Landlords Throw Party to Celebrate Being Able to Evict People Again
The Berkeley Property Owners Association's fall mixer is called "Celebrating the End of the Eviction Moratorium."
A group of Berkeley, California landlords will hold a fun social mixer over cocktails to celebrate their newfound ability to kick people out of their homes for nonpayment of rent, as first reported by Berkeleyside.
The Berkeley Property Owner Association lists a fall mixer on its website on Tuesday, September 12, 530 PM PST. “We will celebrate the end of the Eviction Moratorium and talk about what's upcoming through the end of the year,” the invitation reads. The event advertises one free drink and “a lovely selection of appetizers,” and encourages attendees to “join us around the fire pits, under the heat lamps and stars, enjoying good food, drink, and friends.”
The venue will ironically be held at a space called “Freehouse”, according to its website. Attendees who want to join in can RSVP on their website for $20.
Berkeley’s eviction moratorium lasted from March 2020 to August 31, 2023, according to the city’s Rent Board, during which time tenants could not be legally removed from their homes for nonpayment of rent. Landlords could still evict tenants if they had “Good Cause” under city and state law, which includes health and safety violations. Landlords can still not collect back rent from March 2020 to April 2023 through an eviction lawsuit, according to the Rent Board.
Berkeleyside spoke to one landlord planning to attend the eviction moratorium party who was frustrated that they could not evict a tenant—except that they could evict the tenant, who was allegedly a danger to his roommates—but the landlord found the process of proving a health and safety violation too tedious and chose not to pursue it.
The Berkeley Property Owner Association is a landlord group that shares leadership with a lobbying group called the Berkeley Rental Housing Coalition which advocated against a law banning source of income discrimination against Section 8 tenants and other tenant protections.
The group insists on not being referred to as landlords, however, which they consider “slander.” According to the website, “We politely decline the label "landlord" with its pejorative connotations.” They also bravely denounce feudalism, an economic system which mostly ended 500 years ago, and say that the current system is quite fair to renters.
“Feudalism was an unfair system in which landlords owned and benefited, and tenant farmers worked and suffered. Our society is entirely different today, and the continued use of the legal term ‘landlord’ is slander against our members and all rental owners.” Instead, they prefer to be called “housing providers.”
While most cities’ eviction moratoria elapsed in 2021 and 2022, a handful of cities in California still barred evictions for non-payment into this year. Alameda County’s eviction moratorium expired in May, Oakland’s expired in July. San Francisco’s moratorium also elapsed at the end of August, but only covered tenants who lost income due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In May, Berkeley’s City Council added $200,000 to the city’s Eviction Defense Funds, money which is paid directly to landlords to pay tenants’ rent arrears, but the city expected those funds to be tapped out by the end of June.
Landlords provide no benefit to society, outlaw them
I have benefited from being able to rent a house because there's no way I would have been able to afford to buy one at 18.
Land lords aren't the only option for short term housing. Housing can be provided by the state or the university without a profit motive for cheaper. You can look to systems like Singapore and Vienna where the public housing is robust enough to cover housing needs, without landlords leeching off the work of others.
See my comment below.
The government uses income taxes to build public housing, how is that not leeching off the work of others??
Government, at least democratic ones, are controlled and accountable to the people, landlords aren't. If your going to be forced to pay someone to exist then it's better if you get some say in how that's done.
A landlord and the government also have completely different incentives. A landlords incentive is to raise your rent to:
A democratic governments interest is to keep voters happy. They can do that by building housing for voters and keeping rents stable for the voters in public housing. These incentives are muddled by corruption but even with that they are more aligned with your average person then a landlords.
Oh man this thread. Believing every person renting a house out is exactly as you lay in your description is fascinating in how wrong it is and fascinating how sad it is you've driven your thoughts so far down. This is not real world reality for the vast majority of landlords.
I do not believe every landlord is like this, I believe this is the incentive structure for landlording. Individual landlords can act against their interest and not raise rent, just as an individual CEO can take a pay cut instead of firing workers, but they usually don't because it goes against their material interests. But if you believe this isn't the incentive structure tell me a reason a landlord will decrease rent or promote new construction, besides the kindness of their heart which I'm not willing to bet on.
There are some stupid fallacies, but this one deserves a medal.
Even though it's hard to tell what is the most stupid, the fallacy or the reasoning behind it.
your grandparents probably bought a house that young. Ask them how long they had to rent.
You would if landlords werent a thing.
Explain to me how, at age 18 with no money and minimum wage, I would be able to build a house. If there are no landlords, then there is no housing excess houses so I would need to pay for a house to be built. How can I afford to pay the workers to build the house and pay for the construction materials? You seem to think houses just magically spring from the ground at no cost. Taking away landlords doesn't remove the cost of construction, materials and connection to utilities.
I bet you're going to say something like 'but the government will provide it.'
The theory is that without landlords, there are a lot more houses on the market, driving down prices.
Edit: I'm just relaying the theory. Take your arguments and downvotes elsewhere. So glad I'm done renting, though. I don't envy anyone that is stuck with it.
Ok let's say that happens and house prices drop by half. What bank is lending an 18 year old 100-150k that's making minimum wage? It's still a minimum of 3.5k down payment as well.
An 18 year old living under a bridge too because there was no house for them to rent.
How does that theory work? Landlords don't just sit on empty houses. They make no money if it's not rented.
I'm afraid they do, and I'm completely against it. They make money on capital gains. And also by using the houses as equity to make other investments. Those are the big fish though, most landlords own only one or two houses.
That requires them to sell the property. Just like stocks don't actually make money until you sell them. And that kind of appreciation comes as ebbs and flows... I bought my house at 259k... According to Zillow it's now worth ~410k. In order to actually realize the 150k worth of value I have to sell the house, or take money out against the house. Then when the market inevitably bursts... I'm negative in the house.
If you're negative in the house and miss a single payment you probably don't have a house anymore. Nothing of this is making money on a house while it's empty. And if they're not paying the mortgage on it... the bank will simply take it, including the loans you're assuming that they can borrow against houses for other investments... ultimately this ONLY works if the house is rented (or they're working some other job that allows them to pay the loan payments.)
Stocks sometimes (or even often) bear dividends. They can also split, and in some cases you can borrow against them.
You can also borrow against real estate holdings. I'm not sure if helocs (home equity lines of credit) have specific borrowing requirements, but if they don't you can just borrow and use that money to pay the mortgage and taxes for a time.
I think this is all for small time landlords though. If you own a giant building with lots and lots of units, you may not require all or even most of the units to be rented in order to turn a profit, and there may be many scenarios in which case it makes sense to drive pricing higher through artificial scarcity than try to rent all of your units.
None of what you said is incorrect, but there are houses sitting empty that could be rented out. More than I expected in my city.
It's a small percentage of course, and I expect that the houses are in really rich areas that increase in valuation at a faster rate than the cost of owning an empty house. I'm not an expert on this though.
If we're spending time chasing down 1% or less of all houses out there to punish people... then we've lost the point... The real answer is to build more housing, not chasing down the people who are "hoarding" it.
It's simple logistics... increase supply or decrease demand. In this case demand is a static small increase year after year. This is bad policies (usually at the local level) that stops builders from building more houses (or only building mini mansions because that's what local government incentivized through building code or otherwise [otherwise being that they collect most taxes out of that group of people]).
Agreed, actually recently we had those exact policy changes and now there is construction happening everywhere.
I'd ask where you live where that's happening (Just the mythical fact of bullshit laws getting repealed makes this place you live sound like unicorn levels of legendary...) but I don't want you doxxing yourself. I see countries in the EU resist these random bullshit laws and they continue to do fine year after year. It's make my dual citizenship look really appealing... Just up and leave and go somewhere where there's more sensibility and logic.
I'm on an NZ instance, so it's pretty easy to guess. Compared to the US it is kind of legendary. The downside is we are a tiny island in the middle of nowhere.
Ohhh right, so now that we have had landlords bear the cost of building extra housing, and therefore providing a benefit to society, only now do we not need landlords. I get it.
You can make things to sell, you know
So you wouldn't have taken a 0% deposit house at the same price you rented, thus giving you invested value instead of spending your hard earned cash on someone else's retirement plan?
Then you're a chump.
Providing homes for people is, in fact, a value to society
I totally agree. We should provide homes to people to live in instead of giving them to landlords to rent seek with
Porque no los dos?
Because they're antithetical? Every home owned by a landlord is one unavailable to renters, creating artificial scarcity in the house market, and driving up prices
That's not artificial scarcity. That's just scarcity. It's literally already owned.
Its scarcity because a tiny percentage of the population is holding a bunch of houses as an investment chip, not for shelter.
Societies everywhere have to decide: do you want people housed, do you want a few rich assholes? Hint: one leads to a more stable society than the other
wealth inequality is only growing so violence will increase at this rate
Scroll down. I responded to these claims already. Society as a whole may dislike the kneecapping of the housing market, but it's all locally controlled and people find all sorts of reasons to justify it to themselves (edit: this person literally justifies it to themselves in the next comment). Housing speculation is an obvious end result of this kneecapping of the market.
Homes can either be "nest eggs" or we can have enough housing. Can't be both.
Wealth inequality doesn't matter in any objective sense. It's all feelings. If one person was a quadrillionaire and everyone else had plenty of money to make ends meet and enjoy leisure time, no one would give a shit about the quadrillionaire.
Flat wrong, homes can still appreciate over time, you don't need 20% every 2 -3 years to be a 'nest egg'.
Housing regulations have failed to control foreign investors and airBNBs, its not locally controlled at all.
And nothing you said addressed the coming violence from a massive unhoused population with nothing to lose.
Ideally, homes will slightly depreciate over time, unless rehabbed.
Otherwise, housing prices, by definition, are going up.
This is not a credible threat.
Its not a threat, its a feature of the system https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15817728/#:~:text=The%20most%20well%2Destablished%20environmental,tend%20to%20be%20more%20violent.
the ultra rich are betting they can stay above the fray, but if you're mid rich you're going to have to buy a bunch of security equipment and isolate yourself from society more.
This paper is talking about lower-income people perpetuating crimes against one another which is not a "feature" unless you are a psychopath.
Thats not all it says. Income inequality and all violence are linked, including terrorism https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2766910
I've made this argument before and they followed up with land value increase as a retort. And I folded because it sounded true. Wouldn't land value always go up in a growing city? Maybe you would understand this better than me.
Land value may go up and offset some of your depreciation, but I don't see that as a bad thing. I don't want to punish homeowners specifically, just have housing reflect the reality of it's value over time if supply was sufficient.
Land value will rise less if we maximize use of land - this is why many people support things like LVTs that incentivize maximizing the value of your land.
With an acute shortage of housing, land skyrockets. If we build tall, land rises but much more slowly.
In order for this to be ok you'd also have to provide 0% interest loans, which is very fucking far from the case.
IMO part of the reason we're constantly chasing the whole value growth dragon is that in order for the structure to make any sense at all to people homes have to appreciate in value. Otherwise over the course of the 30 years you'll wind up paying double or near triple (depending upon interest rates) what the house is worth in order to hold it.
Edit: to a lesser extent, inflation is also a factor
It's scarcity in the sense that the market of available houses for people who want to live in one is lower than the number of houses not being lived in; because landlords own houses that they don't live in ...
This removes purchasable houses from the buyers market and inflates prices, as landlords make a return on the ownership in a way that house owners that live in their own house generally don't, meaning they can afford to outbid the average homeowner.
Most landlords don't rent houses, they rent apartments, and apartments are built by landlords fronting a shitload of capital.
No landlords, no apartments, which is a significantly worse housing issue than you see now.
Housing speculation (what you're talking about) is a consequence of a housing market that's been kneecapped by local zoning policies. These policies were not put in place by landlords, but by homeowners who wanted their homes to always go up in value. Landlords oppose these policies because they want to build more housing, because that's how they make money.
If you look at a "housing nightmare" like San Francisco, you can also add in that property taxes were frozen at purchase price, which means you're mad at grandmas in SF who have owned their home for 60 years and watched the value go up tenfold or more and laugh all the way to the bank, but then fall back on being grandmas when the idea of taxing them appropriately comes up.
https://bekinsmovingservices.com/blog/san-francisco-property-tax/#:~:text=What%20Is%20the%20San%20Francisco%20Property%20Tax%20Rate%3F&text=The%20base%20tax%20rate%20in,the%20inflation%20factor%20was%201.036%25.
Edit: you also have "Progressives" like Robert Reich who oppose building multi-family housing in their neighborhoods because they think it would make their neighborhood less attractive if the Poors were there.
https://freebeacon.com/satire/robert-reich-nimby/
And his actual letter, screenshotted https://systemicfailure.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/screen-shot-2020-08-04-at-7.47.05-pm.png
Your first two paragraphs prove my point rather than detracting from it.
The fact that landlords will front a "shitload" more and developers are building for it is the problem. There's no reason those apartments couldn't be sold to aspiring home owners except that they are priced out of the market by the effects you're describing.
Also I don't live in the USA and the problem I'm describing happens worldwide. Defining and arguing it in terms of perceived American exceptionalism is unhelpful.
This is one part of the solution to the actual problem that I describe in my post. There are certainly other parts of the solution as well, from ending rent control policies all the way up to government-funded multi-family housing ("projects" in the US and "council estates" in the UK). None are sufficient on their own.
Landlords didn't fuck up the housing market. If given free reign to build, they would build like ants, and housing prices would fall. We have vastly insufficient supply compared to demand.
Homeowners don't buy apartments because no family needs 120 rooms.
This is not solely an American phenomenon, but as I am American, I use examples I am familiar with. You will find similar market capture among homeowners anywhere you see housing prices skyrocketing. Feel free to test it for yourself, or I can find you examples of you want (but it'll take me a while as I am unaware of the specific zoning policies to search for, worldwide).
Landlords and real estate developers are sometimes the same entity, and often times not.
I guarantee you'll find many landlords that understand fixed supply is their friend, and are happy to sit on and increasingly overcharge for what they have.
I like a lot of your arguments, clearly homeowners are the main agitator against densely developed housing - but this is wrong. Developers and investors seek markets rather than meet demand. This is why frequently you will see new buildings go up are only luxury studio apartments, 5 over 1 student housing made of cardboard and plastic. You're picking San Francisco, I'll pick NYC. In NYC a lot of commercial space landlords never lower prices and are searching for specific chains like starbucks or grocery stores because those massive companies can meet the massive prices. Capitalists create inefficiencies in order to exploit others for personal gain. That's the whole fucking game.
They have no reason to lower pricing on land because there's no land to build on. No sane person is going to sell land in NYC below market. Demolish houses and build multi-family housing.
Of course they build nice apartments - they want to maximize ROI. That still increases net supply and slows price growth (only slows it though, because we still have a dramatic supply:demand I equivalency)
No one 'gives' landlords houses.
Except their parents.
Youre thinking carpenters