it is hard to say that it is a creation of companies rather than an attempt to profit from ethnic self-segregation that appears to happen regardless of blockbusting in other countries
You also get problems with social housing in areas without racial tension. My hometown is 98% white, but one of the council estates has a very bad name, despite also being almost entirely white.
Oh and municipalities want to court middle and high earners for their precious property and sales taxes, which means services (schools, parks, police, etc) are delivered where the middle and upper classes are. So the projects often get shitty schools and poor police coverage.
It's more complicated than this. Sometimes you find that the shitty school actually has a higher budget than the "good" school, because what makes a good school is more parents and less teachers. If kids turn up eager to learn and well-behaved then they will do well with just about any teachers and facilities. But if they turn up hungry from having no breakfast/junk food only, and with their ears ringing from a hateful tirade from abusive parents, and with family wisdom that education doesn't matter, then the kids are not going to do well.
I'm pretty positive that if you took the kids from the worst school in town, and swapped them wholesale with the kids in the best school in town then the best school would instantly become the worst school, and the worst school the best school. It's a dirty secret of private education that the teachers there are not necessarily any better than the state school teachers. In fact, they usually get paid less - the reason that they take the job at all is that it is so much less stressful, with small classes and kids with privileged, largely stable home lives.
As for police, it's easy to be a good cop in a peaceful community where the worst offenses are loud music and a little pot. Much harder to be a good cop in a war zone of crime and drugs and violence, where the victims of crime hate you nearly as much as the criminals.
tying rent to income places an incentive for people who can afford it to reduce their income, atop other means-tested programs that exist.
I was actually told by a landlord when I first moved to Cambridge that they would not offer me a lease extension after the first year because I made too much money. They wanted to get reimbursed for de-leading their apartment and they needed tenants that were below a certain income threshold to do that. But they had no plans to actually reduce the rent to said individuals.
it is hard to say that it is a creation of companies rather than an attempt to profit from ethnic self-segregation that appears to happen regardless of blockbusting in other countries
Its one thing to have something happen naturally.
Its another thing to accelerate something using negative stereotypes and false advertising.
Especially since the US is dealing with the negative consequences of the racial divide in housing even today.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
Absolutely. But it's very hard to persuade the NIMBY's to let it be built. [/quote]
Its hard to overstate how much of a problem NIMBY is for anything related to housing.
I was at a city council meeting one time where a woman was crying, literally crying about someone building a 8 unit apartment complex on her block. And not section 8 either. Middle class two bedrooms.
Now imagine what that woman would do to keep from having someone in assisted housing within a mile of her house.
Its hard to overstate how much of a problem NIMBY is for anything related to housing.
I was at a city council meeting one time where a woman was crying, literally crying about someone building a 8 unit apartment complex on her block. And not section 8 either. Middle class two bedrooms.
Now imagine what that woman would do to keep from having someone in assisted housing within a mile of her house.
People are scared of change. And why not, when your wealth is all tied up in your house, and a good area can turn into a bad area overnight, wiping out your savings?
Its hard to overstate how much of a problem NIMBY is for anything related to housing.
I was at a city council meeting one time where a woman was crying, literally crying about someone building a 8 unit apartment complex on her block. And not section 8 either. Middle class two bedrooms.
Now imagine what that woman would do to keep from having someone in assisted housing within a mile of her house.
People are scared of change. And why not, when your wealth is all tied up in your house, and a good area can turn into a bad area overnight, wiping out your savings?
It's almost as if tying-up all of your money in a home equity bet isn't a good idea... :P
Its hard to overstate how much of a problem NIMBY is for anything related to housing.
I was at a city council meeting one time where a woman was crying, literally crying about someone building a 8 unit apartment complex on her block. And not section 8 either. Middle class two bedrooms.
Now imagine what that woman would do to keep from having someone in assisted housing within a mile of her house.
People are scared of change. And why not, when your wealth is all tied up in your house, and a good area can turn into a bad area overnight, wiping out your savings?
But I mean, it's not like a section eight building or, god forbid, a apartment renting for twice your mortgage payment is going to do anything.
And that's before you get into the idea that maybe owning a home in a mile radius doesn't entitle you to control everyone else's land.
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Irond WillWARNING: NO HURTFUL COMMENTS, PLEASE!!!!!Cambridge. MAModeratormod
tying rent to income places an incentive for people who can afford it to reduce their income, atop other means-tested programs that exist.
I was actually told by a landlord when I first moved to Cambridge that they would not offer me a lease extension after the first year because I made too much money. They wanted to get reimbursed for de-leading their apartment and they needed tenants that were below a certain income threshold to do that. But they had no plans to actually reduce the rent to said individuals.
section 8 in cambridge is a weird, arcane thing. it's better than rent control, but the collection of interests to landlords ends up often with dilapidated properties full of inhabitants who have been there for generations in trendy parts of town.
there are a lot of great things about the city, but it does not have a streamlined set of property statutes or a particularly consistent perspective or goals when it comes to development.
edit: it sounds like your landlords were trying to take advantage of a city subsidy offered to section 8 buildings for de-leading that market units didn't qualify for. hope waltham is treating you better! moody street is really improving fast!
It's kinda silly. Even in the first couple years interest won't amount to 100% of a mortgage payment, so if we are being fair it would be like "85% of rent," at most. And really, as with the $8K home buyer's credit from yesteryear, some portion of that will just distort the market and get consumed by higher rents.
I'll also note that, to my knowledge, the deduction at present is not available for rental properties. Though maybe it's deductible as a business expense?
What does need to happen is a cap on the deduction, and maybe eliminate the deduction for second homes. But from experience, as a married guy with a $200K mortgage, the deduction didn't do much but make my taxes more complicated. It was a couple hundred dollars a year swing, IIRC. Hardly the boon many renters believe it to be. Of course the guy with the $750K McMansion is doing better on it, but there are other ways to address that.
And even then, that's an argument for eliminating the deduction, not expanding it to renters.
I'll thank Wikipedia for introducing me to the idea of the deduction as a "expense on earning income," with that income being any capital gains on the home. So really, just eliminate the cap gains exclusion (both on sale and inherited homes) and it evens out as well. Supposedly this is how Sweden justifies it?
So far reading the thread I'm mostly with Feral. And I have to say the one bare minimum common sense rent control I think anybody can agree with is a limit on increases per year. Even if we allow crazy huge increases, that should come yearly, at lease renewal.
Personally, I don't like talking about social welfare in terms of "rights" rather than in terms of outcomes. Do people have a right to housing? I don't know. But being homeless is shitty, and having homeless people in your city is a nuisance. Long commutes are terrible for health and the environment; especially if they're by car. There's lots of evidence that geographic separation between different income strata reduces economic mobility and exacerbates all of the social ills associated with poverty, though it's not clear if mixed-income housing policies are strong enough medicine. This mirrors my approach to healthcare. I will never argue that universal healthcare is a right, but I will argue that universal healthcare is right.
As for types of policies, I oppose rent control and I believe that we should abolish the mortgage interest tax deduction. I'm suspicious of affordable housing quotas that involve price ceilings. I also think that we should err on the side of increased housing supply, even when entrenched residents oppose new developments, and that we should err on the side of increased density, and err on the side of mixed-use zoning (ie, businesses and housing on the same block). You don't need to have highrises everywhere, but mixing up 3-5 story apartment buildings with townhouses with single-family detached homes with retail businesses can do a lot to simultaneously improve quality of life while keeping rent from skyrocketing. And, of course, transit.
Subsidizing rent is better than fixing a price ceiling on it, but that requires wealth redistribution. Rent control laws pass because landlords are easy targets for public ire; meanwhile wealth redistribution has obvious difficulties in the US.
I don't like 'poor doors' or similar exclusionary construction, but they're so far down on my priority list of issues that they elicit no more than rolled eyes and a yawn from me.
I wanted to come back to this because it seems to be fairly good summary of many of the beliefs expressed so far.
I'm not at all convinced that increased housing supply and increased density can alone be enough to quench skyrocketing rents. The fact remains that more people want to live within a city then there is geographical locations for. That doesn't seem to be changing, and if anything cities continue to grow. With no outside restrictions on rent or building construction the most profitable, and thus seemingly inevitable, outcome is for rental increases to far outpace income growth and drive low income residents farther and farther from the city centers. It's not even clear to me that higher density is necessarily the more profitable approach since a smaller amount of larger more expensive units are easier to maintain, and could potentially yield a similar amount of profit.
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
I'm not at all convinced that increased housing supply and increased density can alone be enough to quench skyrocketing rents. The fact remains that more people want to live within a city then there is geographical locations for.
This doesn't follow. If the constraints on housing supply were geographic then we would see extraordinarily high density in places with unusual geographic constraints, like San Francisco or Manhattan. But we don't. They have high density for the US but not a single US city is even in the densest 50 cities worldwide and only one (Los Angeles) is in the top 100 (though Manhattan would be if it didn't incorporate the other four boroughs).
If the constraints were geographic, then fast-growing places like Austin, Raleigh-Charlotte-Durham, Minneapolis, Phoenix would all be squeezed up like Manhattan. But they aren't. There are social, political, and economic forces preventing us from using the space we have. The simplest one is demand - lots of people don't want to be squeezed up like Manhattan...
...but more people do want to live in urban city centers than we have housing for them. One of the most well-established trends in housing right now is increased demand for units in multifamily buildings (condos and apartments) in walkable, urban neighborhoods. (Example,example, both PDF links.) Developers and cities have been slow to meet that demand, for a confluence of reasons.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
tying rent to income places an incentive for people who can afford it to reduce their income, atop other means-tested programs that exist.
I was actually told by a landlord when I first moved to Cambridge that they would not offer me a lease extension after the first year because I made too much money. They wanted to get reimbursed for de-leading their apartment and they needed tenants that were below a certain income threshold to do that. But they had no plans to actually reduce the rent to said individuals.
section 8 in cambridge is a weird, arcane thing. it's better than rent control, but the collection of interests to landlords ends up often with dilapidated properties full of inhabitants who have been there for generations in trendy parts of town.
there are a lot of great things about the city, but it does not have a streamlined set of property statutes or a particularly consistent perspective or goals when it comes to development.
edit: it sounds like your landlords were trying to take advantage of a city subsidy offered to section 8 buildings for de-leading that market units didn't qualify for. hope waltham is treating you better! moody street is really improving fast!
Before we moved out here everyone told us great things about Moody street. We've haven't quite figured out the hype yet, though. =/ There is like 4 restaurants and the rest of the buildings are shut down. We did buy our mattress from a store there, though. We recently drove up Moody and saw one of the pubs we visited like a year ago is already closed.
I was quite happy to get out of Cambridge. I'm actually not a fan of pretty much any of those cities. I had a co-worker who was active on the community board or whatever in Cambridge who was adamant against parking lots, which is my biggest reason I rarely if ever go into Cambridge or Boston; spending 1.5 hours just to get into the city for a 2 or 3 hour outing, and then another 1.5 hours to get home isn't enticing.
Then again, we both grew up in more suburb/rural areas where everything you want is 10-15 minutes tops and there is a parking lot right next to it.
It's kinda silly. Even in the first couple years interest won't amount to 100% of a mortgage payment, so if we are being fair it would be like "85% of rent," at most. And really, as with the $8K home buyer's credit from yesteryear, some portion of that will just distort the market and get consumed by higher rents.
I'll also note that, to my knowledge, the deduction at present is not available for rental properties. Though maybe it's deductible as a business expense?
What does need to happen is a cap on the deduction, and maybe eliminate the deduction for second homes. But from experience, as a married guy with a $200K mortgage, the deduction didn't do much but make my taxes more complicated. It was a couple hundred dollars a year swing, IIRC. Hardly the boon many renters believe it to be. Of course the guy with the $750K McMansion is doing better on it, but there are other ways to address that.
And even then, that's an argument for eliminating the deduction, not expanding it to renters.
I'll thank Wikipedia for introducing me to the idea of the deduction as a "expense on earning income," with that income being any capital gains on the home. So really, just eliminate the cap gains exclusion (both on sale and inherited homes) and it evens out as well. Supposedly this is how Sweden justifies it?
So far reading the thread I'm mostly with Feral. And I have to say the one bare minimum common sense rent control I think anybody can agree with is a limit on increases per year. Even if we allow crazy huge increases, that should come yearly, at lease renewal.
I know that when I lived in an apartment, we were able to deduct a portion of our rent from our state income tax as the state (rightly) recognized that a portion of property tax is being paid by the resident in the form of higher rents. There are some issues in that apartments and higher density housing (there was a big debate over how trailer parks are billed for property tax - essentially they pay as vacant land) especially as they tend to use more services than typical single family residences...but it seems like that could be addressed or balanced in one way or another. Perhaps bringing property taxes on high denisty housing more in line with lower density housing, and using means-tested subsidies to balance out the higher rents.
I am a bit confused about the 'yearly at lease renewal' portion. If you have a lease and aren't going month to month, how is the rent increasing EXCEPT at renewal? I'm pretty sure a landlord can't change terms of a rental contract at will. You might get boned on extras, things like parking or utilities or something, I guess...but rent should be static.
GREEN BAY, Wis. -
A public housing apartment complex with 170 residents on Green Bay's west side has gone smoke-free.
Press-Gazette Media reported Green Bay housing and fire officials announced the change at Mason Manor on Wednesday as part of National Fire Prevention Week.
Green Bay Metro Fire Lt. Nick Craig said careless smoking is a leading cause of deadly fires in residential properties. He says the Mason Manor smoking ban will improve residents' safety and health.
The 154-unit building houses people who qualify for assistance through the Green Bay Housing Authority. The authority has also banned smoking in its single-family properties.
Housing officials decided to go smoke-free last year and notified residents that the change would take effect this year. Residents now must smoke at least 25 feet from the building.
What makes Blockbusting such a fucking despicable practice was that it was a sustained propaganda campaign against African Americans.
It was white owned companies that built and perpetuated the stereotype that blacks neighbors where a bad thing. Making white people sell their houses at a loss and then selling the houses to African Americans at the old price. The white companies then let the properties decay because it was more profitable that way.
No wonder White Flight left bad blood across Urban America.
The effects of this are seen even today. I live in Manhattan and I pay far less rent than some neighborhoods in Brooklyn. But because my apartment is between a Dominican and Jewish/Russian neighborhood, I get no end of people asking me how often I get shot at.
I live in one of the nicest, most scenic, most family-friendly neighborhoods. I have a sunken living room and 825 square feet with wood floors. I pay peanuts for rent compared to living in a closet in midtown because white people are afraid of minorities. It's amazing.
GREEN BAY, Wis. -
A public housing apartment complex with 170 residents on Green Bay's west side has gone smoke-free.
Press-Gazette Media reported Green Bay housing and fire officials announced the change at Mason Manor on Wednesday as part of National Fire Prevention Week.
Green Bay Metro Fire Lt. Nick Craig said careless smoking is a leading cause of deadly fires in residential properties. He says the Mason Manor smoking ban will improve residents' safety and health.
The 154-unit building houses people who qualify for assistance through the Green Bay Housing Authority. The authority has also banned smoking in its single-family properties.
Housing officials decided to go smoke-free last year and notified residents that the change would take effect this year. Residents now must smoke at least 25 feet from the building.
I actually don't mind rental properties banning smoking inside the building at all, regardless of whether people are getting them subsidized or even paying too damn much for them. It's a substantial cleanliness issue. People shouldn't be smoking inside residential buildings, and while they might have a right to do so if they are the owner, even in that case, it's still a bad idea.
That's not just a a poor thing either. I live in a $3K a month downtown high-rise that's 100% smoke free too. At least I'm fairly certain it is.
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MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
Not a 100% sure if this fits in this thread. But I think it's an example of why some sort of rent control or limits is needed.
Chen bought a house, on the edge of Auckland's Cornwall Park, on leasehold land in 2005 for $450,000 but in 2010 her annual rent increased from an $8,300 to $73,750
Not a 100% sure if this fits in this thread. But I think it's an example of why some sort of rent control or limits is needed.
Chen bought a house, on the edge of Auckland's Cornwall Park, on leasehold land in 2005 for $450,000 but in 2010 her annual rent increased from an $8,300 to $73,750
She bought the house, but not the land. Something like this is life destroying.
Why...
Why would you buy a house on real property you don't own?
That seems like terrible idea.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
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MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
Not a 100% sure if this fits in this thread. But I think it's an example of why some sort of rent control or limits is needed.
Chen bought a house, on the edge of Auckland's Cornwall Park, on leasehold land in 2005 for $450,000 but in 2010 her annual rent increased from an $8,300 to $73,750
She bought the house, but not the land. Something like this is life destroying.
Why...
Why would you buy a house on real property you don't own?
That seems like terrible idea.
Well there's a discussion to be had around freehold versus leasehold land, but currently yeah, it's a terrible idea since there doesn't seem to be any regulation around rents (outside of contract agreements)
Not a 100% sure if this fits in this thread. But I think it's an example of why some sort of rent control or limits is needed.
Chen bought a house, on the edge of Auckland's Cornwall Park, on leasehold land in 2005 for $450,000 but in 2010 her annual rent increased from an $8,300 to $73,750
Not a 100% sure if this fits in this thread. But I think it's an example of why some sort of rent control or limits is needed.
Chen bought a house, on the edge of Auckland's Cornwall Park, on leasehold land in 2005 for $450,000 but in 2010 her annual rent increased from an $8,300 to $73,750
Not a 100% sure if this fits in this thread. But I think it's an example of why some sort of rent control or limits is needed.
Chen bought a house, on the edge of Auckland's Cornwall Park, on leasehold land in 2005 for $450,000 but in 2010 her annual rent increased from an $8,300 to $73,750
She bought the house, but not the land. Something like this is life destroying.
Why...
Why would you buy a house on real property you don't own?
That seems like terrible idea.
Trailer parks are built around this idea with some of the same results.
Trailers, in general, are a horrible trap for the poor. They depreciate like cars, cannot be insured at the same level as a home and, even when you subtract the equity earned in home ownership, actually don't cost that much less than traditional home ownership when you count in the various costs of maintenance and home ownership.
I'm not at all convinced that increased housing supply and increased density can alone be enough to quench skyrocketing rents. The fact remains that more people want to live within a city then there is geographical locations for.
This doesn't follow. If the constraints on housing supply were geographic then we would see extraordinarily high density in places with unusual geographic constraints, like San Francisco or Manhattan. But we don't. They have high density for the US but not a single US city is even in the densest 50 cities worldwide and only one (Los Angeles) is in the top 100 (though Manhattan would be if it didn't incorporate the other four boroughs).
If the constraints were geographic, then fast-growing places like Austin, Raleigh-Charlotte-Durham, Minneapolis, Phoenix would all be squeezed up like Manhattan. But they aren't. There are social, political, and economic forces preventing us from using the space we have. The simplest one is demand - lots of people don't want to be squeezed up like Manhattan...
...but more people do want to live in urban city centers than we have housing for them. One of the most well-established trends in housing right now is increased demand for units in multifamily buildings (condos and apartments) in walkable, urban neighborhoods. (Example,example, both PDF links.) Developers and cities have been slow to meet that demand, for a confluence of reasons.
Geographic may have been the wrong word, but the problem of having more potential tenants than housing options in US cities is what I was getting at. Coupled with a relatively high medium income, means that the natural shift for rents in large US cities will be towards higher end higher rent apartments. Rental prices are going up at alarming rates, and so far I don't see anything in your suggestions that would curb that. How do you overcome the fundamental problem of having too many people that want to live in the same area with not enough housing? Someone has to be excluded, and right now that someone is the low income bracket. Which leads to problems that I layed out in the OP.
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
Not a 100% sure if this fits in this thread. But I think it's an example of why some sort of rent control or limits is needed.
Chen bought a house, on the edge of Auckland's Cornwall Park, on leasehold land in 2005 for $450,000 but in 2010 her annual rent increased from an $8,300 to $73,750
This was the first article I could find, but there have been others how investment buys were down like 3 percent from the peak in the last 6 months but that peak is way too high.
I'm not going to wave the largely jingoistic flag of foreign investment ruining the local market, easy, racist and I have yet to ever see numbers that support it, but something is very wrong in California currently.
...I've grown bitter about housing and real estate.
This was the first article I could find, but there have been others how investment buys were down like 3 percent from the peak in the last 6 months but that peak is way too high.
I'm not going to wave the largely jingoistic flag of foreign investment ruining the local market, easy, racist and I have yet to ever see numbers that support it, but something is very wrong in California currently.
...I've grown bitter about housing and real estate.
CA is a bit of an odd duck when it comes to real estate, thanks in large part to the boat anchor that is Prop. 13.
This was the first article I could find, but there have been others how investment buys were down like 3 percent from the peak in the last 6 months but that peak is way too high.
I'm not going to wave the largely jingoistic flag of foreign investment ruining the local market, easy, racist and I have yet to ever see numbers that support it, but something is very wrong in California currently.
...I've grown bitter about housing and real estate.
It's not even foreign investors for me. My hometown put up 3 massive condos and only about 40 people live in them- the rest were bought by investors, convinced they'd strike it rich when buyers started clamoring. Seven years on, the condos are still almost all dark at night.
This was the first article I could find, but there have been others how investment buys were down like 3 percent from the peak in the last 6 months but that peak is way too high.
I'm not going to wave the largely jingoistic flag of foreign investment ruining the local market, easy, racist and I have yet to ever see numbers that support it, but something is very wrong in California currently.
...I've grown bitter about housing and real estate.
It's not even foreign investors for me. My hometown put up 3 massive condos and only about 40 people live in them- the rest were bought by investors, convinced they'd strike it rich when buyers started clamoring. Seven years on, the condos are still almost all dark at night.
Ha, San Diego perhaps? I know I'm looking at four mostly-dark condos out my window right now (along the waterfront downtown), that are always dark. Had kinda wondered what was up with that, hadn't considered investors might be squatting on the properties. I do think that's perhaps due to Cali-specific issues, though...I don't recall Seattle having nearly the same issues with vacant housing downtown, for instance.
mcdermott on
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Captain Marcusnow arrives the hour of actionRegistered Userregular
This was the first article I could find, but there have been others how investment buys were down like 3 percent from the peak in the last 6 months but that peak is way too high.
I'm not going to wave the largely jingoistic flag of foreign investment ruining the local market, easy, racist and I have yet to ever see numbers that support it, but something is very wrong in California currently.
...I've grown bitter about housing and real estate.
It's not even foreign investors for me. My hometown put up 3 massive condos and only about 40 people live in them- the rest were bought by investors, convinced they'd strike it rich when buyers started clamoring. Seven years on, the condos are still almost all dark at night.
Ha, San Diego perhaps? I know I'm looking at four mostly-dark condos out my window right now (along the waterfront downtown), that are always dark. Had kinda wondered what was up with that, hadn't considered investors might be squatting on the properties. I do think that's perhaps due to Cali-specific issues, though...I don't recall Seattle having nearly the same issues with vacant housing downtown, for instance.
Nah, Florida. Old people love condos but they don't love people buying up all the space and selling them for $TEXAS.
Affordable housing story- hometown had only one affordable housing development. Said development was in dire need of repair/an eyesore and the city decided to bulldoze it and build new affordable housing, making sure that the former residents got first dibs. Five years later, thanks to developers smearing their greasy paws over the project the housing is still not done and half of it has been replaced with condos (remember the city is paying for this). Developers: the worst.
Speaking of the deduction for houses, it's entirely what your income is, and if you're married where it matters.
If you're not married, it's one of the single best things you can tack onto your income reductions if you have no dependents.
I'd actually be all for a rent deduction on taxes, 75% seems like a good amount. It can't be absorbed, because your taxable income factors hugely into what kind of money you'll see back from that.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I remember in an education class we were talking about different classifications of private schools. Religious schools, older elite prep schools, etc. And one classification was the enormous number of private schools that suddenly appeared in the 1950s and 60s, which were solely created so white parents who were outraged by integration would have somewhere to put their kids. So, if you or kid went to a private school that's about 60 years old, there's a good chance that's why it exists!
So, I wrote a huge draft with charts and graphs and specifically used the "Save Draft" button yet Vanilla lost it.
Vanilla, why do you only save the drafts I don't want?
Anyway, 2008 saw a huge shift in housing demand from owner-occupied single-family houses into rentals, which were mostly multi-family. People foreclosed, but they still needed places to live. Hence, owners (and potential owners) became renters.
After strong construction of new multifamily buildings in the 1980s, housing construction in the 1990s and 2000s was overwhelmingly single-family houses.
Rental markets did not have the capacity to absorb that new demand when the housing crunch happened. Housing takes 2-4 years to react to trends in the nimblest of markets; in some cities that can be even slower due to permit requirements.
Meanwhile, median wages did not recover with the rest of the economy. One half of the housing affordability problem is the discrepancy between rents and (depressed, recessionary, unrecovered) wages.
Undersupply is not a complete story, but it is a huge part of the story. The cities that have added the most rental units are the cities with the least severe increases in rent. (I swear I had charts and links supporting every claim in this post. :P )
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
My anecdotal experience is that those with rent control often abuse it. I knew one guy who was rent-controlled in a 2 or 3 bedroom, and because he'd been there so long he rented out the other bedrooms and made money on the place, enough that he wintered somewhere else and sublet his own room for that time.
It's a tough issue, as there are a lot of neighborhoods that lose their core residency over time (which can often disincent people to improve their neighborhood as they would then be unable to afford it), but there are no easy solutions to making things affordable for those that improve the neighborhood.
This was the first article I could find, but there have been others how investment buys were down like 3 percent from the peak in the last 6 months but that peak is way too high.
I'm not going to wave the largely jingoistic flag of foreign investment ruining the local market, easy, racist and I have yet to ever see numbers that support it, but something is very wrong in California currently.
...I've grown bitter about housing and real estate.
It's not even foreign investors for me. My hometown put up 3 massive condos and only about 40 people live in them- the rest were bought by investors, convinced they'd strike it rich when buyers started clamoring. Seven years on, the condos are still almost all dark at night.
Ha, San Diego perhaps? I know I'm looking at four mostly-dark condos out my window right now (along the waterfront downtown), that are always dark. Had kinda wondered what was up with that, hadn't considered investors might be squatting on the properties. I do think that's perhaps due to Cali-specific issues, though...I don't recall Seattle having nearly the same issues with vacant housing downtown, for instance.
Nah, Florida. Old people love condos but they don't love people buying up all the space and selling them for $TEXAS.
Affordable housing story- hometown had only one affordable housing development. Said development was in dire need of repair/an eyesore and the city decided to bulldoze it and build new affordable housing, making sure that the former residents got first dibs. Five years later, thanks to developers smearing their greasy paws over the project the housing is still not done and half of it has been replaced with condos (remember the city is paying for this). Developers: the worst.
They need to write aggressive contracts like the power industry. "Oh, 24 hours late? That's $25,000 fee. Oh, there's a problem and your tech is busy? No biggie, just hired someone else, and here's the bill. Net 30 if you don't mind. 3 dB more than spec? $100,000 please."
If you did your job right, it was incredibly lucrative, but they would fuck you up if anything went wrong, unless you went to them, hat in hand, and explained the situation and negotiated something.
They always struck by as rather aggressive, but they did help prevent nonsense like the above, and really organizations should consider that sort of thing more often.
My anecdotal experience is that those with rent control often abuse it. I knew one guy who was rent-controlled in a 2 or 3 bedroom, and because he'd been there so long he rented out the other bedrooms and made money on the place, enough that he wintered somewhere else and sublet his own room for that time.
It's a tough issue, as there are a lot of neighborhoods that lose their core residency over time (which can often disincent people to improve their neighborhood as they would then be unable to afford it), but there are no easy solutions to making things affordable for those that improve the neighborhood.
That's a major component of it. Subsidizing a physical location, regardless of inhabitant, rather than income bracket leads to about all the things you expect it would lead to, like the above.
Rent control is fairly universally derided by economists.
The specific deleterious effects are a little ambiguous and differ from market to market. But they include some combination of:
Reduction in rental units (units go up for sale rather than rent)
Reduction in maintenance
Increase in price of nearby uncontrolled apartments
Increased commutes and traffic (people who change jobs would rather commute than give up their rent-controlled apartments)
Increased rents during tenant turnover (since that's the only time you can raise rent back to market)
Overall increase in market prices
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
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It's more complicated than this. Sometimes you find that the shitty school actually has a higher budget than the "good" school, because what makes a good school is more parents and less teachers. If kids turn up eager to learn and well-behaved then they will do well with just about any teachers and facilities. But if they turn up hungry from having no breakfast/junk food only, and with their ears ringing from a hateful tirade from abusive parents, and with family wisdom that education doesn't matter, then the kids are not going to do well.
I'm pretty positive that if you took the kids from the worst school in town, and swapped them wholesale with the kids in the best school in town then the best school would instantly become the worst school, and the worst school the best school. It's a dirty secret of private education that the teachers there are not necessarily any better than the state school teachers. In fact, they usually get paid less - the reason that they take the job at all is that it is so much less stressful, with small classes and kids with privileged, largely stable home lives.
As for police, it's easy to be a good cop in a peaceful community where the worst offenses are loud music and a little pot. Much harder to be a good cop in a war zone of crime and drugs and violence, where the victims of crime hate you nearly as much as the criminals.
Absolutely. But it's very hard to persuade the NIMBY's to let it be built.
I was actually told by a landlord when I first moved to Cambridge that they would not offer me a lease extension after the first year because I made too much money. They wanted to get reimbursed for de-leading their apartment and they needed tenants that were below a certain income threshold to do that. But they had no plans to actually reduce the rent to said individuals.
Its one thing to have something happen naturally.
Its another thing to accelerate something using negative stereotypes and false advertising.
Especially since the US is dealing with the negative consequences of the racial divide in housing even today.
Absolutely. But it's very hard to persuade the NIMBY's to let it be built. [/quote]
Its hard to overstate how much of a problem NIMBY is for anything related to housing.
I was at a city council meeting one time where a woman was crying, literally crying about someone building a 8 unit apartment complex on her block. And not section 8 either. Middle class two bedrooms.
Now imagine what that woman would do to keep from having someone in assisted housing within a mile of her house.
People are scared of change. And why not, when your wealth is all tied up in your house, and a good area can turn into a bad area overnight, wiping out your savings?
It's almost as if tying-up all of your money in a home equity bet isn't a good idea... :P
But I mean, it's not like a section eight building or, god forbid, a apartment renting for twice your mortgage payment is going to do anything.
And that's before you get into the idea that maybe owning a home in a mile radius doesn't entitle you to control everyone else's land.
section 8 in cambridge is a weird, arcane thing. it's better than rent control, but the collection of interests to landlords ends up often with dilapidated properties full of inhabitants who have been there for generations in trendy parts of town.
there are a lot of great things about the city, but it does not have a streamlined set of property statutes or a particularly consistent perspective or goals when it comes to development.
edit: it sounds like your landlords were trying to take advantage of a city subsidy offered to section 8 buildings for de-leading that market units didn't qualify for. hope waltham is treating you better! moody street is really improving fast!
It's kinda silly. Even in the first couple years interest won't amount to 100% of a mortgage payment, so if we are being fair it would be like "85% of rent," at most. And really, as with the $8K home buyer's credit from yesteryear, some portion of that will just distort the market and get consumed by higher rents.
I'll also note that, to my knowledge, the deduction at present is not available for rental properties. Though maybe it's deductible as a business expense?
What does need to happen is a cap on the deduction, and maybe eliminate the deduction for second homes. But from experience, as a married guy with a $200K mortgage, the deduction didn't do much but make my taxes more complicated. It was a couple hundred dollars a year swing, IIRC. Hardly the boon many renters believe it to be. Of course the guy with the $750K McMansion is doing better on it, but there are other ways to address that.
And even then, that's an argument for eliminating the deduction, not expanding it to renters.
I'll thank Wikipedia for introducing me to the idea of the deduction as a "expense on earning income," with that income being any capital gains on the home. So really, just eliminate the cap gains exclusion (both on sale and inherited homes) and it evens out as well. Supposedly this is how Sweden justifies it?
So far reading the thread I'm mostly with Feral. And I have to say the one bare minimum common sense rent control I think anybody can agree with is a limit on increases per year. Even if we allow crazy huge increases, that should come yearly, at lease renewal.
I wanted to come back to this because it seems to be fairly good summary of many of the beliefs expressed so far.
I'm not at all convinced that increased housing supply and increased density can alone be enough to quench skyrocketing rents. The fact remains that more people want to live within a city then there is geographical locations for. That doesn't seem to be changing, and if anything cities continue to grow. With no outside restrictions on rent or building construction the most profitable, and thus seemingly inevitable, outcome is for rental increases to far outpace income growth and drive low income residents farther and farther from the city centers. It's not even clear to me that higher density is necessarily the more profitable approach since a smaller amount of larger more expensive units are easier to maintain, and could potentially yield a similar amount of profit.
This doesn't follow. If the constraints on housing supply were geographic then we would see extraordinarily high density in places with unusual geographic constraints, like San Francisco or Manhattan. But we don't. They have high density for the US but not a single US city is even in the densest 50 cities worldwide and only one (Los Angeles) is in the top 100 (though Manhattan would be if it didn't incorporate the other four boroughs).
If the constraints were geographic, then fast-growing places like Austin, Raleigh-Charlotte-Durham, Minneapolis, Phoenix would all be squeezed up like Manhattan. But they aren't. There are social, political, and economic forces preventing us from using the space we have. The simplest one is demand - lots of people don't want to be squeezed up like Manhattan...
...but more people do want to live in urban city centers than we have housing for them. One of the most well-established trends in housing right now is increased demand for units in multifamily buildings (condos and apartments) in walkable, urban neighborhoods. (Example, example, both PDF links.) Developers and cities have been slow to meet that demand, for a confluence of reasons.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
A large, very popular city with high costs of living in the middle of a Goddamn desert.
Pretty sure people don't move to Vegas or go on vacation there so they can be in close proximity with the cacti & mile upon mile of arid dirt.
Before we moved out here everyone told us great things about Moody street. We've haven't quite figured out the hype yet, though. =/ There is like 4 restaurants and the rest of the buildings are shut down. We did buy our mattress from a store there, though. We recently drove up Moody and saw one of the pubs we visited like a year ago is already closed.
I was quite happy to get out of Cambridge. I'm actually not a fan of pretty much any of those cities. I had a co-worker who was active on the community board or whatever in Cambridge who was adamant against parking lots, which is my biggest reason I rarely if ever go into Cambridge or Boston; spending 1.5 hours just to get into the city for a 2 or 3 hour outing, and then another 1.5 hours to get home isn't enticing.
Then again, we both grew up in more suburb/rural areas where everything you want is 10-15 minutes tops and there is a parking lot right next to it.
I know that when I lived in an apartment, we were able to deduct a portion of our rent from our state income tax as the state (rightly) recognized that a portion of property tax is being paid by the resident in the form of higher rents. There are some issues in that apartments and higher density housing (there was a big debate over how trailer parks are billed for property tax - essentially they pay as vacant land) especially as they tend to use more services than typical single family residences...but it seems like that could be addressed or balanced in one way or another. Perhaps bringing property taxes on high denisty housing more in line with lower density housing, and using means-tested subsidies to balance out the higher rents.
I am a bit confused about the 'yearly at lease renewal' portion. If you have a lease and aren't going month to month, how is the rent increasing EXCEPT at renewal? I'm pretty sure a landlord can't change terms of a rental contract at will. You might get boned on extras, things like parking or utilities or something, I guess...but rent should be static.
The effects of this are seen even today. I live in Manhattan and I pay far less rent than some neighborhoods in Brooklyn. But because my apartment is between a Dominican and Jewish/Russian neighborhood, I get no end of people asking me how often I get shot at.
I live in one of the nicest, most scenic, most family-friendly neighborhoods. I have a sunken living room and 825 square feet with wood floors. I pay peanuts for rent compared to living in a closet in midtown because white people are afraid of minorities. It's amazing.
I actually don't mind rental properties banning smoking inside the building at all, regardless of whether people are getting them subsidized or even paying too damn much for them. It's a substantial cleanliness issue. People shouldn't be smoking inside residential buildings, and while they might have a right to do so if they are the owner, even in that case, it's still a bad idea.
She bought the house, but not the land. Something like this is life destroying.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Why...
Why would you buy a house on real property you don't own?
That seems like terrible idea.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Well there's a discussion to be had around freehold versus leasehold land, but currently yeah, it's a terrible idea since there doesn't seem to be any regulation around rents (outside of contract agreements)
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
Trailer parks are built around this idea with some of the same results.
You can move a trailer. If you couldn't, it would be every bit as terrible of an idea.
Why would you do that without at least a contract fixing the rent / rent increase amount?
Trailers, in general, are a horrible trap for the poor. They depreciate like cars, cannot be insured at the same level as a home and, even when you subtract the equity earned in home ownership, actually don't cost that much less than traditional home ownership when you count in the various costs of maintenance and home ownership.
Geographic may have been the wrong word, but the problem of having more potential tenants than housing options in US cities is what I was getting at. Coupled with a relatively high medium income, means that the natural shift for rents in large US cities will be towards higher end higher rent apartments. Rental prices are going up at alarming rates, and so far I don't see anything in your suggestions that would curb that. How do you overcome the fundamental problem of having too many people that want to live in the same area with not enough housing? Someone has to be excluded, and right now that someone is the low income bracket. Which leads to problems that I layed out in the OP.
1) Moving a trailer is a lot of times about as easy as moving a house (which is also possible).
Then supposing it doesn't fall apart In transit you have to find a place to put it.
2) why would you limit the amount of rent you could collect without pressure to do so?
http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/california-all-cash-buyers-california-investor-cash-buying-real-estate-slowing-down/
This was the first article I could find, but there have been others how investment buys were down like 3 percent from the peak in the last 6 months but that peak is way too high.
I'm not going to wave the largely jingoistic flag of foreign investment ruining the local market, easy, racist and I have yet to ever see numbers that support it, but something is very wrong in California currently.
...I've grown bitter about housing and real estate.
It's not even foreign investors for me. My hometown put up 3 massive condos and only about 40 people live in them- the rest were bought by investors, convinced they'd strike it rich when buyers started clamoring. Seven years on, the condos are still almost all dark at night.
Ha, San Diego perhaps? I know I'm looking at four mostly-dark condos out my window right now (along the waterfront downtown), that are always dark. Had kinda wondered what was up with that, hadn't considered investors might be squatting on the properties. I do think that's perhaps due to Cali-specific issues, though...I don't recall Seattle having nearly the same issues with vacant housing downtown, for instance.
Nah, Florida. Old people love condos but they don't love people buying up all the space and selling them for $TEXAS.
Affordable housing story- hometown had only one affordable housing development. Said development was in dire need of repair/an eyesore and the city decided to bulldoze it and build new affordable housing, making sure that the former residents got first dibs. Five years later, thanks to developers smearing their greasy paws over the project the housing is still not done and half of it has been replaced with condos (remember the city is paying for this). Developers: the worst.
If you're not married, it's one of the single best things you can tack onto your income reductions if you have no dependents.
I'd actually be all for a rent deduction on taxes, 75% seems like a good amount. It can't be absorbed, because your taxable income factors hugely into what kind of money you'll see back from that.
I remember in an education class we were talking about different classifications of private schools. Religious schools, older elite prep schools, etc. And one classification was the enormous number of private schools that suddenly appeared in the 1950s and 60s, which were solely created so white parents who were outraged by integration would have somewhere to put their kids. So, if you or kid went to a private school that's about 60 years old, there's a good chance that's why it exists!
Vanilla, why do you only save the drafts I don't want?
Anyway, 2008 saw a huge shift in housing demand from owner-occupied single-family houses into rentals, which were mostly multi-family. People foreclosed, but they still needed places to live. Hence, owners (and potential owners) became renters.
After strong construction of new multifamily buildings in the 1980s, housing construction in the 1990s and 2000s was overwhelmingly single-family houses.
Rental markets did not have the capacity to absorb that new demand when the housing crunch happened. Housing takes 2-4 years to react to trends in the nimblest of markets; in some cities that can be even slower due to permit requirements.
Meanwhile, median wages did not recover with the rest of the economy. One half of the housing affordability problem is the discrepancy between rents and (depressed, recessionary, unrecovered) wages.
Undersupply is not a complete story, but it is a huge part of the story. The cities that have added the most rental units are the cities with the least severe increases in rent. (I swear I had charts and links supporting every claim in this post. :P )
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It's a tough issue, as there are a lot of neighborhoods that lose their core residency over time (which can often disincent people to improve their neighborhood as they would then be unable to afford it), but there are no easy solutions to making things affordable for those that improve the neighborhood.
They need to write aggressive contracts like the power industry. "Oh, 24 hours late? That's $25,000 fee. Oh, there's a problem and your tech is busy? No biggie, just hired someone else, and here's the bill. Net 30 if you don't mind. 3 dB more than spec? $100,000 please."
If you did your job right, it was incredibly lucrative, but they would fuck you up if anything went wrong, unless you went to them, hat in hand, and explained the situation and negotiated something.
They always struck by as rather aggressive, but they did help prevent nonsense like the above, and really organizations should consider that sort of thing more often.
That's a major component of it. Subsidizing a physical location, regardless of inhabitant, rather than income bracket leads to about all the things you expect it would lead to, like the above.
The specific deleterious effects are a little ambiguous and differ from market to market. But they include some combination of:
Reduction in rental units (units go up for sale rather than rent)
Reduction in maintenance
Increase in price of nearby uncontrolled apartments
Increased commutes and traffic (people who change jobs would rather commute than give up their rent-controlled apartments)
Increased rents during tenant turnover (since that's the only time you can raise rent back to market)
Overall increase in market prices
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.