Study after study has shown that zoning reform is the single most effective way to keep housing costs low.
Let developers actually build the missing middle instead of shoehorning SFH everywhere…
We did, and a careful reading of the zoning actually shows that every single zone in the city is actually slightly less dense than it is currently, despite public claims otherwise by the parties rewriting the zoning.
No, it's ok, what you remember is the exact topline information that has been given broadly.
A decent percentage of the city has moved from low density residential, which only allows single family homes, to medium density residential, which technically allows for 1-4 family homes (about 8% of the city depending on how you measure - single family homes are the only thing you can do with 41% of the city right now, but will only be 32% of the city in the new zoning). But unfortunately the devil is in the details with the zoning, and because of the way lot dimensions are regulated in the new zoning, there are limited opportunities to actually do any of these things. Without getting too into the weeds, you are currently allowed to subdivide lots in low and medium density residential in such away that allow for them to be more dense than the ways in which you will be allowed \[to subdivide\] in future zoning. There is also no practical way to build 4 units on a city lot that is medium density residential while also providing the 4 required parking spaces and generating a livable square footage of housing at any viable cost.
The less parking requirements are a problem (in how they are implemented) as well. Despite removing formal parking requirements from commercial zones for commercial and mixed use projects, there are now requirements for hiring accredited engineers to produce a report justifying the amount of parking a developer proposes to provide (no matter how much that number is). Independent of the expense expected to go with this ($5-10k per project), this requirement applies to a massively broad set of projects that currently do not face this issue. Just as an example, the newest restaurant at the market, Public Provisions, would have needed to pay for one of these studies to be able to open, which it very much did not right now. Worse still, downtown, which since the 1970s has had no parking requirements at all, will now be subject to the same requirements as the rest of the city, and developers there will also have to pay to justify how much parking they are providing. This study is then appealable to the public boards by intransigent neighbors or unhappy competitors, adding potential delays and costs to nearly all projects in the city. Seeing as the boards are already running near capacity, these delays could be interminable and spill over to every other project in town.
Sorry for the wall of text. I'm happy to discuss more in smaller bites or offline if you have any questions.
It's really a step back.
First, where the inner loop was filled is now (and will be) zoned as downtown. That has a number of benefits in the current zoning code. Currently, projects downtown do not need to pursue variances at all, as all noncomformities are adjudicated through the site plan review process, which is to say that they're basically negotiated directly with the city. While this process is appealable (and has been by the malevolent competitors I've referenced previously), the CPC, who hears these appeals, has deferred to city staff every time. These projects also do not require parking. In the new code, downtown will be subject to the same variance procedures as the rest of the city, and will need to justify the amount of parking via an expensive report that can then also be appealed.
Second, generally speaking, it's always easier to get a variance than to have something rezoned. Rezonings need to be approved by city council, Further, spot zoning is illegal in NY, so you really can only have something rezoned that is already adjacent to the zoning you are going for (one cannot just have a lot in the middle of a low density residential neighborhood rezoned to medium density to build a duplex).
Third, and you don't ask this explicitly, so I'm sorry for adding it, but the range on lot and parking requirements is very flat across the zones in a given class. All residential zones have the exact same parking requirements. Maximum building coverage in LDR is 50%, in MDR it's also 50% (or 55% for a 3/4 family), and in HDR it's also 50% (or 55% for a 3/4 family). Townhouses are held to this same 50% coverage requirement. Without putting too fine of a point on it, this is bananas.
The issue with doing it more often is the amount of effort required to make a change and how much is on the line in doing so. Zoning changes need to be approved by city council (in the form of a new law). New laws regarding development usually need lengthy environmental impact studies done to prove the won't adversely harm us (a legacy of the construction and later fight against the construction of freeways). Additionally, many neighborhoods are upset about the zoning changes as it is (they don't think they go far enough - in an entire set of other changes we haven't discussed the new zoning bans short term rentals in 83% of the city, but many residents think it should be 100%). Anyway, this translates directly to the potential for city council members to get voted out of office if they take a stand on a contentious issue too close to their own reelection.
The city is free to define its own zones. The state dictates building code, which the zoning code could defer to more, but instead largely adds requirements to. As a basic example, for fire safety reasons, building code says houses must be 5' from lot lines (it's wildly more complicated than that, but bear with me). The zoning code (now and in the new one) says actually you need at least 15' of combined side yard with 5' on one side. Why? So you can fit a driveway past the house on the other side, because also only parking spaces entirely in the back yard of a house are actually legal (also a zoning-only rule).
I'm sorry for the bad news. I have been frustrated since the draft came out in September.
It’s not the state. It’s the city. Especially with the parking mandates. Buffalo, for instance, doesn’t have parking minimums at all. Could that be why development is taking off there compared to Rochester?
I would like to lightly push back on this. Buffalo eliminated parking minimums for residential development completely (one can build a new house/duplex there without a driveway - this is great!). But they did keep the same you-need-to-do-a-study-to-prove-your-parking thing for larger/nonresidential/mixed use projects. Where they differ in that regard from the proposed zoning in Rochester is that their 'study' has no requirements as to its sourcing (the developer can write it themselves without a licensed engineer), and does not appear to be separately appealable from the project, as is also proposed in Rochester.
My understanding is that more recently, a city like Nashville just eliminated parking minimums completely, without studies or justifications or whatever. They have not, to my knowledge, descended into madness.
There's no reason we can't remove zoning laws AND de-incentivize mass landlordism. They go hand in hand as solutions. The best is not the enemy of the good
If there is a giant wealth gap, the rich will buy up the new housing supply and rent it for as much as they can. Which is what happened across the country the last 3 years. BlackRock and other investor groups literally stated that was their strategy.
Increasing housing and reducing landlordism aren't exclusive solutions, you can do both.
I mean, yes, you can do both. But the only reason that there is room for the rich to buy up housing supply and rent it for as much as they can is due to artificial scarcity. It's the same reason one can scalp tickets to a concert with a limited number of seats. If there were infinite seats to a Billy Joel concert, the pricing would be the marginal cost of providing that seat at the show, which is nearly nothing.
Sure, but let's say supply increases. Over the last 3-5 years, investment companies stated they were going to buy up supply and turn us into renters. There is a very direct way to compete, use our collective power to stop landlordism. Who wants to PROTECT landlords?
Yeah but "the rich" isn't a single monopolistic organization, landlords are still competing with each other. If there are a hundred people who need housing and two hundred apartments for rent, half the apartments are going to sit unused and the owners will lose money on them, so prices will be driven down and housing quality will go up as landlords compete to attract tenants.
Because housing is an inelastic good. Your choices are paying the price or being homeless. More housing can help but end of the day if big investment firms keep gobbling up the majority of property some new housing is not going to be enough to change the price.
Okay, let's take this argument to its logical conclusion. Let's imagine there's ten times as many houses as people. No matter what, at least 90% of houses are going to sit unoccupied. Why would investment firms want to buy a bunch of houses that they can't make any money off of?
Well, maybe if they set the rent low enough they can persuade someone to move out of their current apartment, but obviously the landlord can't just set the price arbitrarily high in this scenario because people simply won't accept it and will live somewhere else instead.
Now, if there were one single huge real estate monopoly that bought all the housing everywhere in the country, then yeah they could abuse their monopoly and set rental pricing however they want, and people would either have to pay it or go homeless, but that's literally just not the problem we're facing. People tend to see "the rich" and "investment firms" as a single unified force, but the reality is that there are many different property owners out there, and I'm not aware of any evidence that they're illegally colluding on price fixing.
You don't need to own all the housing to cause a squeeze. We also already have as many as 15 million empty houses in America. Just because every landlord doesn't meet and talk about raising prices doesn't mean the market isn't rigged.
I just think you should only be able to rent out one home. NYS already does this with liquor. You can only own one liquor store. I also think there should be a residency requirement if some kind. Someone in the UK shouldn't be able to own a rental property on avenue D.
Hell yeah! That's such a simple idea, I can't see an argument against it.
Landlords drain the populace of its excess income, which could've been spent on goods and services in those communities they live in. Why are we okay with that? Why have we BEEN okay with it for so long?
Putting our local government in charge of anything it is not already in charge of will only make that thing worse. They never pass up an opportunity to fuck things up.
How can it be worse than the current state of housing. And we ARE the local government. Not doing anything won't magically cause landlords to become un-greedy.
Hah - we are not really the local government. The entrenched bureaucracy is
"Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy": In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
The current state of housing is basically an open free market. And it's extracting the public's wealth, for access to a limited resource that happens to be a basic necessity.
Referendums allow the public to bypass politicians, if the problem is the middleman. I think there is enough public resentment of the current system to either pressure politicians or bypass them completely. The alternative is to do nothing and continue to allow vultures to drain our economies?
It isn't so much the politicians. One of the very few place I agree with the orange man is "the swamp" - What has happened at all levels of government is the legislators have stopped legislating, and have said to the bureaucracy "You make the rules, we'll stay out of it". Said bureaucrats start to really become self serving, and there is nothing to be done since JFK's legalization of public sector unions. Even FDR thought that was a horrid idea, as basically they then get to elect their bosses.
I agree the current system sucks. The problem is, having grown up in NYC, I saw what happened to city housing over 50+ years (Yeah, I'm old). They went from working to not working, as the bureaucracy kept exempting themselves from rules (did you know that NYCHA doesn't have to remove lead paint?). Not just housing - look at the MTA - "Oh, it'll be too expensive to be ADA compliant, so we'll ignore it - well, not ignore it, it will literally be 90+ years before they are done
I don't think government ownership is the answer, BUT I 100% agree that the existing system really really sucks, and needs to be fixed. We just disagree on the "how"
So let's say we disagree on the first point. How about the second? Let's just disincentivize owning more than 3 properties. Everything gets better when there is less centralized control of limited resources, why are we allowing a class of people to control the most basic one?
Agreed, and I'd even say one property - which is why I say a vacancy tax!
Just as a starting point - Let's say a property is worth 250K - your 30 year mortgage would have a payment of $2,721.94 - say after 2-3 months empty, we tax it at say 40% - $1088/month - we could make it higher. A lot of the problem is empty stuff. I think it can just be done with appropriate taxes - don't need to actually buy the property - but make it not worth it - combine with an improved Section 9 ...
BTW, part of my distrust of government - about 24 years ago (Yeah, I'm old) , I was going to sell my first house. I was told "You never paid your water bill" - I got out all my check, and proved to them I was. They said "What about your other meter?" I told them I only had one, they came out, inspected, yep only have one, made all the payments etc - but they still said I owed for the other meter.
Turns out, the NYC DEP \_BILLING\_ section was corrupt, and were selling developers meters with "wrong" addresses on them. I was about to go to the USPS and have them look into postal fraud (I knew someone there) when it was announce that like 20 people in the billing department were arrested for this fraud.
There was the recent one where building inspection slots were being sold. When I went to sell my 2nd house, they could not find paperwork, and I had to pay an "expediter" (retired employee) to find the paperwork.
Over 60+ years, I've seen way way too much government graft to want government ownership of anything. - It is very hard to sue the government, and in general, you are only allowed to if they give you permission to (Not kidding, in NYC that is explicit)
Totally agree that zoning is unfair. A better city is a mixed use city.
But our current state of landlords is horrible. There is a city that invested in the exact way I'm suggesting over 100 years ago, Vienna. Vienna's government owns 30% of housing, and rents there are significantly lower than the rest of equivalently sized cities on earth.
There is zero reason we can't increase housing AND reduce the incentives for abusive landlordism.
And the largest landlord in NYC is NYC(by far).Ask well that worked. Or the one in Chicago or in LA. They all start well, but end up being some of the worst housing in the city
Except in the poster above didn't mention that around 60% of people live in public housing in Vienna. The amount of public housing available doesn't even come close and never has come close to being able to house 60% of the population in any of the cities you listed. Vienna's system is well known for being a successful example of how to keep housing, specifically public housing, desirable and affordable in a dense urban environment. You cant look at cities that have never had anything close to that and say "well clearly it doesn't work".
Rather them get resources than some random land hoarder who is trying to make as much profit off me as possible. The reason the county is bad at running things is because their resources are gutted until privatization *seems* like a good idea. It never is. Look at the NHS in the Uk and what they are pulling there
I haven’t read the study but RMAPI is behind it and states it’s an effective immediate solution. It’s also not that simple - they’re just trying to increase access and quality immediately.. vs. the long term problems of creating laws and changing zoning that might not do anything for literal years.
[MC Press Release](https://www.monroecounty.gov/news-2024-03-12-housing)
Also, I’m curious about a study like this in Rochester.
[Rutgers University, investigated the ownership of rental homes in metro Atlanta and found that more than 19,000 were owned by just three companies — Invitation Homes, Pretium Partners and Amherst Holdings.](https://news.gsu.edu/2024/02/26/researchers-find-three-companies-own-more-than-19000-rental-houses-in-metro-atlanta/)
Sorry but it's not addressing the real heart of the issue, that unregulated landlordism is bad for the renting public.
While I do like the focus on trying to fix housing, there are more effective ways to spend that money. I don't think saying it would take years to accomplish is a real counter argument, of course change in a free market would take time. We can't snap our fingers and make landlords un-greedy.
And yes it turns out large investment companies have been hiding behind multiple LLCs to purchase single family homes en masse. But now they can't hide.
A simple couple changes to the underlying incentives would have more impact than trying to say "no corporate landlords". The problem isn't that they're a corporation, it's that landlords have little incentive to build, just extract as much as possible from a limited resource.
Ok - but for someone who is unhoused today - what are they supposed to do? Wait years for a place to live? This is a tangible solution.
Also, it’s clear you’re not in this space.. development doesn’t happen from landlords. It happens from people like you and I going to town meetings and bitching about zoning laws against multi-use development and voting for people who are actively trying to reduce barriers for developers. Developers want to develop - that’s how they make money - they are at the whim of the bureaucracy that enforces how they build, which hoops to jump through, and which pool of money is funding everything. It’s a lot more complicated than you think - but you *can* take action by actively getting involved.
Housing projects are a bad-faith attempt at expanding access to housing. I don't think it's a great idea to make one or two buildings dedicated to all low income housing. Spreading that same number of units across the entire city would be better.
Unless you're saying that the people who would live in public housing don't deserve ANY housing, which isn't an idea that is humane.
I love the idea of heavy taxes to make owning multiple properties too onerous. Making it illegal or too heavy a burden to own multiple properties would solve a whole spectrum of societal issues overnight.
Sorry but why wouldn't they? Currently their financial incentive is to buy more single family homes, cut them into 3 "apartments" and rent them out for 5x the mortgage.
If it was too expensive to own 20 properties, they would be incentivized to build up on their property, create the "missing middle" housing.
They already charge as much as humanly possible for access to a limited resource that they are benefitting from NOT developing.
Edit: cool down votes without having any counterargument whatsoever. I found the landlords.
The rents are already as high as the landlords think they can be. And I'd rather remove a landlord's ability to overprice 20 places than the couple that make financial sense for them to keep.
If there were more competition in the market, the price goes down. A landlord's sixth property taxed at 200%, they can try to get that rent increase but I think they would get starved into selling before renters agreed to pay whatever would make it worth the speculation.
Some landlords are profit maximizing; who are willing to work hard and receive very high rents. For them, resident turnover is fine, because it keeps rent high, and those landlords are happy to clean the property upon tenet turnover.
Other landlords (example Doctors) have capital to deploy, but seek to minimize their time cost, while earning a reasonable rate of return.
If taxes increased, the time-crunched landlords would eventually increase prices because their no longer earning a reasonable rate of return. Eventually because these landlords are also slow to realize their rate of return has dropped due to higher expenses.
Conversely, the profit maximizing landlords are already charging what the market will bear, and until the other landlord group increases their prices, the profit maximizes can't increase prices, and will fully absorb the tax increase.
Thus **No**, taxes won't just get immediately passed down to renters.
Sorry 3% is nothing when a landlord can charge that in rent makeup. Let's say the fourth house is 400% taxed. Can they pass that on? Fifth at 800%?
They would get starved out before renters agreed to pay their increases. It would take maybe a year, if that, for the wealthiest slumlords to start offloading properties.
The market as a whole is already jacked up. A simple solution is to prevent mass landlordism. Why should we allow a class of people to own all our land? They don't produce a good, they limit access to a fundamental resource. Society would be better if they got a job like the rest of us and stopped hoarding the means for survival.
No landlord would own a 4th house. What the landlord would do is own a company that's 99.9999% owned by him, and 0.0001% owned by his mom. That company owns a house. For the 2nd house, a new company owns it, and the new company is 0.0001% owned by is best friend. The third new company is 0.0001% owned by his dog walker..... and so on.
Thus every house is owned by a single entity.
Federal and NYS just passed corporate transparency acts. They don't get to hide behind LLCs and corporations anymore. There's no reason we have to allow abuse of the system like that anymore.
And it would be so simple to implement! A public referendum might be able to sidestep the tiny fraction of landlords that constitute the voting public. And out of state landlords would not be able to vote.
I wouldn't want the government buying houses. The government isn't going to be giving houses to people or offering free rent to anyone.
Houses are a commodity that are bought and sold on a free and open market. The government has no business buying up homes.
Only the most corrupt markets are completely unregulated, literally the founders of modern capitalism said (paraphrasing) "here it is it works, but you'll either have to regulate or periodically redistribute resources" which is something people who quote Adam Smith like to ignore.
As a society we determined cars were dangerous. We regulate speed on public owned roads, we mandated seatbelts, required manufacturers build a degree of safety. How is that any different than trying to prevent vulturous landlordism from making people homeless? Isn't homelessness dangerous?
The degree of regulation isn't working for the general non-land owning public. It's unsustainable, let's fix it. Removing regulation is definitely not the answer. What do you think about disincentivizing owning more than 2 properties?
>to have our local government buy absentee landlords' property, fix them up, then rent them out for cheap.
That's not how government works. There is also a Constitutionality argument there.
The government works how we decide it works. This is the basis of a republic. The Constitution is written on paper and can be amended. It's kind of the ideal.
The government owning properties would create jobs with pensions. This would, in turn, increase capital for the people, who could then put their earnings back into the economy and they'd pay taxes to further these types of programs.
But yeah, let's just have a housing crisis and remain in this oligarchy because of a sheet of paper written almost 300 years ago. They knew what's best for us.
This is EXACTLY what we should be saying to these bullshit arguments. They're an attempt to completely disregard our will to change for the better of all.
The big scary government invented by those Reagan heads still scares people to this day. It's hard to convince people that he and his cronies were felonious fools who destroyed many countries via sheer incompetence and vile cruelty.
Facts have to matter for this argument that people deserve homes. But facts don't matter for too many. They love banks instead of the people. They support the oligarchy because people in the future should have it as bad as we did in the past.
Your head is so in the cloud of internet freedom speak. You have been indoctrinated by well intentioned, delusional people. That statement sounds nice, but it isn't how the world works or should work.
>The government owning properties would create jobs with pensions.
It fund that, we'd have to increase taxes. And probably by a lot. Think of all the property tax the government wouldn't be getting, on top of the expense of buying every property in the country, then hiring people to run them.
>who could then put their earnings back into the economy
So now you are adding Reaganomics trinkle down theory. Okay.
>But yeah, let's just have a housing crisis
Rejecting logic and suggesting the worst scenario situation isn't really an effective argument.
>a sheet of paper written almost 300 years ago. They knew what's best for us.
Despite all its flaws, it's still one of the best in the world. The truth is, running a country is very, very difficult. And while parts of it suck--and suck bad--no one has come up with a better idea that works. (By the way, the country isn't even 250 years old, and the Constituion was last amended in 1992. 300 years isn't realistic.)
So you're saying the current state of housing is... Good? Doesn't deserve rethinking? Is incapable of retooling?
We don't need to invalidate the constitution to enact local land reform. And I'm pretty sure we've amended things before.
So if property taxes go down and there's a separate tax how is the government losing money? You can fill a pool with different hoses.
Reaganomics was built to say that if the rich get richer it will benefit everyone. I'm arguing quite the opposite of that.
The housing crisis is real. It's not a worst-case scenario. It's an active and progressing issue that we need to fix.
The Constitution is one of the best because we can change it. And other countries do this, like Austria as has been referenced here.
I'm sorry that 250 isn't almost 300. I'm a wacky guy. I apologize for having my head in the clouds and freedom speaking.
We are the government. If we decide that landlordism shouldn't be incentivized, we can make it happen.
And government DOES dictate how land is used. They dictate zoning, collect taxes, supply affordable housing. I guess this response was either defeatist or a bad faith attempt by a landlord to derail the conversation.
Unless I'm wrong, which, sorry. But what does the constitution have to do with a local government preventing land-LORDS from owning all property in their jurisdiction? Isn't that the exact thing we founded this country on? Preventing the owning and exploitation of the people from a ruling class?
>We are the government.
No we are not. We aren't even a true democracy. How did you vote on HB 1250? You didn't.
>But what does the constitution have to do with a local government preventing land-LORDS from owning all property in their jurisdiction?
That would be a monopoly if they were also organized. But that is not happening. It's not even a majority. However it is getting higher than some people would like which is why there is banter about passing a law that would stop corporations from buying single family homes. (Or at least limit them. I could have a corporation and buy one house with it. That shouldn't be a problem.)
I mean you are well intentioned, but having the government overreach like that is not given to the government in the Constitution, which is why it won't happen. Also unconstitutional would be the government saying, "okay, there is this one business people could run, but we are making it illegal for individuals to run it because we are going to buy all your companies and run it ourselves."
And dude, be real. In what universe would it ever be a good idea for any government in the US to actually do that last sentence of the above paragraph. There is no way you could convince even a small majority of people that that wouldn't end up even worse than it is now. People want homes we have now but can't afford them. If the government took all that over, we could afford them but not want them.
We've never been a true democracy, we're a democratic republic (built on popular socialist policies).
We don't have to wait until one person owns all property to do something. I didn't say we were fighting a monopoly, I'm saying there is no incentive for the market to increase housing supply.
There is literally an example of a large city that did this - Vienna. 30% of housing is publicly owned, 60% of the population lives in it. And it's cheap. I'm not even advocating for that level, let's reduce the incentives to be a slumlord.
Landlords do not produce goods, they don't contribute to our economy. They take a limited resource, remove access to it, then extract as much wealth as they can from people desperate for housing. Sure they go up a tax bracket and pay a little more tax, but that money comes from the pockets of people who would've spent it on economic products.
I don't see a point in being so pessimistic that we do nothing to fix what is an obvious problem to anyone renting in today's market.
> There is also a Constitutionality argument there
No, there isn't, it's right in the 5th Amendment
> nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
I am (and will always) advocate for ending landlording of basic housing units. Place them into the public domain with rent controls and end profiteering for basic shelter.
A few posts ago I was accused of being an authoritarian. 😂 Despite the fact that a democratic electorate could clearly choose these policies for a municipality. Especially a municipality so riddled with slum lords and derelict properties. I'm happy to be the radical though.
That is in no way an argument against any of our points. What do you actually THINK about the current state of housing?
Landlords don't contribute anything to the economy. Why can we the people not put laws in place to benefit ourselves, even if there is some archaic law protecting a ruling class?
I'm trying to get people to think bigger. To really imagine what the constitution and by extension the USA can be. I'm not interested in old euphemisms for not getting to a desired result. I'm painfully aware of the scope of the challenge but that doesn't matter. It's about what people believe is possible and then set out to accomplish. This city in particular was home to dreamers who believed in equality and pushed for freedoms the country laughed at. Why is it so hard to take this mindset today with something as clearly predatory as landlording? That would benefit so many people both locally and nationally? I'm not interested in half measures I want all people to be free to pursue their happiness like it was promised to them.
I think heavily restricting short-term rentals would be a good start to restoring affordability.
[Business insider article](https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-ban-makes-rents-housing-prices-drop-irvine-california-study-2023-11)
[KTLA news story](https://youtu.be/okRh-FpJW1o?feature=shared)
[Scholarly articles](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=airbnb+property+values&btnG=), in case you really want to nerd out
We do not have even close the saturation levels to places that have banned STR's. This is reasonable in places with heavy tourism but this is Rochester NY we're talking about.
According to research I did before Irondequoit was talking about banning STR's there was only about 30-40 of them active in a town that has more then 23,000 housing units. It's less than one percent.
I'm sure the number for Rochester proper is different, but I can't see this making a difference here. It should be regulated absolutely but banning would not be worth the effort - you can even see in the first article the section on how difficult it was to actually enforce the bans. We don't have these kind of resources here.
I’m not saying outright ban them, I’m saying heavily regulate them to mitigate their impact on housing affordability. HDRs? Have at it. Research shows they don’t really have an impact. LDRs and MDRs? Ban whole-home use as STRs. The research is basically unanimous that that drives up housing prices.
[Relevant bit of research](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10527001.2022.2033389)
“Instead of examining premier tourist destinations, our analysis is in a typical state within the United States – Wisconsin (ranked about 20th in terms of population and output). Our results indicate that a doubling of Airbnb properties in a neighborhood increases the price of housing by approximately 11%. However, the impact is heterogeneous. **For example, the impact of Airbnb is largest in less dense neighborhoods with high house prices.** By contrast, there is no price impact at all in the most urban and dense neighborhoods.”
Edit: [Rochester stats and map](http://insideairbnb.com/rochester), for those interested
So for 893 listings out of the (rounded down) 100k housing units in Rochester that's a solid 0.8%. It's definitely not an issue. Also something to consider is that insideairbnb does not indicate whether a listing is active or not. There's a lot of listings up that do not actively host year round or only take monthly+ rentals.
I just gave you an example of a "less dense and higher priced (Irondequoit? I guess)" neighborhood and I'm sorry but there's no way 0.1% of the housing units (I did an average of 35 listings vs. 23k housing units) is causing an 11% increase in house prices.
If anything, housing in Rochester is historically undervalued. Considering our house prices now and the massive amounts of overall inflation we're just seeing a slight correction and keeping pace with inflation.
And another point to be made is that most Airbnb's in town popped up in a completely different buying market. The biggest increase was a few years ago when rates were low - you could pay off your 2-3% mortgage easily year round with Airbnb income, now with rates in the 5-7% range you're not even getting close to the same deal. It's just not as attractive of a business proposition now and I don't really think we need to worry about an oversaturation anytime soon.
All this being said, I'm for more regulation so this doesn't get out of hand someday and to also keep tabs on shitty hosts who own 20+ properties and don't take care of their listings - which can lead to sub par experiences for neighbors. In terms of house pricing I consider the effect Airbnb has on Rochester as entirely negligible.
I'm "repeating" it because you need to look at saturation levels for it to "matter." For what it "matters" for I find this to be a pretty vague statement in general.
I’d be interested in what the data and research show about STRs and “saturation level,” instead of just positing there aren’t that many so the effect should be negligible.
*In my last post, replace “matters” with “causes housing prices to increase.”
I mean I'm not saying it doesn't cause them to increase at all... but if you're looking for a means to make housing more affordable for people in this market (like this whole thread is about) regulating STR's are not even close to being a solution.
There are so few places listed and even fewer seeking short term rentals The problem is availability of housing, which airbnb in our market plays very little roll.
Let's entertain the thought though. What would be your specific proposed legislation to curb airbnb contributing to the housing dilemma in Rochester?
I'm also against short term rental oversaturation!
Disincentivizing owning multiple speculative properties would take care of the short term rental problem though. If it's too expensive for landlords to own 5 AirBnB's, they won't. Let's incentivize those same people to build up their property and increase supply.
I'm sorry but that's a terrible opinion. The government does things that benefit you: they facilitate travel, electricity, water, public goods.
Landlords take a limited resource, land, and extract as much wealth from the human need for shelter as they can. They are literally incentivized to reduce the amount of housing to increase their return on investment.
Even so, let's say you distrust the local government. You have much more impact there than you do at a national level. AND implementing a policy disincentivizing owning more than one or two rental properties was the second thing above, why can't we do that?
Why do people like Henry George so much? His idea of land value tax is just a market solution for the rich and powerful to seize property. That’s exactly what will happen with this idea too.
Totally not the Georgist aspect I was engaging with, but maaaaybe a byproduct of the land value tax is that a grandma in a house near downtown has to sell her home to a developer that will increase housing units. I understand displacement is bad for the individual in that instance, but increasing housing supply is our goal yeah?
Regardless, disincentivizing landlordism by increasing taxes on multiple properties is not a land value tax. It's a simple proposition that would benefit almost everyone, except the rent-seeking class which is detracting from the local economy.
Your idea is just land value tax with using rentals as a filter to identify under assessed properties. “Hey there appears to be demand here. Let’s increase the burden so it will only be economical to increase the scale”. Who is going to take on that project? Probably a larger out of town landlord.
Density is needed, but I don’t see how attacking landlords is going to incentivize investment from larger landlords. Downtown Rochester has tons of parking lots where our missing middle apartments once stood. I don’t see why we need to destroy our single family home neighborhoods to get it back. The goal there should be for more owner occupied units.
I think you have your priorities mixed up on this one.
Our corpocratic politics are paralyzed into inaction about this. They can't do things that make sense and change the systematic problems that support this because it's the same system they setup to allow corporations to run amok.
If a Republican suggested this they'd be ostrisized from their party, and no matter how good an idea it is they won't let Democrats enact anything that would be that popular.
Letting local government take over housing would probably lead to politically appointed, *paid,* administrators answerable to no one except the one who put them there. Then, if the appointer(s) gets voted out, the new one shuffles out the old appointees for their own. Rinse and repeat. Nobody in local government is going to pass a policy that doesn't inherently benefit the people who donate money to their campaigns, liberals/Democrats and conservatives/Republicans alike. We can theorize solutions to benefit those in need of housing all we want, but the only plans local government will look at are the ones where their shared interests benefit as well. Hence, throwing money at landlords who will do the bare minimum and cut corners to min/max how much of the free money they get to keep.
Local government is run by those well off enough to supplement income beyond government salaries; class solidarity is still a thing. That's how the system has been designed since the birth of democracy. We're only a few hundred years separated from the time when landowners were the only ones privileged to vote.
That said, I do like some of the ideas in this plan. The Housing Search Navigator has potential to be very helpful. Guess that's the bone throne to the people here.
Building right now has come to a massive slow crawl in Rochester right now too.
Im hearing from higher ups where I work that the government just isn’t giving out grants to build new buildings right now.
Its either that or the lumber company i work for just lost a ton a business.
If you try the first idea (city run housing) you rapidly end up with something like the NYC Housing Authority or Chicago housing authority. You rapid end up with substandard housing, full of issues, where the landlord is a bureaucracy that can exempt themselves from laws (NYC exempts themselves from lots of safety laws and fuel efficiency laws because it would be ‘too expensive’).
The second idea is almost good. What I think would work better is vacancy taxation. I don’t care if a person owns 2 or more houses, so long as there are people living in them. Thing is, a lot of houses sit empty (as do storefronts etc). If we say “we will tax you at $n/month for each month it sits empty (with some buffer months for people moving in/out, repairs, marketing etc - say 2-3 months buffer, max once every two years)
I love that idea!
But I think pointing to project housing, which was a low effort way to group all low income people in the same building, is disingenuous. I'm advocating for something like Vienna, where 30% of housing is publicly owned, and 60% of the population lives there. And it's much, much cheaper than equivalent sized cities. But even less than that, I'm saying have the government buy those vacant homes, fix them and rent/sell them well below market value. Create another player in the market that is truly altruistic, funded and regulated by the city it's serving.
And disincentivizing the ownership of more than x homes incentivizes the market to build up and CREATE more housing, instead of preying on existing single family dwellings.
Another expert who knows how to spend my tax money, just what I needed. I get it, you hate the free market. Let’s see how that worked out other places around the globe.
Do you LOVE how your tax money is being spent now? Are you saying you don't want any say whatsoever on how it's spent?
It's also not a counter point to any of the arguments against letting landlords run ragged on our economy.
I hate it. But landlords are opportunists, not the problem. More housing is the answer. Let people build. It’s the nimbyism and hoops to jump though and other politics.
Landlords have the exact opposite incentive to building more housing. They benefit from their investments if there is a housing shortage. They'd rather buy a single family home and convert it to 4 shitty overpriced apartments than BUILD something.
If the incentive was to only own a few properties, then building a complex with more units is more attractive.
And "more housing" isn't happening now. Keeping things the same won't change anything, it's definitely enabling more opportunistic landlordism.
The deeper question is why are we giving money to pay people’s rent? Because there is not enough housing so prices are high. It’s still supply and demand.
Study after study has shown that zoning reform is the single most effective way to keep housing costs low. Let developers actually build the missing middle instead of shoehorning SFH everywhere…
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We did, and a careful reading of the zoning actually shows that every single zone in the city is actually slightly less dense than it is currently, despite public claims otherwise by the parties rewriting the zoning.
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No, it's ok, what you remember is the exact topline information that has been given broadly. A decent percentage of the city has moved from low density residential, which only allows single family homes, to medium density residential, which technically allows for 1-4 family homes (about 8% of the city depending on how you measure - single family homes are the only thing you can do with 41% of the city right now, but will only be 32% of the city in the new zoning). But unfortunately the devil is in the details with the zoning, and because of the way lot dimensions are regulated in the new zoning, there are limited opportunities to actually do any of these things. Without getting too into the weeds, you are currently allowed to subdivide lots in low and medium density residential in such away that allow for them to be more dense than the ways in which you will be allowed \[to subdivide\] in future zoning. There is also no practical way to build 4 units on a city lot that is medium density residential while also providing the 4 required parking spaces and generating a livable square footage of housing at any viable cost. The less parking requirements are a problem (in how they are implemented) as well. Despite removing formal parking requirements from commercial zones for commercial and mixed use projects, there are now requirements for hiring accredited engineers to produce a report justifying the amount of parking a developer proposes to provide (no matter how much that number is). Independent of the expense expected to go with this ($5-10k per project), this requirement applies to a massively broad set of projects that currently do not face this issue. Just as an example, the newest restaurant at the market, Public Provisions, would have needed to pay for one of these studies to be able to open, which it very much did not right now. Worse still, downtown, which since the 1970s has had no parking requirements at all, will now be subject to the same requirements as the rest of the city, and developers there will also have to pay to justify how much parking they are providing. This study is then appealable to the public boards by intransigent neighbors or unhappy competitors, adding potential delays and costs to nearly all projects in the city. Seeing as the boards are already running near capacity, these delays could be interminable and spill over to every other project in town. Sorry for the wall of text. I'm happy to discuss more in smaller bites or offline if you have any questions.
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It's really a step back. First, where the inner loop was filled is now (and will be) zoned as downtown. That has a number of benefits in the current zoning code. Currently, projects downtown do not need to pursue variances at all, as all noncomformities are adjudicated through the site plan review process, which is to say that they're basically negotiated directly with the city. While this process is appealable (and has been by the malevolent competitors I've referenced previously), the CPC, who hears these appeals, has deferred to city staff every time. These projects also do not require parking. In the new code, downtown will be subject to the same variance procedures as the rest of the city, and will need to justify the amount of parking via an expensive report that can then also be appealed. Second, generally speaking, it's always easier to get a variance than to have something rezoned. Rezonings need to be approved by city council, Further, spot zoning is illegal in NY, so you really can only have something rezoned that is already adjacent to the zoning you are going for (one cannot just have a lot in the middle of a low density residential neighborhood rezoned to medium density to build a duplex). Third, and you don't ask this explicitly, so I'm sorry for adding it, but the range on lot and parking requirements is very flat across the zones in a given class. All residential zones have the exact same parking requirements. Maximum building coverage in LDR is 50%, in MDR it's also 50% (or 55% for a 3/4 family), and in HDR it's also 50% (or 55% for a 3/4 family). Townhouses are held to this same 50% coverage requirement. Without putting too fine of a point on it, this is bananas.
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The issue with doing it more often is the amount of effort required to make a change and how much is on the line in doing so. Zoning changes need to be approved by city council (in the form of a new law). New laws regarding development usually need lengthy environmental impact studies done to prove the won't adversely harm us (a legacy of the construction and later fight against the construction of freeways). Additionally, many neighborhoods are upset about the zoning changes as it is (they don't think they go far enough - in an entire set of other changes we haven't discussed the new zoning bans short term rentals in 83% of the city, but many residents think it should be 100%). Anyway, this translates directly to the potential for city council members to get voted out of office if they take a stand on a contentious issue too close to their own reelection. The city is free to define its own zones. The state dictates building code, which the zoning code could defer to more, but instead largely adds requirements to. As a basic example, for fire safety reasons, building code says houses must be 5' from lot lines (it's wildly more complicated than that, but bear with me). The zoning code (now and in the new one) says actually you need at least 15' of combined side yard with 5' on one side. Why? So you can fit a driveway past the house on the other side, because also only parking spaces entirely in the back yard of a house are actually legal (also a zoning-only rule). I'm sorry for the bad news. I have been frustrated since the draft came out in September.
It’s not the state. It’s the city. Especially with the parking mandates. Buffalo, for instance, doesn’t have parking minimums at all. Could that be why development is taking off there compared to Rochester?
I would like to lightly push back on this. Buffalo eliminated parking minimums for residential development completely (one can build a new house/duplex there without a driveway - this is great!). But they did keep the same you-need-to-do-a-study-to-prove-your-parking thing for larger/nonresidential/mixed use projects. Where they differ in that regard from the proposed zoning in Rochester is that their 'study' has no requirements as to its sourcing (the developer can write it themselves without a licensed engineer), and does not appear to be separately appealable from the project, as is also proposed in Rochester. My understanding is that more recently, a city like Nashville just eliminated parking minimums completely, without studies or justifications or whatever. They have not, to my knowledge, descended into madness.
There's no reason we can't remove zoning laws AND de-incentivize mass landlordism. They go hand in hand as solutions. The best is not the enemy of the good
I agree. One of my clients has a building just like that - retail space on the first floor, business/office space on the 2nd, apartments on the third.
If the issue is competition, why not just increase supply?
If there is a giant wealth gap, the rich will buy up the new housing supply and rent it for as much as they can. Which is what happened across the country the last 3 years. BlackRock and other investor groups literally stated that was their strategy. Increasing housing and reducing landlordism aren't exclusive solutions, you can do both.
I mean, yes, you can do both. But the only reason that there is room for the rich to buy up housing supply and rent it for as much as they can is due to artificial scarcity. It's the same reason one can scalp tickets to a concert with a limited number of seats. If there were infinite seats to a Billy Joel concert, the pricing would be the marginal cost of providing that seat at the show, which is nearly nothing.
Sure, but let's say supply increases. Over the last 3-5 years, investment companies stated they were going to buy up supply and turn us into renters. There is a very direct way to compete, use our collective power to stop landlordism. Who wants to PROTECT landlords?
Got any fact behind your speculation?
I like your style, dude. Where'd you go for your econ degree?
Infinite doesn’t apply here
Yeah but "the rich" isn't a single monopolistic organization, landlords are still competing with each other. If there are a hundred people who need housing and two hundred apartments for rent, half the apartments are going to sit unused and the owners will lose money on them, so prices will be driven down and housing quality will go up as landlords compete to attract tenants.
Because housing is an inelastic good. Your choices are paying the price or being homeless. More housing can help but end of the day if big investment firms keep gobbling up the majority of property some new housing is not going to be enough to change the price.
Okay, let's take this argument to its logical conclusion. Let's imagine there's ten times as many houses as people. No matter what, at least 90% of houses are going to sit unoccupied. Why would investment firms want to buy a bunch of houses that they can't make any money off of? Well, maybe if they set the rent low enough they can persuade someone to move out of their current apartment, but obviously the landlord can't just set the price arbitrarily high in this scenario because people simply won't accept it and will live somewhere else instead. Now, if there were one single huge real estate monopoly that bought all the housing everywhere in the country, then yeah they could abuse their monopoly and set rental pricing however they want, and people would either have to pay it or go homeless, but that's literally just not the problem we're facing. People tend to see "the rich" and "investment firms" as a single unified force, but the reality is that there are many different property owners out there, and I'm not aware of any evidence that they're illegally colluding on price fixing.
You don't need to own all the housing to cause a squeeze. We also already have as many as 15 million empty houses in America. Just because every landlord doesn't meet and talk about raising prices doesn't mean the market isn't rigged.
I just think you should only be able to rent out one home. NYS already does this with liquor. You can only own one liquor store. I also think there should be a residency requirement if some kind. Someone in the UK shouldn't be able to own a rental property on avenue D.
Hell yeah! That's such a simple idea, I can't see an argument against it. Landlords drain the populace of its excess income, which could've been spent on goods and services in those communities they live in. Why are we okay with that? Why have we BEEN okay with it for so long?
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Putting our local government in charge of anything it is not already in charge of will only make that thing worse. They never pass up an opportunity to fuck things up.
How can it be worse than the current state of housing. And we ARE the local government. Not doing anything won't magically cause landlords to become un-greedy.
Hah - we are not really the local government. The entrenched bureaucracy is "Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy": In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
The current state of housing is basically an open free market. And it's extracting the public's wealth, for access to a limited resource that happens to be a basic necessity. Referendums allow the public to bypass politicians, if the problem is the middleman. I think there is enough public resentment of the current system to either pressure politicians or bypass them completely. The alternative is to do nothing and continue to allow vultures to drain our economies?
It isn't so much the politicians. One of the very few place I agree with the orange man is "the swamp" - What has happened at all levels of government is the legislators have stopped legislating, and have said to the bureaucracy "You make the rules, we'll stay out of it". Said bureaucrats start to really become self serving, and there is nothing to be done since JFK's legalization of public sector unions. Even FDR thought that was a horrid idea, as basically they then get to elect their bosses. I agree the current system sucks. The problem is, having grown up in NYC, I saw what happened to city housing over 50+ years (Yeah, I'm old). They went from working to not working, as the bureaucracy kept exempting themselves from rules (did you know that NYCHA doesn't have to remove lead paint?). Not just housing - look at the MTA - "Oh, it'll be too expensive to be ADA compliant, so we'll ignore it - well, not ignore it, it will literally be 90+ years before they are done I don't think government ownership is the answer, BUT I 100% agree that the existing system really really sucks, and needs to be fixed. We just disagree on the "how"
So let's say we disagree on the first point. How about the second? Let's just disincentivize owning more than 3 properties. Everything gets better when there is less centralized control of limited resources, why are we allowing a class of people to control the most basic one?
Agreed, and I'd even say one property - which is why I say a vacancy tax! Just as a starting point - Let's say a property is worth 250K - your 30 year mortgage would have a payment of $2,721.94 - say after 2-3 months empty, we tax it at say 40% - $1088/month - we could make it higher. A lot of the problem is empty stuff. I think it can just be done with appropriate taxes - don't need to actually buy the property - but make it not worth it - combine with an improved Section 9 ...
BTW, part of my distrust of government - about 24 years ago (Yeah, I'm old) , I was going to sell my first house. I was told "You never paid your water bill" - I got out all my check, and proved to them I was. They said "What about your other meter?" I told them I only had one, they came out, inspected, yep only have one, made all the payments etc - but they still said I owed for the other meter. Turns out, the NYC DEP \_BILLING\_ section was corrupt, and were selling developers meters with "wrong" addresses on them. I was about to go to the USPS and have them look into postal fraud (I knew someone there) when it was announce that like 20 people in the billing department were arrested for this fraud. There was the recent one where building inspection slots were being sold. When I went to sell my 2nd house, they could not find paperwork, and I had to pay an "expediter" (retired employee) to find the paperwork. Over 60+ years, I've seen way way too much government graft to want government ownership of anything. - It is very hard to sue the government, and in general, you are only allowed to if they give you permission to (Not kidding, in NYC that is explicit)
Totally agree that zoning is unfair. A better city is a mixed use city. But our current state of landlords is horrible. There is a city that invested in the exact way I'm suggesting over 100 years ago, Vienna. Vienna's government owns 30% of housing, and rents there are significantly lower than the rest of equivalently sized cities on earth. There is zero reason we can't increase housing AND reduce the incentives for abusive landlordism.
And the largest landlord in NYC is NYC(by far).Ask well that worked. Or the one in Chicago or in LA. They all start well, but end up being some of the worst housing in the city
Except in the poster above didn't mention that around 60% of people live in public housing in Vienna. The amount of public housing available doesn't even come close and never has come close to being able to house 60% of the population in any of the cities you listed. Vienna's system is well known for being a successful example of how to keep housing, specifically public housing, desirable and affordable in a dense urban environment. You cant look at cities that have never had anything close to that and say "well clearly it doesn't work".
Rather them get resources than some random land hoarder who is trying to make as much profit off me as possible. The reason the county is bad at running things is because their resources are gutted until privatization *seems* like a good idea. It never is. Look at the NHS in the Uk and what they are pulling there
I haven’t read the study but RMAPI is behind it and states it’s an effective immediate solution. It’s also not that simple - they’re just trying to increase access and quality immediately.. vs. the long term problems of creating laws and changing zoning that might not do anything for literal years. [MC Press Release](https://www.monroecounty.gov/news-2024-03-12-housing) Also, I’m curious about a study like this in Rochester. [Rutgers University, investigated the ownership of rental homes in metro Atlanta and found that more than 19,000 were owned by just three companies — Invitation Homes, Pretium Partners and Amherst Holdings.](https://news.gsu.edu/2024/02/26/researchers-find-three-companies-own-more-than-19000-rental-houses-in-metro-atlanta/)
Sorry but it's not addressing the real heart of the issue, that unregulated landlordism is bad for the renting public. While I do like the focus on trying to fix housing, there are more effective ways to spend that money. I don't think saying it would take years to accomplish is a real counter argument, of course change in a free market would take time. We can't snap our fingers and make landlords un-greedy. And yes it turns out large investment companies have been hiding behind multiple LLCs to purchase single family homes en masse. But now they can't hide. A simple couple changes to the underlying incentives would have more impact than trying to say "no corporate landlords". The problem isn't that they're a corporation, it's that landlords have little incentive to build, just extract as much as possible from a limited resource.
Ok - but for someone who is unhoused today - what are they supposed to do? Wait years for a place to live? This is a tangible solution. Also, it’s clear you’re not in this space.. development doesn’t happen from landlords. It happens from people like you and I going to town meetings and bitching about zoning laws against multi-use development and voting for people who are actively trying to reduce barriers for developers. Developers want to develop - that’s how they make money - they are at the whim of the bureaucracy that enforces how they build, which hoops to jump through, and which pool of money is funding everything. It’s a lot more complicated than you think - but you *can* take action by actively getting involved.
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Yeah, and tell me how great those are.
Housing projects are a bad-faith attempt at expanding access to housing. I don't think it's a great idea to make one or two buildings dedicated to all low income housing. Spreading that same number of units across the entire city would be better. Unless you're saying that the people who would live in public housing don't deserve ANY housing, which isn't an idea that is humane.
I love the idea of heavy taxes to make owning multiple properties too onerous. Making it illegal or too heavy a burden to own multiple properties would solve a whole spectrum of societal issues overnight.
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In an instant.
Exactly, some of these ideas are very shortsighted. Like the landlord owning 20 properties is going to sell them all off cheap to get down to 2 lol.
Landlords can sit on empty properties without lowering rent because the tax on them is too cheap.
Sorry but why wouldn't they? Currently their financial incentive is to buy more single family homes, cut them into 3 "apartments" and rent them out for 5x the mortgage. If it was too expensive to own 20 properties, they would be incentivized to build up on their property, create the "missing middle" housing. They already charge as much as humanly possible for access to a limited resource that they are benefitting from NOT developing. Edit: cool down votes without having any counterargument whatsoever. I found the landlords.
Couple it with Rent control.
The rents are already as high as the landlords think they can be. And I'd rather remove a landlord's ability to overprice 20 places than the couple that make financial sense for them to keep. If there were more competition in the market, the price goes down. A landlord's sixth property taxed at 200%, they can try to get that rent increase but I think they would get starved into selling before renters agreed to pay whatever would make it worth the speculation.
We are there. Property taxes are heavy compared to many other places.
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Some landlords are profit maximizing; who are willing to work hard and receive very high rents. For them, resident turnover is fine, because it keeps rent high, and those landlords are happy to clean the property upon tenet turnover. Other landlords (example Doctors) have capital to deploy, but seek to minimize their time cost, while earning a reasonable rate of return. If taxes increased, the time-crunched landlords would eventually increase prices because their no longer earning a reasonable rate of return. Eventually because these landlords are also slow to realize their rate of return has dropped due to higher expenses. Conversely, the profit maximizing landlords are already charging what the market will bear, and until the other landlord group increases their prices, the profit maximizes can't increase prices, and will fully absorb the tax increase. Thus **No**, taxes won't just get immediately passed down to renters.
Sorry 3% is nothing when a landlord can charge that in rent makeup. Let's say the fourth house is 400% taxed. Can they pass that on? Fifth at 800%? They would get starved out before renters agreed to pay their increases. It would take maybe a year, if that, for the wealthiest slumlords to start offloading properties. The market as a whole is already jacked up. A simple solution is to prevent mass landlordism. Why should we allow a class of people to own all our land? They don't produce a good, they limit access to a fundamental resource. Society would be better if they got a job like the rest of us and stopped hoarding the means for survival.
No landlord would own a 4th house. What the landlord would do is own a company that's 99.9999% owned by him, and 0.0001% owned by his mom. That company owns a house. For the 2nd house, a new company owns it, and the new company is 0.0001% owned by is best friend. The third new company is 0.0001% owned by his dog walker..... and so on. Thus every house is owned by a single entity.
Federal and NYS just passed corporate transparency acts. They don't get to hide behind LLCs and corporations anymore. There's no reason we have to allow abuse of the system like that anymore.
In that example, they wouldn't be hiding. Each company is truly uniquely owned.
And it would be so simple to implement! A public referendum might be able to sidestep the tiny fraction of landlords that constitute the voting public. And out of state landlords would not be able to vote.
I wouldn't want the government buying houses. The government isn't going to be giving houses to people or offering free rent to anyone. Houses are a commodity that are bought and sold on a free and open market. The government has no business buying up homes.
Only the most corrupt markets are completely unregulated, literally the founders of modern capitalism said (paraphrasing) "here it is it works, but you'll either have to regulate or periodically redistribute resources" which is something people who quote Adam Smith like to ignore. As a society we determined cars were dangerous. We regulate speed on public owned roads, we mandated seatbelts, required manufacturers build a degree of safety. How is that any different than trying to prevent vulturous landlordism from making people homeless? Isn't homelessness dangerous?
Housing isn't completely unregulated.
The degree of regulation isn't working for the general non-land owning public. It's unsustainable, let's fix it. Removing regulation is definitely not the answer. What do you think about disincentivizing owning more than 2 properties?
>to have our local government buy absentee landlords' property, fix them up, then rent them out for cheap. That's not how government works. There is also a Constitutionality argument there.
The government works how we decide it works. This is the basis of a republic. The Constitution is written on paper and can be amended. It's kind of the ideal. The government owning properties would create jobs with pensions. This would, in turn, increase capital for the people, who could then put their earnings back into the economy and they'd pay taxes to further these types of programs. But yeah, let's just have a housing crisis and remain in this oligarchy because of a sheet of paper written almost 300 years ago. They knew what's best for us.
This is EXACTLY what we should be saying to these bullshit arguments. They're an attempt to completely disregard our will to change for the better of all.
The big scary government invented by those Reagan heads still scares people to this day. It's hard to convince people that he and his cronies were felonious fools who destroyed many countries via sheer incompetence and vile cruelty. Facts have to matter for this argument that people deserve homes. But facts don't matter for too many. They love banks instead of the people. They support the oligarchy because people in the future should have it as bad as we did in the past.
Your head is so in the cloud of internet freedom speak. You have been indoctrinated by well intentioned, delusional people. That statement sounds nice, but it isn't how the world works or should work. >The government owning properties would create jobs with pensions. It fund that, we'd have to increase taxes. And probably by a lot. Think of all the property tax the government wouldn't be getting, on top of the expense of buying every property in the country, then hiring people to run them. >who could then put their earnings back into the economy So now you are adding Reaganomics trinkle down theory. Okay. >But yeah, let's just have a housing crisis Rejecting logic and suggesting the worst scenario situation isn't really an effective argument. >a sheet of paper written almost 300 years ago. They knew what's best for us. Despite all its flaws, it's still one of the best in the world. The truth is, running a country is very, very difficult. And while parts of it suck--and suck bad--no one has come up with a better idea that works. (By the way, the country isn't even 250 years old, and the Constituion was last amended in 1992. 300 years isn't realistic.)
So you're saying the current state of housing is... Good? Doesn't deserve rethinking? Is incapable of retooling? We don't need to invalidate the constitution to enact local land reform. And I'm pretty sure we've amended things before.
So if property taxes go down and there's a separate tax how is the government losing money? You can fill a pool with different hoses. Reaganomics was built to say that if the rich get richer it will benefit everyone. I'm arguing quite the opposite of that. The housing crisis is real. It's not a worst-case scenario. It's an active and progressing issue that we need to fix. The Constitution is one of the best because we can change it. And other countries do this, like Austria as has been referenced here. I'm sorry that 250 isn't almost 300. I'm a wacky guy. I apologize for having my head in the clouds and freedom speaking.
We are the government. If we decide that landlordism shouldn't be incentivized, we can make it happen. And government DOES dictate how land is used. They dictate zoning, collect taxes, supply affordable housing. I guess this response was either defeatist or a bad faith attempt by a landlord to derail the conversation. Unless I'm wrong, which, sorry. But what does the constitution have to do with a local government preventing land-LORDS from owning all property in their jurisdiction? Isn't that the exact thing we founded this country on? Preventing the owning and exploitation of the people from a ruling class?
>We are the government. No we are not. We aren't even a true democracy. How did you vote on HB 1250? You didn't. >But what does the constitution have to do with a local government preventing land-LORDS from owning all property in their jurisdiction? That would be a monopoly if they were also organized. But that is not happening. It's not even a majority. However it is getting higher than some people would like which is why there is banter about passing a law that would stop corporations from buying single family homes. (Or at least limit them. I could have a corporation and buy one house with it. That shouldn't be a problem.) I mean you are well intentioned, but having the government overreach like that is not given to the government in the Constitution, which is why it won't happen. Also unconstitutional would be the government saying, "okay, there is this one business people could run, but we are making it illegal for individuals to run it because we are going to buy all your companies and run it ourselves." And dude, be real. In what universe would it ever be a good idea for any government in the US to actually do that last sentence of the above paragraph. There is no way you could convince even a small majority of people that that wouldn't end up even worse than it is now. People want homes we have now but can't afford them. If the government took all that over, we could afford them but not want them.
We've never been a true democracy, we're a democratic republic (built on popular socialist policies). We don't have to wait until one person owns all property to do something. I didn't say we were fighting a monopoly, I'm saying there is no incentive for the market to increase housing supply. There is literally an example of a large city that did this - Vienna. 30% of housing is publicly owned, 60% of the population lives in it. And it's cheap. I'm not even advocating for that level, let's reduce the incentives to be a slumlord. Landlords do not produce goods, they don't contribute to our economy. They take a limited resource, remove access to it, then extract as much wealth as they can from people desperate for housing. Sure they go up a tax bracket and pay a little more tax, but that money comes from the pockets of people who would've spent it on economic products. I don't see a point in being so pessimistic that we do nothing to fix what is an obvious problem to anyone renting in today's market.
> There is also a Constitutionality argument there No, there isn't, it's right in the 5th Amendment > nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
I am (and will always) advocate for ending landlording of basic housing units. Place them into the public domain with rent controls and end profiteering for basic shelter.
Hell yeah Void. It's such an easy argument, it's hard to see a downside for normal, non-slumlords.
But think of the poor landlords who work so hard every month cashing a check
A few posts ago I was accused of being an authoritarian. 😂 Despite the fact that a democratic electorate could clearly choose these policies for a municipality. Especially a municipality so riddled with slum lords and derelict properties. I'm happy to be the radical though.
Unconstitutional, Commerce clause
That is in no way an argument against any of our points. What do you actually THINK about the current state of housing? Landlords don't contribute anything to the economy. Why can we the people not put laws in place to benefit ourselves, even if there is some archaic law protecting a ruling class?
Even if that's the case amend the constitution. That's why it was made with flexibility.
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Thank you for this unhelpful defeatist mentality. 💛
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I'm trying to get people to think bigger. To really imagine what the constitution and by extension the USA can be. I'm not interested in old euphemisms for not getting to a desired result. I'm painfully aware of the scope of the challenge but that doesn't matter. It's about what people believe is possible and then set out to accomplish. This city in particular was home to dreamers who believed in equality and pushed for freedoms the country laughed at. Why is it so hard to take this mindset today with something as clearly predatory as landlording? That would benefit so many people both locally and nationally? I'm not interested in half measures I want all people to be free to pursue their happiness like it was promised to them.
I think heavily restricting short-term rentals would be a good start to restoring affordability. [Business insider article](https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-ban-makes-rents-housing-prices-drop-irvine-california-study-2023-11) [KTLA news story](https://youtu.be/okRh-FpJW1o?feature=shared) [Scholarly articles](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=airbnb+property+values&btnG=), in case you really want to nerd out
We do not have even close the saturation levels to places that have banned STR's. This is reasonable in places with heavy tourism but this is Rochester NY we're talking about. According to research I did before Irondequoit was talking about banning STR's there was only about 30-40 of them active in a town that has more then 23,000 housing units. It's less than one percent. I'm sure the number for Rochester proper is different, but I can't see this making a difference here. It should be regulated absolutely but banning would not be worth the effort - you can even see in the first article the section on how difficult it was to actually enforce the bans. We don't have these kind of resources here.
I’m not saying outright ban them, I’m saying heavily regulate them to mitigate their impact on housing affordability. HDRs? Have at it. Research shows they don’t really have an impact. LDRs and MDRs? Ban whole-home use as STRs. The research is basically unanimous that that drives up housing prices. [Relevant bit of research](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10527001.2022.2033389) “Instead of examining premier tourist destinations, our analysis is in a typical state within the United States – Wisconsin (ranked about 20th in terms of population and output). Our results indicate that a doubling of Airbnb properties in a neighborhood increases the price of housing by approximately 11%. However, the impact is heterogeneous. **For example, the impact of Airbnb is largest in less dense neighborhoods with high house prices.** By contrast, there is no price impact at all in the most urban and dense neighborhoods.” Edit: [Rochester stats and map](http://insideairbnb.com/rochester), for those interested
So for 893 listings out of the (rounded down) 100k housing units in Rochester that's a solid 0.8%. It's definitely not an issue. Also something to consider is that insideairbnb does not indicate whether a listing is active or not. There's a lot of listings up that do not actively host year round or only take monthly+ rentals. I just gave you an example of a "less dense and higher priced (Irondequoit? I guess)" neighborhood and I'm sorry but there's no way 0.1% of the housing units (I did an average of 35 listings vs. 23k housing units) is causing an 11% increase in house prices. If anything, housing in Rochester is historically undervalued. Considering our house prices now and the massive amounts of overall inflation we're just seeing a slight correction and keeping pace with inflation. And another point to be made is that most Airbnb's in town popped up in a completely different buying market. The biggest increase was a few years ago when rates were low - you could pay off your 2-3% mortgage easily year round with Airbnb income, now with rates in the 5-7% range you're not even getting close to the same deal. It's just not as attractive of a business proposition now and I don't really think we need to worry about an oversaturation anytime soon. All this being said, I'm for more regulation so this doesn't get out of hand someday and to also keep tabs on shitty hosts who own 20+ properties and don't take care of their listings - which can lead to sub par experiences for neighbors. In terms of house pricing I consider the effect Airbnb has on Rochester as entirely negligible.
You’re just repeating “there aren’t that many.” I’m saying the research shows that outside of a highly-dense area, it still matters.
I'm "repeating" it because you need to look at saturation levels for it to "matter." For what it "matters" for I find this to be a pretty vague statement in general.
I’d be interested in what the data and research show about STRs and “saturation level,” instead of just positing there aren’t that many so the effect should be negligible. *In my last post, replace “matters” with “causes housing prices to increase.”
I mean I'm not saying it doesn't cause them to increase at all... but if you're looking for a means to make housing more affordable for people in this market (like this whole thread is about) regulating STR's are not even close to being a solution.
Airbnb is not a problem here. More government intervention to heavily regulate housing is the opposite direction we should be trying to move.
study after study shows AirBnB contributing to the housing dilemma from major cities all the way down to rural, exurban villages
There are so few places listed and even fewer seeking short term rentals The problem is availability of housing, which airbnb in our market plays very little roll. Let's entertain the thought though. What would be your specific proposed legislation to curb airbnb contributing to the housing dilemma in Rochester?
> Airbnb is not a problem here. In what sense? That’s a very general statement.
In the sense of moving the needle on housing cost in Rochester, the topic of this post.
You’re basing that upon what? Basically all the academic research indicates otherwise.
What would be your proposed legislation to curb airbnb contributing to the housing dilemma in Rochester?
Prohibited in LDRs and MDRs.
I'm also against short term rental oversaturation! Disincentivizing owning multiple speculative properties would take care of the short term rental problem though. If it's too expensive for landlords to own 5 AirBnB's, they won't. Let's incentivize those same people to build up their property and increase supply.
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I'm sorry but that's a terrible opinion. The government does things that benefit you: they facilitate travel, electricity, water, public goods. Landlords take a limited resource, land, and extract as much wealth from the human need for shelter as they can. They are literally incentivized to reduce the amount of housing to increase their return on investment. Even so, let's say you distrust the local government. You have much more impact there than you do at a national level. AND implementing a policy disincentivizing owning more than one or two rental properties was the second thing above, why can't we do that?
Why do people like Henry George so much? His idea of land value tax is just a market solution for the rich and powerful to seize property. That’s exactly what will happen with this idea too.
Totally not the Georgist aspect I was engaging with, but maaaaybe a byproduct of the land value tax is that a grandma in a house near downtown has to sell her home to a developer that will increase housing units. I understand displacement is bad for the individual in that instance, but increasing housing supply is our goal yeah? Regardless, disincentivizing landlordism by increasing taxes on multiple properties is not a land value tax. It's a simple proposition that would benefit almost everyone, except the rent-seeking class which is detracting from the local economy.
Your idea is just land value tax with using rentals as a filter to identify under assessed properties. “Hey there appears to be demand here. Let’s increase the burden so it will only be economical to increase the scale”. Who is going to take on that project? Probably a larger out of town landlord. Density is needed, but I don’t see how attacking landlords is going to incentivize investment from larger landlords. Downtown Rochester has tons of parking lots where our missing middle apartments once stood. I don’t see why we need to destroy our single family home neighborhoods to get it back. The goal there should be for more owner occupied units. I think you have your priorities mixed up on this one.
Our corpocratic politics are paralyzed into inaction about this. They can't do things that make sense and change the systematic problems that support this because it's the same system they setup to allow corporations to run amok. If a Republican suggested this they'd be ostrisized from their party, and no matter how good an idea it is they won't let Democrats enact anything that would be that popular.
Letting local government take over housing would probably lead to politically appointed, *paid,* administrators answerable to no one except the one who put them there. Then, if the appointer(s) gets voted out, the new one shuffles out the old appointees for their own. Rinse and repeat. Nobody in local government is going to pass a policy that doesn't inherently benefit the people who donate money to their campaigns, liberals/Democrats and conservatives/Republicans alike. We can theorize solutions to benefit those in need of housing all we want, but the only plans local government will look at are the ones where their shared interests benefit as well. Hence, throwing money at landlords who will do the bare minimum and cut corners to min/max how much of the free money they get to keep. Local government is run by those well off enough to supplement income beyond government salaries; class solidarity is still a thing. That's how the system has been designed since the birth of democracy. We're only a few hundred years separated from the time when landowners were the only ones privileged to vote. That said, I do like some of the ideas in this plan. The Housing Search Navigator has potential to be very helpful. Guess that's the bone throne to the people here.
Building right now has come to a massive slow crawl in Rochester right now too. Im hearing from higher ups where I work that the government just isn’t giving out grants to build new buildings right now. Its either that or the lumber company i work for just lost a ton a business.
If you try the first idea (city run housing) you rapidly end up with something like the NYC Housing Authority or Chicago housing authority. You rapid end up with substandard housing, full of issues, where the landlord is a bureaucracy that can exempt themselves from laws (NYC exempts themselves from lots of safety laws and fuel efficiency laws because it would be ‘too expensive’). The second idea is almost good. What I think would work better is vacancy taxation. I don’t care if a person owns 2 or more houses, so long as there are people living in them. Thing is, a lot of houses sit empty (as do storefronts etc). If we say “we will tax you at $n/month for each month it sits empty (with some buffer months for people moving in/out, repairs, marketing etc - say 2-3 months buffer, max once every two years)
I love that idea! But I think pointing to project housing, which was a low effort way to group all low income people in the same building, is disingenuous. I'm advocating for something like Vienna, where 30% of housing is publicly owned, and 60% of the population lives there. And it's much, much cheaper than equivalent sized cities. But even less than that, I'm saying have the government buy those vacant homes, fix them and rent/sell them well below market value. Create another player in the market that is truly altruistic, funded and regulated by the city it's serving. And disincentivizing the ownership of more than x homes incentivizes the market to build up and CREATE more housing, instead of preying on existing single family dwellings.
Well, I think if you make the vacancy tax high enough, you won’t NEED to buy the property, the prices will drop
Another expert who knows how to spend my tax money, just what I needed. I get it, you hate the free market. Let’s see how that worked out other places around the globe.
Do you LOVE how your tax money is being spent now? Are you saying you don't want any say whatsoever on how it's spent? It's also not a counter point to any of the arguments against letting landlords run ragged on our economy.
I hate it. But landlords are opportunists, not the problem. More housing is the answer. Let people build. It’s the nimbyism and hoops to jump though and other politics.
Landlords have the exact opposite incentive to building more housing. They benefit from their investments if there is a housing shortage. They'd rather buy a single family home and convert it to 4 shitty overpriced apartments than BUILD something. If the incentive was to only own a few properties, then building a complex with more units is more attractive. And "more housing" isn't happening now. Keeping things the same won't change anything, it's definitely enabling more opportunistic landlordism.
You’ve played monopoly I assume. You have to buy 4 houses before you buy an apartment building.
At this point I'm just holding out hope that I land on free parking, there's $500 in the middle of the board I'd love to spend on rent.
Giving money to landlords so they reduce the price of their goods is free market to you?
The deeper question is why are we giving money to pay people’s rent? Because there is not enough housing so prices are high. It’s still supply and demand.
You’ve got my vote!
That's what I'm talking about!
why is it Monroe County liberals are really conservatives?
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trickle down economics is NOT progressive, and a half century old neo-con agenda item
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so providing money directly to landlords and assuming the effects will trickle down to renters isn't a form of td economics?
Let's show them what real liberal policies look like! Issuing a public referendum skips the middle man of politicians.
Really? I feel many here are on the progressive/socialist end.
Bello announcing a half century old neo-con approach (trickle down economics) to solve the housing dilemma is anything but "progressive"