Rent control and housing

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Rent control and housing

mugrim: Mar 2, 2007; The same eye cannot both look up to heaven and down to earth.

I am familiar with zoning and have seen how it directly affects people, but how does rent control actually work? Who does what?

# ¿ Oct 16, 2014 19:59

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# ¿ May 8, 2024 10:33

mugrim: Mar 2, 2007; The same eye cannot both look up to heaven and down to earth.

Enigma89 posted:

Different cities do it differently. In that wall of text I posted above I gave a couple of examples.

Essentially land lords are limited on how much they can increase rents by a % unless certain requirements are met (tenants moving out or improvements/renovations). The thinking is, if someone moves out then you can bump the rent up. Or if you do renovations then the increase in rents should help compensate the land lords for the money they spent on fixing up the property.

I know land lords are painted as villains in a lot of places and in some places most are right (NYC comes to mind) but in other places rent control does make investing in apartments a bit risky and it boxes out a lot of people in the middle class trying to find any safe/reasonable investment opportunity.

Who in the middle class is trying to buy an apartment building as an investment? Or do you mean a business? Even then, who are these people and how on Earth can they afford it?

# ¿ Oct 17, 2014 20:09

mugrim: Mar 2, 2007; The same eye cannot both look up to heaven and down to earth.

Enigma89 posted:

The clever ones are. The others are putting are investing in...? I don't even know what is actually a profitable investment anymore for the middle class.

You buy a 4-plex as an owner-user with a low interest loan (FHA). You use the tenants to pay off your mortgage and you live in one of the units for free.

You can even move out because as far as I can tell in my experience no one ever really checks if you live there. I know several people who have done this and they have basically used the government to subsidize their initial real estate investment. There is real no need to buy an actual 'home' with your FHA loan. You are allowed to by a multi-unit project.

Also to sweeten the deal you are allowed (in California) to sell the building and if you do an 'exchange' within 30 days of the sale you can take the money you got from your recent sale and put it into a bigger project tax free.

I think we may just have vastly different ideas of middle class.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2014 02:37

mugrim: Mar 2, 2007; The same eye cannot both look up to heaven and down to earth.

Phyzzle posted:

Hmmm, the term really means "somewhere between working class and upper class". The median average person would be working class, and a neurosurgeon would be middle class. (The definition has become a bit hazy over the years.)

quote:

Top-paying jobs
Neurosurgeons take home a median $368,000 in salary and bonus annually.

quote:

$250,000 and over 97.68%

Congrats! You're listing someone literally from the Top 1% as the sole worker in a household as middle class. By like February 10th, that single worker has made more than most ENTIRE families make in a year.

If that is truly your definition, then I don't give a poo poo about that person's ability to earn ADDITIONAL money without risk and most other people don't either. Ignoring making expenses affordable for the median income and poor so that a neurosurgeon can take advantage of a federal program to become richer seems hosed to me.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2014 18:21

mugrim: Mar 2, 2007; The same eye cannot both look up to heaven and down to earth.

lurker1981 posted:

Yes, I am not dead. I am alive. Thank you for informing me of that, Captain Obvious.

I'll give you a hint, the protesters are mad because the law was NOT enforced.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2014 16:32

mugrim: Mar 2, 2007; The same eye cannot both look up to heaven and down to earth.

How much does income inequality and inelasticity play a part? Just doing some quick numbers on home loans it seems that the greater the income gap becomes, the more wildly pricing for homes and housing would be. With people spread out much further in terms of income, you have a set value of housing that is trying to accommodate a wide spectrum of incomes it would seem to turn very unstable at the drop of a hat.

If income fluctuates wildly but homes are already built, that seems like it would toss the system into chaos as you have a crazy amount of demand that is hard to fill despite ample supply.

computer parts posted:

Lower cost of living means either slums or rural areas. The latter you don't want to do for obvious reasons, the former means you have to clear out all of those slums first and displace a bunch of people.

Also, the only 'cheap' part of rural areas is the housing cost to individual people, the price per person from a societal standpoint is relatively astronomical. Delivering road, electricity, communication infrastructure, entitled goods and services gets REALLY loving expensive once you're dealing with areas that have a great deal of distance from metro structures.

mugrim fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Oct 19, 2014

# ¿ Oct 19, 2014 17:17

mugrim: Mar 2, 2007; The same eye cannot both look up to heaven and down to earth.

lurker1981 posted:

Why not just build more apartment units in areas that have a lower cost of living, and then encourage people to move there?

Why spend $1400 for a studio apartment when you can spend $200 a month for the same thing somewhere else?

The USA does in fact have a lot of real estate, and lots of undeveloped land.

This is the worst possible thinking. Undeveloped land and real estate is cheap. Building roads, hospitals that don't serve enough people to sustain their equipment, public trans that serves an extremely small amount of people, and entitlements are expensive. Believe it or not, places with expensive rent are often relatively cheap per capita in terms of total dollars spent compared to counties with like 8000 people. A lot of places are 'cheap' because they're not properly serviced and then people bitch about healthcare and roads and communication tech, etc.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2014 17:31

mugrim: Mar 2, 2007; The same eye cannot both look up to heaven and down to earth.

lurker1981 posted:

But then what would be the solution?

Pay money you can't afford to spend to live with all of your services, or have fewer luxuries, and have more money that you can use to pay off debts, and maybe even put some money in the bank?

Humans have survived for a least 600 years (or however long the bible says we've existed as a species), and it wasn't until the discovery of penicillin that we started having many of our modern conveniences. Some things, like the internet, are a luxury, and you will not die if you don't have access to it (if you didn't already know how to do a quintuple bypass, the internet won't help you with that).

Right, but some things like roads and hospitals and postal service and electricity are not considered luxuries and for good reason. Those things are hella expensive once you leave metro areas. It is dumb to save money on real estate to just then turn around and throw billions at medical services, roads, utilities, etc.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2014 17:55

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# ¿ May 8, 2024 10:33

mugrim: Mar 2, 2007; The same eye cannot both look up to heaven and down to earth.

lurker1981 posted:

But there are a lot of existing towns (with an infrastructure) that lie outside of metro areas that could probably be updated and made cost-efficient for less than the cost of creating an entirely new town or city.

And honestly, I do think everyone should have access to the internet (with the possible exception of the Church of Scientology). You could probably even home school kids over the internet. I know some folks use it to do college courses.

Those areas are also expensive. They cost billions in roads alone and support relatively few people. It would make more sense to try and eminant domain large relatively abandoned cities in the rust belt that already have services and and infrastructure.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2014 18:18

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Rent control and housing