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silence_kit posted:I don't think your idea makes sense. If I were a landlord, I would prefer to collect a medium amount of rent, instead of no rent at all on a property I owned. As a small time landlord this is the case, but as an institutional landlord who may have loans backed up by the value of those rental properties dropping the rent value can drop the assessed value of the property which fucks with the loans, let alone if they've got enough properties to be able to actually be seriously manipulating the market value.
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Mar 26, 2023 00:58
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Fister Roboto posted:Sure, but what if leaving one of your properties vacant made your other 9 properties worth 15% more? That's basically what's going on, landlords are calculating the breakpoint where they can maximize overall profit even if they don't rent out all their units. And the more properties they own, the larger the margin they have to play with. reignonyourparade posted:As a small time landlord this is the case, but as an institutional landlord who may have loans backed up by the value of those rental properties dropping the rent value can drop the assessed value of the property which fucks with the loans, let alone if they've got enough properties to be able to actually be seriously manipulating the market value. I see. Thanks for your post. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Mar 26, 2023 |
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Mar 26, 2023 01:10
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pencilhands posted:Wont rent control just ensure that places to live are harder to find? Yeah. Rent control brings a ton of bad incentives and I don't know if you can fully address them without all parties doing their best to do workarounds. In NYC, you can tell when apartments are rent-controlled because the landlords deliberately slow-walk repairs and maintenance. You also see lots of landlords trying to trick their tenants into moving out or relinquishing rights and trying to squirm their way out of rent stabilization (which was a big story when the owners of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper village tried that). I think in NYC, at least, we need to start thinking about re-zoning a lot of commercial space and incentivizing the conversion of those spaces into residential apartments. There are tons of very obvious and depressing stretches on major streets like Broadway and 42nd Street with storefronts that have been empty for months. I don't think there's going to be enough people clawing those spaces back.
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Mar 26, 2023 01:32
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Mooseontheloose posted:Change on the local and state level is much quicker than federally and while the budgets are smaller they have huge impacts on day to day life. Policing and education are LARGELY local and state issues, healthcare spending on the state level if matched by the federal government, and smaller elections mean more stinginess if you are willing to organize. Voting at every level has been as much a key to the far right's takeover of so much of the government as voting for the rightmost candidate no matter what they're like or how far right it moves the seat. Literally everything they've done with the courts, gerrymandering, etc is a distant third: those were only possible because they did the first two.
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Mar 26, 2023 01:33
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silence_kit posted:Yes. Of course. It is common sense. There are a lot of places in America in which there is an oversupply of housing, and renting or buying a home in those places is dirt cheap. The reason why housing prices are expensive in highly desirable places undergoing population booms is no great mystery. NYFP posted:Former President Donald Trump on Friday proposed holding a contest to design and build up to 10 new “freedom cities” on federal land that the 2024 presidential candidate argues will lead to “a quantum leap in the American standard of living.” If I'm not mistaken this kind of policy has been massively successful for China, although I believe they have been a bit more... coercive about people moving to these places than the US government has the authority to be. But still, it's easy to imagine good demand for places like this. It would cost a lot given the current state of the construction market in the US but that investment, shockingly expensive as it would be (we're talking T's), would be an economic stimulus unto itself.
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Mar 26, 2023 02:11
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reignonyourparade posted:As a small time landlord this is the case, but as an institutional landlord who may have loans backed up by the value of those rental properties dropping the rent value can drop the assessed value of the property which fucks with the loans, let alone if they've got enough properties to be able to actually be seriously manipulating the market value. I believe this has been documented at the commercial level but is there an equivalent study at the residential level? The volume of units and extreme variability in location, tenant income, etc seems like this behavior would be hard to make viable, versus ground floor storefronts.
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Mar 26, 2023 02:26
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Eric Cantonese posted:There are tons of very obvious and depressing stretches on major streets like Broadway and 42nd Street with storefronts that have been empty for months Or just tax vacant stores until they stop holding out for higher rents
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Mar 26, 2023 02:32
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Mellow Seas posted:Trump has proposed a theoretically very good (and actually very on-brand) policy (that of course he doesn't really care about, and that he and the GOP would implement in a terrible, grifty, useless, ideologically backward way if they bothered with it at all): You might as well just have the feds reclaim Detroit, or any of the emptied out rust belt cities in the Midwest. We don’t need to plow over farm land to create a new city in the middle of nowhere when existing cities already have infrastructure in place to serve currently empty homes. That’s aside from the fact that creating new cities that would attract enough people to ease housing pressure would take multiple decades.
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Mar 26, 2023 03:03
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It's really funny seeing people make fun of Chinese 'ghost cities' going all the way back to the 80s, and a couple years later no one talks about how those cities are thriving and continuing to grow, while finding new 'ghost cities' to point at. The rest of the world in general just seems to have completely forgotten what actually building infrastructure even looks like. Bird in a Blender posted:That’s aside from the fact that creating new cities that would attract enough people to ease housing pressure would take multiple decades. Then it's time to start now.
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Mar 26, 2023 03:21
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silence_kit posted:The reason why they do this is because 1) the land is cheaper, 2) suburban housing is what a lot of Americans want, and 3) building new housing in already developed neighborhoods can be difficult politically/practically in many areas. Many Americans oppose new housing developments in their neighborhoods. From what I recall, in some cases it's also developers offering very good deals to cities for these sorts of new developments, on the condition the city is responsible for the roads/infrastructure - it's a win in the short term, but hurts in the long term. I might have some of the details off, but regardless, low density housing is going to hurt cities in the long term, and building a whole ton of it is a bad idea. I don't think you're necessarily advocating one way or another, but I just want to point out an potential issue with "just build more."
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Mar 26, 2023 03:34
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Americans have never Ever seen a building with proper sound and thermal insulation so they assume you need a house with space around if you don't want to listen to your neighbors and also. Ost have been sold on having space and a yard.
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Mar 26, 2023 03:46
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pencilhands posted:Wont rent control just ensure that places to live are harder to find? Rent control means a strong incentive for anyone looking to rent places out to invest in higher density housing if they want to make up for costs. But it does negatively interact with quite a few other systems in ways that can potentially hurt the housing market for the average consumer in bad ways. Mellow Seas posted:Now of course Trump makes it stupid the second he starts talking about it with all this stupid sci-fi bullshit, but IMO building entire new cities is actually a really good idea, especially now that remote work is becoming so common. I would absolutely jump at the chance to move to a place like this, for what it's worth. The chance to actually get in on the ground floor of something new like that... feels like it would be incredible, even if it was rough going for a while. Celexi posted:Americans have never Ever seen a building with proper sound and thermal insulation so they assume you need a house with space around if you don't want to listen to your neighbors and also. Ost have been sold on having space and a yard. There are a great many ways to get access to more space and more yard options with denser housing designs than is allowed for in most of America, though. Let me build a three story multi-family house that doesn't have to split its yard space between the front and back yard and can actually abut the neighbors property if we want it to! But nah, that poo poo (and a whole lot of what should be bog-standard community, art housing, and co-op housing options) ain't allowed in most of suburbia unless your rich enough to bribe the planning committee.
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Mar 26, 2023 04:24
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haveblue posted:Or just tax vacant stores until they stop holding out for higher rents That's a good idea. I honestly don't know what landlords are holding out for right now, although I'm not sure there's some massive wave of brave local wannabe business owners either looking to set up new stores. I did come across this site proposing various solutions: http://www.vacantnewyork.com/
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Mar 26, 2023 04:36
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Mellow Seas posted:Trump has proposed a theoretically very good (and actually very on-brand) policy (that of course he doesn't really care about, and that he and the GOP would implement in a terrible, grifty, useless, ideologically backward way if they bothered with it at all): No one is getting forced into ghost cities. A lot of the homes there are ones that can be bought and sold as a commodity in China, wealthy people in China will buy homes in those areas as either investments or something for their children. The whole idea of the ghost cities is xenophobia, you had articles like this one which paints new construction in as a ghost town when it is really just new construction in a prefecture of 2 million people. https://www.businessinsider.com/ordos-china-ghost-town-2017-5 There's a good Forbes article that actually came out a year before that one about Ordos Kangbashi that explains how these are really just long term infrastructure projects with a bit of real estate investing. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadesh...sh=1344eab23270 Edit: Mind you I'm absolutely for copying the plan and building new cities, there's just nothing sinister about ghost cities unless you think infrastructure and market forces are sinister. I mean they are, a little. Gumball Gumption fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Mar 26, 2023 |
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Mar 26, 2023 04:39
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Eric Cantonese posted:I honestly don't know what landlords are holding out for right now, although I'm not sure there's some massive wave of brave local wannabe business owners either looking to set up new stores. Locally speaking, the area genuinely has people waiting in the wings if the costs ever come down. It's a decent area that does good business, lots of foot traffic, just not the kinda of business that can support paying $12k a month in rent for a tiny space (or significantly more for a large one) that cost less than a quarter of that price a decade ago.
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Mar 26, 2023 04:54
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Eric Cantonese posted:That's a good idea. Money. They want more money. They can't ever not have more money. Landlordism is pretty much an end stage addiction on a society wide scale at this point.
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Mar 26, 2023 05:07
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Bird in a Blender posted:You might as well just have the feds reclaim Detroit, or any of the emptied out rust belt cities in the Midwest. We don’t need to plow over farm land to create a new city in the middle of nowhere when existing cities already have infrastructure in place to serve currently empty homes. I don't think much federal land is farm land. Most of it is mostly undeveloped land that is either a national park or rented out to ranchers to graze their herds. Plus, the whole idea is to build a new city with all new planning and such utilizing assets already owned by the Feds. Buying up Detroit, or some other landmass sitting on centuries of materials that should be bulldozed, replaced, or treated for their dire health and environmental impacts would just make everything even more expensive. Putting forth the money for building, setting up the overall planning, and offering personal intensives on the individual level would be more than enough to actually create new metropolises within a few years. There's a whole lot of very cool things that could be accomplished by doing it. However the main issue is that we can't trust either party to actually oversee the development of actual future facing new cities, because they'd just build a brand new but somehow even more hosed Houston, Detroit, LA, or New York.
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Mar 26, 2023 06:52
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I'm not ready for another round of this. https://twitter.com/evanvucci/status/1639795858005962754?s=20
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Mar 26, 2023 12:12
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pencilhands posted:Wont rent control just ensure that places to live are harder to find? In practice, the argument for more housing is a delay tactic. Washington State was dissuaded from pursuing rent control a few years ago due to this argument. Nothing has happened since.
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Mar 26, 2023 12:37
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Freakazoid_ posted:In practice, the argument for more housing is a delay tactic. Washington State was dissuaded from pursuing rent control a few years ago due to this argument. Nothing has happened since. That the argument for more using can be used as a delaying tactic does not make it a delaying tactic. I've seen plenty of arguments for rent control follow up with absolutely no action either.
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Mar 26, 2023 13:02
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haveblue posted:Or just tax vacant stores until they stop holding out for higher rents Honestly one of the biggest problems in NYC is the tax break you get when your property is vacant. I lived near 3rd ave for five years and in that entire five years every single apartment building from 106th to 110th street was derelict because "maybe the neighborhood will improve and I'll just sell the land to build a high rise, so why waste money making this current building habitable."
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Mar 26, 2023 13:53
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Celexi posted:Americans have never Ever seen a building with proper sound and thermal insulation so they assume you need a house with space around if you don't want to listen to your neighbors and also. Ost have been sold on having space and a yard. Hey as an American I'll have you know I'm well aware of proper sound insulation it's called earplugs and they allow me to hear my neighbor taking a dump a little less loudly 
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Mar 26, 2023 13:57
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pencilhands posted:Wont rent control just ensure that places to live are harder to find? Couldn't you argue it'd encourage more housing since there's effective limits per unit on how much can be made, so if people want to make more money they need to create more supply? Again, I sort of feel like you'd probably want to create more housing AND regulate how much can be charged.
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Mar 26, 2023 14:32
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Related to property discussion: why are there so many companies building new when there are tons of available vacant stores ? Restaurants seem to be the exception; I guess because of specialized infrastructure and poo poo for all the kitchen stuff.
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Mar 26, 2023 14:42
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At least in Charleston SC a lot of the restaurants that change owners do not want to deal with the 1990’s absolute-poo poo buildings. It is cheaper to just wipe it and build a new one if you want to have any modern amenities.
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Mar 26, 2023 15:14
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Oxyclean posted:I want to circle back to this - why would rent control mean places are harder to find? I thought rent control was mostly just rules on how much rent can be charged, and how much it can be raised by over a period, and not really any kind of protection from rentals losing value. The way it worked in some of the places I lived was that the price control was only applied during a tenant’s lease. The rent could rise to the market price when the apartment was on the market. In this situation, if you rent for a long time in a rent controlled apartment in a hot rental market, you get to pay rents which are lower than that of people who are looking to move into a new rental apartment. This disincentivizes people from moving out of their rent controlled apartments.
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Mar 26, 2023 15:22
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Mellow Seas posted:Trump has proposed a theoretically very good (and actually very on-brand) policy (that of course he doesn't really care about, and that he and the GOP would implement in a terrible, grifty, useless, ideologically backward way if they bothered with it at all): We already have a lot of cities in the US with low rent & housing prices where there is an abundance of housing units relative to demand. This is a lot of cities in the Rust Belt. I grew up in one. My sister a couple of years ago purchased a very nice ranch style home in a nice neighborhood in my hometown for $60k. That amount of money is less than what some goons spend on their cars. The main issue is that no one wants to move to those places. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Mar 26, 2023 |
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Mar 26, 2023 15:36
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silence_kit posted:The way it worked in some of the places I lived was that the price control was only applied during a tenant’s lease. The rent could rise to the market price when the apartment was on the market. Boston has asked the state to give them an exception and allow them to peruse rent control as the rents are out of control. New apartment buildings are "luxury" and I don't get how anyone affords them. I think the previous theory of rent control also thought that less units become available shrinking supply but of course 1) landlords lie 2) AirB&B is a thing so the unscrouplous landlords rent their apartment's at hotel rates.
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Mar 26, 2023 15:38
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Freakazoid_ posted:In practice, the argument for more housing is a delay tactic. Washington State was dissuaded from pursuing rent control a few years ago due to this argument. Nothing has happened since. IMO, rent control/stabilization is a delay tactic from passing policies that could actually solve unaffordable rent. Instead of just kicking the can down the road 
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Mar 26, 2023 15:40
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haveblue posted:Or just tax vacant stores until they stop holding out for higher rents Of course, if you proposed this to landlords they'd probably start shouting about how "they're going to smear poo poo all over the walls!" like Frank Reynolds. The reality is that carefully screened light-commercial tenants would probably maintain the property better than leaving it empty.
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Mar 26, 2023 15:41
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Kalit posted:IMO, rent control/stabilization is a delay tactic from passing policies that could actually solve unaffordable rent. Instead of just kicking the can down the road Out of curiosity, what policies do you think could actually solve unaffordable rent?
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Mar 26, 2023 15:55
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Oxyclean posted:I want to circle back to this - why would rent control mean places are harder to find? I thought rent control was mostly just rules on how much rent can be charged, and how much it can be raised by over a period, and not really any kind of protection from rentals losing value. (I suppose rent control could impose minimums, but I don't really see why that has to be.) It's not theory, this actually happens in a number of expensive cities with rent control such as NYC, LA, and SF. Basically you get an underclass of people who can never move from their apartment because the market rate is 2-3x or more than what they're currently paying. Once a rent controlled apartment gets a certain amount below market rate, it effectively gets removed from the housing supply since there is such a strong incentive not to move. To make it worse, landlords have a strong incentive (stronger than normal) to make the apartment as lovely as possible so you'll move out. In a lot of cases rent controlled buildings become de facto slums. It's a great example of unintended consequences. The only long term solution is to bring the market rate down, which involves either increasing supply or reducing demand. Since demand destruction usually results from bad things happening, increasing housing supply is essentially the only answer.
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Mar 26, 2023 15:56
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Dull Fork posted:Out of curiosity, what policies do you think could actually solve unaffordable rent? Easier said than done, but the way to lower housing prices in a particular area is to build more housing in that area.
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Mar 26, 2023 15:57
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Dull Fork posted:Out of curiosity, what policies do you think could actually solve unaffordable rent? -Vacancy tax -Imposing no rent increases over inflation -increase section 8 vouchers payments/investigate landlords who refuse said rentals -Any new apartment's buildings must include affordable and low-income units on top of the market units coming up.
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Mar 26, 2023 16:02
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Dull Fork posted:Out of curiosity, what policies do you think could actually solve unaffordable rent? Kill all landlords and abolish rent.
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Mar 26, 2023 16:07
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Dull Fork posted:Out of curiosity, what policies do you think could actually solve unaffordable rent? The way to reduce rent is to build more housing, it's unaffordable because there isn't enough of it in the places people want to live. One policy way to address that would be to end community input meetings on new housing, the meetings only serve to make building housing more difficult and the community gave its input when it voted for local government officials.
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Mar 26, 2023 16:07
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silence_kit posted:We already have a lot of cities in the US with low rent & housing prices where there is an abundance of housing units relative to demand. This is a lot of cities in the Rust Belt. I grew up in one. My sister a couple of years ago purchased a very nice ranch style home in a nice neighborhood in my hometown for $60k. That amount of money is less than what some goons spend on their cars. You could even build them proximate to struggling cities, and a successful new city could massively increase the desirability of an adjacent legacy city. Here's an area the size of Youngstown, immediately to the east of Youngstown.  \BTW the King of England is a huge urban planning geek and has created a city using some of these ideas, on a small scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poundbury Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Mar 26, 2023 |
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Mar 26, 2023 16:09
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No one wants to move to a pre-fab city in the middle of nowhere either.
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Mar 26, 2023 16:11
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Mooseontheloose posted:-Vacancy tax On top of these, I'd add a way to streamline / dismiss frivolous appeals. Either by making zoning more permissive, or giving the approving council a way to summarily dismiss certain appeals. Of course there needs to be some guard rails around this since there are legitimate appeals, but often these appeals are used as a way to stall / kill the project by special interest groups. This can add millions of dollars to the cost of construction, and sometimes will kill projects outright. In California this is often tied to CEQA appeals that need to go to court to be resolved and can stall projects by a decade or outright kill them. And it's not like these projects are trying to build on protected wetlands or something like that - they're literally apartment buildings in the middle of urbanized areas like Hollywood or Downtown LA. The appeals are often clearly frivolous and funded by neighboring businesses / real estate investors who don't want their investment diluted.
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Mar 26, 2023 16:14
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silence_kit posted:No one wants to move to a pre-fab city in the middle of nowhere either. There is massive value stored in the infrastructure of our abandoned urban cores, and we need to find a way to make it economically useful again, but a project like this would be cheaper to do from scratch. Mellow Seas fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Mar 26, 2023 |
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Mar 26, 2023 16:16
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