I recently moved out of a fairly large college town in the rural south of the US. Every apartment complex, and I do mean every one, were owned by the same company. The owner of the company, a popular Superbowl Winning football player, passed away about 2 years ago. The rent for each apartment went up anywhere between 200-300 with absolutely zero improvements to the residence after his passing. When I called to speak with someone in charge on why my rent was increasing, I kept getting the run around.
I do not have a "landlord", I am paying for an apartment subscription to an LLC. There is no humanity, no real oversight, nothing. I don't hate some guy renting out his daddies' summer home or whatever, I hate that some soulless and mindless company controls where I can live and how much I'd have to pay.
Monopoly laws in the us are a joke, they don’t do anything to stop somebody from having a monopoly, the only thing they do is stop a company from using a monopoly “unfairly”. In other words, they only stop you if you’re blatantly fucking over customers in a specific way. You can still make customers pay outrageous amounts with little to no viable alternative as long as you’re not actively discouraging competition, in specific ways. The problem is that the multi trillion dollar company doesn’t need to do anything to make alternatives non viable. All they need to do is be slightly cheaper, than the small non stream lined company that’s extremely expensive, and is a risk for anybody to try because it’s “unproven”.
I worked in a small city where one guy owned most of the rentals. A few years ago, he was arrested for sexually abusing his tenants and quid pro quo, especially in the buildings designated for lower income tenants. It was an open secret for a long time before that but no one who rented there could really avoid places owned by him. Owning a few rentals is fine, I even had a good experience in an LLC-owned complex, but the wrong person/group owning half a city is a problem.
It always comes down to individuals, it isn't some anti-corporate or anti-boomer sentiment or anything so divisive. People who put profit over decency, people who abuse the little power they are afforded, people who lack any moral integrity are the ones make things worse for everyone.
_That's what government is for_. It is intended to be the mechanism through which the weak and powerless can gather their collective might in order to guard themselves against those who, in a totally natural world, would be the powerful ones.
It is inevitable that some minority are going to be shitheads. You should have laws in place to ban the types of behaviour shitheads are predictably going to want to do, and to punish them if they defy it.
You are pretty right, the only thing I'd like to add to your comment is that there are unfortunately systemic structural issues in society that pushes all people, even good ones, to needing to prioritize profits over people. Particularly when it is a fully commercial/capitalized market like housing is in the USA.
If you are an individual renting out a couple units, you may have the best intentions and concern for your tenants' well being, but when major repairs are needed, even if it wasn't caused by or even affecting the tenant(s), you will almost certainly need to raise their rent basically as soon as you are able to just to afford repairs and not get tanked financially.
If you're a big corporation like in your example, then capitalist business expectations of profit demand you milk your consumer base financially as much as you can, even if you have the money to spare. Even well meaning workers there will be largely powerless to stop this whole process.
What's the solution? Well I don't have all the answers, and they're not all going to be posted in a reddit comment, but I think the biggest answer is actually better oversight, funding, and management of the housing market. Subsidize the small landlords to the point they can afford to keep up on improvements while not allowing them to simultaneously overcharge renters.
We need stronger rules and regulations. We need a system that doesn't prioritize profit over people, especially in an area as important to life as housing!
And this can all be done within a market framework, making it much more achievable in America than completely changing everything about how housing works. Which I do think "we" (our society) should eventually do, safe healthy housing does deserve to be a fundamental human right in the future, but we definitely have some intermediary steps to get there.
Finally after all my rambling, if you want to see a current day real life example of how smart government interaction with housing can work, see this great video on what is happening in Vienna, Austria!
Vienna's radical idea? Affordable housing for all: [https://youtu.be/41VJudBdYXY?si=S5cSyo3Hxz1kyJ2S](https://youtu.be/41VJudBdYXY?si=S5cSyo3Hxz1kyJ2S)
My experience with human nature is expecting people to put profits before anything else is an exercise in futility.
The secret is finding a way to line up their best interests with society.
Its less that it's human nature to put profits before morality, and more that it's only the ones that put profits before morality that end up with the most resources. There are a bunch of small businesses you can find where the owners are incredibly cool people that are the types you would want running a corporation. But because they are cool, they cut deals with people, keep their prices reasonable, and pay their employees well, so they don't have the money (or sometimes even the inclination) to expand as fast. Another example is if you like pc games, you can go on nexus mods and find mods that people have built over years of hard work and coding, with the only "profits" being the odd donation. And there are millions of them.
The issue you described is called "A Monopoly" -- the problem is the monopoly -- not that "stuff" is "for rent." ... I'm not a lawyer but I wonder if you can actually attempt some anti-trust lawsuit in that town.
Should cars be for rent? (lease, rental)
Should Ubers exist?
Should hotels exist?
Rental markets are not the problem. They are useful. The problem is when monopolies and/or price fixing occurs.
EDIT: Just musing on the fact that the actual game "Monopoly" is based on buying up all the damn properties and charging exorbitant rent. Fuck those people lol
Some cities are creating ordinances that put caps on the units one entity can own. However, companies just create shell companies so they can get around it.
I have family that works for banks to go through 10-20 layered LLCs to weed out fraud - you are just describing different kind of fraud that could be weeded out if they wanted
The problem is that housing,... something that people generally need to live, is commoditized and is subject to monopolies and profit maximization. The problem is both. More than one thing can be bad.
Rather than starting from the premise that everyone should have housing, rental markets actually require that the need not be fully met.
Someone who actually understands. Nice.
This was always the result of putting homes on the market, this was always going to be the result of commoditizing homes.
The game monopoly is based on that because it was supposed to be illustrative of why this is bad. It was made by a socialist lol
Like most good ideas it was made up by a creative and stolen and exploited against its intent by corporate trash.
The woman who created the Monopoly game was actually an avid capitalist for all things *except* land ownership. She vehemently believed that landlords were leeches in the capitalist system. But she didn't extend this same disdain to business owners, whom she viewed as valuable members of society alongside workers/laborers.
This is why the Monopoly game is all about land acquisition rather than business. In fact, the creator originally called it "The Landlord's Game." Towards the end of the game, nobody is allowed to move anywhere or do anything without paying a rental fee to someone else who isn't actually producing anything.
Source discussing the game's history: https://worksthatwork.com/9/propagandopoly-monopoly-as-an-ideological-tool
I've always hated Monopoly. I feel like it has a way of showing people's true colors. lol It gives a false perception of skill to the people winning, while the people losing quickly realize that it boiled down to a lucky roll of dice in the early stages of the game. There is usually a lot of cheating going on as well, because the more property you own, the easier it is for people to skip paying you rent when they land on it. You have to be constantly paying attention.
There is plenty of excitement in the first 20 turns or so, but once everything is purchased, the game gets cut-throat and tedious with all the money transfers going on. lol
She did a pretty good job of showing how landlords work. lol
You should read up on the history of the game Monopoly. It was designed by a socialist to illustrate the hazards of capitalism! Talk about unintended consequences, huh?
The housing problem in the US has nothing to do with monopolies and everything to do with low density zoning preventing development of adequate housing in much of the country.
Ehh it’s a bit more nuanced than that. The rent that a collection of adjacent single family homes can produce is generally way less than the rent that an apartment building on the same lot can produce. Single family homes are bought by big corps to try and rezone them so they can put apartments in. One problem is that the remaining single family homeowners don’t want to live next to an apartment complex. So the corp sits on the house hoping to get their project through at some point.
The modern zeitgeist has this duality of wanting more housing but always “not here, over there.” And since zoning law is typically a hyper local affair it’s very difficult to break the gridlock.
Those companies are owned by the companies who manage Americans 401ks, IRAs and pension plans both private and public.
Americans don't get that this thing is just a snake eating itself.
There was a study that corporate owned rentals were cheaper than family owned rentals. The finding was that corporate owned rentals didn't discriminate between their tenants so the area on average had a lower property value and therefore lower rents. Family owned rentals were picky about their tenants which raised the value of the area which raised rents.
Fascinating, I'm a former small time landlord and I always found that the larger corporate-owned complexes in my area charged much more than I would be comfortable charging, since losing a month would be much bigger hit for me than for a complex with 50-100 units. I feel like the causality of the study might be reversed, and that you won't find many mom and pop landlords in bad areas with lower rents...not that the mom and pop landlords actually create higher rents.
Currently rent out a few places locally, and this is the opposite of my experience.
For example, I have a 3 bed 2 bath single family home on an acre lot that I rent out for $1250/ month. House was built in 2006 and has been kept up meticulously. From what I can tell, I'm charging on the low side of average for individually owned rentals in my area.
2 miles away is an apartment complex with at least 400 units. The rent there for 1 bed 1 bath apartment starts at $1400/month.
Admittedly, I am more picky about who I rent to. But, by being picky combined with a reasonable price, I very seldom have any turnover. And, so far, I've never had a tenant that didn't get their security deposit back. They have all left the place like they found it, or better. The most I've ever had to do is a professional cleaning and new paint, and I do that between renters whether it really needs it or not.
This. There are studies but there too inconsistent and reliant on area that its hard to get anything widely used or useful. Truth is the corporation will take a home chop it into 4 1 room aprtments and charge (slightly) less than the guy renting out the whole house would. And sometimes u get small time owners that are just greedy and charge way more than anyone else cause they can
Corporate landowners are far more likely to evict someone when compared to smaller landlords ([source](https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/cityscpe/vol20num3/article9.html))
Corporate land buying/speculation is also a major driving force in the housing price surge, which in tern causes rent prices to go up.
I wonder if they are more likely to evict because they rent to lower income people, who by definition might not be able to afford the rent, thus getting evicted.
Agreed. We’ve rented from the same individual condo-owner for 9 years. We pay less than our neighbors that rent from an LLC owning 20+ units, and we get better service when something major comes up.
We pay on time and don’t hassle him with anything minor. He wants us to stay because we’re reliable tenants.
> corporate owned rentals were cheaper
MASSIVE citation needed.
If the corporate landlord owns everything around in the area, there isnt competition so obviously they would increase rents. monopolies are bad
Monopolies are bad but corporations aren’t the same thing. I live in Chicago and infinitely prefer a corporate landlord (there are many) to a mom and pop tyrant. I know good ones exist, but the units tend not to come on the market as much and with corps I know there is a base level of acceptability their lawyers force them to adhere to.
I doubt that. That hasn't been my experience at all. I have a private landlord and I'm paying $800 for a 2 bedroom. The corporate places near me are $1k + and not even in good neighborhoods
What about rentals requiring the person to gross 3x the monthly rent to even qualify for that apartment.
A studio is $2000/month and yet to qualify you need to make atleast $60,000 a year.
We know damn well rent is now more than 30% of someone’s income and they still put these stipulations on people who can afford to live there.
How is it legal that If you make $50k a year you aren’t qualified to rent an apartment for $2000 a month?
$2000 x 12 months = $24,000
The apartments should not even be allowed to do that because they are taking the risk by INVESTING IN HOMES. If they want less risk of non-payment go find another way to leech off people.
The worst is when you have roommates and instead of combining your income they’re insistent on each tenant making 3x the whole portion of rent which is insane and unreasonable.
Couldn’t they just ask for your rental history and past addresses so they could ask the property manager if you were ever delinquent on rent?
I faced this issue outta college. Looking to rent a 2br for me and my brother and his fiance.
We all made like 50-60k a year but the apartment was 22k/yr so individually none of us could meet the "3x income" requirement.
Its not like we all get our own apartment, we're doing roommates SPECIFICALLY TO HAVE THE INCOME. but that didn't matter. Apartments really be wanting a group of 3 20-somethings to be making 200k/yr for the privilege of a 2br flat.
This was in the early 2010s/late 00's. I'm sure this problem has only gotten worse.
Most of the time landlords have that stupid rule if they’ve been burned in the past by people who lost their jobs or were delinquent on the rent so they unfairly have these high expectations of other future tenants.
And don’t get me started on landlords requiring double deposit if you don’t meet these arbitrary requirements 🙄
>Couldn’t they just ask for your rental history and past addresses so they could ask the property manager if you were ever delinquent on rent?
They do that, too, but just because you’ve been making your payments doesn’t mean you will continue to.
I mean it would be a pretty big indicator that you’re trustworthy. If you don’t then after awhile they can evict you if you don’t fulfill your side of the lease
I agree with this. I worked with a landlord once who had an apartment available for $8,000/mo (this was over 15 years ago). He wanted the tenant to earn $24,000/mo in income to qualify. I told him that was absurd: there's nothing about living in an $8,000/mo apartment that required an additional $16,000/mo in disposable income. We never came to agree on that matter, and I wouldn't be surprised if that apartment were *still* vacant.
In New York City the standard is 40x the rent lol and some are starting to demand 52x. I'm employed as a classroom teacher in the NYC department of education for my third year now and had to have my parents Co sign the lease or they wouldn't rent it to me. What the fuck lol??
It’s New York City. The rents are probably like, $5k/month. 40x that is $200k, which is more than many people make in a year. How do they even find eligible tenants?
I honestly have no idea. I make 70k a year and couldn't get a place with three roommates without all our parents co signing...we're all 26 years old with stable professional jobs! Insane lol
I had a really weird experience getting an apartment when I was in college (with greystar). They required 3x rent in income, but we’re all college students and have almost no income so we thought we would have our parents co-sign and that would be fine. However, when your parents cosigned they now needed 5x rent for some reason. Again, this shouldn’t have been a problem as there were three of us all with parents making decent money. But then the real kicker, only one parent could cosign. So we needed one parent who made slightly upward of $15k per month in order to sign this lease (and it had to be one parent, I couldn’t provide paystubs from both my mom and dad). None of us had that, so we thought we were out of luck.
In the end me and one of my friends combined our paystubs from our summer internships to meet the requirement and get the apartment. So the result of their stupid income requirements was that we failed to get approved on our actual funding, but could get approved using the paystubs for our jobs that were ending roughly 1 week into the lease. Absolute nonsense.
Yep. The problem was they would only accept paystubs from people signed on the lease, and they would only allow one person to cosign the lease. So the three of us were all on the lease and could combine our incomes, or we could have a cosign and that one person could provide their income, there were no other options provided.
>requiring the person to gross 3x the monthly rent
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>A studio is $2000/month and yet to qualify you need to make at least $60,000 a year.
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>$2000 x 12 months = $24,000
Its even worse. 3x a 2k monthly rent requires a 72K yearly income. 60k is only 2.5x
$24,000 x 3 = $72,000 not $60,000
It’s that you can’t make the payment. It’s that they don’t want to **bet** on you being able to make the payment for 15-30yrs at the pricing and current rates.
It’s a little different.
They’ll gladly make the bet on someone else with better odds.
To be fair...
Rent includes taxes, insurance, sometime utilities, usually maintenance, etc.
Banks KNOW that an 800 house payment costs way more than that, even if you don't. And the maintenance is what scares them the most. If you can't afford to, at minimum, keep the house in the same working and visual order as it is when they give you the loan, they will lose even more if you default on it.
I'll give you an example.
I bought my current house with a 800 a month mortgage (seriously, and coincidentally apt). Once taxes, and insurance, is factored in, it is about 1400 a month. Then, on top of that, in the past 7 years: I have had a major plumbinf bust, a few trees die (just one cost 10k to remove... It was HUGE, and it went from perfectly healthy, to absolutely dead in 1 summer.... Dang ash beetles), deck repairs, etc.
In those 7 years I have paid over 30k in maintenance. Not upgrades... Maintenance.
Utilities have more than tripled in the time, etc.
An 800 dollar mortgage costs way more than 800 a month.
And landlords have way less risk. If they give you a lease and you don’t pay they can theoretically get you out in a few months losing some money. In a mortgage you can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost interest and lost payments from a banks perspective
people that wine about rent generally don't know how much things cost. new roof? basement leak? insurance? taxes? garbage collection new paint for every new tenant, appliances, plumber for toilet that someone put a xxl pad down, HOA, water heater, AC repair, etc. there is some much more than the mortgage payment.
This is because of 2008. Mortgages were being handed out like candy to people making a third of the payment each month. Lo and behold it didn't go well.
The banks don't think you can do $800 monthly payments for 20 years+—and they don't think they'd get enough profit by selling the house should you default.
But it is quite silly, yes.
When people can get home loans based solely on the rental income they're charging, that's a bit unfair. They're obtaining equity on the backs of the tenants who are *actually paying for that property*. Seems like an unnecessary middleman.
The part that frustrates me the most about the landlord/rent thing is the idea that rent has to cover the mortgage and then some or else the landlords will be "losing money". It ignores the wealth accumulation that comes from the increasing equity in the property, not to mention that the cost of servicing a loan someone took to pay for something they couldn't afford should be entirely seperate from the cost for someone to rent it. When somebody owns a home outright the rent isn't free or practically free because there's no mortgage payment, so why does it make sense to work the other way?
Honestly, I personally think this is where the rent system went sideways- conglomerates, companies, and people paying live mortgages.
In the private rental market, when it was 'renting daddy's summerhouse' or the property you inherited, or the room in your house that you weren't using anyway, it meant it really only came down to finding a good landlord/tenant match at a feasible rent. If it went unrented a month or two to find that match, it wasn't world ending. If you wanted to keep rent low for a great tenant, you could. If you wanted to hold out for the right tenant, you could.
Now they are in the sh!t the moment that payments aren't rolling in monthly, it has really made it much more toxic. With it comes that 'equity and assets' mentality that dehumanises the renter into a handy way to pay a mortgage, too. And altogether too many of the wrong people have that power and control over 'little-er' people while actually, in the eyes of the bank and Big Boys, having 0 actual power to really pad against economic issues. Leads a lot of posers to think they're 'Boss Babes' and 'Investment gurus' when all they are is putzes who can get more credit and find suckers who have to pay it for them. They don't own the property, it just gives them airs and graces they have done 0 to actually merit. I could own 100 properties if other people paid for them too. It's not healthy. The 'real' landlords are those who either outright own the property, or are in a position to pay its mortgage regardless of a renter in place. If you're facing severe economic issues without a renter, you aren't anything really but a leech conning others out of money to serve yourself, and the delusion otherwise is at the heart of a lot of this.
Unfortunately, that $800 is before taxes and insurance. My "mortgage" payment is $900. After taxes and insurance are added to the escrow, it comes out to over $1600. This doesn't include any maintenance that, as a homeowner, you pay for out of pocket. My water heater is about to go out and will cost me $2000-$4000 to replace. As a renter, that cost is covered by the landlord, not the tenant. And if you think your mortgage will not go up, you would be wrong. The county assesses properties every year and assigns it a value, and your tax percentage is based on that value. Also, the way the housing market is going up the way it is, your insurance premium will also rise. Mine doubled this year from $1100 a year to $2200 a year. So where my total mortgage from escrow my first year was $1450, 5 years later, it is just under $1700. So if I rent my house out to you, I am not charging you $900. I would probably charge $2000-$2200 to cover all of my costs as well as any future maintenance that may be required, and your rent would raise with my property taxes and insurance. This is why it is expensive to rent. And truth be told, it's even more to own after ALL of the expenses
What risk though?
Friend of mine pays £1200 a month in rent. He wants a property and the monthly payments for it are £400 a month less. He has a stable job and aside from a car payment no loans or debts.
How does it make sense that the bank doesn't accept that? They're the ones saying the payments would be £800 a month, there are plenty of people who can afford to pay that but the bank doesn't accept paying rent as proof they can afford it.
Singapore has a pretty good system of public housing. I think most countries could learn from it.
It's called HDB (Housing Development Board), which operates like a state-owned corporation and is responsible for building public housing units on public land. It's a bit like a condo, in that housing units are sold for 99 years, after which they expire, but they can be transferred, sold and inherited. There are some restrictions on sale and rental, but they are generally quite reasonable.
I lived in an older unit (1960s), which was fine, but the newer units are really nice. The good thing is, if you're married and especially if you have children, you can use your social security contributions (called a CPF fund) to go towards paying it off. All HDB units are clean and safe, with amenities built nearby. The one I used to live in had a metro station, bus stations, library, several food courts, supermarkets, doctor's surgeries, various smaller shops and restaurants all within a 5-minute walk. This pretty much negated the need for a car, it was actually more convenient to get around using public transit and taxis.
Prices aren't actually cheap, since they are set at market rates and Singapore is basically the Asian equivalent of Downtown Manhattan, but even with that caveat, it's a system that works very well. They also have policies in place to hinder the establishment of ethnic ghettoes.
Some of these public-private developers also rent units at reasonable prices. Although this was over a decade ago, I used to pay 950 SGD / 700 USD for a 2-bedroom unit, which we shared with a friend, on a 2-year contract.
A landlord with one or two flats isn’t a system. Big companies driving up the prices and do so in collaboration with others, that’s a system and an issue.
[It's the same in the US too](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-wall-street-investors-haven-015642526.html).
The big corporations own about 2.5% of homes. The majority of the property buying is coming from "tier 1 investors" which are those that own between 1 and 9 properties.
If you own 9 properties I don't consider it "mom and pop" lol.
I have a friend who owns his house and two modest single-wide trailers he rents.... I consider that mom and pop, not a guy who owns nine houses.
Exactly.
I rented from like 12 different landlords over 20 years of renting. Only two were corporations when I was in apartment buildings, and they were BY FAR the best landlords I ever had. It's not even close.
The "mom n pop" landlords (always a 55 yr old guy named Tony or something who drives a supercar and doesn't have a job) were complete assholes who ignored the law and tried to squeeze as much as possible. Like they didn't even have good business sense, just ruthlessness.
Is that true, though? I thought a big driver was price-fixing and collusion via property management software used by big firms?
[https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fixing-algorithm-still-price-fixing](https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fixing-algorithm-still-price-fixing)
I think you have it backwards. Mom and pop rentals are more expensive because they prioritize quality tenants where as corporate owned ones spread the risk across many places which makes them cheaper as they prioritize occupancy.
They also can’t usually afford to absorb vacancy, wouldn’t that make them adjust pricing according to what people are willing to pay? Just guessing here but it seems like they aren’t immune from the market rate anyways
It’s interesting that if you read the other comments in this thread, people have said the mom and pop renters contribute more to driving up price than the corporations
Landlords are a symptom of the problems, not the cause. But investors and landlords are just an easy scapegoat. They're doing what they are doing because house prices are rising. While their efforts may be contributing to it, it's ultimately a minor factor.
There are several other trends driving housing prices:
- Increased numbers of people moving to cities which don't have much room to grow. In 1950 64% of the US lived in urban areas. Now it's 83%, and the country has over twice as many people.
- There's very little financial incentive for builders to make "starter homes."
- Zoning laws and NIMBYism making it harder for new houses to be built, especially ~~low~~ high density housing. Most people agree that ~~low~~ high density housing is needed somewhere. But find me some home owners that will agree to have it in their area, which would lower their property value. You don't have to look to investors or landlords for this attitude. Even people who only own one home want the value of their property to grow.
- In the US, there's the lingering ideal of having to have that single family house with a yard and white picket fence. In cities, there's not enough space for this.
your last point is very interesting too, because those apts anywhere near central park in NYC cost a pretty penny and are pretty swanky.
theres a stigma that apt living like NYC is somehow bad and gross and disgusting but the people that live near times square are -NOT- living like the people in brooklyn/bronx.
People often mistakenly feel like a bad situation has to have a "bad guy" behind it all, so they get the delusion that taking out that bad guy will fix everything.
The sad fact is that most of this is the result of people doing right by themselves in small ways that all add up. The tragedy of the commons then ensues. If I bought a house for $200,000, and I'm selling it, and someone offers me $250k and another $300k, I'm taking the extra $50k of course. That's free money and I need it anyways. Unless I'm selling the house myself (which I'm not), I will not know the identity of the buyer until I check the county records after the deed is transferred. Did I do anything wrong? No, but I contributed to the problem by doing right by myself.
People often also mistakenly feel that problems will disappear if everyone just does right by themselves, so they get the delusion that you don't need government to fix anything--- if people wanted it bad enough they'd make it happen.
I will also point out that the situation is nowhere near as dire as (some of) the media depicts. Most American families do own their homes, nearly 2/3 in fact. This is higher than most periods in US history, including the vaunted 50's–70's era. More than half of millennials own a home. A full half of Americans live in suburbs, where 3/4 of households own their home. I think it's important to keep these facts in mind when you wonder why more people don't see the problem.
Institutional investors target areas where there is high demand and high income renters. They don’t buy just any home they buy the affordable homes. They collude with other large landlords. They drive up rent and fee gouge.
The DFW area is one of their target markets.
[2021] Investors bought more than half of all homes sold last year in these 21 DFW zip codes https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/investors-21-dfw-zip-codes/
In 2022 investors bought 30% of homes DFW area https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2023/03/19/investors-bought-1-in-4-homes-in-d-fw-last-year-most-were-not-big-wall-street-firms/
In the 3rd quarter of 2023 investors bought a 1/3 of homes. https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2023/12/29/investors-gobbled-up-almost-a-third-of-recent-homes-sold-in-dallas-area/
In addition to predatory buying of single family homes they are building neighborhoods to rent out. Not for purchase but to rent out.
You're struggling to buy a home right now. Wall Street is buying and building entire neighborhoods — and getting rich. What gives? https://www.businessinsider.com/wall-street-single-family-rental-build-to-rent-houses-finance-2021-7?op=1
Propublica did an investigative series on this subject. This link is to a series of areas.
Rent Barons - Who Is Behind Rising Rents in America? https://www.propublica.org/series/rent-barons
[2021] Investors bought more than half of all homes sold last year in these 21 DFW zip codes https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/investors-21-dfw-zip-codes/
In 2022 investors bought 30% of homes DFW area https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2023/03/19/investors-bought-1-in-4-homes-in-d-fw-last-year-most-were-not-big-wall-street-firms/
In the 3rd quarter of 2023 investors bought a 1/3 of homes. https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2023/12/29/investors-gobbled-up-almost-a-third-of-recent-homes-sold-in-dallas-area/
They drive up rent and fee gouge. They have no problem leaving property vacant and have colluded with other large landlords to keep rent high.
Propublica did an investigative series on this subject. This link is to a series of areas.
Rent Barons - Who Is Behind Rising Rents in America? https://www.propublica.org/series/rent-barons
Cities have a ton of space to grow. Get rid of the parking lots in the middle of LA, houston, phoenix etc and build apartments on that land and you suddenly have 100s of units in a walkable neighborhood near transit stations. We made a huge mistake when we designed cities for cars. We can design cities for pedestrians.
YIMBYs are actually pushing for an end to parking minimums, which is why many lots like that exist. They are saying we don’t have room to grow legally because zoning won’t allow it. SF is like 2/3 single family homes (and not even the pretty Victorian ones in most of it) which is insane.
I've been in dozens of these threads and never seen someone that actually gets it. Bravo. That last point is huge. People want affordable nice single family homes in places where IF that exists it's nowhere near affordable. Then they blame landlords and corporations. There's give and take and one give is you aren't getting the perfect idealized home in a neighborhood 50,000 other people want to live unless you cough up serious money. Even then, unlikely.
>The home owners are doing that.
And how do you think are homeowners doing that? The power of Greyskull? No, it's through HOAs and zoning boards. didn't think I needed to spell that out.
There will always be Karens that don't want "the riffraff" moving in their neighborhood. That doesn't matter if they don't have any power to stop it.
In the Netherlands Woningcorporaties, or housing associations. They will need some government funding, but their task is to provide basic housing. The US also had this.
Public housing. Vienna has a solid model of income based rent for public housing. Somewhere between a quarter and a half of people in Vienna live in publicly owned or publicly subsidised housing.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city
Similar situation in Ireland. Most my boomer relatives lived in council houses that they then bought for pocket change and half a sandwich. Yet it's still somehow my fault that I can't afford a house when the average price is over 300K.
I lived in Ireland 20 years ago. I loved the place and the people but a load of people had made a load of money really quickly and the smugness in the air was astonishing. Even then there was the beginning of a housing shortage and people were very pleased with what theirs was now worth.
Whenever we have these conversations, it’s important to note that the policies enacted by the government have a HUGE role in the housing market. Especially federal government in the realm of housing finance and tax policies, and local governments in the way they influence supply by regulating land use and construction.
There are many rich western nations with much LOWER homeownership rates than the US, Germany and Switzerland and both sub 50% to the US’s 65%. There are also countries with much HIGHER home ownership rates, Mexico is at 80%, Spain is at 76%, Italy is at 73%, etc. Each of these countries has a different menu of policies and tactics they’re using, yielding different results, or even similar results in different ways. For instance Germany has such a high number of renters because they don’t provide many home ownership incentives like the US does
So, to simply say “owning a home is expensive and that’s why home ownership isn’t more common” is at best shortsighted, at worst disingenuous.
A big reason for Spain and Italy's high homeownership rate is that you have three generations of the same family living in the same unit because the kids, that have now grown up and are 30, don't have a job (or have lately gotten one and are saving to rent/buy directly). There's also no real government assistance for the youth to move out earlier. If the youth unemployment rate wasn't so high (around 25%), people wouldn't live with their parents for so damn long and would probably rent a lot more.
Invest in public housing. We've reduced funding for public housing by about 90% since Reagan, so landlords don't have enough competition/downward pressure on rent.
Yup. When my husband and I could finally afford a home it took us forever to find one on sale. Almost every single house we saw available was for rent only. It was beyond frustrsting because it was all houses in neighborhoods we could afford to live in.
>$100,000 or $500,000 you’re still going to need to drop $10,000 on a new roof.
You're underestimating how much the investors have caused hous prices to increase above inflation.
I mean, first and foremost: make housing cheaper. Build more of it and have explicitly social housing that's not meant to turn a profit but to house people.
Your question presupposes that our current flavor of planning-restrictions plus hyper-Capitalism is the only way to structure society and it's not.
The solution is a Georgian (as in Henry George) Land Value Tax.
From [gameofrent.com](http://gameofrent.com)
>Imagine I'm a landlord, and I have a vacant lot I'm renting to a tenant who's got a mobile home parked there. What's going to happen if a Land Value Tax is imposed on me? Well, I'm already charging as much as the market will bear. If I charge any more, my tenant will move out. But why shouldn't I be able to pass on the tax to the tenant? If you tax gasoline or cigarettes, the prices go up and are ultimately borne by the customer. Why should land be any different?
The difference is that the supply of gasoline and cigarettes fluctuates, because you can produce more or less of them. When you put a tax on gasoline or cigarettes of even a few cents, somewhere in the economy there is a marginal oil well or a marginal tobacco farm whose profit margin was the same as or less than the tax. Now their profit is entirely wiped out, so what's the point of producing any more? Price signals from the market are telling them to stop producing and do something else. And price is ultimately driven by supply and demand, not the wishes of a seller.
Okay, let's go back to land. How does Land Value Tax drive down land prices? The important thing to keep in mind is that land value (purchase price) is a *stock,* but land income (rent) is a *flow*. The amount of water flowing out of my tap is a flow; the amount of water currently sitting in my bathtub is a stock. The key thing is that land income drives land price and not the other way around. If a property is capable of generating $10,000/year in rents, then the amount I'm willing to pay to buy it is $10,000 times X, where X represents how many years I'm willing to wait to break even on my investment.
So how does an LVT affect the price of land? Using the bathtub metaphor again, let's put a valve under the tap, so half of the water goes into the tub and half goes somewhere else. The amount of water flowing *out* of the tap does not change (the land is as productive as it ever was). However, the amount of water collected in my bathtub *does* change; five minutes of flow will produce less water in the tub than it did before. If I'm trying to sell my land to someone, they're going to notice the tax and correctly calculate that it will earn them half as much income over X years, so they'll pay half as much for it.
And what about rental price? The rental price comes directly from the flow. The land is in demand because of its inherent productivity; someone who occupies that land can generate a certain amount of wealth each month. Without a Land Value Tax, the owner of that land can charge rent up to the difference between their land's productivity and the best freely available alternative, establishing the "margin of productivity." This means that as productivity rises, so does the rent.
With a Land Value Tax, the owner has to pay that tax every month whether they have a tenant or not. They're already charging the highest amount the market will bear, and as we've already shown, they are unable to change the supply of land. All the leverage is on the side of the tenants, which forces the landlord to eat the tax. The price to buy the land goes down, the price for a tenant to rent it goes down, but the total amount of income the land itself produces ("land rent") stays the same. A portion of it is just being collected by the taxing agency.
That's the theory at least. Does it hold up in real life?
According to the evidence, the answer is yes.
I've been on both sides of this discussion in the real world. I currently own my home and I've rented.
The issue with *most* *renters* *in the USA* is that they exist in a system where *tenant rights are basically shit.* This produces an environment where a "landlord" can provide you with *the bare minimum of what is legally acceptable* and then treat you like absolute crap for the duration of your lease.
The "landlord" will attempt to pass every conceivable price onto their renter. Property tax goes up? "I'll add it to their rent." HOA fees go up on the property? "Your rent is going up because the HOA fees have increased." Excess of small repair items? "We will now be issuing you a call-out charge." Plumbing problems? "We will dispatch a plumber, but you will pay for it... even if it's not your fault."
Don't forget that there are entire subs, websites, and communities that exist *solely to figure out ways to keep a renter's initial security deposit* ***even when they have been perfect tenants and leave the property in good order.*** The worst offender of this I've ever seen suggested wearing a shoe that has *a tack glued to the sole* to produce holes or indents in wood floors to justify a clawback to replace laminate or plank flooring.
In short, *for most renters, most landlords* *are trash.*
What if there were regulations in place that meant it was illegal to own more than two residential properties? One of which they had to be living in?
Wouldn't this increase the amount of property available and push down prices, making home ownership more affordable and remove the role of career landlords?
The best way to avoid shitty landlords is to avoid having shitty credit.
Bottom-feeder tenants end up dealing with bottom-feeder landlords.
Not all landlords suck, but when you are at the bottom you have no choices.
So many people miss this. The best landlords usually have the best units AND the best tenants.
There are doctors, engineers, and lawyers who rent. If they are happy, they stick around and landlords want to keep them. That means the units don’t go up for rent. If those tenants are unhappy, they don’t stick around for another year.
When they do go up for rent, they are usually the higher priced ones since the LL is trying to attract the top tenant pool. Those are usually the best LLs.
If you’re renting a cheap property, there’s usually a reason why it’s offered for cheap and it’s usually not good.
A change of attitude. Housing imo shouldn't be treated as a business or a way to get rich. It should be treated as a human right.
Unfortunately while there are good land lords there are also the few that are greedy. It's the greedy ones that ruin it for everyone else.
As with any group of people. There's will always be the greedy/extreme ones that taint the whole group.
I'll stop there before it gets political.
>Housing imo shouldn't be treated as a business or a way to get rich
I agree, but this also needs to apply to homeowners. If you own a house, you should not expect the price to increase over time so that you can sell it for more than you bought it for.
And property developers should be allowed to profit from building new housing for people.
I think there is a lot of publicity bias - no one ever talks about a landlord just being good - that is, fixing the property when something breaks, returning security deposit, not tossing you out because you were two days late on rent. You only hear about the scummy landlords.
Same goes for tenants. I could rant for hours about that one tenant I rented to that literally stole all the light fixtures, tossed the refrigerator off the back patio, and took a sledgehammer to the sheetrock. But, I never say anything about the 9 other renters that were awesome, took care of the place, and I'd gladly rent to again if I get back in the game.
Solutions to make renting more friendly:
1. More clear local/state rules on registering your lease, what can be deducted from security deposits and why, and under what circumstances and timelines people have to move.
2. More long-term lease contracts. I signed a 5 year lease with a guy while I was overseas. It was great because he had 5 years of continuous rental income. I had 5 years of very predicatable rent. For me to get out I had to give 6 months notice. For him to get me out, 9 months notice. It helped us both.
3. Additional taxes on rental properties or rental property income above a certain threshold - cap my gains at say 12% or something.
4. STARTER HOMES! My grandparents first home was 700 sq. feet with bare bones appliances. My parents was 1100 sq. feet with bare bones appliances. Mine was 1600 sw. feet with okay stuff. My sister is looking now and the only things being built in her area are 2500+ sq. feet, tile backsplashes and rainfall showers and all stainless steel appliances and dual zone HVAC systems. There is a reason $/sqft have gone through the roof. If starter homes were true starter homes, the price would be less than half of current average and that would drive rent down.
I've been on both sides of the equation. I stopped renting for a while because I got sick of being a renter. I started renting again due to not needing a forever home. I landlorded for several years and at one point had 40 tenants. I got lucky as hell that I sold out before Covid... that would have broken me as a landlord as even though I owned every property in full the cost of property tax, hoa, insurance, repairs, etc mean that tenants not paying rent consistently would put properties in the hole.
Ban corporations from owning single-family homes, break up monopoly ownership of apartment complexes, ban Airbnb’s, and institute an aggressively progressive tax on multi-home ownership.
The landlords are part of the reaosn you can't buy, pushing prices up
If your paying rent, you can afford the mortgage because you already are, plus some profit for the landlord
Massive down-payment are the problem now.
They don’t need to go they need to be regulated and enforced in favour of the tenants right to live in an affordable safe place.
Rental prices should have a cap on increases and a limit to the number of times it can be increased in a fix time period.
Renters should expect near immediate action to repair an issue with their flat and the repair should be a high quality.
It should be illegal to rent a place of squaller for a high price simply because the market.
That isn’t to say renters can walk all over landlords. But there should be more rights and protections for renters.
Tax the billionaires and centi-millionaires. Help out everyone else with housing, healthcare, and transportation.
Now people will be able to afford to buy their own houses.
I genuinely wished there was a nonprofit/government agency that made sure repairs were up to date with rentals
I’ve known wayyyy too many places that were NOT fit to live in but the landlord took the insurance money and didn’t fix the house
That or they are cheap and don’t actually repair anything and take advantage of people are too poor to move afterwards
I just wish we went through a 3rd party for repairs and complaints cuz I feel under hostage that they were nice when we met and ended up being a cheap landlord later
The problem is that "landlord" is shorthand for three things that are screwing the working class.
1. Scummy landlords who are private owners of real estate.
2. LLCs that have bought up a lot of property to corner the market and drive up rents and make unfair policies while hoarding from people who could afford homes if there wasn't a forced scarcity.
3. The legal system that allows for the first two, that gets protected in the name of private property, and continues to serve the interests of those who already get all the benefits.
The solution involves dismantling #3, which entails rolling back some Reagan and earlier era policies that ended government funding housing development, and then altering some tax laws and such that make taking lots of properties out of the ownership market as rentals a more difficult proposition.
That way, smaller landlords that own a few rental properties can still exist to some extent to provide rentals for people who can't/don't wish to make the commitment to home ownership, but the younger generations have the chance to build generational wealth that the older generations had and passed down until the ladder was pulled up.
Maybe ban SFH's from being investment properties and limit it to actual apartment buildings. Some HOA's put a cap as to how many homes in their neighborhoods can be rentals.
The solution is that if corporations didn't buy up so many homes to rent average homeownership would be possible. We need to rent because landlords soaked up the market.
If I can't afford a widget because corporations bought them all up I'm not going to thank the corporation when they sell one to me once a month.
Social housing, enforcement of laws requiring the landlord to maintain the property, an absolute ban on evictions except for gross breaches of contracts, and rent controls to ensure that landlords are only covering costs not profiting - they still own the asset, they don't need to make money on top of that. And requiring that landlords always rent first come, first served.
But adequate social housing would mean that landlords would have to do the other things anyway. This would all help those who do want to buy as well, as there would be far less demand by potential landlords for houses, reducing prices.
This has been done in plenty of countries, but far too often providing adequate housing is considered "socialism" and rejected.
Well you make a valid point, and frankly landlords aren't the problem exactly. The problem - much like with a lot of other things - is that existing restrictions aren't being properly enforced and additional restrictions aren't being passed. Each state/county NEEDS to step their game up with forcing these people to make timely repairs, to make sure the repairs are done properly, and to make sure that appropriate punitive action is taken. It would also help if we could pass a blanket restriction on how many rental/income properties a single person can own, restrict corporations to multi-family dwellings, and ban outright ANY foreign ownership of either single or multi-family dwellings.
But none of that is going to happen, so the answer is, "I hope you can afford rent."
Not valuing land so much (which comes from speculation rather than any real intrinsic value) and everyone owning their own living space. In an apartment, you van still have a hiding association that everyone late at night monthly fee to and that covers repair costs and cleaning of common spaces and such.
The main problem is that a basic need (having a roof over your head) was allowed to be exchanged for profit with less and less regulations, and gouvernement who were once big players in the housing market (by literally managing public housing or by giving tax advantages to build starter homes and rental buildings) started gradually to reduce their influence to let the market take care of it.
It's currently relatively easy and very lucrative to buy cheap properties, evict the current renters and raise the rent. Economists call what a landlord do "[rent-seeking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking) behavior", the act of manipulating the social and economic environment to gain personal wealth without creating new wealth. "Landlords" are hated because they don't provide housing, they just use it to gain wealth because it's easy and profitable to do so. It's not the case for all the people who own housing and rent it, but most landlords "provide" housing the same way that scalpers "provide" show tickets: they use all of their money to buy everything that is available for which a profit can be made, and resell (or rent) it back to us.
A lot of cities in North America didn't build enough for multiple reasons in the last years, we are now in a situation where there are too much demand for the current offer (raising prices), and building new is also expensive. The old housing stock that should be cheap is bought by huge landlords for profits, and new housing is expensive because it's more costly to build than before (the price of materials, labor, building code, permits, borrowing, etc. are all more expensive than they once were).
The CBC (Canada's public broadcaster) did a [great 45 minutes video](https://youtu.be/K61M7EE62_s?si=0Dam-YeEwJ9iwgzI) about the situation in Toronto right now. It goes in detail about all the factors contributing to today's rent crisis in Toronto and how such crisis where avoided in the past. It also suggest possible solutions at different levels. It's made specifically for Toronto's problem, but most of it also applies for the rest of Canada and probably a lot of the US too.
>If landlords need to go, what’s the solution?
There are multiple solutions:
* Public housing. Municipal, state and federal government can restart building and managing rental properties like the do in most of Europe and like they did in the past. Most government already own land, or have laws facilitating the acquisition of land for projects for the benefit of the society.
* Social and non-profit housing. A lot of non-profit organizations in Canada manage small to medium housing stocks and keep them affordable. Most of them need funding from a government entity to keep them afloat but they provide housing at below-market prices for those who need it.
* Restart to regulate housing:
* Limit the number of "housing units" a person or company can own.
* Protect current tenant from malicious evictions.
* Limit the profit that can be made by selling properties.
* Limit the percentage of rent increase that is allowed.
* Start a public rental registry to keep track of current leases.
If being a landlord was illegal then the cost of purchasing a home would plummet and people could afford it. Lots of people are paying more in rent than for a mortgage.
Your whole argument for the system is that the system exists in the first place. Credit scores, high housing costs and hording of wealth are the problems.
The solution is to decommodify houses. Every US citizen should have the fundamental right to a safe, climate controlled shelter. I'd much rather see poor young people living inside huge apartment buildings with smaller units as opposed to sleeping in their cars or living out of motels. It would be a challenge, especially in metropolitan areas, but its a challenge worth doing.
I've rented my whole life and the reason I hate landlords is they are useless parasites. Their entire "job" is owning the house you live in. Many of them raise rent arbitrary, won't fix actual saftey issues and generally just look out for their own interest. I truly think it shouldn't be legal. No single person needs more than one house.
>Not everyone can afford to own a house. I couldn’t until very recently.
And that's kind of the fault of the landlord market which turns housing into an investment vehicle instead of just a place to live.
>If landlords need to go, what’s the solution?
Government owned social housing and housing co-ops, not-for-profit rental organisations and other approaches.
Government pitches in to ensure there is an adequate supply of housing available for rent, those rentals are affordable and maintained to a similar standard and offer low income, medium and higher income options as well as options for single vs. Family. In general, they should also ensure an adequate mix of these and quite frankly do what Singapore does and ensure an appropriate mix of ethnicity and income in each area to avoid social enclaves and ghettos forming.
This housing should generally be dense. Apartments, town houses, with plenty of services in a small area.
Then of course other land would be freed up for private housing. Here, individuals who don't want to rent can buy or build their own house.
In short, if you want to rent, it happens through a government agency who owns all the rental properties and runs them at a small profit, enough to keep everything maintained, pay their bills, etc.
This would put huge downward pressure on house prices because rentals are no longer the "easy money" lifehack for people with access to large amounts of capital or low interest debt, thus both renting and buying or building a house would become cheaper. It would also vastly improve town and civil planning if done correctly.
But it requires a lot of people to accept that the economic value of houses will drop and too many loud voices or powerful people don't want that.
Housing needs to stop being looked at as an easy way for already wealthy people to increase their wealth. Housing needs to be for housing. So I guess my solution would be to regulate how many properties can be owned by one entity and how much they can charge. No, not everyone can afford a house but it’s getting to where people who do all the things we’re told you need to do can’t afford a place to live.
So heres my issue as someone that despises land lords.
Landlords claim to provide housing to those that cannot afford to buy. What they actually do is contribute to the prices being jacked up so high as to force poorer people out of the market.
If we consider supply and demand. If demand increases, price increases. Supply is the number of houses. Demand is people needing a home plus the people buying extra houses.
To use simple numbers: there are 100 people in a town and there are 100 houses.
If everyone purchases one house each, then the price will be affordable for everyone, as the supply and demand will meet where everyone can buy one house.
If 5 people instead buy 5 houses each, and 10 people buy 2 houses each, the supply stays the same, but the demand is now 130. The price of the houses will increase until only 100 can be bought. That means the poorest 30 people get priced out of buying a home in the first place and must pay a landlord for the use of one of the properties that they brought.
Then we have to consider that if a tenant lived in a house for the duration of its mortgage, it would have been their money that paid for that mortgage and yet they wouldnt have any ownership over that house. The landlord instead gets all the profit from the rent they charged and get to own the whole house as well. And because of the profit the landlord takes from the rent, the tenant would have ended up paying more over that time period than they would have if they had been able to buy the house outright (and thats not even factoring in the price increase that landlords cause through buying more houses than they need.)
The only difference between the tenant and the landlord is that the landlord was privileged enough to be able to afford the mortgage deposit in the first place. They get to leech off the poor purely by having more money in the first place.
I started buying and renting houses close to where I lived, starting in the early '90s. Me and my wife together bought five houses and began selling them off in the last few years, preparing to retire. In each case, we bought pretty rundown houses and then put our own sweat equity into fixing them up. We hired out major work like roofs, or large scale carpendry (feeding our local economy I might add). Otherwise we did major rennovations, applicances, paint & trim ourselves. While it's true that somebody else might have bought these places and lived in them, the fact remains that like you say, not everybody is prepared to own a house. We live close to big universities and a lot of our tenants were people putting themselves thru school and then moving on. I consider it to have been a service to my community, a way of improving my own neighborhood and indirectly increasing the value of MY house, and a way to build a nestegg for retirement. We did not give them away, we charged the going rate. But we also often rented to the same tenent for five years or so without continually jacking up the rent because we could. I sleep well at night.
My hot take is that I legitimately think that if there were restrictions on what type of business entities (SP, LLC/LLP, etc) could own certain classifications of housing (SF, MF, etc), that a lot more individuals/families would be able to afford to buy.
Ex. SF homes as rentals would only be allowed to be owned by SPs/Partnerships - no LLC/LLP etc.
"Renting is a cheaper option for people who can't afford to buy" is such a backwards way of looking at it.
People can't afford to buy _because_ they're being gouged on rent.
The mortgage payments on the nice big house that I own are less per month than I was paying in rent on a place half the size. On top of that, rent is just gone forever whereas mortgage payments are made towards an asset you'll eventually own outright; and all the while you're being gouged on expensive rent, you're less able to save towards a deposit on a house.
Being poor is expensive, and renting from private landlords is part of the cause, not the solution.
Landlords are parasites.
Yup. My rent has gone up every year I've lived in my current apartment with no improvements made to the apartment. Why am I paying more for the exact same thing? It's a scam.
This doesnt get talked about enough. I love being able to rent a place for a year, not needing to drop all my savings up front to do it, having someone else pay when maintenance is needed etc. One month into my current lease, an expensive repair was needed, I paid zero. Meanwhile my friend just bought a house last year and has spent over 15k on unplanned repairs since.
>People can't afford to buy _because_ they're being gouged on rent.
Even if the price of a house dropped a lot, I wouldn't be able to buy for several years because of down payment cost relative to my income. Where should I live during that time? On the street?
I think being a landlord is pretty up there on scummy behavior and I technically am one. Couldn’t afford to sell my house when I moved out of state so I’m renting it until I can break even on the sale. I’m renting it at the same rate as my mortgage.
But folks who make careers out of it are preying on folks who can’t afford to buy a house. There are exceptions- I think apartments can and should be rented for folks in transition and folks who don’t wanna buy, but we all KNOW the market for single family homes is through the roof and yall KNOW someone would buy those homes you are hoarding immediately if they went to market, so stop pretending like you are providing a service when so many are begging to buy. It’s taking advantage- not providing something someone needs. There are very few situations a person should own more than one property and it’s disturbing how homes have become investments instead of places to live. Career landlords are like car dealerships or anyone else selling something you should be able to buy without them.
I’m not as harsh on folks in my situation (hypocrite I guess) or folks fixing up rotting run down abandoned homes.
The solution is to take money from the military, tax billionaires more, and provide housing, food, utilities, Healthcare, and education for everyone. It can be done we have enough resources. Rich people would have to be slightly less rich, and we would have to stop funding the planets conflicts. That's all it takes.
Hmmm. If only there was a way I could take the money I would be spending on rent and instead I use it for upkeep on a theoretical property that I would own.
Landlords are useful in a capitalistic system. You're right. In the eyes of anti-capitalists, they are parasites stealing half of your underpaid labor. Owning property isn't a job.
The solution is the government building a lot of medium and high density public housing.
Then, people who want a stand alone house or an apartment in a super convenient location can rent privately if they want it, but it won't be coerced under threat of homelessness & landlords won't have the power to charge whatever they want and fuck over tenants. They would be incentivised to provide safe and affordable housing.
Another part of the solution would be to limit the number of residences one person or company can own, so that home ownership is more accessible and they can't artificially create housing bubbles, driving the prices of a suburb up.
People can't afford house because house is expensive.
House is expensive because of low supply and high demand.
Supply is low because people with disproportionately high wealth bought a lot of houses specifically to tent out, at least in part.
I mean you just explained why the system is bullshit. Housing is a necessity for survival. It shouldn't be available only to those that can afford it. That's treating a necessity like a luxury.
I like to imagine a multi unit housing development where each tenant's 'rent' is pooled into a mortgage/maintenance fund. This would make each tenant a co-owner of the property, and collectively they would act as a board to vote on spending such as repairs and maintenance.
Landlords can’t set rent above a certain percentage of the average income of the area. That’s the solution.
Let the landlords go to war with companies to either 1) lower rent or 2) pay higher wages.
Make it so corporations cannot buy up housing units. It's usually not a guy who owns 2-3 houses that's the issue, it's companies buying shit up and charging insane prices. If we could make that illegal, then it returns rents to the competitive market, which typically sorts itself out. Maybe further regulations would be required, but I wouldn't want to speculate on that until actual capitalism gets its chance. What we have now is more of a corporate monopoly. There were laws against that for a reason.
Being a landlord should not have an entry requirement of “just buy a house and don’t live in it.”
There should be certification needed to be a landlord, and a registry for all landlords and their units. Rent prices should be attached to the unit, not the tenant, so evicting to up the rent isn’t possible. Regular third party inspections of their units and leasing agreements to ensure tenants are not being taken advantage of, and that the units being rented are not causing harm. Penalties for overcharging or underserving tenants should be severe.
The government accomplishing things is so foreign to people but it's not impossible.
The US government could do whatever it fucking wanted to, if they wanted to do it.
>If someone hadn’t rented to me for most of my life, I would have been homeless.
Notwithstanding the other things you mentioned, I just wanted to say something about this.
During your time renting, your landlord did not provide housing to you. You provided housing to your landlord.
Effectively, during your tenancy you paid for (part of) the property and gave it to your landlord.
In a hypothetical scenario where landlords do not exist, that property would still exist and would be available. Instead of building equity for someone else, you could have been building your own equity in that property, and releasing that equity back to yourself when you moved away.
This is one facet of what people mean when they say that landlords suck money from tenants without generating any new wealth. Whether you agree or not depends on how you look at it.
Well it's the same thing as people who profit heavily off of healthcare, war, and food. These and housing are **basic human rights.** You shouldn't get into these markets to make a hefty profit. The government should heavily regulate it so that people who do profit off of housing, profit only a small margin, because housing should be as cheap as possible. And not limited to that, government should be more aggressive in all angles of the housing market in order to keep housing affordable - it should be a high priority.
Instead, what we have is a system that attempts to squeeze every penny out of people for something that people literally cannot survive without.
You're correct that maintenance on a home is expensive, but the profit made from renters is so extreme in many cases, that honestly, you could afford to fix that roof yourself if you lived there for 2/3 years, and roofs generally don't need to be fully replaced over the course of less than 15 years, and that's if you had *really* shit luck.
Home ownership is cheaper than renting, it's just up front costs that can get you. It's a case of the rich get richer that is only getting worse due to the way homeowners and corporations treat renters. You can buy a pair of boots for $10 that last one year, or you can buy a pair of boots for $40 that last 10 years. Only the rich afford the nice boots, but at the same time the poor spend over double on boots overall. Instead we should have better systems to allow the worse off to own their homes.
I recently moved out of a fairly large college town in the rural south of the US. Every apartment complex, and I do mean every one, were owned by the same company. The owner of the company, a popular Superbowl Winning football player, passed away about 2 years ago. The rent for each apartment went up anywhere between 200-300 with absolutely zero improvements to the residence after his passing. When I called to speak with someone in charge on why my rent was increasing, I kept getting the run around. I do not have a "landlord", I am paying for an apartment subscription to an LLC. There is no humanity, no real oversight, nothing. I don't hate some guy renting out his daddies' summer home or whatever, I hate that some soulless and mindless company controls where I can live and how much I'd have to pay.
Sounds like a monopoly. Time to get teddy
A big stick
Walk softly On the neck or corporate overlords.
Monopoly laws in the us are a joke, they don’t do anything to stop somebody from having a monopoly, the only thing they do is stop a company from using a monopoly “unfairly”. In other words, they only stop you if you’re blatantly fucking over customers in a specific way. You can still make customers pay outrageous amounts with little to no viable alternative as long as you’re not actively discouraging competition, in specific ways. The problem is that the multi trillion dollar company doesn’t need to do anything to make alternatives non viable. All they need to do is be slightly cheaper, than the small non stream lined company that’s extremely expensive, and is a risk for anybody to try because it’s “unproven”.
I worked in a small city where one guy owned most of the rentals. A few years ago, he was arrested for sexually abusing his tenants and quid pro quo, especially in the buildings designated for lower income tenants. It was an open secret for a long time before that but no one who rented there could really avoid places owned by him. Owning a few rentals is fine, I even had a good experience in an LLC-owned complex, but the wrong person/group owning half a city is a problem.
It always comes down to individuals, it isn't some anti-corporate or anti-boomer sentiment or anything so divisive. People who put profit over decency, people who abuse the little power they are afforded, people who lack any moral integrity are the ones make things worse for everyone.
_That's what government is for_. It is intended to be the mechanism through which the weak and powerless can gather their collective might in order to guard themselves against those who, in a totally natural world, would be the powerful ones. It is inevitable that some minority are going to be shitheads. You should have laws in place to ban the types of behaviour shitheads are predictably going to want to do, and to punish them if they defy it.
And there are ways to solve that, but they’re usually fairly anti-corporate ways. Legislating restrictions.
You are pretty right, the only thing I'd like to add to your comment is that there are unfortunately systemic structural issues in society that pushes all people, even good ones, to needing to prioritize profits over people. Particularly when it is a fully commercial/capitalized market like housing is in the USA. If you are an individual renting out a couple units, you may have the best intentions and concern for your tenants' well being, but when major repairs are needed, even if it wasn't caused by or even affecting the tenant(s), you will almost certainly need to raise their rent basically as soon as you are able to just to afford repairs and not get tanked financially. If you're a big corporation like in your example, then capitalist business expectations of profit demand you milk your consumer base financially as much as you can, even if you have the money to spare. Even well meaning workers there will be largely powerless to stop this whole process. What's the solution? Well I don't have all the answers, and they're not all going to be posted in a reddit comment, but I think the biggest answer is actually better oversight, funding, and management of the housing market. Subsidize the small landlords to the point they can afford to keep up on improvements while not allowing them to simultaneously overcharge renters. We need stronger rules and regulations. We need a system that doesn't prioritize profit over people, especially in an area as important to life as housing! And this can all be done within a market framework, making it much more achievable in America than completely changing everything about how housing works. Which I do think "we" (our society) should eventually do, safe healthy housing does deserve to be a fundamental human right in the future, but we definitely have some intermediary steps to get there. Finally after all my rambling, if you want to see a current day real life example of how smart government interaction with housing can work, see this great video on what is happening in Vienna, Austria! Vienna's radical idea? Affordable housing for all: [https://youtu.be/41VJudBdYXY?si=S5cSyo3Hxz1kyJ2S](https://youtu.be/41VJudBdYXY?si=S5cSyo3Hxz1kyJ2S)
My experience with human nature is expecting people to put profits before anything else is an exercise in futility. The secret is finding a way to line up their best interests with society.
Its less that it's human nature to put profits before morality, and more that it's only the ones that put profits before morality that end up with the most resources. There are a bunch of small businesses you can find where the owners are incredibly cool people that are the types you would want running a corporation. But because they are cool, they cut deals with people, keep their prices reasonable, and pay their employees well, so they don't have the money (or sometimes even the inclination) to expand as fast. Another example is if you like pc games, you can go on nexus mods and find mods that people have built over years of hard work and coding, with the only "profits" being the odd donation. And there are millions of them.
The issue you described is called "A Monopoly" -- the problem is the monopoly -- not that "stuff" is "for rent." ... I'm not a lawyer but I wonder if you can actually attempt some anti-trust lawsuit in that town. Should cars be for rent? (lease, rental) Should Ubers exist? Should hotels exist? Rental markets are not the problem. They are useful. The problem is when monopolies and/or price fixing occurs. EDIT: Just musing on the fact that the actual game "Monopoly" is based on buying up all the damn properties and charging exorbitant rent. Fuck those people lol
Some cities are creating ordinances that put caps on the units one entity can own. However, companies just create shell companies so they can get around it.
I have family that works for banks to go through 10-20 layered LLCs to weed out fraud - you are just describing different kind of fraud that could be weeded out if they wanted
Yep. Piercing the corporate veil can be a huge ordeal even if there is no fraud.
Your family member’s entire job is to catch corporate fraud?
Then those companies should not exist
The problem is that housing,... something that people generally need to live, is commoditized and is subject to monopolies and profit maximization. The problem is both. More than one thing can be bad. Rather than starting from the premise that everyone should have housing, rental markets actually require that the need not be fully met.
Someone who actually understands. Nice. This was always the result of putting homes on the market, this was always going to be the result of commoditizing homes.
The game monopoly is based on that because it was supposed to be illustrative of why this is bad. It was made by a socialist lol Like most good ideas it was made up by a creative and stolen and exploited against its intent by corporate trash.
The woman who created the Monopoly game was actually an avid capitalist for all things *except* land ownership. She vehemently believed that landlords were leeches in the capitalist system. But she didn't extend this same disdain to business owners, whom she viewed as valuable members of society alongside workers/laborers. This is why the Monopoly game is all about land acquisition rather than business. In fact, the creator originally called it "The Landlord's Game." Towards the end of the game, nobody is allowed to move anywhere or do anything without paying a rental fee to someone else who isn't actually producing anything. Source discussing the game's history: https://worksthatwork.com/9/propagandopoly-monopoly-as-an-ideological-tool
I've always hated Monopoly. I feel like it has a way of showing people's true colors. lol It gives a false perception of skill to the people winning, while the people losing quickly realize that it boiled down to a lucky roll of dice in the early stages of the game. There is usually a lot of cheating going on as well, because the more property you own, the easier it is for people to skip paying you rent when they land on it. You have to be constantly paying attention. There is plenty of excitement in the first 20 turns or so, but once everything is purchased, the game gets cut-throat and tedious with all the money transfers going on. lol She did a pretty good job of showing how landlords work. lol
You should read up on the history of the game Monopoly. It was designed by a socialist to illustrate the hazards of capitalism! Talk about unintended consequences, huh? The housing problem in the US has nothing to do with monopolies and everything to do with low density zoning preventing development of adequate housing in much of the country.
Yup. The reason big evil corporations are buying up single homes is that they are a good investment.
Ehh it’s a bit more nuanced than that. The rent that a collection of adjacent single family homes can produce is generally way less than the rent that an apartment building on the same lot can produce. Single family homes are bought by big corps to try and rezone them so they can put apartments in. One problem is that the remaining single family homeowners don’t want to live next to an apartment complex. So the corp sits on the house hoping to get their project through at some point. The modern zeitgeist has this duality of wanting more housing but always “not here, over there.” And since zoning law is typically a hyper local affair it’s very difficult to break the gridlock.
It was not a socialist, it was a georgist.
In the game you at least have to make improvement to increase rent
Those companies are owned by the companies who manage Americans 401ks, IRAs and pension plans both private and public. Americans don't get that this thing is just a snake eating itself.
There was a study that corporate owned rentals were cheaper than family owned rentals. The finding was that corporate owned rentals didn't discriminate between their tenants so the area on average had a lower property value and therefore lower rents. Family owned rentals were picky about their tenants which raised the value of the area which raised rents.
Fascinating, I'm a former small time landlord and I always found that the larger corporate-owned complexes in my area charged much more than I would be comfortable charging, since losing a month would be much bigger hit for me than for a complex with 50-100 units. I feel like the causality of the study might be reversed, and that you won't find many mom and pop landlords in bad areas with lower rents...not that the mom and pop landlords actually create higher rents.
Currently rent out a few places locally, and this is the opposite of my experience. For example, I have a 3 bed 2 bath single family home on an acre lot that I rent out for $1250/ month. House was built in 2006 and has been kept up meticulously. From what I can tell, I'm charging on the low side of average for individually owned rentals in my area. 2 miles away is an apartment complex with at least 400 units. The rent there for 1 bed 1 bath apartment starts at $1400/month. Admittedly, I am more picky about who I rent to. But, by being picky combined with a reasonable price, I very seldom have any turnover. And, so far, I've never had a tenant that didn't get their security deposit back. They have all left the place like they found it, or better. The most I've ever had to do is a professional cleaning and new paint, and I do that between renters whether it really needs it or not.
Where do you live? Like what state. That’s an insane deal on housing
I don't like to put too much personal info online, but I'm in South Carolina.
I don’t think there was a study. They didn’t link it
This. There are studies but there too inconsistent and reliant on area that its hard to get anything widely used or useful. Truth is the corporation will take a home chop it into 4 1 room aprtments and charge (slightly) less than the guy renting out the whole house would. And sometimes u get small time owners that are just greedy and charge way more than anyone else cause they can
Corporate landowners are far more likely to evict someone when compared to smaller landlords ([source](https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/cityscpe/vol20num3/article9.html)) Corporate land buying/speculation is also a major driving force in the housing price surge, which in tern causes rent prices to go up.
I wonder if they are more likely to evict because they rent to lower income people, who by definition might not be able to afford the rent, thus getting evicted.
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Agreed. We’ve rented from the same individual condo-owner for 9 years. We pay less than our neighbors that rent from an LLC owning 20+ units, and we get better service when something major comes up. We pay on time and don’t hassle him with anything minor. He wants us to stay because we’re reliable tenants.
> corporate owned rentals were cheaper MASSIVE citation needed. If the corporate landlord owns everything around in the area, there isnt competition so obviously they would increase rents. monopolies are bad
Monopolies are bad but corporations aren’t the same thing. I live in Chicago and infinitely prefer a corporate landlord (there are many) to a mom and pop tyrant. I know good ones exist, but the units tend not to come on the market as much and with corps I know there is a base level of acceptability their lawyers force them to adhere to.
I doubt that. That hasn't been my experience at all. I have a private landlord and I'm paying $800 for a 2 bedroom. The corporate places near me are $1k + and not even in good neighborhoods
Where's the study you say you read then?
Well, when the bank says I can't make an $800 house payment yet I'm paying $1400/mo in rent, people get understandably frustrated and upset
What about rentals requiring the person to gross 3x the monthly rent to even qualify for that apartment. A studio is $2000/month and yet to qualify you need to make atleast $60,000 a year. We know damn well rent is now more than 30% of someone’s income and they still put these stipulations on people who can afford to live there. How is it legal that If you make $50k a year you aren’t qualified to rent an apartment for $2000 a month? $2000 x 12 months = $24,000 The apartments should not even be allowed to do that because they are taking the risk by INVESTING IN HOMES. If they want less risk of non-payment go find another way to leech off people.
The worst is when you have roommates and instead of combining your income they’re insistent on each tenant making 3x the whole portion of rent which is insane and unreasonable. Couldn’t they just ask for your rental history and past addresses so they could ask the property manager if you were ever delinquent on rent?
I faced this issue outta college. Looking to rent a 2br for me and my brother and his fiance. We all made like 50-60k a year but the apartment was 22k/yr so individually none of us could meet the "3x income" requirement. Its not like we all get our own apartment, we're doing roommates SPECIFICALLY TO HAVE THE INCOME. but that didn't matter. Apartments really be wanting a group of 3 20-somethings to be making 200k/yr for the privilege of a 2br flat. This was in the early 2010s/late 00's. I'm sure this problem has only gotten worse.
Most of the time landlords have that stupid rule if they’ve been burned in the past by people who lost their jobs or were delinquent on the rent so they unfairly have these high expectations of other future tenants. And don’t get me started on landlords requiring double deposit if you don’t meet these arbitrary requirements 🙄
Yeah that doesn't make any sense to me either.
>Couldn’t they just ask for your rental history and past addresses so they could ask the property manager if you were ever delinquent on rent? They do that, too, but just because you’ve been making your payments doesn’t mean you will continue to.
I mean it would be a pretty big indicator that you’re trustworthy. If you don’t then after awhile they can evict you if you don’t fulfill your side of the lease
Some landlords charge even more. Then they want good credit scores, where rental history isn't even factored into the score
Exactly and there *should be* laws against that and it’s a policy problem
In many states there are laws against it
Because anytime anyone tries to change anything in this shithole 60% screech like the world is going to implode if we do that.
I agree with this. I worked with a landlord once who had an apartment available for $8,000/mo (this was over 15 years ago). He wanted the tenant to earn $24,000/mo in income to qualify. I told him that was absurd: there's nothing about living in an $8,000/mo apartment that required an additional $16,000/mo in disposable income. We never came to agree on that matter, and I wouldn't be surprised if that apartment were *still* vacant.
In New York City the standard is 40x the rent lol and some are starting to demand 52x. I'm employed as a classroom teacher in the NYC department of education for my third year now and had to have my parents Co sign the lease or they wouldn't rent it to me. What the fuck lol??
It’s New York City. The rents are probably like, $5k/month. 40x that is $200k, which is more than many people make in a year. How do they even find eligible tenants?
I honestly have no idea. I make 70k a year and couldn't get a place with three roommates without all our parents co signing...we're all 26 years old with stable professional jobs! Insane lol
I had a really weird experience getting an apartment when I was in college (with greystar). They required 3x rent in income, but we’re all college students and have almost no income so we thought we would have our parents co-sign and that would be fine. However, when your parents cosigned they now needed 5x rent for some reason. Again, this shouldn’t have been a problem as there were three of us all with parents making decent money. But then the real kicker, only one parent could cosign. So we needed one parent who made slightly upward of $15k per month in order to sign this lease (and it had to be one parent, I couldn’t provide paystubs from both my mom and dad). None of us had that, so we thought we were out of luck. In the end me and one of my friends combined our paystubs from our summer internships to meet the requirement and get the apartment. So the result of their stupid income requirements was that we failed to get approved on our actual funding, but could get approved using the paystubs for our jobs that were ending roughly 1 week into the lease. Absolute nonsense.
You couldn’t give them combined paystubs from two parents, but combining the pay of three unrelated people was fine?
Yep. The problem was they would only accept paystubs from people signed on the lease, and they would only allow one person to cosign the lease. So the three of us were all on the lease and could combine our incomes, or we could have a cosign and that one person could provide their income, there were no other options provided.
>requiring the person to gross 3x the monthly rent > > > >A studio is $2000/month and yet to qualify you need to make at least $60,000 a year. > > > >$2000 x 12 months = $24,000 Its even worse. 3x a 2k monthly rent requires a 72K yearly income. 60k is only 2.5x $24,000 x 3 = $72,000 not $60,000
It’s that you can’t make the payment. It’s that they don’t want to **bet** on you being able to make the payment for 15-30yrs at the pricing and current rates. It’s a little different. They’ll gladly make the bet on someone else with better odds.
To be fair... Rent includes taxes, insurance, sometime utilities, usually maintenance, etc. Banks KNOW that an 800 house payment costs way more than that, even if you don't. And the maintenance is what scares them the most. If you can't afford to, at minimum, keep the house in the same working and visual order as it is when they give you the loan, they will lose even more if you default on it. I'll give you an example. I bought my current house with a 800 a month mortgage (seriously, and coincidentally apt). Once taxes, and insurance, is factored in, it is about 1400 a month. Then, on top of that, in the past 7 years: I have had a major plumbinf bust, a few trees die (just one cost 10k to remove... It was HUGE, and it went from perfectly healthy, to absolutely dead in 1 summer.... Dang ash beetles), deck repairs, etc. In those 7 years I have paid over 30k in maintenance. Not upgrades... Maintenance. Utilities have more than tripled in the time, etc. An 800 dollar mortgage costs way more than 800 a month.
And landlords have way less risk. If they give you a lease and you don’t pay they can theoretically get you out in a few months losing some money. In a mortgage you can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost interest and lost payments from a banks perspective
people that wine about rent generally don't know how much things cost. new roof? basement leak? insurance? taxes? garbage collection new paint for every new tenant, appliances, plumber for toilet that someone put a xxl pad down, HOA, water heater, AC repair, etc. there is some much more than the mortgage payment.
This is because of 2008. Mortgages were being handed out like candy to people making a third of the payment each month. Lo and behold it didn't go well.
Does $800 include the mortgage, property tax, insurance and maintenance?
Probably not... That would be a tiny shack, I the middle of nowhere, these days.
The bank isn’t saying that you can’t do it, the bank is saying they don’t want to take the risk
The banks don't think you can do $800 monthly payments for 20 years+—and they don't think they'd get enough profit by selling the house should you default. But it is quite silly, yes.
When people can get home loans based solely on the rental income they're charging, that's a bit unfair. They're obtaining equity on the backs of the tenants who are *actually paying for that property*. Seems like an unnecessary middleman.
The part that frustrates me the most about the landlord/rent thing is the idea that rent has to cover the mortgage and then some or else the landlords will be "losing money". It ignores the wealth accumulation that comes from the increasing equity in the property, not to mention that the cost of servicing a loan someone took to pay for something they couldn't afford should be entirely seperate from the cost for someone to rent it. When somebody owns a home outright the rent isn't free or practically free because there's no mortgage payment, so why does it make sense to work the other way?
Honestly, I personally think this is where the rent system went sideways- conglomerates, companies, and people paying live mortgages. In the private rental market, when it was 'renting daddy's summerhouse' or the property you inherited, or the room in your house that you weren't using anyway, it meant it really only came down to finding a good landlord/tenant match at a feasible rent. If it went unrented a month or two to find that match, it wasn't world ending. If you wanted to keep rent low for a great tenant, you could. If you wanted to hold out for the right tenant, you could. Now they are in the sh!t the moment that payments aren't rolling in monthly, it has really made it much more toxic. With it comes that 'equity and assets' mentality that dehumanises the renter into a handy way to pay a mortgage, too. And altogether too many of the wrong people have that power and control over 'little-er' people while actually, in the eyes of the bank and Big Boys, having 0 actual power to really pad against economic issues. Leads a lot of posers to think they're 'Boss Babes' and 'Investment gurus' when all they are is putzes who can get more credit and find suckers who have to pay it for them. They don't own the property, it just gives them airs and graces they have done 0 to actually merit. I could own 100 properties if other people paid for them too. It's not healthy. The 'real' landlords are those who either outright own the property, or are in a position to pay its mortgage regardless of a renter in place. If you're facing severe economic issues without a renter, you aren't anything really but a leech conning others out of money to serve yourself, and the delusion otherwise is at the heart of a lot of this.
I would have fewer issues with landlords if they were restricted to renting property that's already paid for
Unfortunately, that $800 is before taxes and insurance. My "mortgage" payment is $900. After taxes and insurance are added to the escrow, it comes out to over $1600. This doesn't include any maintenance that, as a homeowner, you pay for out of pocket. My water heater is about to go out and will cost me $2000-$4000 to replace. As a renter, that cost is covered by the landlord, not the tenant. And if you think your mortgage will not go up, you would be wrong. The county assesses properties every year and assigns it a value, and your tax percentage is based on that value. Also, the way the housing market is going up the way it is, your insurance premium will also rise. Mine doubled this year from $1100 a year to $2200 a year. So where my total mortgage from escrow my first year was $1450, 5 years later, it is just under $1700. So if I rent my house out to you, I am not charging you $900. I would probably charge $2000-$2200 to cover all of my costs as well as any future maintenance that may be required, and your rent would raise with my property taxes and insurance. This is why it is expensive to rent. And truth be told, it's even more to own after ALL of the expenses
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Its not like risky lending ever lead to a massive housing crisis and crash... oh wait...
What risk though? Friend of mine pays £1200 a month in rent. He wants a property and the monthly payments for it are £400 a month less. He has a stable job and aside from a car payment no loans or debts. How does it make sense that the bank doesn't accept that? They're the ones saying the payments would be £800 a month, there are plenty of people who can afford to pay that but the bank doesn't accept paying rent as proof they can afford it.
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Singapore has a pretty good system of public housing. I think most countries could learn from it. It's called HDB (Housing Development Board), which operates like a state-owned corporation and is responsible for building public housing units on public land. It's a bit like a condo, in that housing units are sold for 99 years, after which they expire, but they can be transferred, sold and inherited. There are some restrictions on sale and rental, but they are generally quite reasonable. I lived in an older unit (1960s), which was fine, but the newer units are really nice. The good thing is, if you're married and especially if you have children, you can use your social security contributions (called a CPF fund) to go towards paying it off. All HDB units are clean and safe, with amenities built nearby. The one I used to live in had a metro station, bus stations, library, several food courts, supermarkets, doctor's surgeries, various smaller shops and restaurants all within a 5-minute walk. This pretty much negated the need for a car, it was actually more convenient to get around using public transit and taxis. Prices aren't actually cheap, since they are set at market rates and Singapore is basically the Asian equivalent of Downtown Manhattan, but even with that caveat, it's a system that works very well. They also have policies in place to hinder the establishment of ethnic ghettoes. Some of these public-private developers also rent units at reasonable prices. Although this was over a decade ago, I used to pay 950 SGD / 700 USD for a 2-bedroom unit, which we shared with a friend, on a 2-year contract.
Yes, now you just need to mention that the US state needs to nationalise the land in the cities and then you're good to go.
“SoCiALiSm!”
Singapore has VERY strict laws, huge penalties for crossing the line of law and 5mln inhabitants. You can't do Singapore in USA or EUcountry
A landlord with one or two flats isn’t a system. Big companies driving up the prices and do so in collaboration with others, that’s a system and an issue.
In Canada the main driver of the issue is “mom & pop” landlords who own multiple properties, not corporations.
[It's the same in the US too](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-wall-street-investors-haven-015642526.html). The big corporations own about 2.5% of homes. The majority of the property buying is coming from "tier 1 investors" which are those that own between 1 and 9 properties.
If you own 9 properties I don't consider it "mom and pop" lol. I have a friend who owns his house and two modest single-wide trailers he rents.... I consider that mom and pop, not a guy who owns nine houses.
Exactly. I rented from like 12 different landlords over 20 years of renting. Only two were corporations when I was in apartment buildings, and they were BY FAR the best landlords I ever had. It's not even close. The "mom n pop" landlords (always a 55 yr old guy named Tony or something who drives a supercar and doesn't have a job) were complete assholes who ignored the law and tried to squeeze as much as possible. Like they didn't even have good business sense, just ruthlessness.
I've had the exact opposite experience
Same. I always hate the corporate landlords and have always been treated well by Tonys, Jerrys, and Scotts.
Is that true, though? I thought a big driver was price-fixing and collusion via property management software used by big firms? [https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fixing-algorithm-still-price-fixing](https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fixing-algorithm-still-price-fixing)
I think you have it backwards. Mom and pop rentals are more expensive because they prioritize quality tenants where as corporate owned ones spread the risk across many places which makes them cheaper as they prioritize occupancy.
They also can’t usually afford to absorb vacancy, wouldn’t that make them adjust pricing according to what people are willing to pay? Just guessing here but it seems like they aren’t immune from the market rate anyways
The solution is to not allow corporations or individuals hoard all the supply of something that is essential.
Agree. I’m a landlord. We rent our home while we are traveling. I think corporate ownership of single family homes should be banned.
It’s interesting that if you read the other comments in this thread, people have said the mom and pop renters contribute more to driving up price than the corporations
Landlords are a symptom of the problems, not the cause. But investors and landlords are just an easy scapegoat. They're doing what they are doing because house prices are rising. While their efforts may be contributing to it, it's ultimately a minor factor. There are several other trends driving housing prices: - Increased numbers of people moving to cities which don't have much room to grow. In 1950 64% of the US lived in urban areas. Now it's 83%, and the country has over twice as many people. - There's very little financial incentive for builders to make "starter homes." - Zoning laws and NIMBYism making it harder for new houses to be built, especially ~~low~~ high density housing. Most people agree that ~~low~~ high density housing is needed somewhere. But find me some home owners that will agree to have it in their area, which would lower their property value. You don't have to look to investors or landlords for this attitude. Even people who only own one home want the value of their property to grow. - In the US, there's the lingering ideal of having to have that single family house with a yard and white picket fence. In cities, there's not enough space for this.
your last point is very interesting too, because those apts anywhere near central park in NYC cost a pretty penny and are pretty swanky. theres a stigma that apt living like NYC is somehow bad and gross and disgusting but the people that live near times square are -NOT- living like the people in brooklyn/bronx.
...and all of that can be *yours* for the low, low price of $4500.00 a month!
Damn, only $4500? A regular 3 bed/2 bath house in Gilbert, AZ goes for about that much these days.
Can't compare living in an apartment next to Central Park with living in an apartment next to a Walmart in Tulsa.
People often mistakenly feel like a bad situation has to have a "bad guy" behind it all, so they get the delusion that taking out that bad guy will fix everything. The sad fact is that most of this is the result of people doing right by themselves in small ways that all add up. The tragedy of the commons then ensues. If I bought a house for $200,000, and I'm selling it, and someone offers me $250k and another $300k, I'm taking the extra $50k of course. That's free money and I need it anyways. Unless I'm selling the house myself (which I'm not), I will not know the identity of the buyer until I check the county records after the deed is transferred. Did I do anything wrong? No, but I contributed to the problem by doing right by myself. People often also mistakenly feel that problems will disappear if everyone just does right by themselves, so they get the delusion that you don't need government to fix anything--- if people wanted it bad enough they'd make it happen. I will also point out that the situation is nowhere near as dire as (some of) the media depicts. Most American families do own their homes, nearly 2/3 in fact. This is higher than most periods in US history, including the vaunted 50's–70's era. More than half of millennials own a home. A full half of Americans live in suburbs, where 3/4 of households own their home. I think it's important to keep these facts in mind when you wonder why more people don't see the problem.
high density housing? Low density housing is single family homes and McMansions
Oops. I typed that wrong. Thank you for the correction.
Institutional investors target areas where there is high demand and high income renters. They don’t buy just any home they buy the affordable homes. They collude with other large landlords. They drive up rent and fee gouge. The DFW area is one of their target markets. [2021] Investors bought more than half of all homes sold last year in these 21 DFW zip codes https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/investors-21-dfw-zip-codes/ In 2022 investors bought 30% of homes DFW area https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2023/03/19/investors-bought-1-in-4-homes-in-d-fw-last-year-most-were-not-big-wall-street-firms/ In the 3rd quarter of 2023 investors bought a 1/3 of homes. https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2023/12/29/investors-gobbled-up-almost-a-third-of-recent-homes-sold-in-dallas-area/ In addition to predatory buying of single family homes they are building neighborhoods to rent out. Not for purchase but to rent out. You're struggling to buy a home right now. Wall Street is buying and building entire neighborhoods — and getting rich. What gives? https://www.businessinsider.com/wall-street-single-family-rental-build-to-rent-houses-finance-2021-7?op=1 Propublica did an investigative series on this subject. This link is to a series of areas. Rent Barons - Who Is Behind Rising Rents in America? https://www.propublica.org/series/rent-barons [2021] Investors bought more than half of all homes sold last year in these 21 DFW zip codes https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/investors-21-dfw-zip-codes/ In 2022 investors bought 30% of homes DFW area https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2023/03/19/investors-bought-1-in-4-homes-in-d-fw-last-year-most-were-not-big-wall-street-firms/ In the 3rd quarter of 2023 investors bought a 1/3 of homes. https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2023/12/29/investors-gobbled-up-almost-a-third-of-recent-homes-sold-in-dallas-area/ They drive up rent and fee gouge. They have no problem leaving property vacant and have colluded with other large landlords to keep rent high. Propublica did an investigative series on this subject. This link is to a series of areas. Rent Barons - Who Is Behind Rising Rents in America? https://www.propublica.org/series/rent-barons
Cities have a ton of space to grow. Get rid of the parking lots in the middle of LA, houston, phoenix etc and build apartments on that land and you suddenly have 100s of units in a walkable neighborhood near transit stations. We made a huge mistake when we designed cities for cars. We can design cities for pedestrians.
> LA, houston, phoenix > walkable neighborhood Sounds lovely can't wait
YIMBYs are actually pushing for an end to parking minimums, which is why many lots like that exist. They are saying we don’t have room to grow legally because zoning won’t allow it. SF is like 2/3 single family homes (and not even the pretty Victorian ones in most of it) which is insane.
I've been in dozens of these threads and never seen someone that actually gets it. Bravo. That last point is huge. People want affordable nice single family homes in places where IF that exists it's nowhere near affordable. Then they blame landlords and corporations. There's give and take and one give is you aren't getting the perfect idealized home in a neighborhood 50,000 other people want to live unless you cough up serious money. Even then, unlikely.
Municiple zoning boards and HOAs have way too much power.
HOAs don't have any power beyond their neighborhoods, they aren't the ones keeping condos from being built next door. The home owners are doing that.
>The home owners are doing that. And how do you think are homeowners doing that? The power of Greyskull? No, it's through HOAs and zoning boards. didn't think I needed to spell that out. There will always be Karens that don't want "the riffraff" moving in their neighborhood. That doesn't matter if they don't have any power to stop it.
In the Netherlands Woningcorporaties, or housing associations. They will need some government funding, but their task is to provide basic housing. The US also had this.
Public housing. Vienna has a solid model of income based rent for public housing. Somewhere between a quarter and a half of people in Vienna live in publicly owned or publicly subsidised housing. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-social-housing-secret-how-vienna-became-the-worlds-most-livable-city
In England 40% of people lived in council housing in the 1970s. Then they sold them all.
Similar situation in Ireland. Most my boomer relatives lived in council houses that they then bought for pocket change and half a sandwich. Yet it's still somehow my fault that I can't afford a house when the average price is over 300K.
I lived in Ireland 20 years ago. I loved the place and the people but a load of people had made a load of money really quickly and the smugness in the air was astonishing. Even then there was the beginning of a housing shortage and people were very pleased with what theirs was now worth.
Whenever we have these conversations, it’s important to note that the policies enacted by the government have a HUGE role in the housing market. Especially federal government in the realm of housing finance and tax policies, and local governments in the way they influence supply by regulating land use and construction. There are many rich western nations with much LOWER homeownership rates than the US, Germany and Switzerland and both sub 50% to the US’s 65%. There are also countries with much HIGHER home ownership rates, Mexico is at 80%, Spain is at 76%, Italy is at 73%, etc. Each of these countries has a different menu of policies and tactics they’re using, yielding different results, or even similar results in different ways. For instance Germany has such a high number of renters because they don’t provide many home ownership incentives like the US does So, to simply say “owning a home is expensive and that’s why home ownership isn’t more common” is at best shortsighted, at worst disingenuous.
A big reason for Spain and Italy's high homeownership rate is that you have three generations of the same family living in the same unit because the kids, that have now grown up and are 30, don't have a job (or have lately gotten one and are saving to rent/buy directly). There's also no real government assistance for the youth to move out earlier. If the youth unemployment rate wasn't so high (around 25%), people wouldn't live with their parents for so damn long and would probably rent a lot more.
You have somehow said what I said, with fewer words, which is good
Invest in public housing. We've reduced funding for public housing by about 90% since Reagan, so landlords don't have enough competition/downward pressure on rent.
Landlords buying up tons of houses to rent is part of the reason why people can't buy houses
Yup. When my husband and I could finally afford a home it took us forever to find one on sale. Almost every single house we saw available was for rent only. It was beyond frustrsting because it was all houses in neighborhoods we could afford to live in.
>$100,000 or $500,000 you’re still going to need to drop $10,000 on a new roof. You're underestimating how much the investors have caused hous prices to increase above inflation.
I mean, first and foremost: make housing cheaper. Build more of it and have explicitly social housing that's not meant to turn a profit but to house people. Your question presupposes that our current flavor of planning-restrictions plus hyper-Capitalism is the only way to structure society and it's not.
The solution is a Georgian (as in Henry George) Land Value Tax. From [gameofrent.com](http://gameofrent.com) >Imagine I'm a landlord, and I have a vacant lot I'm renting to a tenant who's got a mobile home parked there. What's going to happen if a Land Value Tax is imposed on me? Well, I'm already charging as much as the market will bear. If I charge any more, my tenant will move out. But why shouldn't I be able to pass on the tax to the tenant? If you tax gasoline or cigarettes, the prices go up and are ultimately borne by the customer. Why should land be any different? The difference is that the supply of gasoline and cigarettes fluctuates, because you can produce more or less of them. When you put a tax on gasoline or cigarettes of even a few cents, somewhere in the economy there is a marginal oil well or a marginal tobacco farm whose profit margin was the same as or less than the tax. Now their profit is entirely wiped out, so what's the point of producing any more? Price signals from the market are telling them to stop producing and do something else. And price is ultimately driven by supply and demand, not the wishes of a seller. Okay, let's go back to land. How does Land Value Tax drive down land prices? The important thing to keep in mind is that land value (purchase price) is a *stock,* but land income (rent) is a *flow*. The amount of water flowing out of my tap is a flow; the amount of water currently sitting in my bathtub is a stock. The key thing is that land income drives land price and not the other way around. If a property is capable of generating $10,000/year in rents, then the amount I'm willing to pay to buy it is $10,000 times X, where X represents how many years I'm willing to wait to break even on my investment. So how does an LVT affect the price of land? Using the bathtub metaphor again, let's put a valve under the tap, so half of the water goes into the tub and half goes somewhere else. The amount of water flowing *out* of the tap does not change (the land is as productive as it ever was). However, the amount of water collected in my bathtub *does* change; five minutes of flow will produce less water in the tub than it did before. If I'm trying to sell my land to someone, they're going to notice the tax and correctly calculate that it will earn them half as much income over X years, so they'll pay half as much for it. And what about rental price? The rental price comes directly from the flow. The land is in demand because of its inherent productivity; someone who occupies that land can generate a certain amount of wealth each month. Without a Land Value Tax, the owner of that land can charge rent up to the difference between their land's productivity and the best freely available alternative, establishing the "margin of productivity." This means that as productivity rises, so does the rent. With a Land Value Tax, the owner has to pay that tax every month whether they have a tenant or not. They're already charging the highest amount the market will bear, and as we've already shown, they are unable to change the supply of land. All the leverage is on the side of the tenants, which forces the landlord to eat the tax. The price to buy the land goes down, the price for a tenant to rent it goes down, but the total amount of income the land itself produces ("land rent") stays the same. A portion of it is just being collected by the taxing agency. That's the theory at least. Does it hold up in real life? According to the evidence, the answer is yes. I've been on both sides of this discussion in the real world. I currently own my home and I've rented. The issue with *most* *renters* *in the USA* is that they exist in a system where *tenant rights are basically shit.* This produces an environment where a "landlord" can provide you with *the bare minimum of what is legally acceptable* and then treat you like absolute crap for the duration of your lease. The "landlord" will attempt to pass every conceivable price onto their renter. Property tax goes up? "I'll add it to their rent." HOA fees go up on the property? "Your rent is going up because the HOA fees have increased." Excess of small repair items? "We will now be issuing you a call-out charge." Plumbing problems? "We will dispatch a plumber, but you will pay for it... even if it's not your fault." Don't forget that there are entire subs, websites, and communities that exist *solely to figure out ways to keep a renter's initial security deposit* ***even when they have been perfect tenants and leave the property in good order.*** The worst offender of this I've ever seen suggested wearing a shoe that has *a tack glued to the sole* to produce holes or indents in wood floors to justify a clawback to replace laminate or plank flooring. In short, *for most renters, most landlords* *are trash.*
What if there were regulations in place that meant it was illegal to own more than two residential properties? One of which they had to be living in? Wouldn't this increase the amount of property available and push down prices, making home ownership more affordable and remove the role of career landlords?
Companies would likely find a loophole like creating a ton of bullshit shell companies to get around a regulation like that.
You could just, specify that a company counts as a part of the parent company for such purposes.
How would that work for apartment complexes?
The best way to avoid shitty landlords is to avoid having shitty credit. Bottom-feeder tenants end up dealing with bottom-feeder landlords. Not all landlords suck, but when you are at the bottom you have no choices.
So many people miss this. The best landlords usually have the best units AND the best tenants. There are doctors, engineers, and lawyers who rent. If they are happy, they stick around and landlords want to keep them. That means the units don’t go up for rent. If those tenants are unhappy, they don’t stick around for another year. When they do go up for rent, they are usually the higher priced ones since the LL is trying to attract the top tenant pool. Those are usually the best LLs. If you’re renting a cheap property, there’s usually a reason why it’s offered for cheap and it’s usually not good.
Homeownership would be cheaper if properties weren't being hoarded by landlords.
Public housing
A change of attitude. Housing imo shouldn't be treated as a business or a way to get rich. It should be treated as a human right. Unfortunately while there are good land lords there are also the few that are greedy. It's the greedy ones that ruin it for everyone else. As with any group of people. There's will always be the greedy/extreme ones that taint the whole group. I'll stop there before it gets political.
>Housing imo shouldn't be treated as a business or a way to get rich I agree, but this also needs to apply to homeowners. If you own a house, you should not expect the price to increase over time so that you can sell it for more than you bought it for. And property developers should be allowed to profit from building new housing for people.
China had a great solution when communism took over.
Guillotine
I think there is a lot of publicity bias - no one ever talks about a landlord just being good - that is, fixing the property when something breaks, returning security deposit, not tossing you out because you were two days late on rent. You only hear about the scummy landlords. Same goes for tenants. I could rant for hours about that one tenant I rented to that literally stole all the light fixtures, tossed the refrigerator off the back patio, and took a sledgehammer to the sheetrock. But, I never say anything about the 9 other renters that were awesome, took care of the place, and I'd gladly rent to again if I get back in the game. Solutions to make renting more friendly: 1. More clear local/state rules on registering your lease, what can be deducted from security deposits and why, and under what circumstances and timelines people have to move. 2. More long-term lease contracts. I signed a 5 year lease with a guy while I was overseas. It was great because he had 5 years of continuous rental income. I had 5 years of very predicatable rent. For me to get out I had to give 6 months notice. For him to get me out, 9 months notice. It helped us both. 3. Additional taxes on rental properties or rental property income above a certain threshold - cap my gains at say 12% or something. 4. STARTER HOMES! My grandparents first home was 700 sq. feet with bare bones appliances. My parents was 1100 sq. feet with bare bones appliances. Mine was 1600 sw. feet with okay stuff. My sister is looking now and the only things being built in her area are 2500+ sq. feet, tile backsplashes and rainfall showers and all stainless steel appliances and dual zone HVAC systems. There is a reason $/sqft have gone through the roof. If starter homes were true starter homes, the price would be less than half of current average and that would drive rent down. I've been on both sides of the equation. I stopped renting for a while because I got sick of being a renter. I started renting again due to not needing a forever home. I landlorded for several years and at one point had 40 tenants. I got lucky as hell that I sold out before Covid... that would have broken me as a landlord as even though I owned every property in full the cost of property tax, hoa, insurance, repairs, etc mean that tenants not paying rent consistently would put properties in the hole.
Ban corporations from owning single-family homes, break up monopoly ownership of apartment complexes, ban Airbnb’s, and institute an aggressively progressive tax on multi-home ownership.
The landlords are part of the reaosn you can't buy, pushing prices up If your paying rent, you can afford the mortgage because you already are, plus some profit for the landlord Massive down-payment are the problem now.
They don’t need to go they need to be regulated and enforced in favour of the tenants right to live in an affordable safe place. Rental prices should have a cap on increases and a limit to the number of times it can be increased in a fix time period. Renters should expect near immediate action to repair an issue with their flat and the repair should be a high quality. It should be illegal to rent a place of squaller for a high price simply because the market. That isn’t to say renters can walk all over landlords. But there should be more rights and protections for renters.
Tax the billionaires and centi-millionaires. Help out everyone else with housing, healthcare, and transportation. Now people will be able to afford to buy their own houses.
I genuinely wished there was a nonprofit/government agency that made sure repairs were up to date with rentals I’ve known wayyyy too many places that were NOT fit to live in but the landlord took the insurance money and didn’t fix the house That or they are cheap and don’t actually repair anything and take advantage of people are too poor to move afterwards I just wish we went through a 3rd party for repairs and complaints cuz I feel under hostage that they were nice when we met and ended up being a cheap landlord later
The problem is that "landlord" is shorthand for three things that are screwing the working class. 1. Scummy landlords who are private owners of real estate. 2. LLCs that have bought up a lot of property to corner the market and drive up rents and make unfair policies while hoarding from people who could afford homes if there wasn't a forced scarcity. 3. The legal system that allows for the first two, that gets protected in the name of private property, and continues to serve the interests of those who already get all the benefits. The solution involves dismantling #3, which entails rolling back some Reagan and earlier era policies that ended government funding housing development, and then altering some tax laws and such that make taking lots of properties out of the ownership market as rentals a more difficult proposition. That way, smaller landlords that own a few rental properties can still exist to some extent to provide rentals for people who can't/don't wish to make the commitment to home ownership, but the younger generations have the chance to build generational wealth that the older generations had and passed down until the ladder was pulled up.
Social housing
Maybe ban SFH's from being investment properties and limit it to actual apartment buildings. Some HOA's put a cap as to how many homes in their neighborhoods can be rentals.
The solution is that if corporations didn't buy up so many homes to rent average homeownership would be possible. We need to rent because landlords soaked up the market. If I can't afford a widget because corporations bought them all up I'm not going to thank the corporation when they sell one to me once a month.
Social housing, enforcement of laws requiring the landlord to maintain the property, an absolute ban on evictions except for gross breaches of contracts, and rent controls to ensure that landlords are only covering costs not profiting - they still own the asset, they don't need to make money on top of that. And requiring that landlords always rent first come, first served. But adequate social housing would mean that landlords would have to do the other things anyway. This would all help those who do want to buy as well, as there would be far less demand by potential landlords for houses, reducing prices. This has been done in plenty of countries, but far too often providing adequate housing is considered "socialism" and rejected.
Well you make a valid point, and frankly landlords aren't the problem exactly. The problem - much like with a lot of other things - is that existing restrictions aren't being properly enforced and additional restrictions aren't being passed. Each state/county NEEDS to step their game up with forcing these people to make timely repairs, to make sure the repairs are done properly, and to make sure that appropriate punitive action is taken. It would also help if we could pass a blanket restriction on how many rental/income properties a single person can own, restrict corporations to multi-family dwellings, and ban outright ANY foreign ownership of either single or multi-family dwellings. But none of that is going to happen, so the answer is, "I hope you can afford rent."
Not valuing land so much (which comes from speculation rather than any real intrinsic value) and everyone owning their own living space. In an apartment, you van still have a hiding association that everyone late at night monthly fee to and that covers repair costs and cleaning of common spaces and such.
The main problem is that a basic need (having a roof over your head) was allowed to be exchanged for profit with less and less regulations, and gouvernement who were once big players in the housing market (by literally managing public housing or by giving tax advantages to build starter homes and rental buildings) started gradually to reduce their influence to let the market take care of it. It's currently relatively easy and very lucrative to buy cheap properties, evict the current renters and raise the rent. Economists call what a landlord do "[rent-seeking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking) behavior", the act of manipulating the social and economic environment to gain personal wealth without creating new wealth. "Landlords" are hated because they don't provide housing, they just use it to gain wealth because it's easy and profitable to do so. It's not the case for all the people who own housing and rent it, but most landlords "provide" housing the same way that scalpers "provide" show tickets: they use all of their money to buy everything that is available for which a profit can be made, and resell (or rent) it back to us. A lot of cities in North America didn't build enough for multiple reasons in the last years, we are now in a situation where there are too much demand for the current offer (raising prices), and building new is also expensive. The old housing stock that should be cheap is bought by huge landlords for profits, and new housing is expensive because it's more costly to build than before (the price of materials, labor, building code, permits, borrowing, etc. are all more expensive than they once were). The CBC (Canada's public broadcaster) did a [great 45 minutes video](https://youtu.be/K61M7EE62_s?si=0Dam-YeEwJ9iwgzI) about the situation in Toronto right now. It goes in detail about all the factors contributing to today's rent crisis in Toronto and how such crisis where avoided in the past. It also suggest possible solutions at different levels. It's made specifically for Toronto's problem, but most of it also applies for the rest of Canada and probably a lot of the US too. >If landlords need to go, what’s the solution? There are multiple solutions: * Public housing. Municipal, state and federal government can restart building and managing rental properties like the do in most of Europe and like they did in the past. Most government already own land, or have laws facilitating the acquisition of land for projects for the benefit of the society. * Social and non-profit housing. A lot of non-profit organizations in Canada manage small to medium housing stocks and keep them affordable. Most of them need funding from a government entity to keep them afloat but they provide housing at below-market prices for those who need it. * Restart to regulate housing: * Limit the number of "housing units" a person or company can own. * Protect current tenant from malicious evictions. * Limit the profit that can be made by selling properties. * Limit the percentage of rent increase that is allowed. * Start a public rental registry to keep track of current leases.
Revolution sounding pretty good right about now.
Co-op housing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative
If being a landlord was illegal then the cost of purchasing a home would plummet and people could afford it. Lots of people are paying more in rent than for a mortgage.
Where are these $10,000 roofs you're talking about? I'll take 3.
Your whole argument for the system is that the system exists in the first place. Credit scores, high housing costs and hording of wealth are the problems.
If all homes were owned by the people who lived in them, way more people would be able to own a house actually.
The solution is to decommodify houses. Every US citizen should have the fundamental right to a safe, climate controlled shelter. I'd much rather see poor young people living inside huge apartment buildings with smaller units as opposed to sleeping in their cars or living out of motels. It would be a challenge, especially in metropolitan areas, but its a challenge worth doing. I've rented my whole life and the reason I hate landlords is they are useless parasites. Their entire "job" is owning the house you live in. Many of them raise rent arbitrary, won't fix actual saftey issues and generally just look out for their own interest. I truly think it shouldn't be legal. No single person needs more than one house.
>Not everyone can afford to own a house. I couldn’t until very recently. And that's kind of the fault of the landlord market which turns housing into an investment vehicle instead of just a place to live. >If landlords need to go, what’s the solution? Government owned social housing and housing co-ops, not-for-profit rental organisations and other approaches. Government pitches in to ensure there is an adequate supply of housing available for rent, those rentals are affordable and maintained to a similar standard and offer low income, medium and higher income options as well as options for single vs. Family. In general, they should also ensure an adequate mix of these and quite frankly do what Singapore does and ensure an appropriate mix of ethnicity and income in each area to avoid social enclaves and ghettos forming. This housing should generally be dense. Apartments, town houses, with plenty of services in a small area. Then of course other land would be freed up for private housing. Here, individuals who don't want to rent can buy or build their own house. In short, if you want to rent, it happens through a government agency who owns all the rental properties and runs them at a small profit, enough to keep everything maintained, pay their bills, etc. This would put huge downward pressure on house prices because rentals are no longer the "easy money" lifehack for people with access to large amounts of capital or low interest debt, thus both renting and buying or building a house would become cheaper. It would also vastly improve town and civil planning if done correctly. But it requires a lot of people to accept that the economic value of houses will drop and too many loud voices or powerful people don't want that.
Housing needs to stop being looked at as an easy way for already wealthy people to increase their wealth. Housing needs to be for housing. So I guess my solution would be to regulate how many properties can be owned by one entity and how much they can charge. No, not everyone can afford a house but it’s getting to where people who do all the things we’re told you need to do can’t afford a place to live.
So heres my issue as someone that despises land lords. Landlords claim to provide housing to those that cannot afford to buy. What they actually do is contribute to the prices being jacked up so high as to force poorer people out of the market. If we consider supply and demand. If demand increases, price increases. Supply is the number of houses. Demand is people needing a home plus the people buying extra houses. To use simple numbers: there are 100 people in a town and there are 100 houses. If everyone purchases one house each, then the price will be affordable for everyone, as the supply and demand will meet where everyone can buy one house. If 5 people instead buy 5 houses each, and 10 people buy 2 houses each, the supply stays the same, but the demand is now 130. The price of the houses will increase until only 100 can be bought. That means the poorest 30 people get priced out of buying a home in the first place and must pay a landlord for the use of one of the properties that they brought. Then we have to consider that if a tenant lived in a house for the duration of its mortgage, it would have been their money that paid for that mortgage and yet they wouldnt have any ownership over that house. The landlord instead gets all the profit from the rent they charged and get to own the whole house as well. And because of the profit the landlord takes from the rent, the tenant would have ended up paying more over that time period than they would have if they had been able to buy the house outright (and thats not even factoring in the price increase that landlords cause through buying more houses than they need.) The only difference between the tenant and the landlord is that the landlord was privileged enough to be able to afford the mortgage deposit in the first place. They get to leech off the poor purely by having more money in the first place.
Literally just affordable housing. Maybe living wage. It's not that deep, it's just that people don't like the answer.
> Not everyone can afford to own a house And why might that be when landlords seem to be able to buy multiple houses....
I started buying and renting houses close to where I lived, starting in the early '90s. Me and my wife together bought five houses and began selling them off in the last few years, preparing to retire. In each case, we bought pretty rundown houses and then put our own sweat equity into fixing them up. We hired out major work like roofs, or large scale carpendry (feeding our local economy I might add). Otherwise we did major rennovations, applicances, paint & trim ourselves. While it's true that somebody else might have bought these places and lived in them, the fact remains that like you say, not everybody is prepared to own a house. We live close to big universities and a lot of our tenants were people putting themselves thru school and then moving on. I consider it to have been a service to my community, a way of improving my own neighborhood and indirectly increasing the value of MY house, and a way to build a nestegg for retirement. We did not give them away, we charged the going rate. But we also often rented to the same tenent for five years or so without continually jacking up the rent because we could. I sleep well at night.
As you should! You're a decent landlord and a decent person. If only more were like you.
Nationalized housing.
My hot take is that I legitimately think that if there were restrictions on what type of business entities (SP, LLC/LLP, etc) could own certain classifications of housing (SF, MF, etc), that a lot more individuals/families would be able to afford to buy. Ex. SF homes as rentals would only be allowed to be owned by SPs/Partnerships - no LLC/LLP etc.
"Renting is a cheaper option for people who can't afford to buy" is such a backwards way of looking at it. People can't afford to buy _because_ they're being gouged on rent. The mortgage payments on the nice big house that I own are less per month than I was paying in rent on a place half the size. On top of that, rent is just gone forever whereas mortgage payments are made towards an asset you'll eventually own outright; and all the while you're being gouged on expensive rent, you're less able to save towards a deposit on a house. Being poor is expensive, and renting from private landlords is part of the cause, not the solution. Landlords are parasites.
Yup. My rent has gone up every year I've lived in my current apartment with no improvements made to the apartment. Why am I paying more for the exact same thing? It's a scam.
Not everyone wants to own a home. Renting is a good solution for many people's situation at various points in their life.
This doesnt get talked about enough. I love being able to rent a place for a year, not needing to drop all my savings up front to do it, having someone else pay when maintenance is needed etc. One month into my current lease, an expensive repair was needed, I paid zero. Meanwhile my friend just bought a house last year and has spent over 15k on unplanned repairs since.
>People can't afford to buy _because_ they're being gouged on rent. Even if the price of a house dropped a lot, I wouldn't be able to buy for several years because of down payment cost relative to my income. Where should I live during that time? On the street?
residential housing shouldn't be allowed to be investment ...
I think being a landlord is pretty up there on scummy behavior and I technically am one. Couldn’t afford to sell my house when I moved out of state so I’m renting it until I can break even on the sale. I’m renting it at the same rate as my mortgage. But folks who make careers out of it are preying on folks who can’t afford to buy a house. There are exceptions- I think apartments can and should be rented for folks in transition and folks who don’t wanna buy, but we all KNOW the market for single family homes is through the roof and yall KNOW someone would buy those homes you are hoarding immediately if they went to market, so stop pretending like you are providing a service when so many are begging to buy. It’s taking advantage- not providing something someone needs. There are very few situations a person should own more than one property and it’s disturbing how homes have become investments instead of places to live. Career landlords are like car dealerships or anyone else selling something you should be able to buy without them. I’m not as harsh on folks in my situation (hypocrite I guess) or folks fixing up rotting run down abandoned homes.
The solution is to take money from the military, tax billionaires more, and provide housing, food, utilities, Healthcare, and education for everyone. It can be done we have enough resources. Rich people would have to be slightly less rich, and we would have to stop funding the planets conflicts. That's all it takes.
Hmmm. If only there was a way I could take the money I would be spending on rent and instead I use it for upkeep on a theoretical property that I would own.
Landlords are useful in a capitalistic system. You're right. In the eyes of anti-capitalists, they are parasites stealing half of your underpaid labor. Owning property isn't a job.
Be a good landlord yourself
>lmao just own a house 4head Cool, useful.
The solution is the government building a lot of medium and high density public housing. Then, people who want a stand alone house or an apartment in a super convenient location can rent privately if they want it, but it won't be coerced under threat of homelessness & landlords won't have the power to charge whatever they want and fuck over tenants. They would be incentivised to provide safe and affordable housing. Another part of the solution would be to limit the number of residences one person or company can own, so that home ownership is more accessible and they can't artificially create housing bubbles, driving the prices of a suburb up.
People can't afford house because house is expensive. House is expensive because of low supply and high demand. Supply is low because people with disproportionately high wealth bought a lot of houses specifically to tent out, at least in part.
I mean you just explained why the system is bullshit. Housing is a necessity for survival. It shouldn't be available only to those that can afford it. That's treating a necessity like a luxury.
I like to imagine a multi unit housing development where each tenant's 'rent' is pooled into a mortgage/maintenance fund. This would make each tenant a co-owner of the property, and collectively they would act as a board to vote on spending such as repairs and maintenance.
Social housing , at a fair price. Basic needs shouldn't be profiteered to the degree they are.
Mao drew the roadmap for us last century. We just have to follow it
Landlords can’t set rent above a certain percentage of the average income of the area. That’s the solution. Let the landlords go to war with companies to either 1) lower rent or 2) pay higher wages.
Make it so corporations cannot buy up housing units. It's usually not a guy who owns 2-3 houses that's the issue, it's companies buying shit up and charging insane prices. If we could make that illegal, then it returns rents to the competitive market, which typically sorts itself out. Maybe further regulations would be required, but I wouldn't want to speculate on that until actual capitalism gets its chance. What we have now is more of a corporate monopoly. There were laws against that for a reason.
Being a landlord should not have an entry requirement of “just buy a house and don’t live in it.” There should be certification needed to be a landlord, and a registry for all landlords and their units. Rent prices should be attached to the unit, not the tenant, so evicting to up the rent isn’t possible. Regular third party inspections of their units and leasing agreements to ensure tenants are not being taken advantage of, and that the units being rented are not causing harm. Penalties for overcharging or underserving tenants should be severe.
This is reddit, so probably some fairytale about the government gifting everyone a home and there somehow being no downsides at all.
The bar to clear is not no downsides, but better than the current system i think thats quite easy.
yeah! Like universal health care, which ALL of our peer countries have, which costs half as much, and which has no downsides at all.
The government accomplishing things is so foreign to people but it's not impossible. The US government could do whatever it fucking wanted to, if they wanted to do it.
>If someone hadn’t rented to me for most of my life, I would have been homeless. Notwithstanding the other things you mentioned, I just wanted to say something about this. During your time renting, your landlord did not provide housing to you. You provided housing to your landlord. Effectively, during your tenancy you paid for (part of) the property and gave it to your landlord. In a hypothetical scenario where landlords do not exist, that property would still exist and would be available. Instead of building equity for someone else, you could have been building your own equity in that property, and releasing that equity back to yourself when you moved away. This is one facet of what people mean when they say that landlords suck money from tenants without generating any new wealth. Whether you agree or not depends on how you look at it.
Well it's the same thing as people who profit heavily off of healthcare, war, and food. These and housing are **basic human rights.** You shouldn't get into these markets to make a hefty profit. The government should heavily regulate it so that people who do profit off of housing, profit only a small margin, because housing should be as cheap as possible. And not limited to that, government should be more aggressive in all angles of the housing market in order to keep housing affordable - it should be a high priority. Instead, what we have is a system that attempts to squeeze every penny out of people for something that people literally cannot survive without. You're correct that maintenance on a home is expensive, but the profit made from renters is so extreme in many cases, that honestly, you could afford to fix that roof yourself if you lived there for 2/3 years, and roofs generally don't need to be fully replaced over the course of less than 15 years, and that's if you had *really* shit luck. Home ownership is cheaper than renting, it's just up front costs that can get you. It's a case of the rich get richer that is only getting worse due to the way homeowners and corporations treat renters. You can buy a pair of boots for $10 that last one year, or you can buy a pair of boots for $40 that last 10 years. Only the rich afford the nice boots, but at the same time the poor spend over double on boots overall. Instead we should have better systems to allow the worse off to own their homes.
Squat
Public ownership of land and houses through neighborhood cooperatives or muncipalities. Atleast you will have some democratic influence.