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lawmakers are scrambling to help
Sure they are.
Can’t have landlords taking a haircut on rent.
Who did you think they where helping?
What doesn’t work (but inevitably will be tried):
- Asking nicely (lol)
- Subsidising rent (landlords will raise rents to compensate for subsidy)
- Rent caps and rent control (artificial price ceiling creates shortfall in market, leaving people still without adequate housing or on long waiting lists, or landlords will find bullshit reasons to evict tenants and raise rents)
What does work:
- Building more fucking housing
The problem with point 4 is that no developers are going to undertake it unless they can make a significant profit. If the addition of new housing has the potential to lower the ROI where is the insentive to build?
If the government decides that they will be the developer/investor then the whole project is definitely going to lose money because contractors will ALWAYS milk a government project.
The problem with point 4 is that no developers are going to undertake it unless they can make a significant profit. If the addition of new housing has the potential to lower the ROI where is the insentive to build?
Your assumption is that all builders have infinite flexibility and are exactly the same. The real world companies can’t just adjust their staffing and capital equipment based on last hour revenue. There is always someone will to cut into their margins to get a contract.
Imagine you are running one of those companies. You normally make 100k on this type of job, the market is willing to pay 90k. Do you walk or not? If you walk you still have to make payroll this week. Wouldn’t it be better to not make as much money as you want but still make money vs not making any money?
Capitalism is a far far from perfect system, but it really exceeds at racing to the bottom. Someone somewhere is willing to do x for less.
The race to the bottom will work great in underregulated labor markets or anywhere regulations on environmental and safety standards are relaxed. The issue (no problem, because I believe there should be tough regulation) is that there is now a baseline that you can’t really go under unless you cut corners somehow.
I’ve been working in construction in the SF Bay Area for over 15 years.
Right so you can’t think of literally anyway you can follow the rules and make more money? I find that surprising given that I have listed one method in my previous comment and my infrastructure employer is constantly finding tricks to bring the costs down
Public housing is not about profit. It’s about giving people affordable shelter.
In the same way as someone at work caught picking their nose for the entire duration of the project with a deadline due for last week.
Until and unless they break up these predatory property management companies, anything they do push through won’t be anywhere near enough.
Talking to my neighbors, they’re dealing with a ~30% YoY rent hike.
Property is managed by RealPage (or some flavor of subsidiary/partner company).
I really hope that company gets SUNK after the anti-trust lawsuit they’re dealing with (it’s a really slow moving one, and I haven’t heard a substantial update since Summer 2023).
Oregon tried a rental increase cap, it’s not working:
https://www.opb.org/article/2023/09/26/oregon-rent-increase-caps/
"In 2019, Oregon became the first state in the country with statewide rent control. For market-rate housing 15 years or older, the rent increase can be 7 percent plus inflation as measured by the consumer price index, according to state economist Josh Lehner.
But as inflation spiked in recent years, so did rent. In July, lawmakers amended the limit to impose a potentially tighter cap of 10%, when the calculation of 7% plus inflation would be higher than that.
“If that number of 7% plus inflation is larger than 10%,” Lehner said, “then the cap applies.”
Next year the allowable increase would have come in at 12.6% if not for the cap, Lehner’s office found, because of high inflation.
Tenant advocates in Oregon applaud the new cap, but point out some renters will still be dealing with steeper rent increases.
“This does not apply to our newer construction apartments,” Kim McCarty, executive director of the nonprofit Community Alliance of Tenants, said. “That’s still a problem.”"
That hardly sounds like “it’s not working” and more like the cap was just calibrated poorly at the start and needs to be expanded to cover more renters.
Yeah, and there have also been weird things with cutoff dates. There was one year where the cut off was just before the highest inflation, so landlords increased prices as high as they could to make up for “missing” the inflation bump:
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/09/13/oregon-maximum-rent-increase-announced/
I am so lucky I got out when I did. I had been renting a 3 bedroom apartment for $1,800 a month.
In 2021, I took the cash I banked working from home and bought a 3 bedroom house. Mortgage is $2,000 a month.
My old apartment is now $2,300 a month.
Yikes. Good on you for buying a place. I got straddled with a $2500/mo place during COVID because my roommates all flaked before me lol. That shit was not fun.
Man, I would love a 3 bedroom apartment for that!
Living in SF Bay area.
Well, you just need to downgrade to Tualatin, Oregon. :)
Lawmakers are scrambling to pretend to help.
FTFY
Wrong! They are most definitely helping. They are helping the landlords. They don’t give a fuck about the people.
Show me where anyone is doing anything. Bare minimum
As much as my local government sucks they did approve a huge rental complex in my city with the condition that 5% is low income housing. It sucks because even this is no where near enough even for my city alone. Still you asked for anything so I am mentioning it.
Look at Texas property prices, a lot of places actually dropped due to new buildings being available
And you think lawmakers are involved?.
When I was a very young adult, first starting out… waaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy back in the late 80s…
My state offered a feature called “Renter Refund”.
You paid your rent over the course of the year, and as long as you were a resident for more than 1/2 the year, a portion of your rent was kicked back as a tax refund.
Now, that doesn’t help on a month by month basis, but it’s nice to have at the end of the year.
Naturally my first year as an adult was the very last year it was ever offered. :(
Increase property taxes, but provide an equal or greater credit to owner occupants, so tax rates for typical homeowners stay the same, or even drop. Only landlords who don’t live in the property (think: duplexes, triplexes) will pay higher tax rates.
This will radically reduce the returns that a traditional landlord-investor can expect. Investors in Single-Family homes will be pressured to either sell their properties outright, or to convert to private mortgages (seller financing) or land contracts (rent-to-own). Mortgages and land contracts would qualify the occupants as “owners” and gain the owner-occupancy credit.
The only time I’ve seen politicians scramble is when billionaires need another tax break.
And by “Lawmakers” they mean Democrats and Progressives.
So far the taste to actually accomplish anything at all from the right wing is minimal. Maybe they could fail to impeach the head of HUD and see if that helps?
The solution has always been to regulate residential investments.
Treating housing as a comodity is the problem. Unafforable housing is the symptom. End corporate landlordship.
Absolutely and tack on international buyers snapping up homes left right and center so they too can sit empty
Zoning reform, minimize single family housing, prioritize mixed use development, 15 minute (via bike) neighborhoods, encouraging & subsiding building development above 5 stories, separating bike lanes from roads, infill development and subsiding parking garages so people drive into those versus massive parking lots, dedicated bus lanes for emergency services & moving buses much faster than reg streets, signs to restrict right turn at red when pedestrians/ bikers are present, ebike purchase vouchers (Denver did this)
Lower cost of living means more money available which means more housing becomes affordable.
