) connectivity factored in. I know guys that purchased modular homes & placed them 1-2 hours one way from the bulk of our jobs and it was by no means affordable to folks who are housing insecure/low wage/fixed income. But maybe you're thinking that the Private Sector would come in to provide these units at an affordable price? 1/3 @InvaderGzim @AskTheDevil
@Smersh I'm not insensitive to the concept that folks sometimes need to consider moving to escape high costs. But where to go? Moving costs aren't insignificant. If folks could afford to move to somewhere cheaper (maybe, for now) in a different region, they could probably make rent where they are now. Good luck finding somewhere to move that's not so far away from any job opportunities as to make the commute unsustainable. 2/3 @InvaderGzim @AskTheDevil
@Smersh I do agree that government needs to do a better job of getting out of the way- but where? Building safety codes? Environmental impact waivers? Such basic items as adequate sewage infrastructure to handle the waste? Looking for specifics. Sorry for multi, but there's a lot to this. 3/3 @InvaderGzim @AskTheDevil
@Ironworker229 @Smersh @InvaderGzim I think the point of civilization is not living like the dark ages. If our society is designed to hold everyone hostage in a rent economy from birth, maybe we should make a different one.
@Ironworker229 @Smersh @InvaderGzim We keep being told that it's our (apparently unreasonable) desire to be not poisoned, dead, or on fire that makes things expensive.
I don't think that's true.
I think it's like when we're told our plastic straws are the problem as a handful of bad actors cause orders of magnitude more than the rest of us put together.
I think we've been sold a belief system where wanting civilized things is something to be ashamed of.
@Ironworker229 @Smersh @InvaderGzim Yeah. Where would I go, for instance? Somewhere I have no access to medical services and medication, or somewhere I can't afford rent?
@Smersh @InvaderGzim You think fewer than 1% of single-family homes have a mortgage?
Or do not have people living in them but are not owned by large trust and traded by hedge funds?
Do apartments not count as important? More people live in those, last I heard.
Our housing crisis is from greed. Not the way things work, or are supposed to work, or because we oopsed on managing things properly by mistake.
In rent-based economies, you are controlled by expenses owed to live.
@Smersh @InvaderGzim I'm with you that we need to do cheap _all_ that stuff, including housing, and especially transport.
I'd like to see more options than just cars, but I'm very worried about people losing access to cars, or to cars that can or will go where they want them to when they tell them.
Instead of a company, or the police deciding that.
We need to get rid of some evil and greed, so we can have safe travel and transport!
@Smersh @AskTheDevil
Apologies... That may have been the first article that popped up when I searched for an example...
However if you haven't seen companies like Opendoor and Trulia not to mention all the signs up about sell your home for cash...
All available space is being gobbled up by those that have less and less easy ways to increase their wealth....
Why not become a landlord...
This inflation driven system we have here is ridiculous.
And this is just one of the last things to control
@Smersh @InvaderGzim @AskTheDevil
We need more housing supply, is what we need, and it needs to be more affordable housing, not "move up" housing.
Builders have literally still not recovered from the housing crash in 2007/8.
And investors and flippers are absolutely a part of the problem, as well as institutional investors who currently see rental housing as a new way to make money and are buying entire neighborhoods of single-family homes and making them rentals.
@janallmac @Smersh @AskTheDevil
At least here there are builders building. And have been pretty consistently since 2002.
Another development with something like 170 lots was approved.. there's another filling what used to be a vacant field I can see...
The larger issue is good quality lower income apartments... The places are expensive not necessarily well kept...
These might need more but no builder or landlord wants to build those...
@InvaderGzim @Smersh @AskTheDevil
Builders tend to adjust the kind of housing they build to the price of the land they buy. Higher-priced land tends to get higher-priced homes on it. This is true here, I do not know enough about other markets to say it is universally true, however. Cheaper land = lower-priced housing.
Cities and counties can help by approving multi-family construction.
Sometimes local governments specifically forbid certain kinds of housing, including the materials used.
@InvaderGzim @janallmac @Smersh Yes. And they are building mostly higher-priced homes, not affordable housing. We have an enormous glut of overpriced housing, but not enough housing people can afford to live in.
And that doesn't seem to be improving.
So I looked at the "rent control" plan. It only lasts 2 years, and all it does is remove some tax breaks for landlords that raise the rent more than 5%.
So that will do almost nothing except rile up property owners who don't want to pay taxes.
@janallmac @Smersh @InvaderGzim And as some people have mentioned, the proliferation of people using homes as short-term rentals for high profit has also taken large amounts of housing off the market and made it more unaffordable, too.
@AskTheDevil outside of vacation markets, short term rentals are not affecting overall rental rates. In fact, in most markets they’re supplementing overbuilt supply.
@janallmac “move up” housing leads to lower housing costs for everyone. It also increases the housing quality across the board, even for non rich.
They don’t build “affordable housing” because it’s not profitable to. Doubly so when the government restricts your ability to raise rents when interest rates go up.
@Smersh @janallmac @InvaderGzim I'm not sure what the polite thing to do is when someone just says a whole bunch of things that are completely untrue.
I think you've been listening to the people who say things like "we can't raise your pay because inflation will go up" or "spending more on housing actually makes costs go down".
@Smersh @AskTheDevil @janallmac
Short term rentals in cities like NYC and Austin, block out apartments from being rented by locals causing scarcity and thereby driving up rents...
Move up housing is now picking in the $800k range around here... Making the cost of a home like mine push up and up and out of range of young buyers...
The homes they can buy and barely ate fixer uppers that start at $300k??
With down payments and interest and the current salaries for the young it's our of range?
@InvaderGzim again, this is all a supply issue. If we build more housing, prices will come down.
Austin is actually a prime example of this:
"“It’s bad for landlords and it's great for tenants,” said Jake Wegmann, a real estate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “We should be happy about this.”
"The cause? A surge in apartment building and a drop in the number of people moving to the area."
https://www.kut.org/austin/2024-06-13/austin-texas-rent-prices-falling-2024
@Smersh @AskTheDevil @janallmac
Where would one find the space to build in NYC?
Or LA... Or downtown Portland? Denver?
There are many many cities that are land bound? No?
While building may be possible in Austin and other places... I don't think it's feasible in many as well?
But I guess we can agree to disagree...
Enjoy the day...
@InvaderGzim @Smersh @AskTheDevil @janallmac
In cities, where remote work hybrid scheduling has made office space requirements smaller, residential conversion seems smart. Not
"the" solution but "a" solution. Seems like we have an abundance of empty big box stores in more rural areas that might be converted too. Like where Walmart moves out when initial tax breaks end...
@Vanitas @Smersh @AskTheDevil @janallmac
From other reports I've seen...
The conversion of an office building to apartments can be very involved and costly as the numbers of water runs teens to be limited in office buildings...
Don't need a bathroom and kitchen for every room and they centralize the runs that need water and waste disposal...
Not saying it isn't possible just that it's costly... And that would make it into the rent...
@InvaderGzim
Thank you! : )
@Smersh
@Smersh If rent control leads to higher rents because teh rental market starts jacking up prices for everyone, I don't think the problem is rent control, I think it's that we act like if it's capitalism, it gets a pass from morality, ethics, cost...
I'm not married to rent control. What would you suggest we do to fix the problem?
@Smersh Artificial scarcity indeed. I frequently, and have recently I'm sure, mentioned that we have _seven_ times the number of empty houses in the US as we have homeless families.
There is no scarcity of housing. There is a scarcity of being able to afford housing. People are spending money on rent that they might once have put away for retirement or property of their own. We're being bled.
That's not because rent control. It's because greed. Because houses aren't homes, they're investment.
You know how there were a lot of strip malls built in the 1970s, 1980s, and old malls? Then in the 2000s, they lost tenants? Then became like abandoned buildings?
Well, all those could be turned into housing, lower rent.
@JanetZumba_FalPals @AskTheDevil @Smersh I had the idea awhile back about the idea of turning abandoned warehouses and factories into greenhouses.
@Tacitus_Kilgore bravo! That's a good one.
@Smersh If our family loses one social security check or wage, the rest of us are out on the street right now. We've skated on fumes for some years now. Fixed incomes, rising costs.
We already won't be able to afford the rent increase where we are, and everywhere else is more expensive.
So what are we going to do to keep families like mine off the street? Right now. This year?
And please don't say homeless shelters, or I'm staying on your couch.
@AskTheDevil if you can't afford to live where you are and your local government won't allow you all to build enough housing to live -- move. It's what Americans, the world and our ancestors have done for decades, centuries and millennia to survive.
The government's role in housing is to enforce property rights, ensure the structure is safe enough to not become a public burden w/ the least impact and get out of the way so people and orgs can build homes for people.
@Smersh
Curiously, this is dropping soon after Bernie's endorsement. Seems like one of his ideas.
But I agree, this doesn't make sense, at least not on its face. If you went after the slum lords directly, that would be something else.