You should go sit through a day in housing court when it opens up again. The first time I went to housing court was literally life changing. The injustice was eye opening. It’s probably the single event that switched me from Republican to Democrat because I spent my whole life thinking “the system” was fair and reasonable until I saw the system in action.
I once sued my former landlord. As a result, I had to sit through many housing cases (neither of us was represented by a lawyer, so we were put at the end of the docket... that was unjust, but it was equally unjust to both of us). In the end I won (though it was a long and drawn out process- something that impacts landlords and tenants equally), I felt like the rulings, whichever way they ended up going, were pretty fair based on the facts presented. If anything, the judge was more favorable to tenants.
I follow various landlord forums because I feel like one day I may want to start a business related to it. Landlords worry most of all about tenants destroying a building, and having no legal recourse. With eviction courts shutdown, many have had tenants just stop paying rent- often times when the tenants still have their income, some times more income than they had before. The tenants in many cases won't communicate with the landlords about the situation.
Obviously, you mileage may vary depending on where you are, and I have had my share of problems with lying, slumlords (like the one I sued)- but that isn't the majority of them. Most are just trying to run a business.
Sometimes yes, other times no they should be void or unenforceable. Quick example: an employee non-compete clause in California (which are illegal in California but employers include them regularly)
>Should we live in a world where people can take other people’s property with no recourse?
Like the colonist (and later Americans) took the property and land of native Americans?
Or like squatting where one party acquires legal title to property from the own after x years? This is generally legal.
Or like eminent domain where rich people get the local government to take private property on their behalf?
One of the great ironies the great capitalist Trump has quite the history of supporting The taking of lands /property to be given to developers, and the scary socialist Bernie sanders has fought against these acts to uphold Private property rights.
In too many small communities, the only people interested in day to day governing are the ones bending it to their financial interest. Usually property developers, sometimes people who own a local industry or visible store front (auto dealers). American's seem to be waking up.
I like your optimism and I hope true change happens For the better, I’m more than a little jaded and in my experience things only get worse.
Take “Poletown” where GM got the government to seize 1,500 homes, 144 businesses and 16 churches and bulldoze them to the ground to build a GM plant.
Ultimately GM provided half the number of promised jobs and ultimately closed the plant.
I fear what we are seeing now is 20-40M Americans lost their jobs, nearly that many will become homeless in the near future, and ultimately they will be swept under the rug (just removed from employment numbers And every other program like they don’t even exist). Watch unemployment Numbers go back to 5% or so and the politicians go back to bragging about the economy. Once you have 40M+ homeless there is no possibility for them to organize and have a voice...they won’t even have the literal energy to survive let alone effect change, they will be steamrolled just like poletown was and no one will ever even know not unlike poletown.
Yes, it was a massive pain in the ass and for me, personally, I wasn’t compensated enough to make the transaction/relationship worth my time. So I stopped renting.
Landlords can opt out of the rental market if they aren’t earning enough. Tenants have no such luxury.
They can't just opt out. Landlords have mortgages to pay, employees to pay, maintenance, insurance, utilities, etc that they're responsible for, capital expenditures on the property itself.
Right.. you can sell your property and stop being a landlord and just live in the property you own rather than being a rentier.. that's what they mean by "opt out".
Right, you could of course file bankruptcy if your business becomes unprofitable on account of rentiers not paying their rent...but that's not a solution to the housing problem at all and strongly disincentivizes investment in housing.
> but that's not a solution to the housing problem at all and strongly disincentivizes investment in housing.
It would strongly support homeownership.
If “owners” couldn’t buy up multiple properties and become landlords but could only own 1 homestead...then property values would drop and renters would be capable of affording to own in mass.
Unfortunately, we are about to see in short order what happens when renters stop paying rent in mass and landlords stop paying mortgage in mass.
Hint: the renters and owners (collectively “taxpayers“) will both be robbed by their representatives again, and congress will bail out banks (again) so the banks can foreclose (on owners) and evict (renters).
Great! Housing shouldn't be an investment anyway. There's no reason it has to be; there are plenty of places -- like Japan -- where houses are depreciating assets that expected to be torn down when the owners leave.
> There's no reason it has to be; there are plenty of places -- like Japan -- where houses are depreciating assets that expected to be torn down when the owners leave.
Japan has a declining population, which means that rural housing actually can have zero buyers for it, where the population is lower than the number of houses. One in seven buildings in Japan is actually vacant [0].
If their population was increasing faster than housing construction, then housing would actually increase in cost.
Rent is cheap even in Tokyo compared to virtually any American city. I'm living in a city of 800,000 and early 30s families have no trouble buying a new house if they want to. It was this way even before the population started to decline. People tell me all the time that rent is so expensive in Tokyo, because it's... about $100 more a month. Prices are fairly uniform here.
The reason prices aren't high is that nobody wants to live in an old house. "Old" being 15 years old or more. Even with renting apartments, if it's older than 7-8 years old, agents will almost warn you that the property isn't exactly fresh and sparkling, but it's still not bad. If it's a pre-90s house, it's considered basically unwanted and they'll all but try to give it away. Meanwhile, 90s homes in the US are still marketed as pretty new, and demand seems to be higher for older homes than newer ones. America also has loads of empty houses. It also has loads of property owners who refuse to lower prices because their ego is worth more than their property. Apparently about 1/8 American homes are currently vacant, and the population isn't declining. Price and desirability are the problems.
All real estate is sold in a market. The fact that prices may be too high in some places in the U.S., right now, do not change that Japan and America are both subject to supply / demand mechanisms. Foreign investment in U.S. real estate is much, much more common than Japanese real estate.
Japan, is also no stranger to real estate bubbles, having experienced perhaps the worst real estate bubble in modern history in the 90s:
"At their peak, prices in central Tokyo were such that the Tokyo Imperial Palace grounds were estimated to be worth more than all the land in the entire state of California."
Yes, all housing markets are subject to supply and demand. The point I was making was that declining population has zero effect on Japan's non-rising home prices, since home prices have remained stable for decades now and even when the population was still rising. The main regulator is that there's almost zero demand for used homes, and it drops to actual zero as the years go on. The real value is in the land its on, which if you're planning on buying property in somewhere like Roppongi, it's still going to be insanely expensive. But for renting or buying elsewhere, it's not.
Your evidence is one poorly-written newspaper article, a reddit disaster-porn post, and some random picture of Caracas?
Authenticity of the reddit post aside, do you have the slightest knowledge of urban development in the Soviet Union, or like, anywhere, or do you just regurgitate links?
A lotta shit got built 'cause you need to house a lot of people after your country's major urban centers got basically raized to the ground, the surrounding countryside along with it, alongside continuing rural->urban migration. Ain't particularly easy to do that well while also trying to recover your economy from a massive fucking brutal invasion.
Yes, Khrushchevkas aren't exactly marvels of architectural longevity; they were never intended to be. They were supposed to last maybe 30-40 years at best, and they're still standing. Sure, they're shoddy and they look like shit now, the countries that built them lacked the capital to replace them as intended--that's another history lesson, but whatever. You mock them for carrying on shambling well past their intended use? They should be lauded for lasting as long as they have, with what limited resources and tight constraints under which they were originally built.
Point is, you want the government to cheap housing and fund it as such, it does so, and the output sometimes ends up surpassing your original goals! You put funding into producing good housing and government can do that too! You ever been to Singapore? You ever hear about the sprawling abject rotten slums of Singapore, that dominate the whole of the nation? No? Curious that.
Would be really fucking strange to hear that a government could build a lot of good housing for its populace and still succeed economically, I suppose, but hey, they did it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
Imagine a world where when landlords go bankrupt, the government comes in and buys their property, then offers loans to the tenants so they can buy the property and organize a housing co-op. Would be a good investment for the government, if the landlord could wring out a profit from the tenants then the tenants should be able to pay back the loan.
Honest question. Why should society allow banks to give out mortgages for the purchase of residential property for use as a non-primary residence? It seems like this will lead to increasing the cost of rent because the renter pays the mortgage for the landlord plus profit.
Why shouldn't they be allowed to? It's just a secured loan.
Why should banks give out personal loans where someone can do whatever they want with the money? Why do credit cards exist? Why are brokers allowed to provide margin accounts?
> Why shouldn't they be allowed to? It's just a secured loan.
From the perspective of a bank it's a great deal. Either they get the premiums and interest on a loan or if the landlord defaults, they get the asset. But think of it in terms of the community. This helps concentrate wealth for the wealthy. People with lots of assets are more likely to qualify for a loan and they can afford higher house prices than those with less. This can cause cost of housing in residential areas to increase and lead to locking out new residents from becoming home owners in the area they live.
> Why should banks give out personal loans where someone can do whatever they want with the money?
Personal loans have higher premiums, higher interest rates and lower limits because they are not backed by high value assets.
> Why do credit cards exist? Why are brokers allowed to provide margin accounts?
The simple answer is that they are profitable to the providers.
I don't think high eviction rates are signs of a healthy society.
A good portion of rent covers eviction risk. Increase cost of evictions results in an increase in rent. If lower affordability is your goal we should make it harder to evict.
People don't want to hear it but it's true. The landlord has to pay the mortgage on the building. If they end up with 30% non-paying tenants who they can't evict, everybody's got to pay 30% more rent.
> But if the profit is 30% nobody’s getting it but the landlord.
What profit? The landlord has a $10,000/month mortgage payment and 10 tenants who pay $1000/month rent. If three of the tenants stop paying their rent and you can't evict them and replace them with paying tenants, you still have a $10,000/month mortgage, so now you have to raise the rent on the others by >$400/month each just in order to make the payment.
It's systemic, so all the other landlords are in the same situation and have to do the same thing, which means you can raise the rent by that much without losing tenants to the competition.
The people getting the extra money that the other tenants are paying aren't the landlords, they're the tenants who are living there without paying rent because they can't be evicted. And you can imagine what happens when the other tenants can't afford the higher rent and stop paying too.
People who are getting evicted are stressed. They often trash the property or behave in such ways that others don't want to live near them.
For the ll, it is money; for their neighbors it is their life.
Usually, yes! I’m not sure how it works with remote hearings during Covid-19 but I imagine some courts are broadcasting live streams of the proceedings while others are invitation-only. In normal circumstances where courts are open you can just show up and sit in the gallery to observe. Most housing courts have an “eviction day” once a week. If you call the courthouse ahead of time the clerk can tell you what day of the week is eviction day.
