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BoxFour 1 hours ago [-]
> The uptick in rental delinquency isn’t new. It started six years ago
It has nothing to do with Mamdani, for those of who don't want to bother to read. Most of this occurred under Eric Adams's watch.
Anecdotally, I do think covid made people a lot more aware of how deeply backlogged the housing courts are. It seems like a lot of people (like the anonymous one in the article) realized they could not pay rent and avoid being actually evicted for quite some time.
This is a recurring theme in city problems: Backlogged courts. Sometimes that's to the benefit of the less fortunate (here), but it also often results in terrible outcomes (see: Kalief Browder).
eru 1 hours ago [-]
I think even the benefit for the less fortunate here is at most a short-term one. In the longer one, you need building and renting out shelter to be reasonably profitable, so that people do it.
It's basically the same argument that says rent caps are bad for the renters in the long run.
tmnvix 33 minutes ago [-]
We don't always have to consider the apparently very fragile and fickle motivations of investors. Social housing can and has worked very well in many cases.
tommica 29 minutes ago [-]
Where has it been successful, and what counts as success in that? I genuinely do not know.
BobaFloutist 21 minutes ago [-]
It's been exceptionally successful in Singapore, for one.
inigyou 21 minutes ago [-]
Primarily Vienna. There's nothing complicated about what Vienna did - other cities just prefer to please billionaires instead of providing services to citizens.
Plasmoid 7 minutes ago [-]
Do you actually know what Vienna did? Because the overwhelming number of people who reference the city basically just repeat a few dubious talking point about restricting rent.
manyatoms 27 minutes ago [-]
So say they do get evicted eventually, what are their chances of getting the next rental?
N_Lens 24 minutes ago [-]
In a Palantir style totalitarian state with panopticon tracking of everyone's every thought, action and history? I'd say pretty good!
laweijfmvo 24 minutes ago [-]
i assume they also owe back payments? with interest?
ecshafer 7 minutes ago [-]
Blood from a stone. Sure the landlord could theoretically go after them, but they would spend a bunch of money on legal fees for someone that will probably never pay it back.
alexjplant 7 hours ago [-]
> “There is a subset of people, maybe the smallest subset, who are literally making a choice not to pay rent, and we don’t do well with acknowledging that but there is a subset for whom that is the case,” [...] Others bristle at the notion that some tenants are not paying rent just because they may be able to get away with it.
These people absolutely exist. To pretend that they don't is willful ignorance. They are, however, indeed a "small[est] subset" to quote the gentleman in the article. In the era of $4 McDoubles and $6 gallons of gas I have trouble believing that one in four people is my burnout college roommate who spends on Fireball shots and Xbox games instead of paying rent. Life is expensive these days.
jandrewrogers 5 hours ago [-]
I anecdotally know of a few cases in Seattle where tenants with high incomes that could easily pay just don't. There is a subculture that actively encourages this type of behavior and the laws are setup such that there are almost no consequences for it. I've also met people who bragged about doing it. While rare, it is still common enough that it has become a real problem and has become socially acceptable in some circles.
It is corrosive to the social contract when government policy tacitly encourages this behavior.
nikkwong 1 hours ago [-]
It's not rare. I repeat. It's not rare. I am a landlord in Seattle with ~55 active tenants/leases. Let's just say that I know of many landlords in the circles I run in that have absolutely stopped renting to leftie types because they've had so many issues over the last few years with many of them over litigating everything; and deciding not to pay rent over the smallest non-issues, or just not paying rent at all. I could cite case after case; and this topic is especially salient to me in the present moment because I am in fact dealing with one of these tenants right now and its a total nightmare. I will spare you the gruesome details of trying to work with this particular tenant but just trust me—I have an incredibly high tolerance to stress and this individual is doing their best to get as far under my skin as possible.
When the political class or the cultural zeitgeist tells you over and over that landlords are leeches and that "any attempt to profit off of housing is unethical"—people are going to take that to heart and have a hatred for even well-meaning small landlords. If you don't believe this is the attitude, go visit r/Seattle. The inflammatory language of politicians and cultural leaders sets the tone which plays out as legal battles and fights in properties across the city.
This obviously creates an adverse selection problem where small landlords illegally apply their own prejudices and biases in tenant selection. Honestly—could you expect them not to—when the repercussions of picking a bad tenant are so great? And when there are other demographic groups—like immigrants—who are absolutely, verifiably and consistently reliable as tenants. It used to be that it was the section 8 or low income type that were a huge problem but now there's an educated leftish fringe that landlords are also avoiding. Honestly with good reason, IMO.
Some homeowners just decide to not list extra rooms in their house outright. I remember hearing something like that Seattle has the highest number of unrented empty rooms in the country (though someone should fact check that). With the political climate the way it is here, it's obvious as to why this is the case.
jandrewrogers 4 minutes ago [-]
The net effect is most of the people I know with a rental or two in Seattle will only rent via direct referrals from people they know, which also allows them to rent at a lower rate. Their properties are no longer available to the general public. The demand is high enough that this works. Sucks if you are new to Seattle though.
This kind of non-payment of rent abuse exploded during COVID.
ecshafer 4 minutes ago [-]
> And when there are other demographic groups—like immigrants—who are absolutely, verifiably and consistently reliable as tenants.
I know someone with something like 120 units. Unassuming nice old lady that makes over a million a year. She tries to rent to immigrants as much as possible since they don't cause issues.
teachrdan 1 hours ago [-]
With all due respect, do you consider yourself, with ~55 active tenants/leases, to be a "small landlord"?
nikkwong 57 minutes ago [-]
Its spread across about ~ 6 houses. I'm definitely a small landlord. I deal with all tenant issues myself, handle all repairs, leases, and most importantly for me—maintain a healthy relationship (which has grown to many friendships). I use this term in contrast to a faceless, corporate landlord who owns larger apartment buildings. Small landlords and corporate landlords are nothing alike
bombcar 59 minutes ago [-]
I read their story as "I'm not small, but I know a lot of smalls who tell me things they won't even tell their confessor."
jquery 1 minutes ago [-]
>stopped renting to leftie types
I’m curious how they’re managing to do this. I don’t give any outward signals of being a “leftie type” but I absolutely am. Conversely, I know lots of people who have a very punk look but are super conservative.
chirau 14 minutes ago [-]
What exactly do you mean by "well meaning small landlord"?
nikkwong 2 minutes ago [-]
I just try to be the landlord that I would want to have. I respond to my tenants quickly, always give them concessions, let them pay late, or at a discount when they’re struggling, referred them to work at my companies, etc, etc. it’s not all about the money, it’s also being a good member of the community, for me. This is in contrast to a corporate landlord where your $1500 disappears into a void every month.
dh2022 14 minutes ago [-]
Honest question - how do you know a potential tenant is “leftie type”?
ecshafer 3 minutes ago [-]
Honestly? not op but that seems easy.
onetokeoverthe 19 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
alexashka 21 minutes ago [-]
> have a hatred for even well-meaning small landlords
In what way are you well meaning? You're only doing it for money.
The people not paying you rent are also only doing it for money.
Sucks when people behave like you, huh.
nikkwong 9 minutes ago [-]
Yes I’m doing it for the money, I have to be compensated for my time and the financial investment obviously. People who decide to deceive me break not only a social contract but also a legal contract and a commitment they made at the time of signing a lease. If everyone acted like them, there would be no stable housing available for anyone. Talk about a bad take…
CursedSilicon 5 hours ago [-]
As someone who also lives in Seattle, I'd be curious to see any verifiable citations to such a wild claim
He said “anecdotally”. In any case, I was wondering that if I know a friend who does this, how could I ever present a verifiable citation for it? You may have to rethink your ask.
mmooss 2 hours ago [-]
Sure, but the comment upthread could provide evidence that "it is still common enough that it has become a real problem".
CursedSilicon 4 hours ago [-]
Anecdotes aren't usually admissible as evidence, is the thing
I’m on phone but if you search “Kim Seattle landlord” you can get more details of various articles on the situation.
albedoa 2 hours ago [-]
Okay. I can anecdotally tell you that user jandrewrogers does not know of any cases in Seattle where tenants with high incomes that could easily pay just don't. Our anecdotes cancel each other out.
> how could I ever present a verifiable citation for it?
There would likely be at least one (1) report of such a wild claim due to how wild it is. We wouldn't need anecdotes!
I mean, Elmo's SpaceX is busy lying about being "In Redmond" too (they're in Redmond Ridge, a significantly more rural area about 6 miles away)
cyberax 2 hours ago [-]
There are such people. I have a unit in Seattle that sits empty because I don't want to risk getting stuck with such tenants.
In Seattle, you can't:
1. Evict people from November to April (it's "winter").
2. Evict people with schoolchildren during the school year.
3. Run background checks on prospective tenants.
4. You _must_ rent to the first qualifying tenant.
5. You must offer 3 months in rent as compensation if you decline to renew the lease.
6. The maximum rent increase is capped.
Oh, and eviction process takes about 1.5 years now because the courts are overloaded and the tenant can use procedural tricks to drag out the process.
I don't understand why you wouldn't sell and invest elsewhere in this case.
inigyou 16 minutes ago [-]
Apparently, even with all these rules designed to damage the profitability of landlords, being landlord must be extremely profitable as they keep doing it.
pixelatedindex 1 hours ago [-]
Apart from maybe being a little more flexible on evictions, none of the other reasons seem problematic.
For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate?
The giving tenant three month rent thing is for a very small circumstance - for example huge rent increases if the tenant income is low, condo remodeling, etc. The wording is: “landlords who issue a housing cost increase of 10% or more (within a 12-month period) must pay relocation assistance if the affected household earns 80% or less of the Area Median Income and chooses to move.”
Maximum rent increase being capped also makes sense - I’ve been hit with 15-20% rent increases with no choice but to move.
It seems like you don’t like the tenant having any rights, and you want to impose your will upon them.
nikkwong 59 minutes ago [-]
This is an insanely bad take.
> For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate?
You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house. If you're a building owner, there are reasons that you might want to be able to have freedom of choice in choosing who you have live in your building. When the government forces you to choose the first applicant who meets your selection criteria, your selection criteria becomes incredibly strict—720+ credit score, makes 4x the rent, etc. Especially when evicting a bad tenant becomes basically impossible, landlords work even harder to vet candidates, meaning there are a lot of false negatives that aren't offered housing. Seriously, you can't evict a tenant just because its winter? You know how many people take advantage of that — read my sibling comment in my thread. I myself in Seattle have dealt with multiple tenants who have done this so they could have free rent as their lease expired. What do you think this does to my tenant selection process? I up the bar.
> Maximum rent increase being capped also makes sense - I’ve been hit with 15-20% rent increases with no choice but to move.
You act like there's an oligopoly that dictates rent prices from their mountaintop that we all have to abide by. We live in a free market, and small landlords compete with large buildings for tenants. Creating these types of caps just makes the system less efficient — focuses efforts on the false pretense of tenants rights rather than the true equalizer like building more housing. And honestly, it just drives small landlords out of the market who can't handle it. This just leaves corporate landlords who are certainly less tenant friendly and will further this tenant vs landlord arms-race. We should be creating incentives and making it easy for individual homeowners to become landlords (at least in Seattle) if we want the paradigm to improve.
pixelatedindex 51 minutes ago [-]
> You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house. If you're a building owner, there are reasons that you might want to be able to have freedom of choice in choosing who you have live in your building.
That’s basically discrimination? Make a strict selection criteria, that’s fine. The city also has affordable housing for people who don’t qualify. You set what works for you, why do you care if it’s too strict?
I am not acting like there is an oligopoly, but not having tenant protections means tenants are at the mercy of shitty landlords. And there are a TON of them. Am I not supposed to have any rights, and the landlords gets to do whatever they want? Free market doesn’t mean regulation free.
Edit: you said “We should be creating incentives and making it easy for individual homeowners to become landlords (at least in Seattle) if we want the paradigm to improve.” - what do you propose? What about landlords who don’t want housing built because they like owning a scarce asset? What kind of rights do you think tenants should have?
derektank 11 minutes ago [-]
Yes, discrimination based upon characteristics that aren't immutable is perfectly fine and something we do every day. I discriminate against my neighbor who invited me over drinks in favor of my best friend who invited me to his birthday. I discriminate against the potential hire who doesn’t have experience in this line of work in favor of the person who’s a nationally renowned expert. I discriminate against a tenant with a history of failing to make rent in favor of someone who consistently provides payment every month. People are different and valuing one over another in specific contexts is hardly scandalous. It only becomes a proble if you decide to discriminate against someone based upon immutable characteristics such as their race, sex, national origin, etc. because you’re not treating them as an individual.
pixelatedindex 26 seconds ago [-]
I get where you’re coming from, but none of them are scarce inelastic resources. The work one especially doesn’t feel like discrimination.
It’s also very different - you’re hiring someone to do a job for you, vs wanting someone who’ll pay rent on time and not destroy the property. A mediocre employee vs an excellent employee can make any huge difference to a business.
That’s not the case with renters - if person A and person B both pay on time and don’t trash the place then they are quite fungible.
craftkiller 44 minutes ago [-]
> You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house
We already tried that. It turns out that people are racist, so now we need laws to protect against that. It sucks for all the decent non-racist folks but the alternative of not having those protections was far worse.
nikkwong 38 minutes ago [-]
If you force people to have someone in their house that they don't want, they are not going to rent their house out. This will lead to less units on the market. Your point about racism is fair, but I don't think the answer is a solution that reduces rentable units on the market.
inigyou 16 minutes ago [-]
Okay, sell it to someone who will live there then. You're not a saint for taking a unit someone wants to buy and forcing them to rent instead.
craftkiller 28 minutes ago [-]
What alternative solution to housing-related racism would you suggest?
derektank 7 minutes ago [-]
The one that actually exists? Have you never heard of the HUD fair housing initiatives programs? You hire a white actor and a black actor with the same job, income, credit, etc and if a landlord consistently refuses to rent to the black actors, you sic the DoJ on them for violating the Fair Housing Act
CamperBob2 31 minutes ago [-]
How is renting different from hiring in that regard? Nobody would consider requiring employers to hire the first qualified candidate, but at the same time, we don't allow employers to discriminate on the basis of race.
Why couldn't the same law apply to residential leasing?
craftkiller 15 minutes ago [-]
Are we sure that law is working as intended? Or are employers simply not admitting to factoring race into the decision? It is next to impossible to prove a candidate was rejected on the basis of race, especially when you can legally reject someone for not being a "culture fit" on the team.
I'd also argue the stakes are higher when leasing, so landlords will be less likely to take a chance on a race they don't like. Most jobs in the US are at-will employment so you can be fired at any time for almost any reason, but evicting a tenant can be a long process.
DanHulton 1 hours ago [-]
Nothing on that list sounds like a particular hardship. Your "Oh, and" is unfortunate and ought to be addressed, but then again, that was intended as your cherry-topper, not your main course.
This is people's _homes_ we're talking about here, not a baseball card where privileging the owner is without too much consequence. If you lack the empathy to understand why this is a special case, maybe don't be a landlord.
naturalmovement 44 minutes ago [-]
Actually landlords have a reasonable expectation you don't turn _their home_ into a crack house and no one should be forced to rent to scumbags.
inigyou 18 minutes ago [-]
Why should landlords have that expectation? I think the default case should be that when someone rents a space they have freedom to do what they want with that space until they stop renting it, and then when they stop renting it they must be forced to return it to its original condition.
Did you know in Australia it's normal to give your landlord a tour of your house every 3 months to prove you haven't broken it? That's completely ridiculous.
11 minutes ago [-]
JuniperMesos 20 minutes ago [-]
So do other nearby tenants who aren't crack users.
itake 2 hours ago [-]
I explicitly bought in Lynwood so I’d have the option to rent out my house and avoid king county
rdtsc 5 hours ago [-]
> They are, however, indeed a "small[est] subset" to quote the gentleman in the article.
The numbers don't have to stay small because this behavior is not generated independently in a population. Multiple people may become aware of it by talking to each other, social media, forums, some crazy news event that refers to it, etc. All of the sudden a lot more people decide they can do it as well and tell their friends.
I am not defending it or saying one side is right or wrong just that when it comes to things like this there may be a different model at play on how this behavior is generated.
naturalmovement 6 hours ago [-]
There's entire Reddit communities of these people where they encourage and validate their shitty behavior.
With some of the stories I've read, you'd have to be positively insane to be a small-time landlord these days, especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone.
Go watch Pacific Heights with Michael Keaton for a fictionalized account but this stuff absolutely happens every day.
I saw one recently where the renter has not paid rent for six years and is unable to be evicted. It made national news.
So where does that leave the industry? You eventually push out the mom and pop landlords by making the regulations so insane it only leaves behind the large corporate property management companies and their army of lawyers. Who will collude and drive rents up. It's a vicious cycle and these cities are not helping one bit.
pixelatedindex 1 hours ago [-]
Doesn’t help that the landlords want to squeeze the renter for what they are worth. It’s weird to me that shitty landlords are normalized but shitty tenants get a (rightfully) bad rap.
These laws become the way they are because landlords brought it upon themselves for the most part - they’re keeping assets that have massively increased in price and want to extract more and more out of the tenant.
If you have a home that’s paid off your expenses are basically just property taxes, maybe they should do what they can to keep good tenants instead of chasing profits.
jjav 30 minutes ago [-]
> These laws become the way they are because landlords brought it upon themselves for the most part
These laws seem quite unrelated to the problems.
There needs to be laws to protect the renter against bad landlords and there needs to be laws to protect the landlord against bad tenants.
Nowhere there it implies there should be insane laws that make no sense. Such as creating a system where someone can skip paying rent for many years and continue to live there.
Landlords need laws that hold their feet to the fire to maintain the properties to a livable standard (the state/county should define) and fulfill any other obligations of the lease. At the same time there need to be laws that force the renters to pay on time and not destroy the property. It's not a case of one or the other.
pixelatedindex 13 minutes ago [-]
I’m not denying any of that. If you don’t pay rent it makes sense that you’re evicted. This is completely okay with me, and the city should change their rules around it.
The issue is that housing is a necessity, and the relationship isn’t an equal one. A landlord can usually absorb vacancy, repairs, or a bad investment decision; a renter can’t easily absorb losing their home or a sudden 20% rent increase.
bombcar 50 minutes ago [-]
Rental prices stay surprisingly steady even when house prices go insane - compare similar apartments/houses in major expensive cities and cheaper ones.
pixelatedindex 41 minutes ago [-]
Sure but the rent will follow the increased purchase price. They also don’t go down, or at least they’re extremely sticky.
bombcar 38 minutes ago [-]
They're limited by what people will pay - and "techbro" cities have people with insane salaries willing to fork over big bucks. But there are similarly expensive areas that don't support the income necessary, and there often you find huge rental inversions.
rationalist 6 hours ago [-]
I have friends and coworkers that want to have rental properties, and I advise them it's not worth it.
I don't want to be in a position where I have to pay more to fix damages than I collectected in rent if I accidentally rent to deadbeats. Or in a position where I have to provide services to someone not paying me.
One of those friends has parents that rented out their old house to deadbeats at the top of the housing market instead of selling it. Those deadbeats have been nothing but trouble and yet my friend still wants to be a landlord.
Somehow the idea of owning rental properties became a pervasive notion in the U.S.
_DeadFred_ 3 hours ago [-]
Wage theft is the number one form of theft in the USA at around $15 billion. Hopefully you advised your friends to avoid working for wages as that is the number one way to be ripped off by deadbeats in the USA.
Somehow the idea of working for wages became a pervasive notion in the U.S.
Landlords typically have insurance coverage for damage by tenants, including lost rent.
bombcar 45 minutes ago [-]
This form of insurance is exceeding expensive and exceedingly rare. Large buildings self-insure (by having a ton of doors) and small landlords don't want to pay it.
itake 2 hours ago [-]
It’s hard for new landlords. People that bought houses to rent compete against property owners of paid off homes or people with 3% mortgages.
Tacking on optional insurance products on a property that’s already in the red further encourages landlords to push up rents prices.
mx7zysuj4xew 13 minutes ago [-]
Well yeah, it's also hard for any random person to start an oil conglomerate having to compete against ExxonMobil
2 hours ago [-]
nradov 5 hours ago [-]
Tenant "protection" laws are the type of idiocy that economically illiterate progressive politicians always produce. They end up having the opposite effect by making property owners less willing to rent out to anyone. The only effective way to protect tenants is to set public policies that encourage new housing development. When there is a housing surplus, the laws of economics force landlords to treat tenants well. Build more housing!
toast0 2 hours ago [-]
Tentant protection laws are always a matter of degree.
Requiring a process in order to evict tennants is a good thing. If the process is unsatisfyable or extremely lengthy, I don't think it's a good thing anymore. There should be a way to get destructive and severely disruptive tenants out in a hurry. Ordinary breach of contract things (failure to pay rent, problematic behaviors that violate the lease but aren't an immediate issue, etc) should have something like a 3-7 notice period and then be referred to court and figured out without undue delay.
I'm ok with limiting the reason for the landlord ending a lease, especially where the tenant has stayed there for a long time.
IMHO rent control/rent stabilization can be useful when the cap isn't set too low, and there's reasonable ways to pass through less predictable costs. If the cap is too low, rent gets significantly behind the market rent which causes trouble for landlords but also leads to situations where renters end up stuck where they are; maybe better than being forced out but not if the property deteriorates. If the cap is too high, it doesn't provide meaningful stability or a planning horizon for tenants. If it's in the right place, it gives renters reasonable time to adjust to market changes. Again, IMHO, 3% is probably too low, 10% may be too high, somewhere in the middle is nice to have.
Tenant protections setting deposit limits and process for assessing against the deposit seem reasonable to me. Landlords are going to screw tenants out of deposits if they can, regardless of the market realities, because the relationship is over, the renter is busy with other stuff, and the landlord has the money.
inigyou 15 minutes ago [-]
Is there any morally valid reason to evict a tenant other than nonpayment of rent? For bad behavior that should be between them and the police, not you.
woodruffw 4 hours ago [-]
There's an economic floor for the price of housing: the amortized cost of the building and its maintenance, plus taxes and overhead imposed by governments, utilities, mortgages, etc.
In other words: even in a plentiful housing market, there will always be someone who struggles to pay rent (including transiently), because a rational housing market can't offer $0 rents. Tenant protection laws exist to protect that person from a landlord who would otherwise be incentivized to throw them onto the street.
itake 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah… these laws for private landlords to subsidize housing for other families.
If you only have 1 rental property and your tenant doesn’t pay, that’s a 100% loss of revenue while your family personally bears the cost of supporting this other family.
Whereas corporate landlords can absorb these losses by raising rents on 100 doors to cover the families that refuse to pay
inigyou 14 minutes ago [-]
Don't rent it then. All these laws are designed to make being a landlord hell so that people won't be landlords.
asdff 8 minutes ago [-]
Maybe the lesson is just to not be so overleveraged.
2 hours ago [-]
senectus1 4 hours ago [-]
sure because a property owner is going to not rent out a property and just take the month on month hit for having an empty property. They'll either rent it or sell it.
There is a middle ground, just need to find that point.
nradov 4 hours ago [-]
Apparently you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the rental market. Landlords in cities with strong tenant protection laws will absolutely leave a unit vacant for months until they find someone with a high income ratio and credit score. This leaves poorer people stuck with no options.
mmooss 2 hours ago [-]
Do you have evidence? There is evidence that RealPage software illegally coordinated (maybe coordinates) landlords in keeping units off the market in order to reduce demand and increase prices for everyone.
I have a 5 bedroom house that I rent out 2 rooms, but not interested in accepting more people unless they are friends or have a very high income.
At my home’s peak, we had 6 adults living there, now its at 50% capacity.
verall 1 hours ago [-]
How many high income individuals want to share a house with 5 strangers?
itake 47 minutes ago [-]
Apparently not many hence the empty house.
In SF and Seattle during hiring booms, a lot of young workers move to the city with no social connections, so they start their new life in hacker houses to kickstart their friend group.
bombcar 47 minutes ago [-]
It's surprisingly common in places like SF, and near popular colleges.
archagon 2 hours ago [-]
Vacancy tax. No one should have the right to buy multiple, rentable homes and keep them unused in the middle of a housing crisis. It’s sociopathic.
mx7zysuj4xew 17 minutes ago [-]
So in the Netherlands, For many years any property left vacant and unused dor more than a year could be legally squatted.
it forced landlords to keep their properties on the market and insured full usage of the severely limited available housing stock
archagon 2 hours ago [-]
Do you own your own house? Are you rich?
I’ve known acquaintances who got de facto evicted without warning just because their landlord decided to make a few extra bucks. Were that to happen to me, I would not be able to rent in my current city at all due to the recent influx of wealthy tech workers. (Read: extremely high rents with ridiculous income requirements.) Fortunately, my city has robust tenant protections and rent control, so I don’t have to live my life in fear of ending up on the curb. Some people see that as a bad thing; I guess they think I should save up a few million dollars to buy a condo or abandon my community and move to the boonies.
This would be less of an issue with more housing stock, but that takes decades to build. As a city resident inconveniently living in the present, that does not help me much.
Obviously, I’d never vote for a politician who would make it easier for a landlord to evict me arbitrarily. And I’d eagerly vote for the same protections for any other renter.
itake 2 hours ago [-]
I think you’re leaving details out of your story. If the landlord wants to make a few bucks, then they keep their good tenants (lowers vacancy rate, keeps repairs low, etc).
Kicking out good tenants cost landlords money.
archagon 2 hours ago [-]
It’s pretty simple. There’s a tech boom or similar, a bunch of rich workers move in, rents go up. Landlord spikes rent by 30% to take advantage. You can see this happening in r/sanfrancisco today, for non-rent-controlled units.
itake 2 hours ago [-]
Sf is kinda a mess. Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave (locking up more housing, reducing supply, forcing everyone else to pay more), thus continue to discourage rent controlled tenants from moving since moving means even higher prices.
The property tax situation in SF is a mess.
SF also requires a lot of expensive regulations (earthquake proofing, renovation permits, rising California insurance costs, etc).
Also… the unfortunate reality is there is only so much space and the capital markets determine who gets to live where. If you’re not able to keep up in a city, then there are better places for you.
craftkiller 1 hours ago [-]
> Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave
They have exactly as much freedom to leave as they would without rent control. They _choose_ to stay because rent control has made it advantageous to stay. The way you phrased it implies you're suggesting this is a bad thing for renters but that is strictly a positive. Without rent control they'd have zero affordable options, with rent control they have 1 affordable option. Woe to the inhabitants of rent controlled apartments with their golden handcuffs.
itake 24 minutes ago [-]
Rent control drives up rent prices for everyone.
So yes, if you have rent control in a city, it would create an environment with zero affordable options.
inigyou 12 minutes ago [-]
Obviously it does not drive up the rent price of the person who is paying less rent. That's the whole point. The residents of SF have voted to prevent you from taking their apartments, so if you don't want to bid very competitively for an already empty apartment, you'll just have to take an apartment somewhere else.
majormajor 49 minutes ago [-]
> Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave (locking up more housing, reducing supply, forcing everyone else to pay more), thus continue to discourage rent controlled tenants from moving since moving means even higher prices.
This is disingenuous. In the absence of rent control (or prop 13 for property owners) you famously get a situation where tenants ALSO can't afford to leave... but have to anyway.
Why should anyone be forced to leave just because someone richer wants to move in?
You don't have to support someone being unable to evict people who don't pay to believe that there should be limits on how much landlords (or the state, in the case of prop 13) should be able to force current residents to leave just to make a quick buck.
itake 37 minutes ago [-]
> Why should anyone be forced to leave just because someone richer wants to move in?
This triggers my other frustration: empty nesters. They continue to live in great 3-4 bedroom homes that are amazing to raise a family in (near job centers, plenty of bedrooms, tight community, near good schools). This forces people like myself to spend 85+ minutes in a car (away from my family, friends etc) everyday while I drive past all these amazing empty homes.
Yes, if you’re not using the space efficiently, GTFO and let people have the space! Let dad have more time with his kids. Let the tech bro that created 10m jobs and have more time with his wife and kid. Let people burn less fossil fuels to get to work.
Rent-controlled/prop13 grandma needs to find another place to live for the next generation.
Someone living alone in a rent controlled unit paying below market rates is much “richer” than a family of 4 paying 5x more cramped into a 2 bedroom apartment.
inigyou 11 minutes ago [-]
Maybe you could offer a trade. Swap your home for theirs and pay them some rent for it.
nradov 1 hours ago [-]
It sounds like you're living in a badly governed city. Have you considered voting for politicians with an abundance agenda? Or moving to a city with more intelligent housing policies such as Dallas?
majormajor 45 minutes ago [-]
NIMBYism and single-family zoning are alive and thriving in Dallas; what Dallas has is this thing called a huge-fucking-flat-prairie all around it that means Frisco, Addison, etc, have been able to add to the low-density car-centric sprawl and help keep prices down some.
(But even then, plenty of Dallas residents have been upset in the past decade by what happens to rental prices when a bunch of higher-income folks move to town!)
One wonders why the people who don't want to have to leave a city like San Fransisco just cause some other people have more money than them and want to raise their rents out of their reach are the ones who should move to Texas. Why shouldn't the would-be newcomers just be the ones go to all those cookie-cutter new developments?
If you jumped back in time 20 years ago and were able to ensure that YCombinator, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, and other high-paper-valuation companies, and they all had imported their from-out-of-town high-income-or-equity-leveraging employees to McKinney, Texas, not much materially would prevent those companies from still doing what they did. But people who already lived in SF or on the peninsula but didn't own much land there would have a materially better standard of living due to their costs not running away from their existing incomes. And the Texas burbs happily would've built a shit-ton of houses and apartments for the startup workers, because of the aforementioned giant quantities of near-empty land. Greenfield businesses for greenfield real-estate. Much better fit than force-transforming cities.
sp527 2 hours ago [-]
> I guess they think I should save up a few million dollars to buy a condo or abandon my community and move to the boonies.
If you can't afford to live in your city, what distinguishes you from the people in the boonies? Why should they be relegated to the boonies while you successfully game the system?
archagon 2 hours ago [-]
I can afford to live in my city. I’m living in it right now! The nice thing is that I don’t get pushed out by arbitrary economic fluctuations completely out of my control.
ekelsen 1 hours ago [-]
If only we could all get free protection from economic forces we don't control.
That kind of insurance is usually pretty expensive. Why should you get it for free?
inigyou 9 minutes ago [-]
Why shouldn't everyone get everything for free that can be provided for free? Forcing other people to pay a cost because you paid a cost is just sour grapes.
majormajor 43 minutes ago [-]
> If only we could all get free protection from economic forces we don't control.
> That kind of insurance is usually pretty expensive. Why should you get it for free?
Protecting its constituents from the whims of out-of-town money seems like an excellent purpose for a local government. Especially if some of that money wants to move in so badly that it can be very profitably taxed!
Why shouldn't local government try to serve its constituents like that?
inigyou 9 minutes ago [-]
Because I'm rich, and I want to live in SF dagnabbit, and how dare the (checks notes) existing residents of SF vote to block me from taking one of their apartments that I obviously deserve to live in more than they do because I'm rich?
sp527 2 hours ago [-]
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your comment suggested you'd be unable to afford market rent.
archagon 2 hours ago [-]
I can afford to live in my city because my landlord isn’t able to tack an extra $2000 to my rent due to the sudden influx of AI bros.
sp527 17 minutes ago [-]
Pity the boonyman who was afforded no such luxury
inigyou 8 minutes ago [-]
Are AI bros infesting the boonies now
pixelatedindex 1 hours ago [-]
> The only effective way to protect tenants is to set public policies that encourage new housing development
Which the local landowning population promptly block with NIMBY tactics. Have you wondered if that has any impact? Not everything is some progressive boogeyman.
ethbr1 2 hours ago [-]
> especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone
The problem is that there will always be more voting renters than voting landlords. So in a purely democratic system, policies which favor renters at the expense of landlords will always be supported.
And that said, some renter protections are definitely needed, because there is a subset of landlords that engage in flat out illegal behavior.
Deposit withholding, making illegal demands, illegal renter selection practices, etc.
Imho, that tends to be concentrated in the "1-5 unit" landlord range, because those landlords are usually (a) not lawyers & (b) treat their properties like pets instead of a business.
pixelatedindex 1 hours ago [-]
> The problem is that there will always be more voting renters than voting landlords. So in a purely democratic system, policies which favor renters at the expense of landlords will always be supported.
I don’t know about that… the voting landlords (NIMBYs) sure make it a point to reduce development “to preserve their neighborhood character”.
BrenBarn 1 hours ago [-]
The way to handle this, which no one seems to be willing to face, is to make laws that are not wealth-neutral. If you are a mom-and-pop landlord (with a relatively low net worth), your should have more leeway in dealing with tenants. If you are a large landlord, you should have very little. Couple this with ruinous penalties (e.g., full forfeiture) for attempting to hide the true beneficial ownership of the property.
bombcar 43 minutes ago [-]
In many locations, this exists in practice - especially if you rent parts of a building that you reside in (one half of a duplex or 1/4th of a quadplex, etc).
In some cases, anti-discrimination laws don't even apply.
jen20 5 hours ago [-]
If you think the Reddit communities of tenants are bad, you should try reading the Reddit communities of landlords (at least the UK ones).
mc3301 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah.... So many bad tenants. So many bad landlords... So many weird laws protecting and hurting both.
What if we shifted to a different system?
inigyou 7 minutes ago [-]
Then housing couldn't be used as retirement savings and the economy would collapse immediately
weakfish 5 hours ago [-]
The question that many do not want to think about. We (as a society (referring to all Western Liberalism, not just the US)) are so thoroughly convinced that Liberal Democracy is the End of History, and it's the 'flawed but best,' as many say, but refuse to imagine something better.
It's puzzling that a system that is supposed to reward creativity and genius like capitalism limits it's inhabitants in their imagination when it comes to how one might structure society.
I don't claim to have the answer, and _no,_ my issues with Liberal Democracy/Capitalism don't mean I'm a communist / socialist / thing-people-don't-like.
_DeadFred_ 3 hours ago [-]
It's not Liberal Democracy that is the problem but a society where all of the slack has been optimized out, every extraction maximized, every infraction forever a scarlet letter on an individual, zero stability but constant crisis inflicted on individuals. There is no room in modern day America for people in the margins. Society needs to make a place for them and a path out of constant crisis, or the homeless problem will continue to grow.
Another hidden issue in the USA is many households are dependent on contributing income from a retired/disabled/working past retirement age elderly parent/family member. Those people are going to start passing in mass, and a lot of households will become even less resilient.
nradov 4 hours ago [-]
What would you like us to imagine? So far everything that we've tried at scale other than liberal democracy and capitalism has inevitably led to war, famine, and genocide. Western liberalism appears to be the only system that empirically works. Some would claim that "socialism with Chinese characteristics" works better, but if you look below the surface prosperity in first-tier cities the actual economic situation is rather grim and the human rights situation is horrific.
inigyou 5 minutes ago [-]
If everything but liberal democracy and capitalism lead to war, famine, and genocide, and we're currently trying capitalism and it's not working, then maybe it's time to try liberal democracy
margalabargala 4 hours ago [-]
Arguably, benevolent dictatorships tend to be the best. Singapore is a good example.
The trouble is making a system that can guarantee the "benevolent" part in the longer term.
mmooss 2 hours ago [-]
Make an argument, beyond one city (if it's true there - Singapore might be better off, on some of the best real estate in the world, with free elections)? All the most free, wealthy, safe, creative, innovative societies in the world are democratic.
And on what basis does some dictator get to tell others what to do? OK, I am the dictator and I'm telling you to give me 10% of your income and never post this nonsense in HN again. :)
margalabargala 2 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of values there that.you're presenting as though "this is what society should be" when it's actually "this is what liberal democracy thinks society should be". So obviously we have a foregone conclusion.
Plenty of societies happily trade away one or more of those values for other values.
mmooss 53 minutes ago [-]
That's not an argument: You don't specify which values, don't address my argument, and just repeat an old trope of dictators and their apologists with no support.
> Plenty of societies happily trade away one or more of those values for other values.
Which ones? Let's hear some evidence.
People around the world strongly embrace and defend their freedom, including self-determination; the idea that it's not universal (in any meaningful sense) has little support. It's embraced wherever people have the opportunity in Europe and N. America, in East Asia, in China (Taiwan, and also Hong Kong until it was taken from them), S. America, SE Asia, South Asia, a variety of places in Africa, ... you can see the mass protests in Iran, the Arab Spring, etc.
And rationally, again, why should you or anyone else tell me what to do? On that basis, why can't I just as well tell you or them what to do?
Human rights' universality is essential - without it, it's just people fighting for power. That's why it's so important, and that's why those who want to control others try to attack the universality.
inigyou 3 minutes ago [-]
Democracy isn't freedom. It's quite easily possible for a democracy to be non-free (many current examples) or for a non-democracy to be free (not as many).
poopdick 5 hours ago [-]
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8note 6 hours ago [-]
This is a bit of an intentional result, no?
the goal is for peoppe to own the places they live in
nradov 5 hours ago [-]
Why should that be a goal?
fyredge 5 hours ago [-]
To discourage rent seeking behaviour?
CursedSilicon 5 hours ago [-]
Because every human being needs shelter?
nradov 5 hours ago [-]
Having shelter is not the same as owning real estate.
morkalork 6 hours ago [-]
In my city, and I assume many others, there's an informal landlord's group that shares lists of problem tenants to avoid renting to. While problematic, I wonder if it's made any impact.
seanmcdirmid 5 hours ago [-]
Usually this is handled with credit reports right? It’s only when the state forbids landlords from demanding credit reports that informal networks are necessary.
In general as a tenant you can only get away with not paying rent once (until eviction happens, no one will ever rent to you again without federal or state assurances), and as a landlord you will only skip the credit report requirement once (because your first tenant is going to be a deadbeat who screw’s you).
nradov 5 hours ago [-]
In cities with excessive tenant protection laws, sometimes landlords will negotiate agreements with deadbeat tenants in which the tenant agrees to leave and the landlord doesn't report anything to the credit bureaus.
polski-g 4 hours ago [-]
Credit reports do not have a section for "plays music loudly" or "secretly smokes by the bathroom window".
inigyou 2 minutes ago [-]
Why's that anything to do with you. Call the cops.
toast0 2 hours ago [-]
They can have a section of public records if anything rises to the level of filing with the courts.
toofy 5 hours ago [-]
i occasionally come across some of the forums and online groups of landlords and the things they have to deal with, particularly in cities with strong protections for the tenants and its interesting to watch the perspectives.
on one hand i feel for some of the landlords who have to deal with some of the very real slacks who go out of their way to be difficult tenants.
on the other we’re talking about homes, by this i mean to stress home over investment. i think we’ve made a terrible mistake in incentivizing people to use homes as an investment. it should be difficult to evict someone from their home, and it should be risky and a pain in the ass to use someone else’s home as an investment.
i feel bad for _some_ of the landlords but from a larger societal perspective we’re going to look back at incentivizing so many people to invest as a landlord as a massive mistake.
dfxm12 2 hours ago [-]
The landlord can divest themselves of the property. It's also ok if people lose money on investments. I don't think you have to feel especially bad for landlords.
polski-g 4 hours ago [-]
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1986 4 hours ago [-]
They're being evicted from their home, but from the landlord's property. It would be the landlord's home if the landlord lived there, but they don't, because they're renting it to the tenant.
margalabargala 3 hours ago [-]
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delichon 6 hours ago [-]
> We have to consider what the unintended consequences are of public policies or practices where there are no immediate consequences for someone who falls behind on rent
> Many [landlords] say they don’t actually intend to evict anyone, but that filing these cases is the most expedient way to get emergency rental aid from the city.
Economics in one easy lesson: incentives matter.
vannevar 6 hours ago [-]
While that is certainly true, it's a very narrow view disconnected from the reasons for the policies. The most likely explanation for more people not paying their rent is that even fixed rents have become increasingly unaffordable because other costs have risen faster than wages. So yes, people are "choosing" not to pay rent because the consequences of not paying the rent lag substantially behind the consequences of not eating or buying gas. But it's an absolutely rational decision. FTA:
>...plenty of economic indicators suggest worsening financial duress for people already struggling. Costs are going up faster than wages, and inflation that took hold after the pandemic has proven painfully persistent.
throwawayqqq11 5 hours ago [-]
>plenty of economic indicators suggest
> — and no one's sure why
Now that i saw the framing, i am looking differently on the discussion here. The smalles troublemakers are more news worthy than broad economic factors behind us all, so you dumb down your headline...
_DeadFred_ 3 hours ago [-]
All slack has been removed from society. All pricing has been maximized. Every interaction capitalized. Every point of extraction extracted from.
People living in these situations now live from crisis to crisis. Not paying rent/dealing with the consequences is just another on the list. At some point people just become numb. Modern society at the peripherals is not sustainable. There will always be people in the peripherals, but society is now structured to require middle class type stability as the bottom baseline for an individual to survive.
kbar13 2 hours ago [-]
and the middle class is being destroyed
anovikov 47 minutes ago [-]
Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working.
Also perhaps there should be a new field for startups (yes i'm aware of 'proptech' but there has to be more than that), that will collect dirt on tenants to threaten them with legal consequences unless they pay.
jquery 5 minutes ago [-]
> Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners has an excellent scene where something like this happens to a kid down on his luck.
djeastm 6 hours ago [-]
It sounds like an ad-hoc rent strike. Not a great sign for an economy.
gacgacgac 6 hours ago [-]
People can't afford to live and food comes before paying your landlord? Economy is fucked right now. Income inequality pushes any gains into the hands of the wealthy.
And frankly, more and more people are willing to stuff their landlord if they feel their landlord isn't holding up their end of the deal.
sieabahlpark 6 hours ago [-]
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hagbard_c 6 hours ago [-]
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_bohm 5 hours ago [-]
I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of low-income people who are delinquent on their rent have no clue who Cea Weaver is. Nor is there any kind of organized rent strike occurring. Do you live in NYC?
hagbard_c 5 hours ago [-]
No, I don't even live in the USA. I followed the election of Mamdani as an outside observer because it is quite a thing for a 'democratic socialist' to become mayor of what can be considered to be the 'financial capital of the world'.
albedoa 2 hours ago [-]
> No, I don't even live in the USA.
Oh no way.
There are plenty of outside observers who are not confused about why a hugely popular New York City mayoral candidate was elected mayor of New York City. Your improbable confusion would seem to be a personal failure that has nothing to do with New York, Mamdani, democratic socialism, or your identity as an outside observer.
hdgvhicv 6 hours ago [-]
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RagnarD 6 hours ago [-]
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nathan_compton 6 hours ago [-]
"The uptick in rental delinquency isn’t new. It started six years ago, when the pandemic flung the city’s economy into chaos and plunged low-income New Yorkers into dire financial straits. But even as the city has rebounded, rent collection rates in affordable housing remain short of pre-pandemic levels. As costs balloon, landlords say insufficient rental income is threatening their ability to stay afloat."
It started 6 years ago, before he was mayor.
alex43578 6 hours ago [-]
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valiant55 6 hours ago [-]
The pandemic didn't end when Mamdani was elected. The economic impact from the pandemic is going to be felt for decades.
JCTheDenthog 6 hours ago [-]
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tomhow 5 hours ago [-]
We've banned this account.
Don't register accounts to post vile comments like this. We don't care what the source is; we care about the insinuation and the agenda, and everything it pattern-matches with. We've already banned a previous account of yours for one of the most egregious comments ever seen here. Please stop wasting everyone's time.
The question raised by the article isn't why people don't pay their rent; it is why the number of people not paying their rent has increased. Occam's Razor suggests that the most likely reason is also the simplest one: that prices have risen much faster than wages, making even fixed rents less affordable.
greekrich92 6 hours ago [-]
Put the skull calipers down
JCTheDenthog 6 hours ago [-]
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1shooner 6 hours ago [-]
What in the world does conspicuous consumption by race have to do with TFA?
JCTheDenthog 6 hours ago [-]
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lovich 6 hours ago [-]
I agree with the skull calipers comment, you came out of left field with the race shit and all benefit of the doubt for dog whistles left a few years ago
It has nothing to do with Mamdani, for those of who don't want to bother to read. Most of this occurred under Eric Adams's watch.
Anecdotally, I do think covid made people a lot more aware of how deeply backlogged the housing courts are. It seems like a lot of people (like the anonymous one in the article) realized they could not pay rent and avoid being actually evicted for quite some time.
This is a recurring theme in city problems: Backlogged courts. Sometimes that's to the benefit of the less fortunate (here), but it also often results in terrible outcomes (see: Kalief Browder).
It's basically the same argument that says rent caps are bad for the renters in the long run.
These people absolutely exist. To pretend that they don't is willful ignorance. They are, however, indeed a "small[est] subset" to quote the gentleman in the article. In the era of $4 McDoubles and $6 gallons of gas I have trouble believing that one in four people is my burnout college roommate who spends on Fireball shots and Xbox games instead of paying rent. Life is expensive these days.
It is corrosive to the social contract when government policy tacitly encourages this behavior.
When the political class or the cultural zeitgeist tells you over and over that landlords are leeches and that "any attempt to profit off of housing is unethical"—people are going to take that to heart and have a hatred for even well-meaning small landlords. If you don't believe this is the attitude, go visit r/Seattle. The inflammatory language of politicians and cultural leaders sets the tone which plays out as legal battles and fights in properties across the city.
This obviously creates an adverse selection problem where small landlords illegally apply their own prejudices and biases in tenant selection. Honestly—could you expect them not to—when the repercussions of picking a bad tenant are so great? And when there are other demographic groups—like immigrants—who are absolutely, verifiably and consistently reliable as tenants. It used to be that it was the section 8 or low income type that were a huge problem but now there's an educated leftish fringe that landlords are also avoiding. Honestly with good reason, IMO.
Some homeowners just decide to not list extra rooms in their house outright. I remember hearing something like that Seattle has the highest number of unrented empty rooms in the country (though someone should fact check that). With the political climate the way it is here, it's obvious as to why this is the case.
This kind of non-payment of rent abuse exploded during COVID.
I know someone with something like 120 units. Unassuming nice old lady that makes over a million a year. She tries to rent to immigrants as much as possible since they don't cause issues.
I’m curious how they’re managing to do this. I don’t give any outward signals of being a “leftie type” but I absolutely am. Conversely, I know lots of people who have a very punk look but are super conservative.
In what way are you well meaning? You're only doing it for money.
The people not paying you rent are also only doing it for money.
Sucks when people behave like you, huh.
One news article mentioned he worked in the medical field and when he was approved to move in, his income was $300k+).
The state actually ended up helping cover the lost rent and paid for the tenant’s legal bills for fighting the eviction.
https://www.discovery.org/a/nightmare-tenant-in-bellevue-con...
I’m on phone but if you search “Kim Seattle landlord” you can get more details of various articles on the situation.
> how could I ever present a verifiable citation for it?
There would likely be at least one (1) report of such a wild claim due to how wild it is. We wouldn't need anecdotes!
In Seattle, you can't:
1. Evict people from November to April (it's "winter"). 2. Evict people with schoolchildren during the school year. 3. Run background checks on prospective tenants. 4. You _must_ rent to the first qualifying tenant. 5. You must offer 3 months in rent as compensation if you decline to renew the lease. 6. The maximum rent increase is capped.
Oh, and eviction process takes about 1.5 years now because the courts are overloaded and the tenant can use procedural tricks to drag out the process.
If you want names, this case made newspapers: https://wealthandpoverty.center/2025/02/11/the-bellevue-squa...
For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate?
The giving tenant three month rent thing is for a very small circumstance - for example huge rent increases if the tenant income is low, condo remodeling, etc. The wording is: “landlords who issue a housing cost increase of 10% or more (within a 12-month period) must pay relocation assistance if the affected household earns 80% or less of the Area Median Income and chooses to move.”
Maximum rent increase being capped also makes sense - I’ve been hit with 15-20% rent increases with no choice but to move.
It seems like you don’t like the tenant having any rights, and you want to impose your will upon them.
> For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate?
You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house. If you're a building owner, there are reasons that you might want to be able to have freedom of choice in choosing who you have live in your building. When the government forces you to choose the first applicant who meets your selection criteria, your selection criteria becomes incredibly strict—720+ credit score, makes 4x the rent, etc. Especially when evicting a bad tenant becomes basically impossible, landlords work even harder to vet candidates, meaning there are a lot of false negatives that aren't offered housing. Seriously, you can't evict a tenant just because its winter? You know how many people take advantage of that — read my sibling comment in my thread. I myself in Seattle have dealt with multiple tenants who have done this so they could have free rent as their lease expired. What do you think this does to my tenant selection process? I up the bar.
> Maximum rent increase being capped also makes sense - I’ve been hit with 15-20% rent increases with no choice but to move.
You act like there's an oligopoly that dictates rent prices from their mountaintop that we all have to abide by. We live in a free market, and small landlords compete with large buildings for tenants. Creating these types of caps just makes the system less efficient — focuses efforts on the false pretense of tenants rights rather than the true equalizer like building more housing. And honestly, it just drives small landlords out of the market who can't handle it. This just leaves corporate landlords who are certainly less tenant friendly and will further this tenant vs landlord arms-race. We should be creating incentives and making it easy for individual homeowners to become landlords (at least in Seattle) if we want the paradigm to improve.
That’s basically discrimination? Make a strict selection criteria, that’s fine. The city also has affordable housing for people who don’t qualify. You set what works for you, why do you care if it’s too strict?
I am not acting like there is an oligopoly, but not having tenant protections means tenants are at the mercy of shitty landlords. And there are a TON of them. Am I not supposed to have any rights, and the landlords gets to do whatever they want? Free market doesn’t mean regulation free.
Edit: you said “We should be creating incentives and making it easy for individual homeowners to become landlords (at least in Seattle) if we want the paradigm to improve.” - what do you propose? What about landlords who don’t want housing built because they like owning a scarce asset? What kind of rights do you think tenants should have?
It’s also very different - you’re hiring someone to do a job for you, vs wanting someone who’ll pay rent on time and not destroy the property. A mediocre employee vs an excellent employee can make any huge difference to a business.
That’s not the case with renters - if person A and person B both pay on time and don’t trash the place then they are quite fungible.
We already tried that. It turns out that people are racist, so now we need laws to protect against that. It sucks for all the decent non-racist folks but the alternative of not having those protections was far worse.
Why couldn't the same law apply to residential leasing?
I'd also argue the stakes are higher when leasing, so landlords will be less likely to take a chance on a race they don't like. Most jobs in the US are at-will employment so you can be fired at any time for almost any reason, but evicting a tenant can be a long process.
This is people's _homes_ we're talking about here, not a baseball card where privileging the owner is without too much consequence. If you lack the empathy to understand why this is a special case, maybe don't be a landlord.
Did you know in Australia it's normal to give your landlord a tour of your house every 3 months to prove you haven't broken it? That's completely ridiculous.
The numbers don't have to stay small because this behavior is not generated independently in a population. Multiple people may become aware of it by talking to each other, social media, forums, some crazy news event that refers to it, etc. All of the sudden a lot more people decide they can do it as well and tell their friends.
I am not defending it or saying one side is right or wrong just that when it comes to things like this there may be a different model at play on how this behavior is generated.
With some of the stories I've read, you'd have to be positively insane to be a small-time landlord these days, especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone.
Go watch Pacific Heights with Michael Keaton for a fictionalized account but this stuff absolutely happens every day.
I saw one recently where the renter has not paid rent for six years and is unable to be evicted. It made national news.
So where does that leave the industry? You eventually push out the mom and pop landlords by making the regulations so insane it only leaves behind the large corporate property management companies and their army of lawyers. Who will collude and drive rents up. It's a vicious cycle and these cities are not helping one bit.
These laws become the way they are because landlords brought it upon themselves for the most part - they’re keeping assets that have massively increased in price and want to extract more and more out of the tenant.
If you have a home that’s paid off your expenses are basically just property taxes, maybe they should do what they can to keep good tenants instead of chasing profits.
These laws seem quite unrelated to the problems.
There needs to be laws to protect the renter against bad landlords and there needs to be laws to protect the landlord against bad tenants.
Nowhere there it implies there should be insane laws that make no sense. Such as creating a system where someone can skip paying rent for many years and continue to live there.
Landlords need laws that hold their feet to the fire to maintain the properties to a livable standard (the state/county should define) and fulfill any other obligations of the lease. At the same time there need to be laws that force the renters to pay on time and not destroy the property. It's not a case of one or the other.
The issue is that housing is a necessity, and the relationship isn’t an equal one. A landlord can usually absorb vacancy, repairs, or a bad investment decision; a renter can’t easily absorb losing their home or a sudden 20% rent increase.
I don't want to be in a position where I have to pay more to fix damages than I collectected in rent if I accidentally rent to deadbeats. Or in a position where I have to provide services to someone not paying me.
One of those friends has parents that rented out their old house to deadbeats at the top of the housing market instead of selling it. Those deadbeats have been nothing but trouble and yet my friend still wants to be a landlord.
Somehow the idea of owning rental properties became a pervasive notion in the U.S.
Somehow the idea of working for wages became a pervasive notion in the U.S.
https://www.denver7.com/news/national-politics/the-race/wage...
Tacking on optional insurance products on a property that’s already in the red further encourages landlords to push up rents prices.
Requiring a process in order to evict tennants is a good thing. If the process is unsatisfyable or extremely lengthy, I don't think it's a good thing anymore. There should be a way to get destructive and severely disruptive tenants out in a hurry. Ordinary breach of contract things (failure to pay rent, problematic behaviors that violate the lease but aren't an immediate issue, etc) should have something like a 3-7 notice period and then be referred to court and figured out without undue delay.
I'm ok with limiting the reason for the landlord ending a lease, especially where the tenant has stayed there for a long time.
IMHO rent control/rent stabilization can be useful when the cap isn't set too low, and there's reasonable ways to pass through less predictable costs. If the cap is too low, rent gets significantly behind the market rent which causes trouble for landlords but also leads to situations where renters end up stuck where they are; maybe better than being forced out but not if the property deteriorates. If the cap is too high, it doesn't provide meaningful stability or a planning horizon for tenants. If it's in the right place, it gives renters reasonable time to adjust to market changes. Again, IMHO, 3% is probably too low, 10% may be too high, somewhere in the middle is nice to have.
Tenant protections setting deposit limits and process for assessing against the deposit seem reasonable to me. Landlords are going to screw tenants out of deposits if they can, regardless of the market realities, because the relationship is over, the renter is busy with other stuff, and the landlord has the money.
In other words: even in a plentiful housing market, there will always be someone who struggles to pay rent (including transiently), because a rational housing market can't offer $0 rents. Tenant protection laws exist to protect that person from a landlord who would otherwise be incentivized to throw them onto the street.
If you only have 1 rental property and your tenant doesn’t pay, that’s a 100% loss of revenue while your family personally bears the cost of supporting this other family.
Whereas corporate landlords can absorb these losses by raising rents on 100 doors to cover the families that refuse to pay
There is a middle ground, just need to find that point.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/technology/realpage-doj-s...
I have a 5 bedroom house that I rent out 2 rooms, but not interested in accepting more people unless they are friends or have a very high income.
At my home’s peak, we had 6 adults living there, now its at 50% capacity.
In SF and Seattle during hiring booms, a lot of young workers move to the city with no social connections, so they start their new life in hacker houses to kickstart their friend group.
it forced landlords to keep their properties on the market and insured full usage of the severely limited available housing stock
I’ve known acquaintances who got de facto evicted without warning just because their landlord decided to make a few extra bucks. Were that to happen to me, I would not be able to rent in my current city at all due to the recent influx of wealthy tech workers. (Read: extremely high rents with ridiculous income requirements.) Fortunately, my city has robust tenant protections and rent control, so I don’t have to live my life in fear of ending up on the curb. Some people see that as a bad thing; I guess they think I should save up a few million dollars to buy a condo or abandon my community and move to the boonies.
This would be less of an issue with more housing stock, but that takes decades to build. As a city resident inconveniently living in the present, that does not help me much.
Obviously, I’d never vote for a politician who would make it easier for a landlord to evict me arbitrarily. And I’d eagerly vote for the same protections for any other renter.
Kicking out good tenants cost landlords money.
The property tax situation in SF is a mess.
SF also requires a lot of expensive regulations (earthquake proofing, renovation permits, rising California insurance costs, etc).
Also… the unfortunate reality is there is only so much space and the capital markets determine who gets to live where. If you’re not able to keep up in a city, then there are better places for you.
They have exactly as much freedom to leave as they would without rent control. They _choose_ to stay because rent control has made it advantageous to stay. The way you phrased it implies you're suggesting this is a bad thing for renters but that is strictly a positive. Without rent control they'd have zero affordable options, with rent control they have 1 affordable option. Woe to the inhabitants of rent controlled apartments with their golden handcuffs.
So yes, if you have rent control in a city, it would create an environment with zero affordable options.
This is disingenuous. In the absence of rent control (or prop 13 for property owners) you famously get a situation where tenants ALSO can't afford to leave... but have to anyway.
Why should anyone be forced to leave just because someone richer wants to move in?
You don't have to support someone being unable to evict people who don't pay to believe that there should be limits on how much landlords (or the state, in the case of prop 13) should be able to force current residents to leave just to make a quick buck.
This triggers my other frustration: empty nesters. They continue to live in great 3-4 bedroom homes that are amazing to raise a family in (near job centers, plenty of bedrooms, tight community, near good schools). This forces people like myself to spend 85+ minutes in a car (away from my family, friends etc) everyday while I drive past all these amazing empty homes.
Yes, if you’re not using the space efficiently, GTFO and let people have the space! Let dad have more time with his kids. Let the tech bro that created 10m jobs and have more time with his wife and kid. Let people burn less fossil fuels to get to work.
Rent-controlled/prop13 grandma needs to find another place to live for the next generation.
Someone living alone in a rent controlled unit paying below market rates is much “richer” than a family of 4 paying 5x more cramped into a 2 bedroom apartment.
(But even then, plenty of Dallas residents have been upset in the past decade by what happens to rental prices when a bunch of higher-income folks move to town!)
One wonders why the people who don't want to have to leave a city like San Fransisco just cause some other people have more money than them and want to raise their rents out of their reach are the ones who should move to Texas. Why shouldn't the would-be newcomers just be the ones go to all those cookie-cutter new developments?
If you jumped back in time 20 years ago and were able to ensure that YCombinator, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, and other high-paper-valuation companies, and they all had imported their from-out-of-town high-income-or-equity-leveraging employees to McKinney, Texas, not much materially would prevent those companies from still doing what they did. But people who already lived in SF or on the peninsula but didn't own much land there would have a materially better standard of living due to their costs not running away from their existing incomes. And the Texas burbs happily would've built a shit-ton of houses and apartments for the startup workers, because of the aforementioned giant quantities of near-empty land. Greenfield businesses for greenfield real-estate. Much better fit than force-transforming cities.
If you can't afford to live in your city, what distinguishes you from the people in the boonies? Why should they be relegated to the boonies while you successfully game the system?
That kind of insurance is usually pretty expensive. Why should you get it for free?
> That kind of insurance is usually pretty expensive. Why should you get it for free?
Protecting its constituents from the whims of out-of-town money seems like an excellent purpose for a local government. Especially if some of that money wants to move in so badly that it can be very profitably taxed!
Why shouldn't local government try to serve its constituents like that?
Which the local landowning population promptly block with NIMBY tactics. Have you wondered if that has any impact? Not everything is some progressive boogeyman.
The problem is that there will always be more voting renters than voting landlords. So in a purely democratic system, policies which favor renters at the expense of landlords will always be supported.
And that said, some renter protections are definitely needed, because there is a subset of landlords that engage in flat out illegal behavior.
Deposit withholding, making illegal demands, illegal renter selection practices, etc.
Imho, that tends to be concentrated in the "1-5 unit" landlord range, because those landlords are usually (a) not lawyers & (b) treat their properties like pets instead of a business.
I don’t know about that… the voting landlords (NIMBYs) sure make it a point to reduce development “to preserve their neighborhood character”.
In some cases, anti-discrimination laws don't even apply.
What if we shifted to a different system?
It's puzzling that a system that is supposed to reward creativity and genius like capitalism limits it's inhabitants in their imagination when it comes to how one might structure society.
I don't claim to have the answer, and _no,_ my issues with Liberal Democracy/Capitalism don't mean I'm a communist / socialist / thing-people-don't-like.
Another hidden issue in the USA is many households are dependent on contributing income from a retired/disabled/working past retirement age elderly parent/family member. Those people are going to start passing in mass, and a lot of households will become even less resilient.
The trouble is making a system that can guarantee the "benevolent" part in the longer term.
And on what basis does some dictator get to tell others what to do? OK, I am the dictator and I'm telling you to give me 10% of your income and never post this nonsense in HN again. :)
Plenty of societies happily trade away one or more of those values for other values.
> Plenty of societies happily trade away one or more of those values for other values.
Which ones? Let's hear some evidence.
People around the world strongly embrace and defend their freedom, including self-determination; the idea that it's not universal (in any meaningful sense) has little support. It's embraced wherever people have the opportunity in Europe and N. America, in East Asia, in China (Taiwan, and also Hong Kong until it was taken from them), S. America, SE Asia, South Asia, a variety of places in Africa, ... you can see the mass protests in Iran, the Arab Spring, etc.
And rationally, again, why should you or anyone else tell me what to do? On that basis, why can't I just as well tell you or them what to do?
Human rights' universality is essential - without it, it's just people fighting for power. That's why it's so important, and that's why those who want to control others try to attack the universality.
the goal is for peoppe to own the places they live in
In general as a tenant you can only get away with not paying rent once (until eviction happens, no one will ever rent to you again without federal or state assurances), and as a landlord you will only skip the credit report requirement once (because your first tenant is going to be a deadbeat who screw’s you).
on one hand i feel for some of the landlords who have to deal with some of the very real slacks who go out of their way to be difficult tenants.
on the other we’re talking about homes, by this i mean to stress home over investment. i think we’ve made a terrible mistake in incentivizing people to use homes as an investment. it should be difficult to evict someone from their home, and it should be risky and a pain in the ass to use someone else’s home as an investment.
i feel bad for _some_ of the landlords but from a larger societal perspective we’re going to look back at incentivizing so many people to invest as a landlord as a massive mistake.
> Many [landlords] say they don’t actually intend to evict anyone, but that filing these cases is the most expedient way to get emergency rental aid from the city.
Economics in one easy lesson: incentives matter.
>...plenty of economic indicators suggest worsening financial duress for people already struggling. Costs are going up faster than wages, and inflation that took hold after the pandemic has proven painfully persistent.
> — and no one's sure why
Now that i saw the framing, i am looking differently on the discussion here. The smalles troublemakers are more news worthy than broad economic factors behind us all, so you dumb down your headline...
People living in these situations now live from crisis to crisis. Not paying rent/dealing with the consequences is just another on the list. At some point people just become numb. Modern society at the peripherals is not sustainable. There will always be people in the peripherals, but society is now structured to require middle class type stability as the bottom baseline for an individual to survive.
Also perhaps there should be a new field for startups (yes i'm aware of 'proptech' but there has to be more than that), that will collect dirt on tenants to threaten them with legal consequences unless they pay.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners has an excellent scene where something like this happens to a kid down on his luck.
And frankly, more and more people are willing to stuff their landlord if they feel their landlord isn't holding up their end of the deal.
Oh no way.
There are plenty of outside observers who are not confused about why a hugely popular New York City mayoral candidate was elected mayor of New York City. Your improbable confusion would seem to be a personal failure that has nothing to do with New York, Mamdani, democratic socialism, or your identity as an outside observer.
It started 6 years ago, before he was mayor.
Don't register accounts to post vile comments like this. We don't care what the source is; we care about the insinuation and the agenda, and everything it pattern-matches with. We've already banned a previous account of yours for one of the most egregious comments ever seen here. Please stop wasting everyone's time.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48623195 and marked it off topic.