Summary: moratoria are popular because they don’t cost anything (actually they shift unfunded mandate onto landlords who respond to the new market risk) or cost a bit when tenant lawyers were supplied. This increases homelessness.
Market stabilization against short term shocks (i.e. temporary rent subsidy) functions like unemployment insurance, stabilizing the entire market and not increasing homelessness.
How is shifting the burden to landlords via moratoria different from shifting the burden to landlords via tax increases? Unless you could forego tax increases by printing more money or by generating more revenues by falling towards the inflection point on the laffer curve.
Presumably, it's not just landlords that are shouldering the risk. Also, the US budget is huge and has a lot of buffer room. Worst case you're trading off investing in future development projects with keeping the market stable.
The effect of a tax increase is more distributed so that it is less likely to be directly passed on to consumers.
Increasing taxes shifts the burden more indirectly so it is less likely to be directly passed on to consumers.
With rent assistance the landlords continue to receive rent, so it may be easier for them to absorb the costs.
Since people receiving rent assistance can keep receiving the assistance if they move to a better deal, competition between landlords is still in place.
I know hotels owners that have restricted anyone from staying at the hotel long enough to qualify as a tenant (usually ~30 nights). So due to these moratoria, everyone now has to depart prior to 30 nights and stay somewhere else because otherwise the hotel will literally be unable to remove a non paying and likely even problematic person from their property for the foreseeable future in some states.
I saw a video of one guy threatening hotel staff who the cops would not forcibly remove and the courts are not requiring it because it was not deemed threatening enough. He is still in the room months after the incident, not paying, with the individual hotel owners and staff eating the cost.
Who it's shifted on and how it's passed on depends on the kind of tax.
If you impose a tax on buildings, that gets shifted onto tenants. If its a tax on land (ie, the rental value of the location), the landlord has to eat it and it gets fully capitalized into the price, which means the landlord can't pass that on to the tenants and it actually brings the price of the land and rents down. There's a long string of empirical studies that back up this finding, the latest being this one out of Denmark:
> If you impose a tax on buildings, that gets shifted onto tenants. If its a tax on land (ie, the rental value of the location), the landlord has to eat i
I'm not quite sure I understand the difference here, but I may be misunderstanding why a tax on the buildings and a tax on the land is different? Are you saying a tax based on rental prices? Otherwise I would assume any cost to the landlord would eventually get passed on to the tenet, being the source of revenue.
This is a good question! So a standard property tax is a tax on the value of the building and the tax on the land.
The landlord has to pay the tax whether they're renting it out or not, but what kind of tax you're assessing affects how much they can charge in rent to their tenant.
When you tax something, the cost typically gets "passed on" because you are changing the marginal profitability of that thing, and this causes the supply to decrease, which drives up the price.
We can make more buildings. But we can't make more land (locations).
So theory has long held that a tax on the value of land (also known as a site value tax) cannot be passed on to tenants, because it's not like someone says "well the cost of holding land went up this week Charlie, better make slightly less land this quarter." Though they can and absolutely do in fact do that with regards to, say, housing construction (and gasoline, and cigarettes, and sirloin steaks, and plush dolls, and anything else you might want to tax).
And this is exactly the empirical effect that the referenced research paper (and many more like it) find in practice. If you assign a split-rate property tax which taxes two things: land, and improvements (buildings, essentially) at different rates, and you have a natural experiment where you randomly vary the tax rate on the improvements and the tax rate on the land, you will find that the price of the property goes down proportionately to the tax rate on land (full capitalization of land taxes), but that doesn't happen with the portion of the tax rate that falls on buildings.
I think the point is that the tax is structured in such a way that doesn't disincentivize housing stock. Under a land value tax scheme, a landlord is incentivized to produce as many housing units for a given amount of land as possible, because it allows him to spread out the same tax across more tenants. In contrast, a fixed percentage (eg. 10% tax on rent) doesn't have this feature.
That makes no sense. Landlords are going to charge the maximum rent that the market will bear, regardless of how much they pay in taxes for the land and building. And if they can't make a profit at that rate then they'll eventually sell the property, or develop it for a more profitable use.
All I can say is read the empirical results! It's what happens in actual reality in plenty of studies I can cite. Landlords charge the maximum rent that the market will bear, but the land taxes shift what the market will bear, because you can't make more land, and changing how much we make of something is how producers are able to pass on taxes to consumers.
> If they can't make a profit at that rate then they'll eventually sell the property, or develop it for a more profitable use.
This is exactly the political purpose of land value taxes, by the way! Under a sufficiently high land value tax, the only way to make land more profitable is to IMPROVE it by building useful stuff on it. So if the improvements go untaxed (you don't get penalized for building stuff), but the location is taxed, you incentivize people to build stuff lots of people need, such as dense housing rather than parking lots and single family homes.
Only because the substitution good to rent is purchase which would also be subject to the same taxation.
The only reason rent and property value are correlated is that they are substitution goods, but the linkage is not fixed. Simple examples would be say student towns, not every student is going to be able to chose between rent and purchae etc.
> How is shifting the burden to landlords via moratoria different from shifting the burden to landlords via tax increases?
In the case of a moratorium, the landlord takes an immediate, complete, revenue hit. In the case of tax increases, the landlord pays something extra, spread out over both time and the taxed population.
It's like the difference between not getting a paycheck and having your rent go up.
Making landlords take all the risk individually also means that the market will reward those with increased risk tolerance, i.e. small landlords suffer and exit the market in favor of big landlords.
Firstly, it wouldn't necessarily shift as much burden onto landlords, depending on the tax. The burden would be spread around all earners if it were an income tax hike, or all consumers for a sales tax or VAT. The extent to which it does affect landlords, rent subsidies would more than compensate.
Secondly, how much landlords pay in tax is less relevant than what incentives the policy sets up. On the part of landlords, eviction moratoria incentivise not renting to higher-risk tenants at all. Higher taxes + rent subsidy would have the opposite effect, with more reason to rent to high risk tenants, and renting out properties that might be marginal otherwise.
I don't know all the details of this, obviously, but this sort of policy analysis is much more about how it shifts incentives on the margin, rather than who pays more and who pays less.
A tax would be evenly distributed among all property owners. An eviction moratorium or rent stabilization places the burden on random individuals to subsidize poor housing policy (restrictive zoning).
For one thing, the tax burden wouldn't be equal to a months rent, and then multiplied by however many months the moratorium lasts. If you were renting out a house for $1,500 a month, and not able to collect rent for over a year, that's over $18,000 including property taxes. That's quite a tax there, only on landlords. Many of whom not only rely on a small bit of income from them, but are also responsible for paying the mortgage. Likely the bulk of that $1,500 is going to a bank, not a landlords pocket. Not all landlords own the building outright. I doubt most do.
Your question shows the limits from reductio analysis. You have to look at it systemically.
Shifting the burden to the landlord, especially at a time of transient shock, is not only a direct tax, it's a tax when they may be themselves suffering a revenue shock just as their tenants are. Even replacing a tenant isn't automatic; there are transient costs and it can take time. While subsidizing the tenants takes cash from a large base (including debt, borrowed at a much lower rate than a landlord can get). That's the surface difference.
But you may ask "who cares? Why do the landlords a favor?" Well there's a systemic issue in such a shock (think of swimming in the ocean when a wave drops you then lifts you independent of your swimming). Keeping the tenants in situ means the landlords can continue economic activity (doing repairs, buying lunch, going on vacation, etc). The tenants can too -- if nothing else they can look for a job rather than looking for a job AND looking for a place to live. Or they may not have actually lost their job, but just suffered from transient reduced demand (e.g. fewer haircuts) which might end up being complete job loss if they lose housing. Essentially you are preventing a liquidity crisis.
And there are second order consequences as well: as the paper shows homelessness increases; this is a general tax on everyone not just in social programs but in all the followon consequences of having a lot of people on the streets.
It's the same argument for subsidising farmers, even if most of them these days are big businesses: they suffer a lot of transient economic pressure (busts and booms) but we need a reliable food supply. So we engage in dreadfully wasteful behavior because we've decided it's better to pay that than suffer a food supply shock.
Because housing is not liquid. Spread risk over as many people as possible and they will just consider it the cost of doing business. If all the risk is unloaded on a few individuals then every participant will have to account for the potential of a 100% loss no matter how unlikely it is.
Taking someones profits to zero means they 'break even' on their expenses. Taking someones revenue to zero means they have to pay all their costs out of their own pocket.
How is firing someone different from them going up a tax bracket?
The tax increase can be for the landlords. Maybe a smart thing is to tax vacant housing and use that money to subsidize unpaid rent.
The point is to limit the risk for landlords. Maybe they will earn less on good tenants, because of taxes, but they won't hesitate as much before taking "not as good" tenants.
Sadly, the moratoria were supposed to be buffered with rental assistance programs. But administration was left up to individual states, and many did nothing, or hired apparently incompetent contractors. As of July, only 11% of the allocated rental assistance was disbursed.
When I worked in commercial real estate in a blue state I was introduced to the 'right to counsel' concept, which is just wild. Grifters and professional con artists can successfully not pay rent to small-time family landlords (most rental real estate are tiny, unprofessional operations with 1-2 buildings- lots of recent immigrant owners). And when brought to court, they receive free attorneys from legal aid societies, while the owners have to pay thousands out of pocket. I found the whole concept outrageous. I would never want to be a landlord, the risk-adjusted premia just doesn't make any sense
Perhaps there ought to be an adjustment to the regulation that differentiates between megacorp landlords and the small landlords who only own a few properties. Maybe some threshold below which both sides qualify for right-to-counsel.
> Seems reasonable in the context of going to court with a mega-corp landlord, though.
The mega-corp landlords are much more savvy when it comes to dealing with grifters and con artists, to the point that they will usually avoid taking them on as tenants (e.g. via extensive background checks). Small-time landlords are getting savvier, but not at the same speed.
> Which is increasingly common.
And given the above, they will be probably become the norm in a decade or so.
On the contrary. For some reason petite landed gentry get a pass on cruel methods of extracting value for laborers, but when faceless mega-corps do it we suddenly sprout a non-sociopathic value system out of nowhere.
Rental law is not so hard that an intelligent landlord can't learn the basics and be in a good situation. Oppositely, a small grifter doesn't need a lawyer to walk over an dumb landlord. Since the grifter has done their thing for a while, the know the ropes and the law (where assigned council is just public defender who's job about it about ordinary defense and not outrageous claims).
I'm not terribly sympathetic to landlord in this situation. As far as I can tell, it's the greedy, lazy landlords that get taken by these people - if you follow the letter of the law, keep your premises in good shape and document everything, it's pretty hard to be taken. Oppositely, a lot of landlords skirt the law on a regular basis.
I think the main issue is not whether "good" landlords are affected, but the impact it has on the market. If renting to regular people is a huge liability, the smart landlords will prefer keeping units vacant or bring them up high in the market - where tenants have more means - to avoid dealing with the risk. This leads to the people in need with very little supply they can qualify for. It essentially backfires.
If housing becomes prohibitively expensive to people in need just because we hold landlords accountable for abusive actions, maybe we should consider a different way to allocate housing resources.
You don't just get to send men with guns to take large chunks of peoples wealth without dire social and economic consequences. To believe otherwise is pure fantasy.
Dire economic and social consequences clearly do not discourage authorities from sending men with guns (and threats thereof) to confiscate people's wealth. It happens all over the globe, frequently, and with large magnitude, both 3rd and 1st world and and with the full support of nearly all of the public.
In many places in the US we have government officials who decide who gets to live in which house and how much they will pay for rent. Tenants are part owners in properties, sometimes majority owners.
Zimbabwe sent men with guns to take the land of evil white farmers exploiting hundreds of thousands of black farm workers. (this is sarcasm). They lost their agriculture sector, became dependent on food imports without having any export sector (like oil) which ultimately lead to starvation and then finally hyperinflation as the government was no longer able to pay for the imported food.
One simple way that's already practiced in some places is to tax unoccupied residencies - and, ideally, use that tax to subsidize housing. And then you either live in your apartment yourself, or put it up as a rental under the terms required by the law, or you pay up.
Subziding housing drives up the price, because it increases demand for housing. Have we not learned this lesson? After so many years, this basic economic fact is still tripping people up?
Please, stop with the housing subsidies. Why do you want to make housing more expensive?
Direct housing subsidies don't prevent additional supply. Rent control prevents additional supply.
Also, politicians have to be accountable for the subsidies which means that restrictive zoning will burn a pocket into the local budget. They don't give a damn about losses due to rent control. I.e. they privatize political gains and socialize the economic losses.
The idea that the price of housing will not increase if a good is subsidized because the supply isn't "prevented
from increasing" is so confused and wrong it literally makes me sad.
We have the data of house prices rising as a result of subsidies. Housing is half land and half structure, and in constrained areas, 80% land and 20% structure. Land does not increase. Moreover even if housing was all structure and land was free, the subsidies cause houses to become bigger, as people can afford more structure, leading per house prices to rise.
Then you continue with a string of cliches, "privatize gains" etc. And a complaint that other people don't care enough.
Well, OK, but what of it? We don't shoot ourselves in the foot because other people don't care.
Adopting policies that make the world a worse place just because you are morally outraged is a terrible way of doing public policy.
Sure, but I think this sort of grandstanding doesn't serve the conversation well. We're talking about realistic, incremental policy changes here. The kind of stuff that hopefully solves the problem at hand while limiting the blast radius of what could go wrong. Throwing away how property ownership works in most of the world would likely cause large scale shocks and I think it's disingenuous to suggest these kind of things in a conversation about municipal policies.
I didn't say this "make it so tenants can't defend themselves". My argument is that punitive policies against landlord are about the only tool being wielded, and the only tool proposed, along with the only alternative being nuclear options.
I think there's definitely a problem that needs to be addressed, and that many landlords are bad actors in many markets, and that may tenants are bad actors in many other markets. I'm not even sure that landlording makes sense, it's rather feudal. I'm pro realistic rent control. I just think that, short of throwing away the entire system and making a revolution (that would kill millions), we should approach the problem from a carrot and stick perspective, not a stick-only perspective.
If you want to make eviction hard for the average tenant, fine. But if you leave it at that, where's the incentive for renting to riskier tenants? There's nothing re-balancing the risk exposure, nothing that makes up for the risk-adjusted expected loss of renting to a risky tenant. If we want these risky tenants to be housed _while_ preventing undue evictions, we need to fix up the incentive structure so that landlords still have something to gain from renting to risky tenants. Otherwise, why would they do it?
I didn't say this "make it so tenants can't defend themselves". My argument is that punitive policies against landlord are about the only tool being wielded
The only "punitive policy" that's being discussed is giving tenants free lawyers so they can defend themselves in court.
It’s the only one I’ve seen explicitly mentioned. As for the fairness aspect, tenants and landlords aren’t equal partners in the power dynamic. Should the state stop providing free lawyers to defendants, because it doesn’t provide free lawyers to those wanting to prosecute others?
I don’t know where this image of the “yeoman” landlord is coming from, these people are clearly financially stable enough to speculate on a human necessity but also want to be able 100% shielded from any risk? That’s not how business works, though maybe that is how business works now given how many companies and banks US taxpayers are expected to bail out.
I think it's more saying that there is a line where making it easier and easier for tenants to defend themselves has effects on the total number of houses available for rent, and at a certain point, may reduce the number of housed people.
If there was a 10M fee for any evictions, it would certainly reduce the number of unjust evictions, but many landlords would be unwilling to assume that risk and just choose to not rent the property. Obviously its an extreme example, but there is a line somewhere where we can optimize for maximizing our housing supply usage.
I think it's more saying that there is a line where making it easier and easier for tenants to defend themselves has effects on the total number of houses available for rent, and at a certain point, may reduce the number of housed people.
No number of lawyers allows a tenant to just flagrantly break the law.
The thing is, many landlords casually break the law and generally benefit from doing so - they fail to make timely repair, they take deposits unjustly and so-forth. Most tenants put up with this since fighting it isn't worth their while - the advantage the small opportunistic landlord takes is like a tax that tolerable though not pleasant.
Occasionally you get a sort of cagey and kind of crazy person who turns around and uses all the shenanigan of the sloppy landlord against them. The "grifters" - I've seen these types. Sure, they too will break the law but they get their mileage from the normally sloppy and abusive behavior of the small landlord.
The original poster I replied to on this thread believed that legal aid for tenants is what allowed these "grifters" operate. I dispute that and even more dispute the idea that not legal giving tenants legal aid would increase the housing supply. As I noted, the so-called grifters know the law and removing their free lawyers isn't going to change much. It's average tenants who need lawyers since they don't make a business of staying in apartment when a landlord is trying to legally or illegally evict them.
Further, a change making it easier for a landlord to illegally evict a tenant wouldn't improve the housing situation - the illegally evicted tenants would be looking for more housing and the opened-up units would be at a higher price.
You are not accounting for bad faith actors who lie about the landlord's actions for their direct own financial gain. Living rent free in a property is saving a tremendous amount of money! Like, as a % of income it's probably more than the average person pays in taxes. The financial incentives to abuse the system are enormous
You're advising that a non-attorney can represent themselves against a professional attorney and somehow win. What are the odds that an amateur that's never done a job can defeat a professional who does it full time?
The other issue is that you can't 'win' in court against someone with no assets. If they owe you thousands, haven't paid rent for months, severely damaged the apartment.... they don't have any assets to seize. And a judge, especially in a blue state, is not to authorize anything harsh. They can essentially not pay rent or badly damage your place with zero consequences
His point was that the professional worked in a different specialty and also doesn't care about the work being performed. Take the average web programmer and tell him to program something in Roblox vs. an enthusiastic teen and see who produces what.
> most rental real estate are tiny, unprofessional operations
The proportion of rental units owned by individuals used to be a large majority, but has been falling and recently dipped under 50%. As of the 2018 Rental Housing Finance Survey [1], there were 48 million rental units in the United States, with ownership breaking down as:
41% individual
37% LLP, LP, or LLC
3% real estate corporation
3% nonprofit organization
2% general partnership
2% trustee for estate
2% real estate investment trust (REIT)
10% other or unreported
The number DIY managed by the owner or owner's family/associates is similarly down, to 42%, with 54% of units now professionally managed (4% other/unknown).
I don't have numbers, but I'd imagine it looks even more skewed in the direction of professional landlords if you looked at major cities.
Yes, as the other commenter mentioned, anyone can set up an LLC so that doesn't mean much. The fact that 41% of landlords have the property in their names & not an LLC just shows you how unprofessional and small-time these operations are
Many properties owned by LLCs are actually small-time investors, individuals, and families. LLCs only became a popular/viable way to own real estate in the last couple decades. Now they are the recommended structure for most rental property owners - whether individuals who own 1-5 properties, or huge institutional investors who own thousands.
I would bet that a good chunk of the trend you’re asserting is just small time rental property owners increasingly using LLCs to limit their liability.
The fact that only 42% are now self-managed (54% managed by paid professionals) leads me to believe that the trend is still against the kind of small-time recent immigrant landlords that the post I was replying to claimed to be the typical landlord. I agree some of the LLCs are investment vehicles for individuals, who buy a property, wrap it in an LLC, and pay a management company to rent it out, but that's a bit different (these are just passive investors buying into an asset class managed by professionals). It'd be interesting to know what percentage though. By number of units (vs. number of LLCs) my bet would still be towards most being larger-scale operations.
In fact, as of the time of that report, one of the largest real estate investors in the US, Blackstone Group, was organized as an LP and went in that category (they changed forms to a Corporation in 2019). A few large real-estate investors still organized in the LLC/LP/LLP form are the BH Companies, UBS Realty Investors, Harbor Group International, AEW Capital Management, and Invitation Homes.
> I agree some of the LLCs are investment vehicles for individuals, who buy a property, wrap it in an LLC, and pay a management company to rent it out, but that's a bit different (these are just passive investors buying into an asset class managed by professionals).
No, creating an LLC for your RE business does not require the use of a management service. The exact same individual landlords can own properties through LLC as without; the LLC just grants them some liability protection.
It doesn't require it, no. Nonetheless, the majority of properties are professionally managed, so it is simply false that most landlords are small-time individual owners doing it themselves. If everything under "individual" and "LLC/LC/LP" ownership were small-time individuals doing it themselves as a family business, we'd expect to see closer to 78% of properties be self-managed, not 42%.
The rate of increase of professional management is also pretty high: the 2015 survey had 43% of properties professionally managed, which had risen to 54% by 2018. I'd be willing to bet it's more like 60%+ now as there's been quite a bit of buying into the rental market by large investors.
A lot of small-time individual owners with single properties pay a management company a monthly fee to handle leases, maintenance calls, stuff like that. It saves a lot of headaches. Is that what you're considering "professionally managed"?
>I agree some of the LLCs are investment vehicles for individuals, who buy a property, wrap it in an LLC, and pay a management company to rent it out, but that's a bit different (these are just passive investors buying into an asset class managed by professionals)
None of this is correct. An LLC is just a legal structure you create for a few hundred bucks using a two page document online. They're not 'passive investors buying into an asset class'.... you can still be a mom & pop with an LLC. I'm sure most tiny retail businesses are an LLC too.
I didn't personally see the statistics about professional 'management' on the page that you linked, but that doesn't make one a large-scale investor either. Property management companies usually collect 5-10% of the monthly rent, which is a tiny amount of money, so they're incredibly small scale or shady fly-by-night operations. I suspect you saw a statistic that includes the guy that mows the grass and patches the roof, and thought that was 'professional management'.
I think a better/more focused stat would be to understand how many properties or units each investor owns, rather than continuing to misread this table about an industry you're not familiar with. If you own 1-2 small buildings, you meet my personal definition of 'mom & pop operation'
LLP, LLC, and SP don't necessarily mean it's not individual or small family business, either. For those numbers to be meaningful, you need to distinguish between small business investors and soulless corporate vampires. Using an LLC can be a prudent and wise move for a married couple or family team.
Seems like the net size of a corporation is an indicator of how little we as a society want it involved in our daily lives - the bigger they get, the more effectively they are exploiting a rent seeking niche, in this case literally.
Others have already commented appropriately, but I also wanted to point out that most investors set up separate LLCs for each property to self-contain risk, which could bias the ownership distribution you listed. A single individual may have 3 properties, each with their own LLC.
In Texas you can use a series LLC to separate risk between properties with a single LLC, but it is the only state I know of that offers it (*I may be misremembering based on a BiggerPockets podcast from a couple years ago).
The policy + moratorium will end up lowering the percentage of mom and pop landlords, and increasing the share of larger corporations. I draw the analogy just like what's happening to the mom and pop shops vs Amazon. If tenants think landlords are leeches now, well, they are exchanging it with snakes, with lawyers on retainer.
Many mom and pop landlords are exempted from housing regulations, and are afforded much more leeway in terms of rights and discretion than larger landlords are.
Almost all of the issues I've had while renting were with small landlords. Corporate landlords at least held up their ends of leases in my experience.
I've been looking at SFH rentals recently. 4 beds. The companies that bought all these up are running them into the ground. It's sad what is being passed as proper. And it's not like it's dirt cheap either.
I'm not sure why small unprofessional landlords should be allowed to mistreat their tenants. Being a small landlord still puts you in a position of power over somebody else
I'm not sure why tenants should be allowed to mistreat their small unprofessional landlords. Being a tenant still puts you in a position of power over somebody else
You mean that landlords face some level of restriction in simply tossing people onto the street. The people on the other side of the transaction are at risk for their life while the landlord is at risk for their aspirations to the upper class.
I'd also point out that "investments" in a "free market" aren't supposed to be risk-free. If the landlord can't hack it, whelp that's their problem as a speculative investor.
The problem is that the increased risk profile is indeed taken into account by landlords... it makes them retreat higher up market, depleting affordable housing supplies.
I don't think landlords are saying "I can't risk evicting a poor tenant, I'll make my unit unaffordable" - it's a market. If the neighborhood is gentrifying, rent to gentrifiers. If the best you can do is Section 8, take section 8.
Its a race to the bottom (section 8 is guaranteed money) or top (high income homes tend to be more stable).
No one wants a medium income rental due to that. And I'm thinking about being a landlord - as I'm moving - and evicting a tenant that refuses to pay for 6 months while I still need to maintain the property and pay mortgage is prohibitive. The risk there is scary high for what shouldn't be risky.
Depending where you live, if you attend some landlord association meetings, or read any popular literature about real estate investing, you'll see that this is basically what happens. The common advice is to try to bring your units higher up in the market as much as possible, to minimize risk because folks with higher incomes are seen as less likely to trash the place, less likely to sue, less likely to stop paying. Books go on for hours about how you should keep your unit vacant instead of renting to a risky tenant.
I'm not making this up and these are not my rules or opinions. It's just the logical conclusions these people come up with, given the environment they're faced with.
I don't think that you're making this up. I think that the advice would still be to leave units vacant and bring them up market even in the presence of extremely landlord-friendly eviction policy...
this dynamic will always be true: "folks with higher incomes are seen as less likely to trash the place, less likely to sue, less likely to stop paying"
Basically, this is somewhere I think govt. _constructive/supportive_ intervention is needed, because today's punitive policies creates economics that don't allow a humane end result.
Government just needs to crank out large volume affordable housing. With modern tools and methods (+R&D), enough scale and a long term plan for maintenance this is entirely doable. The goal shouldn't be to house everyone but to create a surplus. (Lots of empty homes) Popular locations with insufficient space will continue to get more expensive, as it should be.
I like the idea but I think the concept of using technology to build big, low cost volume housing is mistaken. The act of concentrating affordable housing is not desirable and easily forgotten about. It creates ghettos. Watching interviews about homelessness, a lot of homeless folks will talk about how dangerous it is to hang out in places like Skid Row. That it's dangerous to be surrounded by other people with problems. Read about the struggle faced by youngsters in poor neighborhoods, about how their surrounding were a huge strain on their ability to develop and escape. The environment in which you are located, when you're facing economic struggle, really dictates your odds of recovering. I grew up poor in a single-mom family, and lived in lower income neighbourhood and know first hand how their influence is bad for kids. My mom did all she could to pull us out of there, so we wouldn't be influenced too much by the neighbourhood. Still, had plenty of time to see sad things and be originally influenced in suboptimal ways.
I think we should build more single unit affordable housing! And shove it all over the place, in affluent neighbourhoods! Help people leave their problems behind.
> The act of concentrating affordable housing is not desirable and easily forgotten about.
We know how to plan this properly. Mistakes will no doubt be made but there is no reason to think they will be this obvious.
Almost everything you describe is the effect of a housing shortage. The new houses wont happen overnight, it takes quite a bit of time to create a surplus.
creating housing by the the government is a possibility. (a ton of plattenbau build straight after ww2 is still used in my country).
if they could fix the housing crisis my bombed out city straight after ww2, I'm pretty sure the US is able to do so 80 years later with modern construction methods.
The ones who are doing that are talking from experience. E.g. they had to evict a poor tenant and now they are overreacting for an understandable reason.
The total value of all US real estate is $50 trillion. There's not a lot of situations in life where you can say, even the United States government doesn't have enough money to make a dent here- but....
That's only if they buy it. In the civil war, we took the slaves and land of the confederacy without making the owners whole. Landlords may not be slaveholders, but they are parasites and exploiters, even Adam Smith said so of the big landlords (in fact he was against the modern incarnation of our economy which is highly concentrated way beyond imagining in his time). Rentiers make money by simple ownership and exclusion, not by their labor. It is not socially beneficial. The word "lord" is part of their name and most Americans, at least the common people in 1776, understood the American project as the destruction of the nobility and aristocratic privileges. While the formal titles are gone, the plots of land that were the source of the nobility's power remain.
When I was in my teens, I was a conservative. As I get older, I become more leftist as I read more history books. Entire countries have been formed on the basis of similar ideas. It's childish to think they can be dismissed flippantly.
Not flippantly, no. But USSR and its authoritarian ilk can be dismissed on the basis that they ended up worsening the conditions of their residents relative to similar countries that didn't try such experiments.
OTOH there's still the libertarian left. But Soviets and other leftist authoriarians were always as hostile to it as they are to anyone right of them.
Eh, I would be very careful about incentives and side effects. Confiscation of property never quite goes the way you expect, and is usually semi-impossible without a preceding war (see: 1917 Russia).
The Soviet Union didn't have landlords to deal with, but the housing situation was not any better - just instead of apartments being unaffordable, you'd get in a queue for public housing that was like 20 years long...
Our situation seems quite bad and deteriorating, so I am open to reopening the book on the Soviet idea. I think a careful analysis of why their housing was not ideal is needed.
At the beginning of their project, many people lived in huts so the step up to small stark apartments was a huge step up for millions. After a few decades though, they appear to have failed to improve their housing infrastructure at a fast enough rate. I don't know exactly why.
Some sources I've read say that once Krushev (and his base of support) were in power, they redirected resources into consumer goods to try to match western lifestyles too early. The previous plan was to constantly reinvest in heavy industry which creates exponential growth by providing the material basis for more heavy industry. This shifting of resources away reduced the rate of growth as the population continued to grow and resulted in a stagnating standard of living.
This makes intuitive sense to me so far, but I have not done enough research to say this is conclusive.
I would point out that in the US, we have the perception of being able to move wherever you want given enough money. However, in reality we are restricted (queued) by the affordability of housing and moving. The people at the top do have real freedom, but the bottom sections (most of them not present in this highly paid programmer forum) have very little.
Soviet economy was tilted very heavily towards heavy industry until the very end. For very simple reasons: that's what makes tanks and bombs.
That aside, you can't look at economics of USSR in isolation from its politics. For example, under Stalin, most peasants were effectively tied to their land in kolkhozes and sovkhozes - they couldn't freely move to the cities where the better-paying jobs were, and thus couldn't compete for housing there.
Tanks and bombs (something the US also produces in spades (why would the USSR need an equipped military??)) are also consumables, they aren't additional investment in core heavy industry. They detract from economic growth and civilian improvements (though some military technologies do come back and help other areas of technical development).
The urban centers had something like 10-20% of the population. If the peasants all moved to the cities, there would a) be not enough jobs and b) no food as no one would be producing it.
I'm talking about tanks and bombs as proportion of the overall economic output. It was higher in USSR than it was in US, or indeed any other country.
And I'm not saying that producing those things is an investment, but rather that Soviets consciously invested into heavy industry to the (rather significant) detriment to the rest of the economy, so as to have manufacturing capacity to produce them.
> The urban centers had something like 10-20% of the population. If the peasants all moved to the cities, there would a) be not enough jobs and b) no food as no one would be producing it.
Well, the peasants wanted to move to the cities because the pay and the overall quality of life there was better. Peasants in kolkhozes were essentially serfs, with the government coming and literally taking the "excess" of their food output away. This could have been solved by, you know, actually paying them properly for that food. But why pay when you don't have to, and would rather spend that money elsewhere - e.g. on industrializing the cities?
One thing to keep in mind here is that Bolsheviks were very much not a peasant party. In the Constituent Assembly (which was directly elected by the population), they were a minority, and the most numerous party was the Socialist Revolutionaries, who actually represented the immediate interests of the peasants. Which is precisely why the Assembly did not rubber-stamp the Bolshevik government, and was forcibly dissolved.
Similarly, in village councils, Bolsheviks rarely had a majority - so they introduced kombeds to override those unruly councils. Also, when the council system was first codified in the 1918 Soviet constitution, the Congress of Soviets (i.e. the ultimate legislative body) had one representative for every 25,000 constituents of urban councils, and one representative for every 125,000 constituents of rural councils - i.e. one factory worker effectively had the same voting power as 5 peasants .
These kinds of things is why there were so many large peasant uprisings in Soviet Russia early on, to the point where they had to use poison gas to effectively suppress some of them.
If you want to have a fair society just make the holders of capital pay for the privilege of owning it. This is commonly known as a wealth tax but there are two taxes whose introduction leads to no economic dead weight losses.
Taxes on money and land holdings. If you spend your money you do not "win" because you pay transaction taxes (VAT etc) or you increase your exposure to risk in the financial markets. If you don't spend your money you lose because you pay the wealth tax for nothing.
The reason why a land value tax works is that land already exists. It's supply is inelastic. The owner of the land did nothing to create it. So taxing the owner for holding onto land will not discourage him from working (building a house and renting it out). The tax revenue can be used to pay for public infrastructure like transportation then the value of the land goes up which will directly fund the infrastructure. A holding fee on land discourages speculation because the expected value of holding onto land without utilizing it is negative. The reason why land speculation is so profitable is that location is a monopoly. As the community around the land develops the speculator benefits off the work other people while doing no work himself. It's especially bad when income taxes are used to fund infrastructure. As the government does more infrastructure projects and charges higher income taxes your rent will go up as the value of the land goes up.
Just a thought experiment: A single tax implementation of land value taxes implies that you've paid your taxes by paying rent. Rent would still be expensive but products and services would be cheap and your income would be higher.
My personal opinion is that governments should provide a backstop guarantee for tenants, to bear the risk instead of forcing landlords into making cruel choices.
I think it'd make sense. It's beneficial to govt. to keep people productive and ultimately off the street. Hence (in a capitalist system) they want to encourage the market to provide housing to people who would otherwise not get it. If the government came involved into transactions as a guarantor for people in need, and provided incentives and reassurances to landlords that they would not be disadvantaged if they provide housing to those in needs, I believe there would be less homeless people in the street, and more generosity from landlords.
E.g.:
(1) if I have no upside and a high risk exposure in providing housing to a recovering addict, will I do it if I'm then unable to evict that person when they fall back down into addiction? No, I wouldn't, even if in my heart of heart I wish I could help them.
(2) if on another hand, the government came and said "we'll guarantee this market rate, and will facilitate eviction proceedings and pay for repairs if things don't work out", would I be willing to risk it and rent to that person? Probably yes, there would be enough structural support to encourage me to do some goodwill help.
The problem is that the stick presented in (1) is what's going on right now, and there's no carrot (2). It's basically the policy makers telling landlords: all you, don't you dare taking in tenants who are a higher risk! Because if you do, we'll be watching!
* * *
In coordination with this, I think a smart policy would be to combine this idea with something else: instead of trying to build affordable housing projects, try to spread these initiatives around. Avoid the creation of ghettos. If a govt. agency was to support someone's tenancy, the agency should try to spread these people uniformly around town, mixing them with all strata of society, instead of putting all these people in the same geographical area. This would encourage reintegration in a constructive environment. People living in their walled gardens would be annoyed, but ultimately, the people in need of help would be allowed a chance to heal in a safer environment.
First, density is obviously cheaper, and many people already begrudge homeless people sleeping outside even though that doesn't cost anything. Second, even if a person is addicted to drugs, they still need a place to live. So evicting them doesn't actually solve anything except your business risk. Third, NIMBYism is almost omnipotent as a political force in most parts of the US worth living in. You aren't going to convince people to let poor people or people with problems live near them. They will fight like hell to stop it, and many will be wealthy or influential.
This one is personal because it happened to me. Abusive tenant refusing to pay rent and stealing from me, in a house I myself was living in and renting as the sole lessee and subletting (which was allowed).
So, I was already broke from thousands in unpaid rent, then got notice that she was fighting the eviction and would be represented in court by a pro bono lawfirm. So I had to scrounge my last $ and remember not to fill up my gas tank all the way, to hire the town's cheapest attorney to go in and settle, letting her stay an extra month free of charge to agree to leave. Finally she illegally overstayed that and only left the day before the cops were to show up and forcibly remove her. This is all while she's living on gov't cheese and blowing her money on booze and festivals.
In all I was out many thousands of dollars I didn't have and basically couldn't sleep in my own rented room for over a month, and got fought in court by fancy lawyers paid with tax-deducted charity money. I spent a while seriously considering, and my only other option would have been, to end my own lease and leave and let my landlord deal with trying to remove her.
So no, I was actually at risk for becoming homeless due to this situation as the "landlord", and I get fairly angry when its described in this blithe way as if the person fighting the eviction is always the poor little guy and the "landlord" is always BlackRock having to eat a 0.001% hit to their profit margins.
If you're leasing the property, you're not a member of the propertied classes. You are yourself a renter fighting with other renters to scrap together some measure of survival. Your landlord is the one that was threatening you with eviction.
If you don't pay your rent for let's say 1 month the landlord should have all the rights to remove you from property with minimal process and claim all those cost with reasonable penalty interest rates. And these should not be dischargeable in bankruptcy.
The counterpoint i always bring up is my college days """eviction""".
I was 1/2 a day """""late""""" with rent (as in, it was the 1st, and i didn't have it when the landlord came to see me in the morning, as i was on my way to school) came back to find the locks changed, was told i was evicted and even if i paid rent for the next month, all it would get me was my property back.
(reminder, they were demanding i rent for the next month, that hasn't happened yet, as condition to retrieve my property, while telling me it wouldn't result in me being allowed to stay in said unit i just paid the next months rent on.)
Had to use legal counsel help to put a stop to that bullshit.
As a landlord, some tenants commonly did not pay until after the 15th. I never charged them a late fee.
A few didn't pay me for the last 5 months, and things did not work out with the state.
I will never rent a property again. This pandemic has shown me exactly who is disposable. No governor will again decide that my tenants don't need to honor their payment agreements.
May landlords vanish; I am no longer among their number.
followed by a rant about the indignity of the poors having access to legal representation (?!?!). And an appeal to mom-and-pop immigrants to provide smoke cover for commercial real estate developers and the local landed gentry.
This is where "eat the rich" comes from. I'll take my flag-dead for this one.
Everyone that has a dispute with a landlord is a grifter and con artist? That's a strawperson to beat all strawpeople.
> When I worked in commercial real estate
Is that the attitude toward renters in your industry?
Why would landlords be expected to be any more honest? IME, everyone who has had a legal dispute with a landlord has been an honest person with an honest claim (though not always legally supported), and landlords have had enormous power over them. I have no doubt there are some bad people in both camps.
A slight tangent: I wonder what is going to happen to rents over the coming year now that most of the moratoriums have expired and the evictions are starting to work their way through the court system. Some landlords are going to try to work with delinquent tenants on some sort of payment agreement. Some of these will work out, some won't, which will mean more evictions in the legal pipeline. The people who are evicted aren't going to be able to easily rent another home so there should end up being a glut of rental properties on the market. In theory this should drive down prices as landlords compete for tenants with clean rental records but maybe inflation will end up eating the downward price pressure. Some percentage of those evicted won't be able to find alternate living quarters and end up on the street or living in a vehicle.
On other hand any reasonable landlord should increase rents moving forward to take in account next possible moratorium. I would, it is clear that state is against them so they must set rents to level that can cover such scenario again.
Pricing model before would have had near 0% probablilty of 12 month moratorium. New model must take it into account, it is simply a question of what probability. Or take out insurance to cover the scenario.
Reminds me of Wimbledon. Oddly reported as a "windfall" but no doubt they were called "stupid" for spending $2mil a year on pandemic insurance.
It has learnt from the SARS outbreak, taking out pandemic insurance since 2003
Well to be fair the market decides. It's not solely up to landlords, it's up to what the market is willing to pay. Unfortunately even if you did, corporate landlords probably won't because they can afford to. Leaving their prices lower, and a continuation of the cycle of property moving into the hands of corporate landlords like Blackrock. It's a tough issue
I am renting out an apartment since the tenant protection law in my country is so permissive it is basically non-existent. I am a laid back landlord who can afford to rent out at slightly under-market rate and not try to squeeze any juice from my tenants.
If there would be eviction moratorium, I will think twice before renting out and will only ever consider wealthy tenants and exclude anybody who may have any problems in the future. If there were anything like Paris laws where the tenant may refuse to evict at all, I will just take the property off market.
This is basic game theory. The only reason why there's supply is because it comes no strings attached.
I'm also a landlord and in a state that is trying to still push a moratorium and on top of that make it harder to evict once its lifted. You're right. The more strict the laws, the more that goes into tenant screening.
Right now the only requirement for me is that you need a security deposit. That'll get adjusted to credit checks, criminal checks, and leases that allow me to void them over basically anything I can get away with per the law.
Others, I fear, won't work within the law and start screening on perceptions, stereotypes, and personal history with individuals that get projected onto groups.
In short, the quicker it is to evict someone for failure to pay, the less protections a landlord needs to use or worse, invent, to protect their livelihood.
Philosophically, I believe the right to shelter is a more important natural right than any other property right.
I don't believe it should be legal to extract a profit from ownership of real estate.
I don't have any issues with handymen, gardeners, plumbers, construction workers, or even real estate/leasing agents receiving fair compensation for their labor. My issue is only with the idea that landlords should have a right to take profit.
No. Clearly, above, in context, I'm referring to residential real-estate.
Everyone having a safe place to live and sleep is a more important right than any other property right. Law designed to protect property rights should start with this premise.
Nothing about this premise entails that movie theaters shouldn't exist. Because, again, the goal is to protect the right to shelter and movie theaters don't make for good shelter.
Except perhaps in the case where there's not enough housing stock. Which is actually an excellent setting for demonstrating the imminent sanity my value system and cruelty of the landed gentry value system. Why? Because "movie theaters shouldn't have a right to make a profit when people need to sleep in them" isn't even particularly controversial. In rare circumstances when there are severe shortages in habitable housing (eg emergencies) we often see spaces like theaters or stadiums reappropriated as housing.
Anyways. Even in hypothetical cases where the right to shelter and property rights of the theater own conflict, it's not the sale admissions tickets that I would object to per se.
I never said admission tickets to movies. If you got rid of rent, I think you would see something like seasonal passes for properties and other workarounds.
I could let it stay vacant, let my friends live in it when they come to town, keep it for my children/old years, keep around as an investment, etc, etc.
At the very minimum I could never consider any vulnerable people as tenants. And this is a red light for any housing policy, really!
If it comes up, I'm pretty sure I'd leave my home vacant rather than renting it out. The loss in rent can be accounted for. The cost of a property manager can be accounted for. The costs of tenants who will not pay rent, who will fight eviction, and who will damage the house in a fit of pique upon leaving is immeasurable.
This decision isn't made though vague horror stories, there are people I know who've had tenants do thousands of dollars worth of damage before they're forcibly evicted. It's not worth the risk.
> If it comes up, I'm pretty sure I'd leave my home vacant rather than renting it out.
I'm not sure if it's everywhere, but in some states you legally cannot do this if you still owe a mortgage. The mortgage requires home owners insurance, and the insurance companies won't sell you home owners insurance on an empty house. We were forced to rent our house when we needed to move (during the slump, so no buyers) due to this.
Not the case. In the US you can normally get investment (rental property) insurance with a vacancy rider that jacks up your rate a bit. I've had to do this once or twice during extended periods between tenants. There may be time limits on it though, which I don't recall.
Do we have numbers on how many tenants are making use of eviction moratoria?
I know a few folks that are apprehensive of the markets just cashed out, took a mortgage and bought a condo to rent. Especially if they bought a couple of condos I can't imagine they'd otherwise have the income or reserve to pay out-of-pocket when their tenants refuse to. I'm as liberal as they get but this kind of thing feels like over-stepping from the government; I agree tenants need to be helped, but not by moving the hardship upstream in the economy - maybe the government should pay their rent instead. Dunno, feels very strange.
Just to voice an opinion opposite what seems to be the prevailing one in this thread.
So what.
They bought a spare house and wanted to farm people for what they felt was a safe 8% while doing minimal work themselves. The situation changed. Life sucks doesn't it.
We don't bail market investors out in a market crash and at least they're (outside of REITs, and you can guess my views on those) not speculating on the essentials of literally living.
Why should we offer landlords a bung off the back of hard-working taxpayers who are, a large minority, already handing over vast amounts of their take-home to landlords anyway.
Worst comes to the worst they foreclose on their spare home and the bank who took a stupid risk lending eat the loss from the tenant.
Every annual company statement contains a risks section which usually includes the unforeseens such as changes to legislation. That's what's happened here, why should rent seekers get kid gloves?
That's not an accurate comparison. Risk is risk of course, the rental market could crash but what I find weird is the government stepping in like this.
Imagine you wanted to sell your Facebook stock once it starts crashing (to buy another stock that maybe performs better) but the government says no you can't because Facebook employees will be affected so not only are you obligated to hold the stock, but you'll also need to pay out of pocket to keep it.
Just to be clear, I have no sympathy for the slumlords and rental corporations, I'm talking about regular folks that chose the rental market as more risk-adverse investors and maybe put all their savings into a single property that they fixed up and are maintaining themselves.
>> I'm talking about regular folks that chose the rental market as more risk-adverse investors and maybe put all their savings into a single property that they fixed up and are maintaining themselves.
I think more risk-averse people would avoid a single property as their entire investment portfolio.
Everyone says "diversify" your investments. if you are more-risk averse, you should not be putting all your money into 1 bet or 1 property.
I can certainly understand your view despite my almost pathological hatred of landlordism. I just think a once in a century pandemic is the type of event where it's useful for the government to step in and safeguard essentials for the population.
And asking landlords not to throw people on the street at no additional cost (let's say they do evict, who is going to be doing viewings at the height of the pandemic?) to them is a very low impact ask.
Edit: I think the root cause disagreement is how we categorise housing, as an essential or an investment. I can see why you'd be squeamish about such heavy-handed intervention with investments but my view is that's a category error. This is like wartime rationing, people need to eat and they need to live.
I understand your point of view, but I'm not aware of any society in which housing is not considered an investment; unless we're talking about utopic scenarios or communist economies where the state owns all property, or ex-communist countries where the vast majority are home-owners and tenants/landlords are a minority.
Agree that for most home-owners, it'd be a mistake to regard their own home they live in as an investment. FWIW, I have no dog in this race, I'm neither a landlord nor a tenant (I -and my mortgage provider- own the home I'm living it).
What would stop you from selling the property? You can't evict the renters, but you can absolutely sell.
> Just to be clear, I have no sympathy for the slumlords and rental corporations, I'm talking about regular folks that chose the rental market as more risk-adverse investors and maybe put all their savings into a single property that they fixed up and are maintaining themselves.
A core problem is that so many of us have never met one of these people. 100% of my landlords have either been large corporations or slumlords. So when people say "think of the small landlord trying to be nice" we wonder where that person is.
> A core problem is that so many of us have never met one of these people.
Back when I rented, the corporate apartments were the worst experience since there was zero flexibility to anything, all was managed with zero tolerance based on the company playbook.
Renting from individual owners was a delight though since I was dealing with an actual human. Very flexible about everything, always open to discuss options.
In my experience, corporate landlords are inflexible as you mention. They also raise prices consistently.
But at least they repair stuff. Whenever I had a system break my corporate landlords sent somebody over that day without question. With individuals I’ve had to pull teeth to get even critical maintenance done.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadMarket stabilization against short term shocks (i.e. temporary rent subsidy) functions like unemployment insurance, stabilizing the entire market and not increasing homelessness.
The effect of a tax increase is more distributed so that it is less likely to be directly passed on to consumers.
Increasing taxes shifts the burden more indirectly so it is less likely to be directly passed on to consumers.
With rent assistance the landlords continue to receive rent, so it may be easier for them to absorb the costs.
Since people receiving rent assistance can keep receiving the assistance if they move to a better deal, competition between landlords is still in place.
I saw a video of one guy threatening hotel staff who the cops would not forcibly remove and the courts are not requiring it because it was not deemed threatening enough. He is still in the room months after the incident, not paying, with the individual hotel owners and staff eating the cost.
If you impose a tax on buildings, that gets shifted onto tenants. If its a tax on land (ie, the rental value of the location), the landlord has to eat it and it gets fully capitalized into the price, which means the landlord can't pass that on to the tenants and it actually brings the price of the land and rents down. There's a long string of empirical studies that back up this finding, the latest being this one out of Denmark:
https://www.zbw.eu/econis-archiv/bitstream/11159/1082/1/arbe...
I'm not quite sure I understand the difference here, but I may be misunderstanding why a tax on the buildings and a tax on the land is different? Are you saying a tax based on rental prices? Otherwise I would assume any cost to the landlord would eventually get passed on to the tenet, being the source of revenue.
The landlord has to pay the tax whether they're renting it out or not, but what kind of tax you're assessing affects how much they can charge in rent to their tenant.
When you tax something, the cost typically gets "passed on" because you are changing the marginal profitability of that thing, and this causes the supply to decrease, which drives up the price.
We can make more buildings. But we can't make more land (locations).
So theory has long held that a tax on the value of land (also known as a site value tax) cannot be passed on to tenants, because it's not like someone says "well the cost of holding land went up this week Charlie, better make slightly less land this quarter." Though they can and absolutely do in fact do that with regards to, say, housing construction (and gasoline, and cigarettes, and sirloin steaks, and plush dolls, and anything else you might want to tax).
And this is exactly the empirical effect that the referenced research paper (and many more like it) find in practice. If you assign a split-rate property tax which taxes two things: land, and improvements (buildings, essentially) at different rates, and you have a natural experiment where you randomly vary the tax rate on the improvements and the tax rate on the land, you will find that the price of the property goes down proportionately to the tax rate on land (full capitalization of land taxes), but that doesn't happen with the portion of the tax rate that falls on buildings.
See this for more on the underlying theory: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...
If you want more sources on the empirical findings I'm happy to provide that to.
> If they can't make a profit at that rate then they'll eventually sell the property, or develop it for a more profitable use.
This is exactly the political purpose of land value taxes, by the way! Under a sufficiently high land value tax, the only way to make land more profitable is to IMPROVE it by building useful stuff on it. So if the improvements go untaxed (you don't get penalized for building stuff), but the location is taxed, you incentivize people to build stuff lots of people need, such as dense housing rather than parking lots and single family homes.
Only because the substitution good to rent is purchase which would also be subject to the same taxation.
The only reason rent and property value are correlated is that they are substitution goods, but the linkage is not fixed. Simple examples would be say student towns, not every student is going to be able to chose between rent and purchae etc.
In the case of a moratorium, the landlord takes an immediate, complete, revenue hit. In the case of tax increases, the landlord pays something extra, spread out over both time and the taxed population.
It's like the difference between not getting a paycheck and having your rent go up.
Secondly, how much landlords pay in tax is less relevant than what incentives the policy sets up. On the part of landlords, eviction moratoria incentivise not renting to higher-risk tenants at all. Higher taxes + rent subsidy would have the opposite effect, with more reason to rent to high risk tenants, and renting out properties that might be marginal otherwise.
I don't know all the details of this, obviously, but this sort of policy analysis is much more about how it shifts incentives on the margin, rather than who pays more and who pays less.
Shifting the burden to the landlord, especially at a time of transient shock, is not only a direct tax, it's a tax when they may be themselves suffering a revenue shock just as their tenants are. Even replacing a tenant isn't automatic; there are transient costs and it can take time. While subsidizing the tenants takes cash from a large base (including debt, borrowed at a much lower rate than a landlord can get). That's the surface difference.
But you may ask "who cares? Why do the landlords a favor?" Well there's a systemic issue in such a shock (think of swimming in the ocean when a wave drops you then lifts you independent of your swimming). Keeping the tenants in situ means the landlords can continue economic activity (doing repairs, buying lunch, going on vacation, etc). The tenants can too -- if nothing else they can look for a job rather than looking for a job AND looking for a place to live. Or they may not have actually lost their job, but just suffered from transient reduced demand (e.g. fewer haircuts) which might end up being complete job loss if they lose housing. Essentially you are preventing a liquidity crisis.
And there are second order consequences as well: as the paper shows homelessness increases; this is a general tax on everyone not just in social programs but in all the followon consequences of having a lot of people on the streets.
It's the same argument for subsidising farmers, even if most of them these days are big businesses: they suffer a lot of transient economic pressure (busts and booms) but we need a reliable food supply. So we engage in dreadfully wasteful behavior because we've decided it's better to pay that than suffer a food supply shock.
Taking someones profits to zero means they 'break even' on their expenses. Taking someones revenue to zero means they have to pay all their costs out of their own pocket.
How is firing someone different from them going up a tax bracket?
The point is to limit the risk for landlords. Maybe they will earn less on good tenants, because of taxes, but they won't hesitate as much before taking "not as good" tenants.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/08/25/89-f...
The mega-corp landlords are much more savvy when it comes to dealing with grifters and con artists, to the point that they will usually avoid taking them on as tenants (e.g. via extensive background checks). Small-time landlords are getting savvier, but not at the same speed.
> Which is increasingly common.
And given the above, they will be probably become the norm in a decade or so.
I'm not terribly sympathetic to landlord in this situation. As far as I can tell, it's the greedy, lazy landlords that get taken by these people - if you follow the letter of the law, keep your premises in good shape and document everything, it's pretty hard to be taken. Oppositely, a lot of landlords skirt the law on a regular basis.
Easy, by having the government send Men With Guns to confiscate it from you.
You don't just get to send men with guns to take large chunks of peoples wealth without dire social and economic consequences. To believe otherwise is pure fantasy.
In many places in the US we have government officials who decide who gets to live in which house and how much they will pay for rent. Tenants are part owners in properties, sometimes majority owners.
OK, sounds promising
> ..use that tax to subsidize housing
record needle scratch sound.
Subziding housing drives up the price, because it increases demand for housing. Have we not learned this lesson? After so many years, this basic economic fact is still tripping people up?
Please, stop with the housing subsidies. Why do you want to make housing more expensive?
Also, politicians have to be accountable for the subsidies which means that restrictive zoning will burn a pocket into the local budget. They don't give a damn about losses due to rent control. I.e. they privatize political gains and socialize the economic losses.
The idea that the price of housing will not increase if a good is subsidized because the supply isn't "prevented from increasing" is so confused and wrong it literally makes me sad.
We have the data of house prices rising as a result of subsidies. Housing is half land and half structure, and in constrained areas, 80% land and 20% structure. Land does not increase. Moreover even if housing was all structure and land was free, the subsidies cause houses to become bigger, as people can afford more structure, leading per house prices to rise.
Then you continue with a string of cliches, "privatize gains" etc. And a complaint that other people don't care enough.
Well, OK, but what of it? We don't shoot ourselves in the foot because other people don't care.
Adopting policies that make the world a worse place just because you are morally outraged is a terrible way of doing public policy.
So we're saying that making it so tenants can't defend themselves against illegal evictions is going to increase the housing supply incrementally?
I think there's definitely a problem that needs to be addressed, and that many landlords are bad actors in many markets, and that may tenants are bad actors in many other markets. I'm not even sure that landlording makes sense, it's rather feudal. I'm pro realistic rent control. I just think that, short of throwing away the entire system and making a revolution (that would kill millions), we should approach the problem from a carrot and stick perspective, not a stick-only perspective.
If you want to make eviction hard for the average tenant, fine. But if you leave it at that, where's the incentive for renting to riskier tenants? There's nothing re-balancing the risk exposure, nothing that makes up for the risk-adjusted expected loss of renting to a risky tenant. If we want these risky tenants to be housed _while_ preventing undue evictions, we need to fix up the incentive structure so that landlords still have something to gain from renting to risky tenants. Otherwise, why would they do it?
The only "punitive policy" that's being discussed is giving tenants free lawyers so they can defend themselves in court.
I don’t know where this image of the “yeoman” landlord is coming from, these people are clearly financially stable enough to speculate on a human necessity but also want to be able 100% shielded from any risk? That’s not how business works, though maybe that is how business works now given how many companies and banks US taxpayers are expected to bail out.
Well, the state does provide lawyers to the prosecution side, since the prosecutor is the state.
No number of lawyers allows a tenant to just flagrantly break the law.
The thing is, many landlords casually break the law and generally benefit from doing so - they fail to make timely repair, they take deposits unjustly and so-forth. Most tenants put up with this since fighting it isn't worth their while - the advantage the small opportunistic landlord takes is like a tax that tolerable though not pleasant.
Occasionally you get a sort of cagey and kind of crazy person who turns around and uses all the shenanigan of the sloppy landlord against them. The "grifters" - I've seen these types. Sure, they too will break the law but they get their mileage from the normally sloppy and abusive behavior of the small landlord.
The original poster I replied to on this thread believed that legal aid for tenants is what allowed these "grifters" operate. I dispute that and even more dispute the idea that not legal giving tenants legal aid would increase the housing supply. As I noted, the so-called grifters know the law and removing their free lawyers isn't going to change much. It's average tenants who need lawyers since they don't make a business of staying in apartment when a landlord is trying to legally or illegally evict them.
Further, a change making it easier for a landlord to illegally evict a tenant wouldn't improve the housing situation - the illegally evicted tenants would be looking for more housing and the opened-up units would be at a higher price.
The other issue is that you can't 'win' in court against someone with no assets. If they owe you thousands, haven't paid rent for months, severely damaged the apartment.... they don't have any assets to seize. And a judge, especially in a blue state, is not to authorize anything harsh. They can essentially not pay rent or badly damage your place with zero consequences
The proportion of rental units owned by individuals used to be a large majority, but has been falling and recently dipped under 50%. As of the 2018 Rental Housing Finance Survey [1], there were 48 million rental units in the United States, with ownership breaking down as:
The number DIY managed by the owner or owner's family/associates is similarly down, to 42%, with 54% of units now professionally managed (4% other/unknown).I don't have numbers, but I'd imagine it looks even more skewed in the direction of professional landlords if you looked at major cities.
[1] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/rhfs.html
> 37% LLP, LP, or LLC
All of the individual real estate investors I know wrap their rental properties in an LLC. It's trivially easy to set up and manage an LLC these days.
Unless those numbers are somehow separating out individual LLCs, I would assume a lot of those LLCs are owned by singular individuals.
I would bet that a good chunk of the trend you’re asserting is just small time rental property owners increasingly using LLCs to limit their liability.
In fact, as of the time of that report, one of the largest real estate investors in the US, Blackstone Group, was organized as an LP and went in that category (they changed forms to a Corporation in 2019). A few large real-estate investors still organized in the LLC/LP/LLP form are the BH Companies, UBS Realty Investors, Harbor Group International, AEW Capital Management, and Invitation Homes.
No, creating an LLC for your RE business does not require the use of a management service. The exact same individual landlords can own properties through LLC as without; the LLC just grants them some liability protection.
The rate of increase of professional management is also pretty high: the 2015 survey had 43% of properties professionally managed, which had risen to 54% by 2018. I'd be willing to bet it's more like 60%+ now as there's been quite a bit of buying into the rental market by large investors.
None of this is correct. An LLC is just a legal structure you create for a few hundred bucks using a two page document online. They're not 'passive investors buying into an asset class'.... you can still be a mom & pop with an LLC. I'm sure most tiny retail businesses are an LLC too.
I didn't personally see the statistics about professional 'management' on the page that you linked, but that doesn't make one a large-scale investor either. Property management companies usually collect 5-10% of the monthly rent, which is a tiny amount of money, so they're incredibly small scale or shady fly-by-night operations. I suspect you saw a statistic that includes the guy that mows the grass and patches the roof, and thought that was 'professional management'.
I think a better/more focused stat would be to understand how many properties or units each investor owns, rather than continuing to misread this table about an industry you're not familiar with. If you own 1-2 small buildings, you meet my personal definition of 'mom & pop operation'
Seems like the net size of a corporation is an indicator of how little we as a society want it involved in our daily lives - the bigger they get, the more effectively they are exploiting a rent seeking niche, in this case literally.
In Texas you can use a series LLC to separate risk between properties with a single LLC, but it is the only state I know of that offers it (*I may be misremembering based on a BiggerPockets podcast from a couple years ago).
Almost all of the issues I've had while renting were with small landlords. Corporate landlords at least held up their ends of leases in my experience.
New York City had a decline in evictions when it was enacted (the decline outpaced nearby areas).
https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/nyc-right-to-counsel
I'd also point out that "investments" in a "free market" aren't supposed to be risk-free. If the landlord can't hack it, whelp that's their problem as a speculative investor.
No one wants a medium income rental due to that. And I'm thinking about being a landlord - as I'm moving - and evicting a tenant that refuses to pay for 6 months while I still need to maintain the property and pay mortgage is prohibitive. The risk there is scary high for what shouldn't be risky.
I'm not making this up and these are not my rules or opinions. It's just the logical conclusions these people come up with, given the environment they're faced with.
this dynamic will always be true: "folks with higher incomes are seen as less likely to trash the place, less likely to sue, less likely to stop paying"
Basically, this is somewhere I think govt. _constructive/supportive_ intervention is needed, because today's punitive policies creates economics that don't allow a humane end result.
I think we should build more single unit affordable housing! And shove it all over the place, in affluent neighbourhoods! Help people leave their problems behind.
This thread is getting deep for HN and it's hard to respond, but I had shoved my random thoughts on this in https://twitter.com/AntoineGrondin/status/145489614700107776...
We know how to plan this properly. Mistakes will no doubt be made but there is no reason to think they will be this obvious.
Almost everything you describe is the effect of a housing shortage. The new houses wont happen overnight, it takes quite a bit of time to create a surplus.
if they could fix the housing crisis my bombed out city straight after ww2, I'm pretty sure the US is able to do so 80 years later with modern construction methods.
https://www.quora.com/Was-Adam-Smith-against-landlords?share...
OTOH there's still the libertarian left. But Soviets and other leftist authoriarians were always as hostile to it as they are to anyone right of them.
The Soviet Union didn't have landlords to deal with, but the housing situation was not any better - just instead of apartments being unaffordable, you'd get in a queue for public housing that was like 20 years long...
At the beginning of their project, many people lived in huts so the step up to small stark apartments was a huge step up for millions. After a few decades though, they appear to have failed to improve their housing infrastructure at a fast enough rate. I don't know exactly why.
Some sources I've read say that once Krushev (and his base of support) were in power, they redirected resources into consumer goods to try to match western lifestyles too early. The previous plan was to constantly reinvest in heavy industry which creates exponential growth by providing the material basis for more heavy industry. This shifting of resources away reduced the rate of growth as the population continued to grow and resulted in a stagnating standard of living.
This makes intuitive sense to me so far, but I have not done enough research to say this is conclusive.
I would point out that in the US, we have the perception of being able to move wherever you want given enough money. However, in reality we are restricted (queued) by the affordability of housing and moving. The people at the top do have real freedom, but the bottom sections (most of them not present in this highly paid programmer forum) have very little.
That aside, you can't look at economics of USSR in isolation from its politics. For example, under Stalin, most peasants were effectively tied to their land in kolkhozes and sovkhozes - they couldn't freely move to the cities where the better-paying jobs were, and thus couldn't compete for housing there.
The urban centers had something like 10-20% of the population. If the peasants all moved to the cities, there would a) be not enough jobs and b) no food as no one would be producing it.
And I'm not saying that producing those things is an investment, but rather that Soviets consciously invested into heavy industry to the (rather significant) detriment to the rest of the economy, so as to have manufacturing capacity to produce them.
> The urban centers had something like 10-20% of the population. If the peasants all moved to the cities, there would a) be not enough jobs and b) no food as no one would be producing it.
Well, the peasants wanted to move to the cities because the pay and the overall quality of life there was better. Peasants in kolkhozes were essentially serfs, with the government coming and literally taking the "excess" of their food output away. This could have been solved by, you know, actually paying them properly for that food. But why pay when you don't have to, and would rather spend that money elsewhere - e.g. on industrializing the cities?
One thing to keep in mind here is that Bolsheviks were very much not a peasant party. In the Constituent Assembly (which was directly elected by the population), they were a minority, and the most numerous party was the Socialist Revolutionaries, who actually represented the immediate interests of the peasants. Which is precisely why the Assembly did not rubber-stamp the Bolshevik government, and was forcibly dissolved.
Similarly, in village councils, Bolsheviks rarely had a majority - so they introduced kombeds to override those unruly councils. Also, when the council system was first codified in the 1918 Soviet constitution, the Congress of Soviets (i.e. the ultimate legislative body) had one representative for every 25,000 constituents of urban councils, and one representative for every 125,000 constituents of rural councils - i.e. one factory worker effectively had the same voting power as 5 peasants .
These kinds of things is why there were so many large peasant uprisings in Soviet Russia early on, to the point where they had to use poison gas to effectively suppress some of them.
Taxes on money and land holdings. If you spend your money you do not "win" because you pay transaction taxes (VAT etc) or you increase your exposure to risk in the financial markets. If you don't spend your money you lose because you pay the wealth tax for nothing.
The reason why a land value tax works is that land already exists. It's supply is inelastic. The owner of the land did nothing to create it. So taxing the owner for holding onto land will not discourage him from working (building a house and renting it out). The tax revenue can be used to pay for public infrastructure like transportation then the value of the land goes up which will directly fund the infrastructure. A holding fee on land discourages speculation because the expected value of holding onto land without utilizing it is negative. The reason why land speculation is so profitable is that location is a monopoly. As the community around the land develops the speculator benefits off the work other people while doing no work himself. It's especially bad when income taxes are used to fund infrastructure. As the government does more infrastructure projects and charges higher income taxes your rent will go up as the value of the land goes up.
Just a thought experiment: A single tax implementation of land value taxes implies that you've paid your taxes by paying rent. Rent would still be expensive but products and services would be cheap and your income would be higher.
I think it'd make sense. It's beneficial to govt. to keep people productive and ultimately off the street. Hence (in a capitalist system) they want to encourage the market to provide housing to people who would otherwise not get it. If the government came involved into transactions as a guarantor for people in need, and provided incentives and reassurances to landlords that they would not be disadvantaged if they provide housing to those in needs, I believe there would be less homeless people in the street, and more generosity from landlords.
E.g.:
(1) if I have no upside and a high risk exposure in providing housing to a recovering addict, will I do it if I'm then unable to evict that person when they fall back down into addiction? No, I wouldn't, even if in my heart of heart I wish I could help them.
(2) if on another hand, the government came and said "we'll guarantee this market rate, and will facilitate eviction proceedings and pay for repairs if things don't work out", would I be willing to risk it and rent to that person? Probably yes, there would be enough structural support to encourage me to do some goodwill help.
The problem is that the stick presented in (1) is what's going on right now, and there's no carrot (2). It's basically the policy makers telling landlords: all you, don't you dare taking in tenants who are a higher risk! Because if you do, we'll be watching!
* * *
In coordination with this, I think a smart policy would be to combine this idea with something else: instead of trying to build affordable housing projects, try to spread these initiatives around. Avoid the creation of ghettos. If a govt. agency was to support someone's tenancy, the agency should try to spread these people uniformly around town, mixing them with all strata of society, instead of putting all these people in the same geographical area. This would encourage reintegration in a constructive environment. People living in their walled gardens would be annoyed, but ultimately, the people in need of help would be allowed a chance to heal in a safer environment.
So, I was already broke from thousands in unpaid rent, then got notice that she was fighting the eviction and would be represented in court by a pro bono lawfirm. So I had to scrounge my last $ and remember not to fill up my gas tank all the way, to hire the town's cheapest attorney to go in and settle, letting her stay an extra month free of charge to agree to leave. Finally she illegally overstayed that and only left the day before the cops were to show up and forcibly remove her. This is all while she's living on gov't cheese and blowing her money on booze and festivals.
In all I was out many thousands of dollars I didn't have and basically couldn't sleep in my own rented room for over a month, and got fought in court by fancy lawyers paid with tax-deducted charity money. I spent a while seriously considering, and my only other option would have been, to end my own lease and leave and let my landlord deal with trying to remove her.
So no, I was actually at risk for becoming homeless due to this situation as the "landlord", and I get fairly angry when its described in this blithe way as if the person fighting the eviction is always the poor little guy and the "landlord" is always BlackRock having to eat a 0.001% hit to their profit margins.
It is only fair way for system to work.
I was 1/2 a day """""late""""" with rent (as in, it was the 1st, and i didn't have it when the landlord came to see me in the morning, as i was on my way to school) came back to find the locks changed, was told i was evicted and even if i paid rent for the next month, all it would get me was my property back.
(reminder, they were demanding i rent for the next month, that hasn't happened yet, as condition to retrieve my property, while telling me it wouldn't result in me being allowed to stay in said unit i just paid the next months rent on.)
Had to use legal counsel help to put a stop to that bullshit.
A few didn't pay me for the last 5 months, and things did not work out with the state.
I will never rent a property again. This pandemic has shown me exactly who is disposable. No governor will again decide that my tenants don't need to honor their payment agreements.
May landlords vanish; I am no longer among their number.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARES_Act#Foreclosure_and_evic...
followed by a rant about the indignity of the poors having access to legal representation (?!?!). And an appeal to mom-and-pop immigrants to provide smoke cover for commercial real estate developers and the local landed gentry.
This is where "eat the rich" comes from. I'll take my flag-dead for this one.
Everyone that has a dispute with a landlord is a grifter and con artist? That's a strawperson to beat all strawpeople.
> When I worked in commercial real estate
Is that the attitude toward renters in your industry?
Why would landlords be expected to be any more honest? IME, everyone who has had a legal dispute with a landlord has been an honest person with an honest claim (though not always legally supported), and landlords have had enormous power over them. I have no doubt there are some bad people in both camps.
If the court finds in favor of the tenant, that means the landlord screwed up (and probably broke the law, too).
Reminds me of Wimbledon. Oddly reported as a "windfall" but no doubt they were called "stupid" for spending $2mil a year on pandemic insurance.
It has learnt from the SARS outbreak, taking out pandemic insurance since 2003
https://www.insurancetimes.co.uk/news/wimbledon-set-for-coro...
If there would be eviction moratorium, I will think twice before renting out and will only ever consider wealthy tenants and exclude anybody who may have any problems in the future. If there were anything like Paris laws where the tenant may refuse to evict at all, I will just take the property off market.
This is basic game theory. The only reason why there's supply is because it comes no strings attached.
Right now the only requirement for me is that you need a security deposit. That'll get adjusted to credit checks, criminal checks, and leases that allow me to void them over basically anything I can get away with per the law.
Others, I fear, won't work within the law and start screening on perceptions, stereotypes, and personal history with individuals that get projected onto groups.
In short, the quicker it is to evict someone for failure to pay, the less protections a landlord needs to use or worse, invent, to protect their livelihood.
Maybe they should grow up and get a job.
I don't believe it should be legal to extract a profit from ownership of real estate.
I don't have any issues with handymen, gardeners, plumbers, construction workers, or even real estate/leasing agents receiving fair compensation for their labor. My issue is only with the idea that landlords should have a right to take profit.
Everyone having a safe place to live and sleep is a more important right than any other property right. Law designed to protect property rights should start with this premise.
Nothing about this premise entails that movie theaters shouldn't exist. Because, again, the goal is to protect the right to shelter and movie theaters don't make for good shelter.
Except perhaps in the case where there's not enough housing stock. Which is actually an excellent setting for demonstrating the imminent sanity my value system and cruelty of the landed gentry value system. Why? Because "movie theaters shouldn't have a right to make a profit when people need to sleep in them" isn't even particularly controversial. In rare circumstances when there are severe shortages in habitable housing (eg emergencies) we often see spaces like theaters or stadiums reappropriated as housing.
Anyways. Even in hypothetical cases where the right to shelter and property rights of the theater own conflict, it's not the sale admissions tickets that I would object to per se.
And do what with it? Pay taxes for it to be empty? Sell it (thus providing exactly the same unit of living space to the market)?
At the very minimum I could never consider any vulnerable people as tenants. And this is a red light for any housing policy, really!
This decision isn't made though vague horror stories, there are people I know who've had tenants do thousands of dollars worth of damage before they're forcibly evicted. It's not worth the risk.
I'm not sure if it's everywhere, but in some states you legally cannot do this if you still owe a mortgage. The mortgage requires home owners insurance, and the insurance companies won't sell you home owners insurance on an empty house. We were forced to rent our house when we needed to move (during the slump, so no buyers) due to this.
This is only true if being a landlord is your "day job."
The risk of a tenant trashing your property is the entire value of the home.
I know a few folks that are apprehensive of the markets just cashed out, took a mortgage and bought a condo to rent. Especially if they bought a couple of condos I can't imagine they'd otherwise have the income or reserve to pay out-of-pocket when their tenants refuse to. I'm as liberal as they get but this kind of thing feels like over-stepping from the government; I agree tenants need to be helped, but not by moving the hardship upstream in the economy - maybe the government should pay their rent instead. Dunno, feels very strange.
So what.
They bought a spare house and wanted to farm people for what they felt was a safe 8% while doing minimal work themselves. The situation changed. Life sucks doesn't it.
We don't bail market investors out in a market crash and at least they're (outside of REITs, and you can guess my views on those) not speculating on the essentials of literally living.
Why should we offer landlords a bung off the back of hard-working taxpayers who are, a large minority, already handing over vast amounts of their take-home to landlords anyway.
Worst comes to the worst they foreclose on their spare home and the bank who took a stupid risk lending eat the loss from the tenant.
Every annual company statement contains a risks section which usually includes the unforeseens such as changes to legislation. That's what's happened here, why should rent seekers get kid gloves?
Imagine you wanted to sell your Facebook stock once it starts crashing (to buy another stock that maybe performs better) but the government says no you can't because Facebook employees will be affected so not only are you obligated to hold the stock, but you'll also need to pay out of pocket to keep it.
Just to be clear, I have no sympathy for the slumlords and rental corporations, I'm talking about regular folks that chose the rental market as more risk-adverse investors and maybe put all their savings into a single property that they fixed up and are maintaining themselves.
I think more risk-averse people would avoid a single property as their entire investment portfolio.
Everyone says "diversify" your investments. if you are more-risk averse, you should not be putting all your money into 1 bet or 1 property.
And asking landlords not to throw people on the street at no additional cost (let's say they do evict, who is going to be doing viewings at the height of the pandemic?) to them is a very low impact ask.
Edit: I think the root cause disagreement is how we categorise housing, as an essential or an investment. I can see why you'd be squeamish about such heavy-handed intervention with investments but my view is that's a category error. This is like wartime rationing, people need to eat and they need to live.
Agree that for most home-owners, it'd be a mistake to regard their own home they live in as an investment. FWIW, I have no dog in this race, I'm neither a landlord nor a tenant (I -and my mortgage provider- own the home I'm living it).
> Just to be clear, I have no sympathy for the slumlords and rental corporations, I'm talking about regular folks that chose the rental market as more risk-adverse investors and maybe put all their savings into a single property that they fixed up and are maintaining themselves.
A core problem is that so many of us have never met one of these people. 100% of my landlords have either been large corporations or slumlords. So when people say "think of the small landlord trying to be nice" we wonder where that person is.
Back when I rented, the corporate apartments were the worst experience since there was zero flexibility to anything, all was managed with zero tolerance based on the company playbook.
Renting from individual owners was a delight though since I was dealing with an actual human. Very flexible about everything, always open to discuss options.
But at least they repair stuff. Whenever I had a system break my corporate landlords sent somebody over that day without question. With individuals I’ve had to pull teeth to get even critical maintenance done.