“what do you mean a vampire shouldn’t suck so much blood? might as well put a stake through my unbeating heart!”
Good. Bye bitch.
Oh no… they’d have to sell >.>
Introduce additional legislation that limit property sales to corporations and I’ll donate to yer campaign
Sell to whom, though?
The people enjoying the suddenly over-supplied market that used to pay way over mortgage to rent from these fucks.
Why would they care?
Depends if they’re on the coast or not.
Foreign investors (in part)
I want to see a crack down on that too
After the whole graffiti towers thing, the city is also a bit annoyed by them, too.
Fucking Aquaman?
Good riddance
I’m old enough to remember when the government has tried to cap the cost of one thing while ignoring other factors. It never ends the way the government thinks it will.
I’m only enough to remember when corporations were not people, and when the ultra wealthy paid taxes.
Corporate personhood was ruled on in 1886.
That’s not what your link says
That’s exactly what that case was. It grated Equal Protection Rights to corporations as well as Natural Persons. That’s then what is referred back to as the case law when “Is a corporation a person?” comes up.
A headnote issued by the court reporter in the 1886 Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. claimed to state the sense of the Court regarding the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as it applies to corporations, without the Court having actually made a decision or issued a written opinion on that point
This is why you don’t go to Wiki Law School.
… It’s then referenced as if it was part of the verdict in Singer Manufacturing Company v. Wright the next session where Justice Newman’s opinion confirmed it explicitly.
“[…] it is now considered settled, I presume, by the language used by Chief Justice Waite, speaking for the supreme court, in the case of Santa Clara Co. v. Railroad, 118 U.S. 396, 6 Sup.Ct.Rep. 1132, that corporations are so included and entitled, as fully as natural persons, to its protection”.
This is why you should read a bit deeper.
Oh snap
That’s bullshit. Nyc has rent stabilized apartments and it’s fucking fantastic. Not perfect of course, but really really good. Those apartments are highly sought after. The biggest problem is that there aren’t remotely enough of them
Almost like no one wants to build any because they can’t be invested in and the only people it works for are those who already got one.
Maybe housing shouldn’t be an investment?
It shouldn’t be - but ill tell you right now that no one will be a landlord unless they can make money from it, and people who move out of home at 18 won’t have the money saved to buy straight away.
Make no mistake, I don’t like the housing crisis and its causes either but I know rent caps isn’t how we fix it long term.
Why do we need people to be landlords?
Housing coops and government-owned housing work out fine.
Yes they could - but they aren’t being used.
Plus, you know, that’s socialism or communism or something else people don’t like for some reason.
How strange. Probably wholly unrelated to rent control in any way.
So how much money someone can make from a property has no relationship to the decision to build more property?
Really?
Absolutely not. Economics, shmeconomics. Landlords bad. LALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU LANDLORDS BAD ALSO BUILD MORE HOUSING
If you’re talking about a government that is ignoring other factors, which is not true in this situation. Go read the article.
But even in general, if you’re trying to argue that the government can’t possibly solve the problem of mega corporations buying up tons of property, making tons of money, and screwing over millions of Americans, then you might be right but I sure hope you’re wrong.
No agency/group/organization can possibly account for all factors. They are going to fail to take something into account.
That something is going to blow up in their face.
I remember when the government tried to tell truckers they couldn’t charge more to ship products. The government failed to take into account a little item called gas, to this day I can’t figure out how they screwed that one up. Guess what the truckers did.
They put the keys on the dash and said f u. Ask truckers who drove during the 70s and 80s and they will tell you about it.
This too will blow up in people’s faces.
Is rent getting out of control? Yes. But if someone says “ oh we’ll just put a cap on how much can be increased and that will fix the problem”. It tells me they are just delusional. How do we fix the problem? I don’t know. But yeah this will end badly.
They’d flood the market with properties shifting us along the supply curve to allow younger people to afford properties?
Darn, that’d be so… awful? No, I was looking for awesome.
It probably won’t flood the market as property/land is sort of like gold. Renting it is just extra money on top of land value rise. It only gets rarer. (In desirable locations)
The problem is basic. Everyone wants to live at A but A has finite amount of space. This is the core theme of property gold. Renting is just double dipping
The solution is complex. It isn’t to expand A but to make B equally attractive. If the small area in city was not the ultimate goal of whole country the price boom would rapidly crash overnight.
What is priced isn’t property but dreams and aspirations, prestige, bright future in the city of opportunity. Even love in a way because good luck finding someone in some rural mud hut.
Hence the inaction of government to invest in the rural areas adds to the housing bubble. And of course capitalism itself prays on individuality at the cost of community. Me get rich in the city vs Build community and improve what is around me for me and others. The second is not advisable to anyone to even attempt.
Everything is fuelled into those few acres of asphalt and concrete. The impossibly hot focus point of the nation.
So incredibly fierce that you can die out of heat even during winter. The speed limits on the arteries are rather minimums than maximum as the circulation of wealth cannot tolerate stopping for even the 20 seconds of red light. Every crossing is a race starting line but there is no end. Furious engines roar jolting towards the success.
The night is day and the day is madness.First person I’ve seen who didn’t say it increases supply.
Nice.
Hey, I remember my macroeconomics!
Supply/demand is usually micro…
Isn’t that exactly what they just said?
Is it really functionally any different? “increases supply” is a decent shorthand
Oh my God oh my God if the landlords have to sell, that would be… Check notes… That would be really good for people who want to buy houses.
this is what is known as “a feature, not a bug”
But worse for those looking for a rental.
Rent control is a bandaid on a real problem that makes things worse long term. What California needs is build more, which means end the NIMBY and unfreeze property taxes so those seating on underutilized land are forced to develop it or sell.
LVT, not property tax. You want to tax the value of the land, not the value of the property built on it.
Would property taxes actually do much? They’re so little even in high property-tax states that I think you’d need to do a lot more than that to FORCE rich people to utilize their other properties. High taxes would potentially push more costs on renters. Maybe we should just outlaw having more than 1 or 2 homes… including for real estate companies and banks :)
I keep wondering how to make the law do that. Making a company is like $100, that’s nothing compared to the house price. They would just have shell companies all over each owning a single location. 123 Fake St., LLC; 124 Fake St., LLC; etc.
You’d limit Ultimate Beneficial Ownership of the properties, not direct ownership.
I’d probably do something like: No individual or private entity may have Direct, Indirect or Ultimate Beneficial Ownership exceeding or of multiple of any of X(2-5?) Single Family properties, Y(2-3?) low density Multi-tenant properties, or Z(1-2?) high density Multi-tenant properties. Excluding the first wholely and solely owner occupied property. Excluding Ultimate Beneficial Ownership of less than A(.01-5?)% of a property. Excluding Ownership less than B(30-180?) days. Failure to comply results in forfeiture of newer ownership to REGULATOR-TBD until compliance is met. Multi-tenant properties have C (5-10?) residences
IANAL, probably some other loopholes that need closing. But the intent would be to limit consolidated ownership of many properties. But not impact several of the more reasonable ownership structures, nor impact churn of properties. The regulator would sell whatever extra it gets to fund housing programs.
Law with two parts, only a specific type of company may own rental properties. And you may not own or be employed by more than one property; including holding stock. The same rules apply to property management companies that service land lords with few properties; possibly with larger limits on how many properties they can manage at a time.
With that basic structure we can decide how many buildings/units each company can own. For example the limit could be 100 single family homes, or 3 mid sized complexes, or 1 large tower. Then we should be able to have a system that keeps landlords from going big. Makes the system so decentralized market concepts must work and monopoly power is effectively destroyed.
High taxes would potentially push more costs on renters.
Potentially, but I think here not so much. Competition drives prices down. In a perfectly competitive market, prices are pretty much equal to the cost of production. In that case, any tax would be completely passed on to the customer. But you can’t produce land at a certain location. My guess is that rents are largely determined by willingness to pay.
I don’t think you need to add any taxes. If the area is attractive enough to warrant a higher density redevelopment, just unlock it and it will get done.
I mean, if you are a developer and you know for certain there’s a lot of interest in a certain area and you know for certain that you could buy that big single family lot and make a 3-5 story building instead with 10-20 apartments, you’d be crazy not to offer double the market rate to get it and develop it as fast as possible.
Just need to change the law to allow redevelopment of single family areas into medium density.
Hmm build more. I’d be curious to see the stats on this. California has probably built 10 times more than the rest of the country combined over the last decade or so. People need to GO THE FUCK BACK HOME.
SIKE! sold houses are only bought by corporate holding companies, now you’ve lost even more rights!
In France there is a law that forces you to sell to your tenant if he has the highest bid
More precisely, when you sell the tenant has the right to buy it first.
If the landlord is thinking of accepting an external offer under the initial price then he has to ask again to the tenant if he would buy it at this lower price.
This happened a lot during the Great Depression. But then I believe the owners found a way to withdraw the auctioned property if the minimum bid didn’t suit them. The French law might bring back the Penny Auction by saying, “You put it up for bid - a sale has to go through.”
They can still do that through proxy buyers. If you go to enough auctions, it’s easy enough to pick them out.
Wouldn’t most people sell to the highest bid anyway?
Yes but we had our fair share of assholes
Never any history of racial segregation in the housing market, nope. No Sir. Never.
Are people really accepting less money so they don’t sell to brown people? Like why would you care? You’re selling the property. You don’t have to deal with the new owners if you happen to be racist.
Gotta keep the community pure.
I’ll add, as a minority there are neighborhoods that are off limits because I know I would not be accepted, and, I have an “ethnic” name, so I assume some bias may be held towards people selling in neighborhoods like that.
Granted, this article was from all the way back in… last week.
“An African-American woman’s quest to buy a pricey condo near the Virginia Beach Oceanfront – impeded by the white homeowner’s refusal because of her race – is just the latest example.”
“…landlords frequently use subtle methods or mask the real reasons why they don’t want people to move in.”
The neighbors care. So unless you don’t live in that town it could make for some interesting neighborly interactions. Wouldn’t be surprised to find court cases of neighbors suing for loss of property value.
There have been auctions in the past, mostly farm, that the community got together to drive off outsiders and then proceed to lowball every item on the auction. They would then return everything to the owner after the auction.
It was a fine ‘fuck you’ to the bank, until the bank closed or sold out because they no longer had the assets and cash reserves needed to stay open themselves. Which then screwed the rest of the community over.
Umm, you can legally sell it to someone else and not the highest bidder?
Not in France. If the tenant wants it, the tenant gets it
It’s even better than that because it is illegal to make bids on a property you sell so the seller name a price and if someone want to buy it at that price it’s sold. Most of the time buyers tries to bargain on markets where the demand is low
Wouldn’t you sell to the highest bidder anyway?
I mean, my wife and I didn’t sell to the two highest bidders on our first house because the fuckers were obviously going to rent it out.
One was a bid entered by a piece of software often used by flippers and rental companies (had branding at the bottom of the pages etc) and the other was a cash in hand bid with an overt offer of more under the table, which is fairly illegal where we live.
We selected third place, someone who had messy handwriting, obviously has been written by two different people, and ended the bid with “777” which was cute and showed us not only were they human, they really wanted the place. And no wonder, with offers like the first two likely happening on nearly every sale in the area.
I did that myself with a home. I ignored the high bid in favor of selling at a steep discount to a young family.
Why would you need a law to make someone sell to the highest bidder?
Because sometimes there’s a tie
Or the landlord might just want to spite the tenant, or he might want to sell to a “new” buyer who turns out to be business partner/cohort/shell LLC/etc.
This is doomerist myth. It’s a miniscule fraction, go look up the actual numbers. Landlords selling their properties would be very good for everyone.
I know your post is a joke, but doomerism just builds complacency and we should all be pushing for better.
Idk, something like 12% of all metro Atlanta area homes are leased out by about 3 rental property companies. That’s a huge amount.
I understand that statistic sounds scary, but let’s actually look into it. The percentage country wide is .2%, so why is your stat so different? Source
For one, it’s a specific city and not the whole U.S or even all U.S. cities. This makes it likely it was cherry-picked by your source in order to increase clicks. One city’s data isn’t a representative sample.
There’s a lot of confounding issues when you pick one specific city to look at. For one, property management companies tend to serve specific areas, and are not US-wide. So those Atlanta companies likely aren’t institutional investors, just large local companies.
Additionally, many more buildings in cities are rented out than elsewhere. People in cities are often there temporarily for work, so many opt for apartments because the closing fees would cost more than the rent and interest when living there short term living.
Comparing across the nation doesn’t really matter in things like real estate where prices, inflow vs outflow of people etc vary wildly, particularly when talking about the actual impact on the average person within the locality.
“Cherry picked by source to increase clicks” what sort of landlord boot licking is this lmao. Amherst Holdings (owns almost 40,000 homes nationally), Pretium Partners (owns around 80,000 homes nationally), and Invitation Homes (also around 80,000 nationally) own through subsidiaries 11% of all single family homes across metro Atlanta for rental purposes.
This isn’t opinion or spin, it is fact.
Most of their ownership (9.2% of that 11%) is from houses in the lower half of median home value, effectively ripping those inventories out of the market for first time home buyers and inflating the price of those tiers of homes for first time home buyers.
Maybe you’re confused about what “Metro Atlanta” means. It’s not just the City of Atlanta. Metro Atlanta is spread across 5 counties, from the heart of downtown to some real yeehaw rural areas of the outer counties.
You provided no evidence to dispute my source saying it’s .2%, and are now distracting from my initial point which was that the actual statistic is extremely low.
I think it’s safe to assume that I’ve proven my point and that you’re now just trying to save face or evangelize your political position with zero real evidence. Whatever floats your butt.
Also please cut it out with the insults, it’s hurtful. I’m human too, you know. You calling me names isn’t helping convince anyone outside of your doomerist echo chamber.
0.2% nationally != 0.2% locally.
Link to the research: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24694452.2023.2278690
Read it for yourself.
k
Rent control is literally the textbook case of making a bad situation worse via unintended consequences.
If it’s textbook, can you describe the textbook examples?
Sure, so Oregon did the same thing in 2019.
“7% plus the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, West Region (All Items), as most recently published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or 10%, whichever is lower.”
https://www.oregon.gov/das/oea/pages/rent-stabilization.aspx
So 10% in 2024, 14.6% in 2023, 9.9% in 2022.
What this does is encourage landlords to increase rent by the maximum allowed, because they don’t know how much they can increase it next year.
Even in years where they might not have had a reason to increase rent, or increase it minimally, they take the maximum.
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/09/13/oregon-maximum-rent-increase-announced/
I guess the argument is that they will raise rent by the maximum, even at excessive risk of losing tenants? Because if the tenants will pay that much, why wouldn’t the landlord charge that anyway?
Yup, it incentivizes the landlords to maximize increases.
I bought a house in October of '21, I had been renting an apartment for $1,800 a month. My mortgage is just over $2,000 and is locked in for 30 years.
I looked up my old apartment for funsies recently… $2,300 a month.
Which tracks…
$1,800 in 2021. 2022 - 9.9% increase +$178.2 = $1,978.2
2023 - 14.6% increase +$288.82 = 2,267.02
2024 - 10% increase +$226.70 = $2,493.72
I learned this in my Econ101 class; if you impose rent control you will disinsintivize investment into building homes exacerbating the problem of housing supply. Some one in my class literally asked why rent control was common in places like NY and my Econ teacher dodged the question. Econ101 in the US is basically neoliberal indoctrination.
The easiest response to the textbook is to point out that the current problem isn’t supply. In the US we have 6 houses for every homeless person. We have plenty of housing stock. The problem monopoly power over housing.
Beyond that I believe that housing investment should be managed cooperatively; rather than by the profit incentive.
Does the Econ101 class also teach you to assume that humans are rational consumers?
Usually - yes they do. Everyone acts in their own interest.
I don’t remember them saying that specifically. But we did spend a lot of time on supply and demand curves which heavily implies that.
To be fair to my econ101 class for a moment when I took that class it was during the Obama years and that was a bit before progressivism made the come back it has now. A lot of people were still Fukuyamaists.
I think economics is a pretty complicated subject that is deeply intersecting with ideology. It maybe impossible fully to disentangle how the economy works with how it should work. To expect kids just out of high school to critically examine all the nuances of a field beyond the assumptions they grew up with, while simultaneously learning the basics of that field is a pretty tall order. And if the experts at the time are moving away from that way of thinking anyway, why bother?
Of course in retrospect they probably should have bothered. But that’s just how the flow of history has to work I guess.
Edit: There’s some nuance and detail I could probably add to that conclusion. But I’m running out of steam for tonight.
My problem with economics is that it takes economic theory and tries to prescribe it to reality… rather than explain the reality of it. It is also quite vague about what happens when institutions that deliberately meddle with fundamental assumptions like that of a free market… like Multimillion dollar MNCs that manipulate governments and essentially are policy makers who shape the market itself.
Does economic theory hold good when the free market ceases to exist as described by it?
the current problem isn’t supply. In the US we have 6 houses for every homeless person. We have plenty of housing stock.
This ignores a lot of factors, like location. Huge swaths of Detroit, for example, are basically ghost towns. Not many people want to live there because of this, the houses are in poor condition from neglect, and it has one of the worst crime rates in the US.
Not to mention, if you take a homeless person and stick them in a house, that doesn’t fix any issues that might have caused them to become homeless in the first place, like mental health issues or drug addiction. And you’ve probably uprooted them from whatever support system they had.
Can you explain the monopoly bit without me watching a youtube video?
Literally every single time anyone has ever (literally ever) linked me a Youtube video to explain something or serve as a source, that video could have been summarized in an article that would take less than 60 seconds to read. The trend should die.
TLDW: Landlords are colluding to fix pricing with algorithms. The FBI is actually doing something good for once and breaking them up.
There are websites used by many of the smaller landlords which “suggests” a price for each unit. The landlord stops thinking about a price on their own, takes the website suggestion, and that’s a type of price collusion. And there are large investors which own thousands of units in many buildings who apply the same price formula across them all. Both tend to greatly reduce the leverage a renter can have by shopping around multiple offers.
No but I can link a youtube video that’s completely unrelated
Thank you beautiful stranger. Eloquent, succinct, and has the sources to back it up and put fools on blast.
While I like their comment, YouTube videos are not a ‘source’
Econ 101 is just a beginners class. It doesn’t make sense to claim that Econ 101 is comprehensive or rigorous.
Not OP but ill do you one better and link the free online textbook that is used at a number of universities.
Look up “The core Economy 1.0” chapter 11, section 10. Case study on fixing rent prices and the following consequences, along with a step by step diagram.
You forgot the other thing they teach.
Never discuss that with anyone who hasn’t studied economics - the same as how we will deliberately reduce GDP to increase the unemployment rate, or sometimes a country is better off by axing a productive market and putting 50k people out of work. They don’t see how and will only take it out on you.
Its just not worth the arguement.
Maybe the point is such a system that only works on numbers is inhumane and should be avoided? Economics people want to argue within economic frameworks which don’t work well if some assumed market conditions don’t exist. I have never seen reality work quite as described when free market breaks down and MNCs control government policymaking
People don’t like applying economic theory because it reminds us of the core part of being human - I only care about myself and will act in a way that benefits me. Even altruistic people act as they do because they want to disadvantage themselves to help others and you can’t force them to change.
Rent caps are one of those that sound good in theory - like telling ticketmaster to lower the price of tickets, or 0% unemployment. But doing so just means other things suffer.
Please do this, we need more houses on the market
