L.A. County wants to cap rent hikes at 3%. Landlords say that would push them to sell

return2ozma@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 844 points –
L.A. County wants to cap rent hikes at 3%. Landlords say that would push them to sell
latimes.com

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I'm old enough to remember when the government has tried to cap the cost of one thing while ignoring other factors. It never ends the way the government thinks it will.

That's bullshit. Nyc has rent stabilized apartments and it's fucking fantastic. Not perfect of course, but really really good. Those apartments are highly sought after. The biggest problem is that there aren't remotely enough of them

Almost like no one wants to build any because they can't be invested in and the only people it works for are those who already got one.

How strange. Probably wholly unrelated to rent control in any way.

So how much money someone can make from a property has no relationship to the decision to build more property?

Really?

Absolutely not. Economics, shmeconomics. Landlords bad. LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU LANDLORDS BAD ALSO BUILD MORE HOUSING

Maybe housing shouldn't be an investment?

It shouldn't be - but ill tell you right now that no one will be a landlord unless they can make money from it, and people who move out of home at 18 won't have the money saved to buy straight away.

Make no mistake, I don't like the housing crisis and its causes either but I know rent caps isn't how we fix it long term.

Why do we need people to be landlords?

Housing coops and government-owned housing work out fine.

Yes they could - but they aren't being used.

Plus, you know, that's socialism or communism or something else people don't like for some reason.

I'm only enough to remember when corporations were not people, and when the ultra wealthy paid taxes.

Corporate personhood was ruled on in 1886.

That's not what your link says

That’s exactly what that case was. It grated Equal Protection Rights to corporations as well as Natural Persons. That’s then what is referred back to as the case law when “Is a corporation a person?” comes up.

A headnote issued by the court reporter in the 1886 Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. claimed to state the sense of the Court regarding the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as it applies to corporations, without the Court having actually made a decision or issued a written opinion on that point

This is why you don't go to Wiki Law School.

… It’s then referenced as if it was part of the verdict in Singer Manufacturing Company v. Wright the next session where Justice Newman’s opinion confirmed it explicitly.

“[…] it is now considered settled, I presume, by the language used by Chief Justice Waite, speaking for the supreme court, in the case of Santa Clara Co. v. Railroad, 118 U.S. 396, 6 Sup.Ct.Rep. 1132, that corporations are so included and entitled, as fully as natural persons, to its protection”.

This is why you should read a bit deeper.

Oh snap

Yea, I get that it likely wasn’t what was decided in the original case, but to claim that case isn’t what the justices use to define corporate personhood is ignorant.

The much more egregious error that is referred to is Qualified Immunity, which seems to have been invented whole cloth by a scribe during the first time US laws were collated when he incorrectly wrote down a law.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4179628

If you're talking about a government that is ignoring other factors, which is not true in this situation. Go read the article.

But even in general, if you're trying to argue that the government can't possibly solve the problem of mega corporations buying up tons of property, making tons of money, and screwing over millions of Americans, then you might be right but I sure hope you're wrong.

No agency/group/organization can possibly account for all factors. They are going to fail to take something into account.

That something is going to blow up in their face.

I remember when the government tried to tell truckers they couldn’t charge more to ship products. The government failed to take into account a little item called gas, to this day I can’t figure out how they screwed that one up. Guess what the truckers did.

They put the keys on the dash and said f u. Ask truckers who drove during the 70s and 80s and they will tell you about it.

This too will blow up in people’s faces.

Is rent getting out of control? Yes. But if someone says “ oh we’ll just put a cap on how much can be increased and that will fix the problem”. It tells me they are just delusional. How do we fix the problem? I don’t know. But yeah this will end badly.

I think you've backed yourself into a corner that's hard to support. Originally you were saying that they didn't take into account enough factors, and I pointed out that in fact they had researched the issue extensively. Now you're claiming that they didn't take into account all possible factors... I agree with you on this claim, but I don't agree with your conclusion. Because if the claim is that failure to take into account all possible factors will lead legislation to fail, then we have thousands of examples to the contrary. Many laws have succeeded throughout history across hundreds of countries around the world. And not once had the lawmakers considered all possibilities and all implications of the laws that they were creating.

What is the best approach to fixing housing prices? I don't know. Will this method succeed? Maybe. But if you're assuming that it's going to fail because the issue is complex, then history says your assumption is unwarranted.

How do we fix it - make it less profitable to be an investor without pushing up the price of building new houses.

  • capital gains tax

  • empty property/ land banking tax... and a significant one.

  • significant taxes on investment properties when multiple are owned. Controversial take - i think no penalties should apply on your second property, and half on the third.

  • minimum standards and registration of rentals.

  • and a significant reduction on these if the property was built in the last 10 years.