Treating the symptom.
Okay I guess. I'll get excited when I see a plan to treat the disease.
There’s no reason to get excited at all. Biden can call for it, but Congress has to write and pass the legislation. Republican House majority won’t let that happen.
Vote in November.
Not even. Can't charge more for rent when it's already max out against income. It's a placebo that'll have zero effect. Don't get too excited about a "plan". This is the plan.
What world are you living in when they can't raise rates too high for your income level? Not the one the rest of us are living in.
The vast majority of individuals must be able to afford to house, feed, and cloth themselves, as well as travel to and from work. If not they will riot. This is bad for economic growth, the mandate of capitalism. It's particularly bad when the market is still significantly inflated relative the economy.
It'll never be written into law. However, Biden's proposed rent caps under projected inflation, signifying rent has fully saturated its allocation of income. Housing began balancing systemically naturally, human sellers drying up. Landlords have no obstacles.
I live in a world of nuance. The rent sucks.
Historically that's actually not what causes people to riot. The slow chipping away actually almost never causes riots. It's the immediate stripping of a right or privilege. Look back at history that's how it Works nearly every single time. You're basically making the same argument people who you sanctions as a political tool make. That if you keep making life shittier and shittier and shittier slowly the people will riot. Doesn't work.
Furthermore capitalism does not possess the capacity to change in that manner. It does not possess the capacity to adjust to the needs of the masses. Thinking capitalism will fix this is insane.
If you look at history, the last half century is far from "slow chipping away".
The last half century of political sanctions? What does that even mean? I feel like you were trying to be clever and you lost the point somewhere. If you ever had one.
I responded to the part that wasn't strawman with a response of equivalent quality, simple clarification of the point of disagreement.
Why do you expect more than you give?
I would expect a coherent thought but after four comments you haven't given one once.
Read more books.
Best of luck.
Cool, my rent is still 70% of what I make in a month. It's almost like it's already too late, but I'm too poor and uneducated to be an expert. Got any other ideas?
The best time to do it was any point in the last 100 years. The second best time is now.
5% is crazy talk when workers wages are going up 2.5% per year. Landlords need at least 20% more every year.
But if it pass, then it is first win.
I fear that landlord are not going to let it happen without a fight
You gotta get something that will pass
This is what happened in California. The statewide rent control is 5% plus inflation per year, capped at 10% per year. There's a bunch of exclusions too, like the property has to be at least 15 years old, and single-family homes that aren't owned by a corporation are excluded too. I think the builders and landlords had quite a bit of a say in it, hence the limit being so high above inflation (assuming inflation of <=5%).
Still a lot better than it used to be. It applies to month-to-month rentals too, so you can get the flexibility of a month-to-month rental while still having a limit on the rent increase per year. Evictions also need to have just cause and there's a notice period of 60 days if the tenant has lived there for longer than a year.
Is 5% really that crazy when the current rate is 20% as you describe?
Man this entire thread is just a perfect encapsulation of the perfect being the enemy of the good. What a bunch of useless chuds.
I'm not sure I've ever heard that phrase. Do you mind explaining what you mean? (Just to be clear, I'm not trying to be combative. I just have no idea how to read that)
In simple terms, the failure to do something absolutely perfectly shouldn't stop you from doing something that will still be better than the status quo.
What if the act of doing something carries a cost with a negative expected return on investment?
...then the original saying doesn't apply, does it? Is this some kind of "gotcha" I'm not understanding?
…then the original saying doesn’t apply, does it?
And that's the million dollar question. I'm not arguing the perfect should be the enemy of the good. I'm questioning how much "good" I get by aligning myself with a fundamentally bad dude. Biden's played this bait-and-switch game before, and there's a real reason to believe 2025 Joe Biden won't be willing or able to deliver on his 5% rent cap promise. In exchange, what is he asking you to give up?
An hour of your life in line to vote on election day? A small recurring donation to his campaign? A week block-walking your neighborhood to canvas for him? Three months volunteering to work for his reelection campaign?
Presidential elections aren't cheap. I have to wonder what would happen if all the money and manpower pouring into Biden's coffers was simply directed towards Habitat For Humanity instead. Would we get more bang for our bucks?
Dawg, I'm not even the OP. I was just explaining an idiom, and you expect me to answer a humanist philosophical question as if I'm the greatest thinker of our generation 😭
I can't help you decide what extent you're willing to compromise to vote Biden/democrats. I can't even vote in the US.
that doesn't sound very good to me
"Don't make perfect the enemy of good" essentially says that it's better to do what you can in the short term to reduce harm or make positive change than to wait for the perfect solution and do nothing in the meantime. The idea is that the good is still going to help some people while we wait for the perfect solution to the problem- which, crucially, may never come, or come too late for a whole bunch of people.
One example would be letting a parent having their kid eat fast food instead of a perfectly healthy diet because their parents live in a food desert; not ideal, but it'll keep the kid fed and alive.
We want actual change.
Not this half-assed thing of "oh shit Biden isn't polling well. Quick, do something popular!".
Seeing this honestly frustrates me more because we all know they could do better than this.
This guy really larps these this trust me bro jaja
What BS. This is like arguing that "trickle down economics" is good because money eventually trickles down to us plebs. We're in a sinking boat filled with holes and you're trying to argue that we should be happy that 1 of 1000 holes got patched up even though there isn't time to patch the other 999 holes before the ship sinks because the crew would rather sit on their ass and drink martinis.
No this is like y'all getting mad at someone working on patching a hole because he's not simultaneously patching every hole in the exact same instance. All why you sit there and don't work on anything. Get a mallet get some wood get to work or shut up.
Cheap vodka comes in plastic bottles and landlords are faceless corporate entities on the other side of the country (if they're in the country at all). So my ability to help is limited.
Interesting. We all have the same feeling about you. The sad part is that you might actually know something. Maybe you could say something constructive, if only you cared to do so.
You could have made an argument about how aiming for perfection is a bad strategy here. But you didn't, so let me show how you're wrong. The proposed solution doesn't address the underlying problem, and it adds complexity. Rent can only go up by 5%, sure, but what happens if you sell the property you move into it or other exceptional circumstances happen? Then you can raise the price. Or perhaps you rent it through Airbnb, so the rules don't apply either. It doesn't really matter what the special cases are, because finance folk love complicated solutions. They're always going to find ways to game the system at our expense.
But let's suppose the 5% solution is somehow good. If it's good for rent then it should be good for other things too, right? You can't let electricity or gas prices go up faster, or people won't be able to heat their homes. You can't let food prices go up faster, or people won't be able to eat. Oh, and you certainly need minimum wage to be going up 5%, for any of that to make sense.
So if we consider all of that, and we find the aforementioned proposal slightly lacking, maybe it's not because we're seeking perfection. Maybe it's because you have no idea what problems we are trying to solve.
I stand corrected, this is the perfect encapsulation.
Also you are a disgrace to that username.
Lol it's like you summoned the ancient spirit of not understanding incremental improvement, who then wrote a short essay to explain to you just how much they don't understand the concept.
I also stand corrected. I thought you might actually know something. But then you double down with a witty empty response: two sentences with zero information. What good is that? Grandstanding is boring and pointless.
And then you want to trash talk my username? Jesus. Have fun with that.
Some people are here to learn, some people are here to teach, some people are here to share, some people are here to build community. You're not doing any of those things. Meh.
we have several lifetimes worth of policies to change to fix the mess we are in. this is exactly what Biden should be doing, passing policy after policy in the next few months that have obvious positive results for the common voter. he's not gonna run out of stuff to do if he's re-elected, so he needs to stop holding onto this shit like it's his last wild card of all time.
But that might upset his owners, I mean campaign contributors.
"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."
— some guy
He's not a dictator. Most of those would never pass in the Senate.
It's not about that. It's about building momentum for the idea. If it passes great, if not then it's out there. People know it's possible and it will never stop haunting the elites who the government actually serves.
If only someone had given him the power to be a dictator!
Guess he just fuckin loses and the next guy does it anyways.
Woah, an actual campaign promise? Maybe the Dems do want to look like they're trying after all.
If Democrats kept their promises we'd have codified Roe, have free healthcare for all, and literally no one would carry student debt but those that haven't yet had time to graduate.
If Republicans kept theirs, we'd be living in a christofascist, ultra-capitalist, white ethnostate.
We've got this instead. Behold the power of compromise.
It's not compromise. It's only turning right. They're just arguing about how fast and which corporations should get the money.
Where I live we've had a 4% cap for a long time. It just means tenants get evicted to increase the price. It's illegal, but the procedure to after landlords cheating the system is so grueling and adversarial, it puts justice beyond the reach of many victims. I can only imagine this being even worse in the US.
If this caps rent even if the tenant changes it'd be something. I don't see how this passes an R house or gets through the "moderate" Dems in the senate.
It's certainly an essential piece of the puzzle, but without the other puzzle pieces it is only going to have a minimal effect and is easy to abuse. Better than nothing nothing though, it won't be a wasted effort if it passes, it just won't fix anything or curb rent prices on the whole. But it will help people out here and there.
I don't see how a national rent cap survives even the most liberal courts either.
It's not a cap on rent it's a cap on raising it. Not much different than setting interest rates imo. I don't know enough law about it but at least it's an attempt? There's a lot of talk here about how it doesn't solve the underlying problem but I don't see people providing another solution.
I'd like to see property taxes increased with more single family homes owned. Let businesses keep the apartments let homes become a place to live and not an investment though.
The problem is rent isn't interstate commerce. There isn't a way to justify that there is a national mandate for this, it's a matter left to states.
As for property taxes, many states already do this with exemptions for a primary residence that reduces taxes.
I'm talking about increased taxes for each additional home so that owning more than 2 or 3 homes becomes financially unviable. This causes an incentive to sell if you own a lot and prevents someone wanting to own a lot in the first place.
We have rent stabilization in nyc (for some buildings). It caps the increases, and landlords are obligated to renew your lease if you want to unless you violated it in some serious way. In returnfor haveing a building stabalized, the landlord gets tax incentives.
That’s great!!!
Need to stop corporations buying houses next, and tamper foreigners buying up houses too (almost every country I’ve traveled to won’t let me buy so why not do the same?)
I feel like banning corporations from owning housing isn’t the panacea people expect it to be. It’s pretty impractical when you start talking about larger buildings and mixed use housing, and I’m not convinced it’s really a big driver of the problem.
I think a steep land value tax is a more workable solution. It incentivizes anyone who holds non-productive property (vacant homes in this case) to either make better use of the land or sell it. This also has the benefit of impacting individuals who own second homes or have mostly empty airbnbs.
Property taxes are insufficient for this purpose because they are generally based on the value of the home rather than just the land, so not only are they easier to game, but it disincentivizes improving the property.
Crazy idea.
How about instead of corporations owning the unit, maybe the person who lives in the unit gets to own part of it.
I know crazy.
Owning part of a larger building is actually much more complicated than simply owning a house. I’m not sure everyone would actually want that even if they could buy the unit they live in at a low price.
I almost bought a condo in a multi-story building a couple of years ago and I'm glad as hell I didn't. It was a one-bedroom unit for $125K, which is fine except that the monthly condo fees are $1000 (which includes utilities, at least), property taxes plus insurance are another $400, and the last three consecutive years residents have been hit with a special assessment of about $10K - which means I would have been paying around $2500 a month to live in a one-bedroom apartment that I'd already paid $125K for.
The biggest issue with corporations owning low income multifamily housing is that they act like slumlords. When you have nowhere else to go and the landlord won't fix major issues then it takes a toll on you. When a kid sees this growing up, then it leads to antisocial behavior. Investors think that "passive investment" means no input at all when it requires a great deal of active management if contracts are being followed. They just know that the residents have no reasonable way to enforce the contract.
Are corporations more likely to be slumlords? Pretty much everyone I’ve ever known who owns a rental property has been a complete asshole, but I’ve only known a few.
I agree about taxes. Tax the ever loving bejesus out of vacant rentals or speculative residential real estate. That will keep them from buying in the first place or deeply incentivize them to keep them rented out.
I disagree. No need to force development to destroy natural landscapes just to avoid a tax. Simply tax multiple residential properties somewhat exponemtially.
100%, 133%, 200%, 350%, 500% or something
Generally it’s not destroying undeveloped land, but fixing up dilapidated houses so that they are livable.
Having a progressive tax based on number of homes owned may work, but you would need to rewrite quite a bit of real estate law to make it actually effective. Obviously corporations would not be allowed to own houses to avoid people owning through shell companies, but you would also have to draw a line so corporations could own larger apartment complexes and mixed use buildings. You also do want builders to be able to temporarily own houses for the purpose of building and selling them as well as corporate flippers.
Frankly, I think it’s too complicated to expect on a national level.
Right.
Owning one or two residential properties is fine, more is problematic.
I say "two" to handle the very common case of children putting their parents' homes in their own name because Medicare clawback rules will take the home after they die if you don't do it early enough.
The Medicare clawback crap is why we can't expect to fix one issue with capitalism without addressing all the issues simultaneously. Can't just raise minimum wage because landleeches will raise rents. Can't just have universal healthcare because a lot of people would become unemployed when the insurance industry dies its overdue painful death.
Universal healthcare, student loan cancellation (and free state university), UBI, and the elimination of for-profit housing. All within one president's term to have a chance of sticking past four years.
exponentially would be e. g. 100%, 1000%, 10 000%, etc.
you meant geometricallly
No, i was picturing an exponential with scale factors and coefficemts.
Some countries have a large yearly tax if you leave a house vacant for longer than 6 months or a year without a valid reason. More countries need to do this.
Not sure about the USA, but it's a big problem in Australia. Foreign investors (that don't live in Australia nor have any intent of moving to Australia) buy properties then just hold them as speculative assets. They don't want tenants, because they don't want to go through all that effort. All they want to do is hold them and watch the value go up, in the same way you'd hold stock or Bitcoin.
Yeah, that does feel like it could help reduce housing prices. There is no such tax in most parts of the US, but San Francisco passed a vacancy tax that just went into effect this year. If that works out hopefully other municipalities look into a similar scheme.
Strong disagree. Can you imagine what red states will do with the power to demand proof of citizenship to own property? Or all the hell couples where one is a Permanent Resident the other a Citizen will go through?
You should be terrified of someone like Jeff Session or Kris Kobach able to just veto any random person from owning land. You can see it now in your head
Them drafting letters on government stationary to real estate agents demanding paperwork from anyone with a Latino or Chinese name. Effectively making agents terrified of dealing with minorities.
Random spot checks, having deputies show up to open houses asking for papers or waiting until after closing then interrogation of the family
Activists courts arguing that all members of the household must be citizens based on vague feelings
New rules that state that the entire inheritance path must all be citizens
Non-citizens being forced to sell at a 1/10th the value
The lawsuits from groups like the ACLU pointing out that it is a obvious violation of the civil rights act, which goes to the Supreme Court who then declares the Bill of Rights only applies to citizens
If you are interested the experiment has been run already. Go read up what Kris Kobach did when he got a town to pass a law requiring citizenship tests to rent. He not only near bankrupted the town due to lawsuits he personally sent threatening letters to Latinos who lived there.
ve traveled to won’t let me buy so why not do the same?
The standard is good behavior, not other people.
Have you traveled much? More countries do this than don’t. The trump nazis will abuse everything yes. But people not being able to afford a place to live is also giving us trump nazis in the first place
Have you traveled much?
Again
The standard is good behavior, not other people.
Must I repeat it again?
The trump nazis will abuse everything yes.
And yet you want to give them more? You don't hand a gun to a person who went to jail repeatedly for using a gun.
But people not being able to afford a place to live is also giving us trump nazis in the first place
Assertion, please demonstrate it. Also demonstrate that your method of handing Nazis more power will make them less powerful. Lastly compare the US grabbling with fascists to other nations who have rules like you are advocating for and how they are also grappling with fascists.
It's a little thing but I kinda want you to acknowledge that the one time this idea was tried in diet form in the US it not only didn't work it also legalized racism. You are suggesting an idea that we tried and it not only failed in the task it was meant to perform it also created a host of new problems.
3 years of absurd rent prices and we are just now seeing legislation, wonder why......
Usually just need to see what Reps have blocked to find out.
As if it would ever last the captured supreme court.
Would be good if he coupled it with a promise to stack the Supreme Court
In my province the cap for increase was usually around 1.5 - 2% for existing tenants/renewing lease.
The conservative gov went ahead and fucked everything up and said this doesn't apply to anything built after 2005, or new builds - that means any new anything in an existing building.
New basement rooms? No cap. (No cap)
But, if the basement had rooms 35 years ago, and you 'build' "new" rooms, it isn't new and falls under the older more tenant friendly laws.
However, between tenants, a landlord can do whatever the fuck they want to prices.
Shitty rooms went from 375 to 700 I'm 5 years.
Hello fellow Ontarians. I feel your pain. It may be little solace but know I bought a house with a basement tenant 3 years ago. Their rent was $1100 a month for a 1 bedroom 3 years ago and it's 1100$ a month now. I don't need the money. Fuck landholding pariahs taking advantage of renters.
I suppose he has to do something to signal to voters that he's going to try to fix the housing affordability crisis, but this is pretty meaningless. But, what can he say? The truth? That the housing crisis is an extremely complex problem that will take decades to fix? Probably not going to go over very well.
Not allowing landlords to drive people into homeless on speculation and greed is a good first step to solving the very complex problem that will take decades.
How is this meaningless?
Well, for one, it almost certainly won't pass. So the chances of it becoming law in the first place are pretty low. But even if it were passed, I think it would be difficult to enforce. Even if it were enforced, landlords would just hike the rent 4.99% every year.
4.99% is way better than the 50% my previous landlord tried. You can always vote Republican if you want. See what they're going to do for you.
You can always vote Republican if you want.
No thanks.
Not to mention that unless wages also rise by 5% per year, which mine haven't recently not sure about others, then it's still unsustainable for renters.
That the housing crisis is an extremely complex problem that will take decades to fix?
No? There’s currently no cap on single housing investments, and at the very least private equity needs to be banned from buying housing in any form.
Let's build a million new homes and sell them to people that don't currently own any homes.
Let’s buildseize a million new homes and sell them to people that don’t currently own any homes.
FTFY
Fuck these ogres hoarding real estate.
There's no shortage of homes in the US. They're just being hoarded for their increasing value.
I don't believe that is the case. There is no value in letting a property sit empty accumulating value, when it could be doing exactly that while pulling in a hefty monthly rent.
It may well be the case that there's enough homes empty to house everyone, but only if they're happy to move somewhere they don't want to be, and where there's no jobs to pay for them.
renters bring risks. if the home is on the market, they also make it a half to sell
Eliminate zoning and force cities to build up. Nobody wants a house in the middle of nowhere
This guy is clearly not scared of "crime"
Edgelord
Please expand on what you mean.
For context, I live in greater Boston. The state here has actually forced towns and cities in the inner belt around Boston to remove their zoning laws anywhere within a mile of a train or subway stop. Thousands of additional condos and apartments have been (and are being) built as a side effect and we will have dozens of new squares with shops and businesses on the ground floor and tens of thousands of new residences surrounding our transit hubs.
It’s not been smooth. Some towns are suing the state and doing other random bullshit to slow the process. Pushing these rules to the federal level would actually help states and metro areas consisting of multiple connected cities address the issues more efficiently.
"Crime" is code word for boomers and nimbys to block proper development
Doesn't help if there is housing available but it's 3 hours from where my work is :/
Hasn't rent control been shown to be ineffective at making everyone play nice? I feel like it's much more effective to put your finger on the supply/demand balance by subsidizing the supply side.
And not by just giving handouts to corporate landlords, either.
Hasn’t rent control been shown to be ineffective at making everyone play nice?
It's proven effective at causing landlords to scream and cry and publish 10,000 word Op-Eds about how they're going to do a capital strike if the rules aren't changed.
But, when paired with new investment in public housing, its incredibly effective at keeping rental costs stable long term.
Just like with unions, you know it's good for the common people, because the business and property owners speak out against it so strongly. If it's pointless, they could just let it happen. But instead, they rally against it. So you know they're lying when they say it won't matter.
It will matter.
Yeah. It has but stuff like this plays well in the echo chamber. Like most attempts at price controls it has a lot of unintended consequences such as fewer apartments built and rented out, landlords charging obscene amounts to a new renter knowing they cannot raise the prices as needed later on, landlords raising prices whether they need to or not because they can't hike them quickly when needed, worse maintenance.
No one is proposing rent control in a vaccum. Arguing against that idea is disingenuous and is how you end up with the status quo of "rent control is actually bad for renters" that gets parroted in economics circles. State intervention is necessary for markets to exist in the first place and they have overwhelming power in shaping them.
Building large scale affordable public housing, incentive structures that promote the building of affordable high density private housing, banning corporate ownership of single family homes and short term rentals like AirBnB, limiting corporate ownership within apartment complexes, reworking zoning laws to better suit current needs, more robust mechanisms for tenant disputes and transparency for historical rental prices to prevent abuse.
All of that is possible if the political will was there.
Okay then let's just drop an anchor into the market. Have the federal government commit to buying and managing 50,000 units in every major city. They're available on the open market at cost plus 100 dollars a month. The 100 dollars goes into a fund and the city with the highest rents gets more federally owned apartments.
We just keep dropping anchors until developers provide reasonable housing at reasonable prices or housing is no longer a private market.
Government has a really big damn stick. If people's needs don't start getting met then those developers are going to feel it, right in their profits.
I think the problem is that once the government subsidizes anything it becomes all hands on deck peak business interest to exploit and steal said subsidies.
Some sort of enforced regulation might work, but the government doesn't really like to do that.
That last sentence is all that ever happens in supply side economics. It's the entire handbook.
They've had enough carrot. It's time for the stick.
Not giving handouts to corporate lawyers? Impossible. Next you'll tell me that we should ease zoning restrictions and ignore NIMBYs that are afraid of black people moving in?
I'm sure this comes with a guaranteed 5% increase to minimum wages at the same time right?
... right? Any amount of minimum wage increase from the last increase 15 years ago?
Prices are already jacked up to an insane level compared to wages, the horse is already out of the barn: This is not going to fix the problem renters face.
A soft cap works as a ratchet. Downturns in the rental market are sticky while up turns are slow and marginalized.
It's effectively the opposite of the way things are now, with cartelized units staying artificially high through downturns and prices skyrocketing during every shortfall.
Timely.
That translates into rents doubling in less than 15 years
Well mine went up 28% in a year so I’ll take 5%
Good thing wages are going up!
Where I'm at it's indexed to inflation (but circumvented by evicting renters then raising rates illegally like someone else mentioned). Setting a target higher than the target inflation is mostly symbolic. Outside of specific situations like Covid, it is not likely to change much materially at 5%.
I was being sarcastic, wages have not really gone up inflation adjusted for majority of people over last 40 years in the US.
That’s still way higher than anyone’s raises each year…
Raises have nothing to do with inflation or cost of living. Companies that pin raises to those things are severely underpaying employees and hoping they don’t seek greener pastures.
Market rates set compensation. The best way to know your market rate is to find a new job.
If the company is doing COLAs right then their employees wouldn't need to seek greener pastures.
COLA is almost always lower than what you’ll get by job hopping
I didn't say they were doing it right.
what the fuck? you get less than 5% raise in a year in the US?
edit: in light of responses, I'd like to reiterate, what the fuck... this is the most obscenely wealthy country in the world.
Yep, company loyalty is dead here. The only way to get a significant raise is to switch jobs.
i mean that's what happens if you don't give a raise. what a stupid market.
People are lucky to get a raise at all. Much less 5%, usually it's 1 or 2. For at least a decade the only way to significantly increase your pay has been to move jobs.
The average Wages and salaries increased 1.1 percent and benefit costs increased 1.1 percent from December 2023.
Oh and then people that did get raises averaged 4.4% last year. So its really raises for some and poverty for most.
Most people are lucky to get 2%.. my company set the max at 2.5 last year and you only got that if you were IT Jesus
Cool, but also cap property tax increases as well. Mine have increased over 10% for the last 3 years.
They did this in California and Oregon, then the schools went to shit.
Also, property taxes are a good way to encourage density, which is necessary to fight climate change
Can they even cap that? That's a state tax, I feel like that's one that you would need to deal directly with your state to resolve. As someone who lives in one of the highest property tax states, I also wish this could happen...
Be careful what you wish for. California capped property tax increase since 1978 with prop 13 and most experts say this is a major factor in their insanely expensive housing market. Most people are heavily incentivized to never move to keep their low property tax rate, but this in turn prevents most new development and upzoning while simultaneously leading to the worst sprawl in the nation.
It also starves the state of tax revenue requiring them to levy the tax further for new buyers and seek other income streams like heightened income and sales tax. Policies like this somewhat unintuitively only benefit those who are already well off. Renters and younger people gain no benefit and ultimately pay higher property taxes than those who already are financially established enough to own a property.
A healthy property tax disincentivizes housing as a speculative investment, improving the overall market for people who actually live there. There should certainly be breaks for poverty and financial distress but capping or cutting rates broadly encourages speculation. For a basic human need such high degree of speculation benefits nobody.
Isn't that due to the reassessment of property tax when a new owner purchases the property? And wouldn't that be solved if the cap persists regardless of ownership change?
That just puts an insane value premium on older housing stock
That's how it's done in Oregon and we also have high housing costs. The housing costs are more likely tied to the massive demand of people moving to the coasts and lack of housing than property tax rates. The above argument doesn't even make sense to me as someone who moves within California is still only going to own one house so how does that make housing cheaper and more available whether they move or not? It only works if they move out of state and if that's the case, they aren't going to be affected by the property tax increase on a new purchase anyway.
Did those "experts" note that the rest of the country, that people want to live in, have the same insane high prices and yet don't have that cap? No, don't bother I already know the answer and so do you.
Economics isn't a science, it is playtime daydreaming. Which is fine, I enjoy my weekly D&D session. The thing is I know I am not a lvl 12 mountain dwarf fighter.
Is the property tax rate that's increasing or your home's appraised value? My home has doubled in appraised value since we bought it in 2016, so our taxes have doubled as well.
No, property tax is basically the only direct motivation in place for home owners to vote for politicians and policies that will keep housing affordable for future generations and people who don't already own a home. Otherwise why wouldn't home owners want to see housing prices skyrocket in value if there's no financial downside for them (and a giant payout when they do sell)? As mentioned in other comments, some states have tried property tax caps, and the result is creating a system of haves and have nots based entirely around who was lucky enough to buy into the market before it shot to the moon.
I agree that’s the problem. Property taxes go up, rent has to go up to cover it. If property taxes go up by X amount but you can’t raise rent the appropriate amount then there’s a problem.
We need to cap both.
You could just make slightly less money. It is allowed. It isn't like chemical reaction balance thing. It isn't even that they are losing money, they are just making less than they want.
Make slightly less is one thing. Going negative is another. Many landlords work on a shoe string budget.
Oh darn. Maybe they should get jobs if money is so tight!
I am sure with all the lawyers and accountants that work in Washington DC they can easily structure it to deal with a few edge cases. I am pretty sure my dumbass could figure it out. Maybe a tiered system looking at the last few years, ones that are on there verge of failure have more control compared to ones doing well.
These two things are not linked. Rent already is as high as the market will bear, property taxes will come out of landlord profits.
How are they not linked? The taxes have to be paid. The money comes from the rent.
Likely not, I think if taxes go up 10% rent will go up 10%+ percent.
Yeah, that doesn't math out.
Also, my rent got hiked 13% last year, despite the taxes remaining the same. Which is why I threw everything I had into getting out of renting.
I'm curious what the federal government can actually do in this situation. Most private leases are contracts under state law, not federal law.
I would think tax law could make it completely untenable to own residential properties as rentals and give federal tax breaks to developers that build affordable housing? I’m sure there could also be federal grants to cities for easing zoning restrictions. Not sure how much of this is possible.
Threats I guess 🤷
You can always put new limits in that private contacts have to abide by. The only limit is the Constitution.
And then roll it back to 2016 +5%
Cute... The beauty of profit is that it is never undo even if it was a crime.
That's a feature, not a bug btw
Oh neat, now if you can't afford rent (the issue) next year it will only be 5% more out of reach.
"politician expected to say that something we would want to should be a thing"
why is this news?
5% raise cap is lame! way lower than wage increases! a 1000$ rent after 5 years is 1300$, which after 5 years becomes a 30 % increase
Him and his filthy rich Democratic politicians are so disconnected from reality that this seems to them like a revolutionary policy
Here’s the thing, it provides at least some sort of predictability for tenant.
Nothing worse than settling into a place and getting booted because rent goes up 20% or 30%.
This will largely guarantee that rent goes up by 5% every year, but it will limit crazy jumps.
A year or so ago they surveyed the homeless in San Diego. Everyone assumed that the homeless population is largely from out of state, coming to SD to be warm while homeless. What they found was the complete opposite.
Most of the homeless do not have a drug problem or only started taking drugs after becoming homeless. Most homeless people were employed full time for the 12 months before they became homeless. Most homeless people in San Diego were born there and watched as the relentless march of 5-10% increases (California state maximums) slowly pushed them into homelessness.
Banal evil, is still evil.
The fear of a 30% rent hike has motivated several of my big decisions, and it happened once (luckily at a time where I could recover). But ya know, compounding interest - 5% every year is still exponential. Everyone's pretty sure the world's ending anyway.
Healthy markets also create predictability by constraining prices.
We’d have a healthy housing market if we stopped actively suppressing new housing construction.
We make some projects impossible and every project harder than it needs to be when it comes to constructing new housing. The government’s thumb is constantly pressing, pressing, pressing on the scale to keep supply lower than natural.
This shit never works out as simply as you expect it to. With any public policy change there are layers and nuance. If you restrict rent increases then every year you're gonna see the majority of landlords including the ones who do not increase rent yearly suddenly change course to always up the rent 5% per year, every year. Otherwise as a member of the ownership class who doesn't increase rent your are losing out on equity compared to those who do. Compound interest never catches up.
If you want to make renting profitable and homeownership obtainable for nearly everyone you need to setup a system where renters gain a share of ownership proportional to the money they put in. Make it so ALL renters eventually own the place they rent if they stay long enough. Ownership increases for every dollar spent towards rent. Evaporate the double dip appreciation for landlords and punish the income so that you gain money but at a slower rate than an index fund.
You also need subsidized lending for individuals who own no home. Possibly make it so 100% of rental income tax goes into a fund that provides mortgages to someone purchasing a primary residence when they do not own any current properties or are selling their primary residence to purchase another one (e.g. moving, not hoarding housing.) Make the application process for these mortgages prioritize families without any owned homes in their direct lineage (e.g. those with parents and children which do not own homes get a higher priority than the kids of wealthy homeowners.)
Something like this can bring homeownership to the masses and bring prices down as investment income from housing is no longer as valuable as other investments. Prices may still stay high, but subsidized mortgages would keep monthly payments affordable for those who qualify while minimizing profitability for hoarders.
Finally if you are still in love with rent control, then do it concurrently with a program like the above. Balance the scales.
Why would someone buy a house so someone else could slowly buy it from them? They would essentially be acting like a bank.
Who keeps up with the house maintenance?
Landlords are unneeded middlemen. A good system doesn't use them.
Your idea is "rent to own".
You can rent to own a Playstation that's 300 dollars for a small monthly price but at the end of the loan you're going to pay 600 dollars total for the Playstation.
Why am I going to go to Best Buy, buy a Playstation for 300, then let Jimmy down the street play with it while he slowly pays me back my 300?
Why am going to buy a house for 100,000 and let Jimmy rent to own it?
600 a month for 15 years. He'd pay for it.
If I put 100k in the S&P500 for 15 years, I'd have 415k.
Would I rather:
A. Help Jimmy get a house
B. Make ~300k for just sitting
If you think landlords are bad you should see how much the bank makes.
My 500k 7.5% mortgage if I only paid the mandatory payment would end up costing me something like 1.6 million dollars. My PITI is something like 4k/mo and only like $500 is principal.
Edit:
Why would someone buy a house so someone else could slowly buy it from them?
Imagine if you can't make your mortgage payment on a home that you will not be living in due to whatever personal reasons you have, so you want to pause payments. Instead of selling the home you choose to rent it out.... barely losing equity thanks to the kind renters who take on the interest and tax payments for you so you don't have to pay.
The renters are not getting a worse deal than buying and they get the benefit of having a home they are gaining equity in. The landlord is not losing the home they otherwise could not afford to keep given whatever factor is going on. (Parents need short term care? traveling? going to college for a year or two? just don't want to work?) Bottom line, it's far more equitable for everybody.
Anything that just rips away equity from those who currently have it is going to be wildly unpopular. In gaming terms, nobody likes nerfs, you need to buff the curve for people who do not have equity. If you are perceived as taking something away it is so hard to convince anybody that the change is for the better or needed.
What you're saying
Say my mortgage is 1k a month.
I can't afford 1k, so I let you move in and pay me "rent"
You pay me 1k each month.
After a year, I kick you out and move back in.
Where'd your 12k go?
Bank going to give 12k in cash to you and increase my mortgage by 12k?
So let's say your mortgage is 1k/mo. We're not talking PITI, just mortgage.
Let's pretend the house is worth $30,000 and the landlord has $7200 in equity at the beginning of the lease (20%.)
Let's also say of that mortgage 700 is interest and 300 is principal. So a renter pays you 1k/mo rent for 12 months. They get 300/mo principal totaling $3,600 after a year.
At this point there are a few different ways of handling it.
Option 1: The tenant is buying debt from the bank with the principal payments over the course of the year. So $3600 of the debt they now own, when you pay the bank the payments go proportionally to the tenant which actively reduces their equity, but they collect all the interest income for the share they own.
Option 2: You could have shares of the home. As money is paid in against principal the tenant gains share of the overall home - so in this case a bit over 10% over the course of the term. Since this is shares as the valuation of the home increases so do the share prices and the typical compound interest applies. This can be very messy because when you want to cash out the principal owner either need to buy you out by taking another mortgage or paying you, but it could be done.
When you factor in things like the appreciation of the home the first option gives the appreciation to the landlord without reducing their mortgage. They would gain in net worth because the home is worth more money, even though they still have a mortgage that hasn't decreased in price.
The second option takes the equity gain away from the landlord proportional to shares owned. Although harder to track it's still possible.
This is ignoring the real world scenario where the mortgage is really only $500/mo for a lot of long time landlords who bought 20+ years ago or refinanced in 2020 and the rent is $2000-3000+++ There would have to be something that takes into account excess paid beyond the mortgage/taxes. This also doesn't make any sense at all if the house is paid off either since there would be only taxes, no mortgage. Obviously there would need to be some nuance in implementing a solution but it's not impossible.
If you want to make renting profitable
Why the fuck would anyone other than the leeches that feed off of the rest of society by putting a human right behind a pay wall want that?
You need to free your mind of the worm that is capitalism, an entirely artificial construct designed to keep you down, you'd be able to see a significantly brighter future then..
I like the idea of rent to own condos from the federal government. That removes the profit incentive and allows tenants to immediately form a council for their building to manage maintenance and such rather than having a landlord (or 10 who own single units in multiple buildings) run the building council.
It's easy as pie too, federal government buys or builds, (doesn't matter), then divides the cost by the number of units. That number is the magic number at which you own the condo free and clear. Divide the magic number by 30 and you have base rent that must be paid monthly. You can pay more if you want or you can just do the base plus fees set by the building council. If you need to move before 30 years then someone can buy you out of your unit by paying the amount you've already paid or more. Otherwise the government will buy you out and start the process over with the next tenant.
Build enough of these and we can drop an anchor into the housing market that naturally prevents things from going too high. After all why would I mortgage 800k when I can pay half that over 30 years with no interest?
Unless that also comes with a 5% raise every year, then it's not as good
At least it prevents people getting a 20-30% increase one year
So if we can elect like, any old fuck now, can't we just go even older and elect the corpse of mao or something? cause that's kinda the only way I see rent, and rent specifically, becoming a non-issue in the near future. This is like one of the main issues which is directly symptomatic of capitalism, and which keeps capitalism as a system directly propped up. I don't really see any long term solution to it that doesn't involve a lot of no longer having capitalism. Other capitalist countries still have this problem. It's only like, china and the former soviet union and apparently barcelona with superblocks which are still gonna be subject to market demands and rates, it's only those countries which are going to be constructing such an excess of housing that a good amount of it can remain empty, which is also the case here as well but with the caveat that we still have massive amounts of homelessness and the empty housing is basically just to increase demand on top of straight up not having enough housing even were we to construct mass housing projects.
I dunno, this is a pretty good encapsulation of why we are specifically incredibly fucked and how this incrementalism isn't going to work at all to address our current issues. We're cooked, lads. Get the titanic band to start playing the song or whatever.
We had public housing projects in the 60's but we poison pilled them. So we don't need to go all the way to Mao. It is possible to have the government build housing and do a rent to own program that rolls it's funding to keep making more housing. (As you pay your monthly rent it goes back into the building fund.)
I mean yeah, but I'm not sure we won't just poison pill them again as soon as the metronome swings back around and keeps us from having anything nice.
You could use that argument with any government function or public good though. Why do anything if the GOP could poison pill it?
I mean I would just get rid of the GOP if that were a viable option. and probably also the political system in which we live, as a whole.
I do think more realistically though the only point I'm making is that it's a kind of insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome, without understanding why they're able to poison pill anything and everything and roll back any advancements as soon as they feel that the public pressure has let up enough. There's a deeper issue there beyond just the lack of public housing, an issue that causes that lack of public housing in the first place, and simply building massive amounts of public housing, even if we were able to do that, which would be quite a feat, and something I would be happy about, even that would be a temporary solution, as we've seen.
I absolutely agree but until we get the grassroots to agree then anything like a constitutional convention is just asking for a dictator.
There actually is a solution that doesn't involve destroying capitalism: mixed-use zoning, tax on the unimproved value of land, and small UBI.
yeah georgism is crap though
wdym?
I mean I'm generally skeptical of like "this one weird 19th century ideology can solve all our problems" schtick, right, and I'm also skeptical of the mythical single tax systems, as a kind of simplified and idealistic compromise between your libertarians, your anarchists, and your more standard socialists and communists.
If you were to ask me in more detail, I would basically say that I think it's a compromise solution for an extremely narrow set of problems that too often gets extrapolated into encompassing the entirety of a political system. I think that it functions well enough as an ideology within a specific set of constraints and goals, but if you seek to extrapolate it solve like, every political problem, as georgists generally tend to do, then it kind of falls apart, and doesn't tend to be broad enough.
It's basically just a less generalized version of marxism, to me, where land is equivalent in the system to capital, and rent-seeking behavior is only really banned from interference with whatever resources are seen as natural, which is primarily land. I dunno. I think as I slowly go more insane and become more cranky, I find myself increasingly wanting a horrible authoritarian state that just does exactly what I want, because everything I like is awesome, and everything everyone else thinks is bad and evil or whatever.
I think as I slowly go more insane and become more cranky, I find myself increasingly wanting a horrible authoritarian state that just does exactly what I want, because everything I like is awesome, and everything everyone else thinks is bad and evil or whatever.
Mood 😅
I get your skepticism, but I do think there is some value in specific ideologies like Georgism, namely that you can actually try them out slowly and reverse course if needed. I'm mostly against a wide scale federal land value tax at a high percentage off the bat, but I do think its probably worth trying it out locally or at a low percentage to see what happens.
Singapore has a good social housing system as far as I know but the government has to be pretty authoritarian in order to pull it off
but the government has to be pretty authoritarian in order to pull it off
I dunno if that's a super necessary element, really. I think they could probably get off better, actually, if they had a more lenient prison system, and, say, didn't execute people for minor weed possession or like, being gay. But then I also think their economy relies on a large portion of oppressed migrant labor, if I remember right? I dunno, somebody fact check me on that
Yes in a marginalist framework (the supply and demand people) the solution is to increase the housing supply to a permanent slight excess. Preferably in a way that is least damaging to the economy.
However the old commie block approach created a consecrated symbol for the forces of capital to attack, and ultimately dynamite.
The problem is the rentier class has the most resources to throw against this and they still can find other ways to rescarcify housing unless forced building programs are big enough to over power them.
The problem is the rentier class has the most resources to throw against this and they still can find other ways to rescarcify housing unless forced building programs are big enough to over power them.
Yeah, we probably just need to get rid of the rentier class. I don't like them very much, I think they might be bad.
Not better to cap it at 5% of the property value?
God this is embarrassingly lame.
I thought it was $55?
It is set at 2.5% where I live.
Realistically that's about what it should be. 3% tops. Average worker wages haven't gone up that much yearly in forever.
Weird, I just bought a house and to be on the safe side I consulted with a real estate lawyer before signing the purchase agreement. I plan to rent it out for a couple of years before moving into it myself, and the lawyer offered me a copy of his standard rental lease agreement. The lease called for an automatic annual renewal with a 5% increase in rent, and I was shocked because in 30 years of renting I've never been hit with an increase anywhere near that (almost every renewal I've ever agreed to was at the same rent). It's weird to think of increases even larger than that, such that a 5% cap would be beneficial.
Biden should eliminate density restrictions in zoning if he wants to help with the housing crisis. Making housing less profitable is going to help for about 6 months then make things worse.
"Here old man, rattle off this list! It'll save you! Get 'em, Joey!"
And then he screwed it up and read the teleprompter wrong as "capping rent at $55 dollars." No joke.
I’m down
I think people are focusing quite a bit too much on Biden's speaking abilities and too little on his policies.
I'll take Biden's policies any day over Trump's policies and his toxic personality.
It's over...
Pelosi privately told Biden polls show he cannot win and will take down the House
If you think Biden has any chance of beating Trump at this point then I've got a bridge to sell you
I didn't say it, the poll said it.
Prices decreased last month. Not inflation decreased...prices. Deflation happened last month.
Inflation has been tamed.
Groceries are still more than double the price than they were 5 years ago. A slight back tick isn't "tamed".
That's like saying a dog isn't trained because the total number of times it peed in the house is still high. I get why you don't like that thing that happened in the past, but the point is that it isn't happening anymore.
Lol yes it is. Go to the store and look at the prices. They are demonstrably higher than they were.
Also that was a terrible analogy.
Sounds like you didn't understand it. I'm not saying prices aren't higher than they were years ago... prices always go up long term, the target is 2% per year. That's not the question. The question is whether inflation has been tamed, meaning will prices rise wildly in the future or are we back to normal inflation rates. So going forward, will inflation be 2% like normal? Or are you claiming it will be higher?
Right now you're not even answering the question you're just saying it was higher in the past, which isn't relevant to whether it is tamed now.
Good lord.
No I don't think that there will be another huge swing because no one would buy things.
Having inflation just slowed down instead of reversing it is not tamed.
Pedantic mother fucker.
You know what would get more votes? That student loan forgiveness thing! Maybe the kids who never graduated or used their expensive education should get their loans forgiven???
Remember that? Yeah?
Cuz 5% is not gonna do much if you got a 15% loan.
Seems kind of weird to blame the guy who is trying to do the thing you want and not the people who keep blocking it from happening.
trying to do the thing you want
Except he isn't, at this point all he's doing is claiming to want to give the poor some crumbs, so that those who haven't yet, don't turn on him.
A 5% increase limit is still an increase, he's not doing you any fucking favours by continuing to allow landlords to gouge you, only a little more conservatively.
I was responding specifically to the implication that Biden isn't trying to do loan forgiveness, which is factually incorrect. It's the courts that keep blocking the plan and forcing it to be narrower in scope, not Biden.
As for this proposed cap on rent increases, I fail to see how a limited increase is worse than an unlimited one. Is it less action than we need? Definitely. Is it insulting that it took the credible threat of a fascist dictatorship to extract this tiny concession? Absolutely. Am I going to kick and scream because it isn't everything I wanted? Hell no! Just the fact that the President is seriously discussing this is an improvement, and we need all the leftward momentum we can get if we ever want to start pushing the Overton window on economic issues.
I used to scoff like this at early efforts to decriminalize marijuana. "Lower penalties? State-issued medical cards with heavy restrictions? None of that actually solves anything! It needs to be completely legal!" Now look at where we are: Fully legal in 24 states, partially legal in most others, and the DEA has started the process for rescheduling to a less-restricted category. It was slow going and we're still not quite where we need to be, but that's way more progress than I ever thought we would get!
I'm just reminding him since I got a certain loved one that I inherited a certain amount of this debt from. Like WTF. It's like buying a slave....how much is that slave over there? Oh that one? Yeah that'll be 5000 Dollars in student loans please!.
He literally forgave my loan and the supreme court said no. fuckin pissed
Basically, if he loses, I gotta pay someone's loan. WTF!
the supreme court literally rewrote a law to prevent loan forgiveness.
Such buttholes! Gurr. The supremes and the president electoral college. I tell you, we got no say at all.
Treating the symptom.
Okay I guess. I'll get excited when I see a plan to treat the disease.
There’s no reason to get excited at all. Biden can call for it, but Congress has to write and pass the legislation. Republican House majority won’t let that happen.
Vote in November.
Not even. Can't charge more for rent when it's already max out against income. It's a placebo that'll have zero effect. Don't get too excited about a "plan". This is the plan.
What world are you living in when they can't raise rates too high for your income level? Not the one the rest of us are living in.
The vast majority of individuals must be able to afford to house, feed, and cloth themselves, as well as travel to and from work. If not they will riot. This is bad for economic growth, the mandate of capitalism. It's particularly bad when the market is still significantly inflated relative the economy.
It'll never be written into law. However, Biden's proposed rent caps under projected inflation, signifying rent has fully saturated its allocation of income. Housing began balancing systemically naturally, human sellers drying up. Landlords have no obstacles.
I live in a world of nuance. The rent sucks.
Historically that's actually not what causes people to riot. The slow chipping away actually almost never causes riots. It's the immediate stripping of a right or privilege. Look back at history that's how it Works nearly every single time. You're basically making the same argument people who you sanctions as a political tool make. That if you keep making life shittier and shittier and shittier slowly the people will riot. Doesn't work.
Furthermore capitalism does not possess the capacity to change in that manner. It does not possess the capacity to adjust to the needs of the masses. Thinking capitalism will fix this is insane.
If you look at history, the last half century is far from "slow chipping away".
The last half century of political sanctions? What does that even mean? I feel like you were trying to be clever and you lost the point somewhere. If you ever had one.
I responded to the part that wasn't strawman with a response of equivalent quality, simple clarification of the point of disagreement.
Why do you expect more than you give?
I would expect a coherent thought but after four comments you haven't given one once.
Read more books.
Best of luck.
Cool, my rent is still 70% of what I make in a month. It's almost like it's already too late, but I'm too poor and uneducated to be an expert. Got any other ideas?
The best time to do it was any point in the last 100 years. The second best time is now.
Do your boots have straps?
Move to another country
If only it were that easy I totally would. Trust me I've tried looking into it before.
5% is crazy talk when workers wages are going up 2.5% per year. Landlords need at least 20% more every year.
But if it pass, then it is first win. I fear that landlord are not going to let it happen without a fight
You gotta get something that will pass
This is what happened in California. The statewide rent control is 5% plus inflation per year, capped at 10% per year. There's a bunch of exclusions too, like the property has to be at least 15 years old, and single-family homes that aren't owned by a corporation are excluded too. I think the builders and landlords had quite a bit of a say in it, hence the limit being so high above inflation (assuming inflation of <=5%).
Still a lot better than it used to be. It applies to month-to-month rentals too, so you can get the flexibility of a month-to-month rental while still having a limit on the rent increase per year. Evictions also need to have just cause and there's a notice period of 60 days if the tenant has lived there for longer than a year.
Is 5% really that crazy when the current rate is 20% as you describe?
Man this entire thread is just a perfect encapsulation of the perfect being the enemy of the good. What a bunch of useless chuds.
I'm not sure I've ever heard that phrase. Do you mind explaining what you mean? (Just to be clear, I'm not trying to be combative. I just have no idea how to read that)
It has it's own wiki page!
In simple terms, the failure to do something absolutely perfectly shouldn't stop you from doing something that will still be better than the status quo.
What if the act of doing something carries a cost with a negative expected return on investment?
...then the original saying doesn't apply, does it? Is this some kind of "gotcha" I'm not understanding?
And that's the million dollar question. I'm not arguing the perfect should be the enemy of the good. I'm questioning how much "good" I get by aligning myself with a fundamentally bad dude. Biden's played this bait-and-switch game before, and there's a real reason to believe 2025 Joe Biden won't be willing or able to deliver on his 5% rent cap promise. In exchange, what is he asking you to give up?
An hour of your life in line to vote on election day? A small recurring donation to his campaign? A week block-walking your neighborhood to canvas for him? Three months volunteering to work for his reelection campaign?
Presidential elections aren't cheap. I have to wonder what would happen if all the money and manpower pouring into Biden's coffers was simply directed towards Habitat For Humanity instead. Would we get more bang for our bucks?
Dawg, I'm not even the OP. I was just explaining an idiom, and you expect me to answer a humanist philosophical question as if I'm the greatest thinker of our generation 😭
I can't help you decide what extent you're willing to compromise to vote Biden/democrats. I can't even vote in the US.
that doesn't sound very good to me
"Don't make perfect the enemy of good" essentially says that it's better to do what you can in the short term to reduce harm or make positive change than to wait for the perfect solution and do nothing in the meantime. The idea is that the good is still going to help some people while we wait for the perfect solution to the problem- which, crucially, may never come, or come too late for a whole bunch of people.
One example would be letting a parent having their kid eat fast food instead of a perfectly healthy diet because their parents live in a food desert; not ideal, but it'll keep the kid fed and alive.
We want actual change.
Not this half-assed thing of "oh shit Biden isn't polling well. Quick, do something popular!".
Seeing this honestly frustrates me more because we all know they could do better than this.
This guy really larps these this trust me bro jaja
What BS. This is like arguing that "trickle down economics" is good because money eventually trickles down to us plebs. We're in a sinking boat filled with holes and you're trying to argue that we should be happy that 1 of 1000 holes got patched up even though there isn't time to patch the other 999 holes before the ship sinks because the crew would rather sit on their ass and drink martinis.
No this is like y'all getting mad at someone working on patching a hole because he's not simultaneously patching every hole in the exact same instance. All why you sit there and don't work on anything. Get a mallet get some wood get to work or shut up.
Cheap vodka comes in plastic bottles and landlords are faceless corporate entities on the other side of the country (if they're in the country at all). So my ability to help is limited.
Interesting. We all have the same feeling about you. The sad part is that you might actually know something. Maybe you could say something constructive, if only you cared to do so.
You could have made an argument about how aiming for perfection is a bad strategy here. But you didn't, so let me show how you're wrong. The proposed solution doesn't address the underlying problem, and it adds complexity. Rent can only go up by 5%, sure, but what happens if you sell the property you move into it or other exceptional circumstances happen? Then you can raise the price. Or perhaps you rent it through Airbnb, so the rules don't apply either. It doesn't really matter what the special cases are, because finance folk love complicated solutions. They're always going to find ways to game the system at our expense.
But let's suppose the 5% solution is somehow good. If it's good for rent then it should be good for other things too, right? You can't let electricity or gas prices go up faster, or people won't be able to heat their homes. You can't let food prices go up faster, or people won't be able to eat. Oh, and you certainly need minimum wage to be going up 5%, for any of that to make sense.
So if we consider all of that, and we find the aforementioned proposal slightly lacking, maybe it's not because we're seeking perfection. Maybe it's because you have no idea what problems we are trying to solve.
I stand corrected, this is the perfect encapsulation.
Also you are a disgrace to that username.
Lol it's like you summoned the ancient spirit of not understanding incremental improvement, who then wrote a short essay to explain to you just how much they don't understand the concept.
I also stand corrected. I thought you might actually know something. But then you double down with a witty empty response: two sentences with zero information. What good is that? Grandstanding is boring and pointless.
And then you want to trash talk my username? Jesus. Have fun with that.
Some people are here to learn, some people are here to teach, some people are here to share, some people are here to build community. You're not doing any of those things. Meh.
we have several lifetimes worth of policies to change to fix the mess we are in. this is exactly what Biden should be doing, passing policy after policy in the next few months that have obvious positive results for the common voter. he's not gonna run out of stuff to do if he's re-elected, so he needs to stop holding onto this shit like it's his last wild card of all time.
But that might upset his owners, I mean campaign contributors.
— some guy
He's not a dictator. Most of those would never pass in the Senate.
It's not about that. It's about building momentum for the idea. If it passes great, if not then it's out there. People know it's possible and it will never stop haunting the elites who the government actually serves.
If only someone had given him the power to be a dictator!
Guess he just fuckin loses and the next guy does it anyways.
Woah, an actual campaign promise? Maybe the Dems do want to look like they're trying after all.
If Democrats kept their promises we'd have codified Roe, have free healthcare for all, and literally no one would carry student debt but those that haven't yet had time to graduate.
If Republicans kept theirs, we'd be living in a christofascist, ultra-capitalist, white ethnostate.
We've got this instead. Behold the power of compromise.
It's not compromise. It's only turning right. They're just arguing about how fast and which corporations should get the money.
Where I live we've had a 4% cap for a long time. It just means tenants get evicted to increase the price. It's illegal, but the procedure to after landlords cheating the system is so grueling and adversarial, it puts justice beyond the reach of many victims. I can only imagine this being even worse in the US.
If this caps rent even if the tenant changes it'd be something. I don't see how this passes an R house or gets through the "moderate" Dems in the senate.
It's certainly an essential piece of the puzzle, but without the other puzzle pieces it is only going to have a minimal effect and is easy to abuse. Better than nothing nothing though, it won't be a wasted effort if it passes, it just won't fix anything or curb rent prices on the whole. But it will help people out here and there.
I don't see how a national rent cap survives even the most liberal courts either.
It's not a cap on rent it's a cap on raising it. Not much different than setting interest rates imo. I don't know enough law about it but at least it's an attempt? There's a lot of talk here about how it doesn't solve the underlying problem but I don't see people providing another solution.
I'd like to see property taxes increased with more single family homes owned. Let businesses keep the apartments let homes become a place to live and not an investment though.
The problem is rent isn't interstate commerce. There isn't a way to justify that there is a national mandate for this, it's a matter left to states.
As for property taxes, many states already do this with exemptions for a primary residence that reduces taxes.
I'm talking about increased taxes for each additional home so that owning more than 2 or 3 homes becomes financially unviable. This causes an incentive to sell if you own a lot and prevents someone wanting to own a lot in the first place.
We have rent stabilization in nyc (for some buildings). It caps the increases, and landlords are obligated to renew your lease if you want to unless you violated it in some serious way. In returnfor haveing a building stabalized, the landlord gets tax incentives.
That’s great!!!
Need to stop corporations buying houses next, and tamper foreigners buying up houses too (almost every country I’ve traveled to won’t let me buy so why not do the same?)
I feel like banning corporations from owning housing isn’t the panacea people expect it to be. It’s pretty impractical when you start talking about larger buildings and mixed use housing, and I’m not convinced it’s really a big driver of the problem.
I think a steep land value tax is a more workable solution. It incentivizes anyone who holds non-productive property (vacant homes in this case) to either make better use of the land or sell it. This also has the benefit of impacting individuals who own second homes or have mostly empty airbnbs.
Property taxes are insufficient for this purpose because they are generally based on the value of the home rather than just the land, so not only are they easier to game, but it disincentivizes improving the property.
Crazy idea.
How about instead of corporations owning the unit, maybe the person who lives in the unit gets to own part of it.
I know crazy.
Owning part of a larger building is actually much more complicated than simply owning a house. I’m not sure everyone would actually want that even if they could buy the unit they live in at a low price.
I almost bought a condo in a multi-story building a couple of years ago and I'm glad as hell I didn't. It was a one-bedroom unit for $125K, which is fine except that the monthly condo fees are $1000 (which includes utilities, at least), property taxes plus insurance are another $400, and the last three consecutive years residents have been hit with a special assessment of about $10K - which means I would have been paying around $2500 a month to live in a one-bedroom apartment that I'd already paid $125K for.
The biggest issue with corporations owning low income multifamily housing is that they act like slumlords. When you have nowhere else to go and the landlord won't fix major issues then it takes a toll on you. When a kid sees this growing up, then it leads to antisocial behavior. Investors think that "passive investment" means no input at all when it requires a great deal of active management if contracts are being followed. They just know that the residents have no reasonable way to enforce the contract.
Are corporations more likely to be slumlords? Pretty much everyone I’ve ever known who owns a rental property has been a complete asshole, but I’ve only known a few.
Look up Monarch Investment
I agree about taxes. Tax the ever loving bejesus out of vacant rentals or speculative residential real estate. That will keep them from buying in the first place or deeply incentivize them to keep them rented out.
I disagree. No need to force development to destroy natural landscapes just to avoid a tax. Simply tax multiple residential properties somewhat exponemtially.
100%, 133%, 200%, 350%, 500% or something
Generally it’s not destroying undeveloped land, but fixing up dilapidated houses so that they are livable.
Having a progressive tax based on number of homes owned may work, but you would need to rewrite quite a bit of real estate law to make it actually effective. Obviously corporations would not be allowed to own houses to avoid people owning through shell companies, but you would also have to draw a line so corporations could own larger apartment complexes and mixed use buildings. You also do want builders to be able to temporarily own houses for the purpose of building and selling them as well as corporate flippers.
Frankly, I think it’s too complicated to expect on a national level.
Right.
Owning one or two residential properties is fine, more is problematic.
I say "two" to handle the very common case of children putting their parents' homes in their own name because Medicare clawback rules will take the home after they die if you don't do it early enough.
The Medicare clawback crap is why we can't expect to fix one issue with capitalism without addressing all the issues simultaneously. Can't just raise minimum wage because landleeches will raise rents. Can't just have universal healthcare because a lot of people would become unemployed when the insurance industry dies its overdue painful death.
Universal healthcare, student loan cancellation (and free state university), UBI, and the elimination of for-profit housing. All within one president's term to have a chance of sticking past four years.
exponentially would be e. g. 100%, 1000%, 10 000%, etc.
you meant geometricallly
No, i was picturing an exponential with scale factors and coefficemts.
Some countries have a large yearly tax if you leave a house vacant for longer than 6 months or a year without a valid reason. More countries need to do this.
Not sure about the USA, but it's a big problem in Australia. Foreign investors (that don't live in Australia nor have any intent of moving to Australia) buy properties then just hold them as speculative assets. They don't want tenants, because they don't want to go through all that effort. All they want to do is hold them and watch the value go up, in the same way you'd hold stock or Bitcoin.
Yeah, that does feel like it could help reduce housing prices. There is no such tax in most parts of the US, but San Francisco passed a vacancy tax that just went into effect this year. If that works out hopefully other municipalities look into a similar scheme.
Strong disagree. Can you imagine what red states will do with the power to demand proof of citizenship to own property? Or all the hell couples where one is a Permanent Resident the other a Citizen will go through?
You should be terrified of someone like Jeff Session or Kris Kobach able to just veto any random person from owning land. You can see it now in your head
Them drafting letters on government stationary to real estate agents demanding paperwork from anyone with a Latino or Chinese name. Effectively making agents terrified of dealing with minorities.
Random spot checks, having deputies show up to open houses asking for papers or waiting until after closing then interrogation of the family
Activists courts arguing that all members of the household must be citizens based on vague feelings
New rules that state that the entire inheritance path must all be citizens
Non-citizens being forced to sell at a 1/10th the value
The lawsuits from groups like the ACLU pointing out that it is a obvious violation of the civil rights act, which goes to the Supreme Court who then declares the Bill of Rights only applies to citizens
If you are interested the experiment has been run already. Go read up what Kris Kobach did when he got a town to pass a law requiring citizenship tests to rent. He not only near bankrupted the town due to lawsuits he personally sent threatening letters to Latinos who lived there.
The standard is good behavior, not other people.
Have you traveled much? More countries do this than don’t. The trump nazis will abuse everything yes. But people not being able to afford a place to live is also giving us trump nazis in the first place
Again
Must I repeat it again?
And yet you want to give them more? You don't hand a gun to a person who went to jail repeatedly for using a gun.
Assertion, please demonstrate it. Also demonstrate that your method of handing Nazis more power will make them less powerful. Lastly compare the US grabbling with fascists to other nations who have rules like you are advocating for and how they are also grappling with fascists.
It's a little thing but I kinda want you to acknowledge that the one time this idea was tried in diet form in the US it not only didn't work it also legalized racism. You are suggesting an idea that we tried and it not only failed in the task it was meant to perform it also created a host of new problems.
3 years of absurd rent prices and we are just now seeing legislation, wonder why......
Usually just need to see what Reps have blocked to find out.
As if it would ever last the captured supreme court.
Would be good if he coupled it with a promise to stack the Supreme Court
In my province the cap for increase was usually around 1.5 - 2% for existing tenants/renewing lease.
The conservative gov went ahead and fucked everything up and said this doesn't apply to anything built after 2005, or new builds - that means any new anything in an existing building.
New basement rooms? No cap. (No cap) But, if the basement had rooms 35 years ago, and you 'build' "new" rooms, it isn't new and falls under the older more tenant friendly laws.
However, between tenants, a landlord can do whatever the fuck they want to prices.
Shitty rooms went from 375 to 700 I'm 5 years.
Hello fellow Ontarians. I feel your pain. It may be little solace but know I bought a house with a basement tenant 3 years ago. Their rent was $1100 a month for a 1 bedroom 3 years ago and it's 1100$ a month now. I don't need the money. Fuck landholding pariahs taking advantage of renters.
I suppose he has to do something to signal to voters that he's going to try to fix the housing affordability crisis, but this is pretty meaningless. But, what can he say? The truth? That the housing crisis is an extremely complex problem that will take decades to fix? Probably not going to go over very well.
Not allowing landlords to drive people into homeless on speculation and greed is a good first step to solving the very complex problem that will take decades.
How is this meaningless?
Well, for one, it almost certainly won't pass. So the chances of it becoming law in the first place are pretty low. But even if it were passed, I think it would be difficult to enforce. Even if it were enforced, landlords would just hike the rent 4.99% every year.
4.99% is way better than the 50% my previous landlord tried. You can always vote Republican if you want. See what they're going to do for you.
No thanks.
Not to mention that unless wages also rise by 5% per year, which mine haven't recently not sure about others, then it's still unsustainable for renters.
No? There’s currently no cap on single housing investments, and at the very least private equity needs to be banned from buying housing in any form.
Let's build a million new homes and sell them to people that don't currently own any homes.
FTFY
Fuck these ogres hoarding real estate.
There's no shortage of homes in the US. They're just being hoarded for their increasing value.
I don't believe that is the case. There is no value in letting a property sit empty accumulating value, when it could be doing exactly that while pulling in a hefty monthly rent.
It may well be the case that there's enough homes empty to house everyone, but only if they're happy to move somewhere they don't want to be, and where there's no jobs to pay for them.
renters bring risks. if the home is on the market, they also make it a half to sell
Eliminate zoning and force cities to build up. Nobody wants a house in the middle of nowhere
This guy is clearly not scared of "crime"
Edgelord
Please expand on what you mean.
For context, I live in greater Boston. The state here has actually forced towns and cities in the inner belt around Boston to remove their zoning laws anywhere within a mile of a train or subway stop. Thousands of additional condos and apartments have been (and are being) built as a side effect and we will have dozens of new squares with shops and businesses on the ground floor and tens of thousands of new residences surrounding our transit hubs.
It’s not been smooth. Some towns are suing the state and doing other random bullshit to slow the process. Pushing these rules to the federal level would actually help states and metro areas consisting of multiple connected cities address the issues more efficiently.
"Crime" is code word for boomers and nimbys to block proper development
Doesn't help if there is housing available but it's 3 hours from where my work is :/
Hasn't rent control been shown to be ineffective at making everyone play nice? I feel like it's much more effective to put your finger on the supply/demand balance by subsidizing the supply side.
And not by just giving handouts to corporate landlords, either.
It's proven effective at causing landlords to scream and cry and publish 10,000 word Op-Eds about how they're going to do a capital strike if the rules aren't changed.
But, when paired with new investment in public housing, its incredibly effective at keeping rental costs stable long term.
Just like with unions, you know it's good for the common people, because the business and property owners speak out against it so strongly. If it's pointless, they could just let it happen. But instead, they rally against it. So you know they're lying when they say it won't matter.
It will matter.
Yeah. It has but stuff like this plays well in the echo chamber. Like most attempts at price controls it has a lot of unintended consequences such as fewer apartments built and rented out, landlords charging obscene amounts to a new renter knowing they cannot raise the prices as needed later on, landlords raising prices whether they need to or not because they can't hike them quickly when needed, worse maintenance.
No one is proposing rent control in a vaccum. Arguing against that idea is disingenuous and is how you end up with the status quo of "rent control is actually bad for renters" that gets parroted in economics circles. State intervention is necessary for markets to exist in the first place and they have overwhelming power in shaping them.
Building large scale affordable public housing, incentive structures that promote the building of affordable high density private housing, banning corporate ownership of single family homes and short term rentals like AirBnB, limiting corporate ownership within apartment complexes, reworking zoning laws to better suit current needs, more robust mechanisms for tenant disputes and transparency for historical rental prices to prevent abuse.
All of that is possible if the political will was there.
Okay then let's just drop an anchor into the market. Have the federal government commit to buying and managing 50,000 units in every major city. They're available on the open market at cost plus 100 dollars a month. The 100 dollars goes into a fund and the city with the highest rents gets more federally owned apartments.
We just keep dropping anchors until developers provide reasonable housing at reasonable prices or housing is no longer a private market.
Government has a really big damn stick. If people's needs don't start getting met then those developers are going to feel it, right in their profits.
I think the problem is that once the government subsidizes anything it becomes all hands on deck peak business interest to exploit and steal said subsidies.
Some sort of enforced regulation might work, but the government doesn't really like to do that.
That last sentence is all that ever happens in supply side economics. It's the entire handbook.
They've had enough carrot. It's time for the stick.
Not giving handouts to corporate lawyers? Impossible. Next you'll tell me that we should ease zoning restrictions and ignore NIMBYs that are afraid of black people moving in?
I'm sure this comes with a guaranteed 5% increase to minimum wages at the same time right? ... right? Any amount of minimum wage increase from the last increase 15 years ago?
Prices are already jacked up to an insane level compared to wages, the horse is already out of the barn: This is not going to fix the problem renters face.
A soft cap works as a ratchet. Downturns in the rental market are sticky while up turns are slow and marginalized.
It's effectively the opposite of the way things are now, with cartelized units staying artificially high through downturns and prices skyrocketing during every shortfall.
Timely.
That translates into rents doubling in less than 15 years
Well mine went up 28% in a year so I’ll take 5%
Good thing wages are going up!
Where I'm at it's indexed to inflation (but circumvented by evicting renters then raising rates illegally like someone else mentioned). Setting a target higher than the target inflation is mostly symbolic. Outside of specific situations like Covid, it is not likely to change much materially at 5%.
I was being sarcastic, wages have not really gone up inflation adjusted for majority of people over last 40 years in the US.
That’s still way higher than anyone’s raises each year…
Raises have nothing to do with inflation or cost of living. Companies that pin raises to those things are severely underpaying employees and hoping they don’t seek greener pastures.
Market rates set compensation. The best way to know your market rate is to find a new job.
If the company is doing COLAs right then their employees wouldn't need to seek greener pastures.
COLA is almost always lower than what you’ll get by job hopping
I didn't say they were doing it right.
what the fuck? you get less than 5% raise in a year in the US?
edit: in light of responses, I'd like to reiterate, what the fuck... this is the most obscenely wealthy country in the world.
Yep, company loyalty is dead here. The only way to get a significant raise is to switch jobs.
i mean that's what happens if you don't give a raise. what a stupid market.
People are lucky to get a raise at all. Much less 5%, usually it's 1 or 2. For at least a decade the only way to significantly increase your pay has been to move jobs.
Acording to this report: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/eci.pdf
The average Wages and salaries increased 1.1 percent and benefit costs increased 1.1 percent from December 2023.
Oh and then people that did get raises averaged 4.4% last year. So its really raises for some and poverty for most.
Most people are lucky to get 2%.. my company set the max at 2.5 last year and you only got that if you were IT Jesus
Cool, but also cap property tax increases as well. Mine have increased over 10% for the last 3 years.
They did this in California and Oregon, then the schools went to shit.
Also, property taxes are a good way to encourage density, which is necessary to fight climate change
Can they even cap that? That's a state tax, I feel like that's one that you would need to deal directly with your state to resolve. As someone who lives in one of the highest property tax states, I also wish this could happen...
Be careful what you wish for. California capped property tax increase since 1978 with prop 13 and most experts say this is a major factor in their insanely expensive housing market. Most people are heavily incentivized to never move to keep their low property tax rate, but this in turn prevents most new development and upzoning while simultaneously leading to the worst sprawl in the nation.
It also starves the state of tax revenue requiring them to levy the tax further for new buyers and seek other income streams like heightened income and sales tax. Policies like this somewhat unintuitively only benefit those who are already well off. Renters and younger people gain no benefit and ultimately pay higher property taxes than those who already are financially established enough to own a property.
A healthy property tax disincentivizes housing as a speculative investment, improving the overall market for people who actually live there. There should certainly be breaks for poverty and financial distress but capping or cutting rates broadly encourages speculation. For a basic human need such high degree of speculation benefits nobody.
Isn't that due to the reassessment of property tax when a new owner purchases the property? And wouldn't that be solved if the cap persists regardless of ownership change?
That just puts an insane value premium on older housing stock
That's how it's done in Oregon and we also have high housing costs. The housing costs are more likely tied to the massive demand of people moving to the coasts and lack of housing than property tax rates. The above argument doesn't even make sense to me as someone who moves within California is still only going to own one house so how does that make housing cheaper and more available whether they move or not? It only works if they move out of state and if that's the case, they aren't going to be affected by the property tax increase on a new purchase anyway.
Did those "experts" note that the rest of the country, that people want to live in, have the same insane high prices and yet don't have that cap? No, don't bother I already know the answer and so do you.
Economics isn't a science, it is playtime daydreaming. Which is fine, I enjoy my weekly D&D session. The thing is I know I am not a lvl 12 mountain dwarf fighter.
Is the property tax rate that's increasing or your home's appraised value? My home has doubled in appraised value since we bought it in 2016, so our taxes have doubled as well.
No, property tax is basically the only direct motivation in place for home owners to vote for politicians and policies that will keep housing affordable for future generations and people who don't already own a home. Otherwise why wouldn't home owners want to see housing prices skyrocket in value if there's no financial downside for them (and a giant payout when they do sell)? As mentioned in other comments, some states have tried property tax caps, and the result is creating a system of haves and have nots based entirely around who was lucky enough to buy into the market before it shot to the moon.
I agree that’s the problem. Property taxes go up, rent has to go up to cover it. If property taxes go up by X amount but you can’t raise rent the appropriate amount then there’s a problem.
We need to cap both.
You could just make slightly less money. It is allowed. It isn't like chemical reaction balance thing. It isn't even that they are losing money, they are just making less than they want.
Make slightly less is one thing. Going negative is another. Many landlords work on a shoe string budget.
Oh darn. Maybe they should get jobs if money is so tight!
I am sure with all the lawyers and accountants that work in Washington DC they can easily structure it to deal with a few edge cases. I am pretty sure my dumbass could figure it out. Maybe a tiered system looking at the last few years, ones that are on there verge of failure have more control compared to ones doing well.
These two things are not linked. Rent already is as high as the market will bear, property taxes will come out of landlord profits.
How are they not linked? The taxes have to be paid. The money comes from the rent.
Likely not, I think if taxes go up 10% rent will go up 10%+ percent.
Yeah, that doesn't math out.
Also, my rent got hiked 13% last year, despite the taxes remaining the same. Which is why I threw everything I had into getting out of renting.
I'm curious what the federal government can actually do in this situation. Most private leases are contracts under state law, not federal law.
I would think tax law could make it completely untenable to own residential properties as rentals and give federal tax breaks to developers that build affordable housing? I’m sure there could also be federal grants to cities for easing zoning restrictions. Not sure how much of this is possible.
Threats I guess 🤷
You can always put new limits in that private contacts have to abide by. The only limit is the Constitution.
And then roll it back to 2016 +5%
Cute... The beauty of profit is that it is never undo even if it was a crime.
That's a feature, not a bug btw
Oh neat, now if you can't afford rent (the issue) next year it will only be 5% more out of reach.
"politician expected to say that something we would want to should be a thing"
why is this news?
5% raise cap is lame! way lower than wage increases! a 1000$ rent after 5 years is 1300$, which after 5 years becomes a 30 % increase
Him and his filthy rich Democratic politicians are so disconnected from reality that this seems to them like a revolutionary policy
Here’s the thing, it provides at least some sort of predictability for tenant.
Nothing worse than settling into a place and getting booted because rent goes up 20% or 30%.
This will largely guarantee that rent goes up by 5% every year, but it will limit crazy jumps.
A year or so ago they surveyed the homeless in San Diego. Everyone assumed that the homeless population is largely from out of state, coming to SD to be warm while homeless. What they found was the complete opposite.
Most of the homeless do not have a drug problem or only started taking drugs after becoming homeless. Most homeless people were employed full time for the 12 months before they became homeless. Most homeless people in San Diego were born there and watched as the relentless march of 5-10% increases (California state maximums) slowly pushed them into homelessness.
Banal evil, is still evil.
The fear of a 30% rent hike has motivated several of my big decisions, and it happened once (luckily at a time where I could recover). But ya know, compounding interest - 5% every year is still exponential. Everyone's pretty sure the world's ending anyway.
Healthy markets also create predictability by constraining prices.
We’d have a healthy housing market if we stopped actively suppressing new housing construction.
We make some projects impossible and every project harder than it needs to be when it comes to constructing new housing. The government’s thumb is constantly pressing, pressing, pressing on the scale to keep supply lower than natural.
This shit never works out as simply as you expect it to. With any public policy change there are layers and nuance. If you restrict rent increases then every year you're gonna see the majority of landlords including the ones who do not increase rent yearly suddenly change course to always up the rent 5% per year, every year. Otherwise as a member of the ownership class who doesn't increase rent your are losing out on equity compared to those who do. Compound interest never catches up.
If you want to make renting profitable and homeownership obtainable for nearly everyone you need to setup a system where renters gain a share of ownership proportional to the money they put in. Make it so ALL renters eventually own the place they rent if they stay long enough. Ownership increases for every dollar spent towards rent. Evaporate the double dip appreciation for landlords and punish the income so that you gain money but at a slower rate than an index fund.
You also need subsidized lending for individuals who own no home. Possibly make it so 100% of rental income tax goes into a fund that provides mortgages to someone purchasing a primary residence when they do not own any current properties or are selling their primary residence to purchase another one (e.g. moving, not hoarding housing.) Make the application process for these mortgages prioritize families without any owned homes in their direct lineage (e.g. those with parents and children which do not own homes get a higher priority than the kids of wealthy homeowners.)
Something like this can bring homeownership to the masses and bring prices down as investment income from housing is no longer as valuable as other investments. Prices may still stay high, but subsidized mortgages would keep monthly payments affordable for those who qualify while minimizing profitability for hoarders.
Finally if you are still in love with rent control, then do it concurrently with a program like the above. Balance the scales.
Why would someone buy a house so someone else could slowly buy it from them? They would essentially be acting like a bank.
Who keeps up with the house maintenance?
Landlords are unneeded middlemen. A good system doesn't use them.
Your idea is "rent to own".
You can rent to own a Playstation that's 300 dollars for a small monthly price but at the end of the loan you're going to pay 600 dollars total for the Playstation.
Why am I going to go to Best Buy, buy a Playstation for 300, then let Jimmy down the street play with it while he slowly pays me back my 300?
Why am going to buy a house for 100,000 and let Jimmy rent to own it?
600 a month for 15 years. He'd pay for it.
If I put 100k in the S&P500 for 15 years, I'd have 415k.
Would I rather:
A. Help Jimmy get a house
B. Make ~300k for just sitting
If you think landlords are bad you should see how much the bank makes.
My 500k 7.5% mortgage if I only paid the mandatory payment would end up costing me something like 1.6 million dollars. My PITI is something like 4k/mo and only like $500 is principal.
Edit:
Imagine if you can't make your mortgage payment on a home that you will not be living in due to whatever personal reasons you have, so you want to pause payments. Instead of selling the home you choose to rent it out.... barely losing equity thanks to the kind renters who take on the interest and tax payments for you so you don't have to pay.
The renters are not getting a worse deal than buying and they get the benefit of having a home they are gaining equity in. The landlord is not losing the home they otherwise could not afford to keep given whatever factor is going on. (Parents need short term care? traveling? going to college for a year or two? just don't want to work?) Bottom line, it's far more equitable for everybody.
Anything that just rips away equity from those who currently have it is going to be wildly unpopular. In gaming terms, nobody likes nerfs, you need to buff the curve for people who do not have equity. If you are perceived as taking something away it is so hard to convince anybody that the change is for the better or needed.
What you're saying
Say my mortgage is 1k a month.
I can't afford 1k, so I let you move in and pay me "rent"
You pay me 1k each month.
After a year, I kick you out and move back in.
Where'd your 12k go?
Bank going to give 12k in cash to you and increase my mortgage by 12k?
So let's say your mortgage is 1k/mo. We're not talking PITI, just mortgage.
Let's pretend the house is worth $30,000 and the landlord has $7200 in equity at the beginning of the lease (20%.)
Let's also say of that mortgage 700 is interest and 300 is principal. So a renter pays you 1k/mo rent for 12 months. They get 300/mo principal totaling $3,600 after a year.
At this point there are a few different ways of handling it.
Option 1: The tenant is buying debt from the bank with the principal payments over the course of the year. So $3600 of the debt they now own, when you pay the bank the payments go proportionally to the tenant which actively reduces their equity, but they collect all the interest income for the share they own.
Option 2: You could have shares of the home. As money is paid in against principal the tenant gains share of the overall home - so in this case a bit over 10% over the course of the term. Since this is shares as the valuation of the home increases so do the share prices and the typical compound interest applies. This can be very messy because when you want to cash out the principal owner either need to buy you out by taking another mortgage or paying you, but it could be done.
When you factor in things like the appreciation of the home the first option gives the appreciation to the landlord without reducing their mortgage. They would gain in net worth because the home is worth more money, even though they still have a mortgage that hasn't decreased in price.
The second option takes the equity gain away from the landlord proportional to shares owned. Although harder to track it's still possible.
This is ignoring the real world scenario where the mortgage is really only $500/mo for a lot of long time landlords who bought 20+ years ago or refinanced in 2020 and the rent is $2000-3000+++ There would have to be something that takes into account excess paid beyond the mortgage/taxes. This also doesn't make any sense at all if the house is paid off either since there would be only taxes, no mortgage. Obviously there would need to be some nuance in implementing a solution but it's not impossible.
Why the fuck would anyone other than the leeches that feed off of the rest of society by putting a human right behind a pay wall want that?
You need to free your mind of the worm that is capitalism, an entirely artificial construct designed to keep you down, you'd be able to see a significantly brighter future then..
I like the idea of rent to own condos from the federal government. That removes the profit incentive and allows tenants to immediately form a council for their building to manage maintenance and such rather than having a landlord (or 10 who own single units in multiple buildings) run the building council.
It's easy as pie too, federal government buys or builds, (doesn't matter), then divides the cost by the number of units. That number is the magic number at which you own the condo free and clear. Divide the magic number by 30 and you have base rent that must be paid monthly. You can pay more if you want or you can just do the base plus fees set by the building council. If you need to move before 30 years then someone can buy you out of your unit by paying the amount you've already paid or more. Otherwise the government will buy you out and start the process over with the next tenant.
Build enough of these and we can drop an anchor into the housing market that naturally prevents things from going too high. After all why would I mortgage 800k when I can pay half that over 30 years with no interest?
Unless that also comes with a 5% raise every year, then it's not as good
At least it prevents people getting a 20-30% increase one year
So if we can elect like, any old fuck now, can't we just go even older and elect the corpse of mao or something? cause that's kinda the only way I see rent, and rent specifically, becoming a non-issue in the near future. This is like one of the main issues which is directly symptomatic of capitalism, and which keeps capitalism as a system directly propped up. I don't really see any long term solution to it that doesn't involve a lot of no longer having capitalism. Other capitalist countries still have this problem. It's only like, china and the former soviet union and apparently barcelona with superblocks which are still gonna be subject to market demands and rates, it's only those countries which are going to be constructing such an excess of housing that a good amount of it can remain empty, which is also the case here as well but with the caveat that we still have massive amounts of homelessness and the empty housing is basically just to increase demand on top of straight up not having enough housing even were we to construct mass housing projects.
I dunno, this is a pretty good encapsulation of why we are specifically incredibly fucked and how this incrementalism isn't going to work at all to address our current issues. We're cooked, lads. Get the titanic band to start playing the song or whatever.
We had public housing projects in the 60's but we poison pilled them. So we don't need to go all the way to Mao. It is possible to have the government build housing and do a rent to own program that rolls it's funding to keep making more housing. (As you pay your monthly rent it goes back into the building fund.)
I mean yeah, but I'm not sure we won't just poison pill them again as soon as the metronome swings back around and keeps us from having anything nice.
You could use that argument with any government function or public good though. Why do anything if the GOP could poison pill it?
I mean I would just get rid of the GOP if that were a viable option. and probably also the political system in which we live, as a whole.
I do think more realistically though the only point I'm making is that it's a kind of insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome, without understanding why they're able to poison pill anything and everything and roll back any advancements as soon as they feel that the public pressure has let up enough. There's a deeper issue there beyond just the lack of public housing, an issue that causes that lack of public housing in the first place, and simply building massive amounts of public housing, even if we were able to do that, which would be quite a feat, and something I would be happy about, even that would be a temporary solution, as we've seen.
I absolutely agree but until we get the grassroots to agree then anything like a constitutional convention is just asking for a dictator.
There actually is a solution that doesn't involve destroying capitalism: mixed-use zoning, tax on the unimproved value of land, and small UBI.
yeah georgism is crap though
wdym?
I mean I'm generally skeptical of like "this one weird 19th century ideology can solve all our problems" schtick, right, and I'm also skeptical of the mythical single tax systems, as a kind of simplified and idealistic compromise between your libertarians, your anarchists, and your more standard socialists and communists.
If you were to ask me in more detail, I would basically say that I think it's a compromise solution for an extremely narrow set of problems that too often gets extrapolated into encompassing the entirety of a political system. I think that it functions well enough as an ideology within a specific set of constraints and goals, but if you seek to extrapolate it solve like, every political problem, as georgists generally tend to do, then it kind of falls apart, and doesn't tend to be broad enough.
It's basically just a less generalized version of marxism, to me, where land is equivalent in the system to capital, and rent-seeking behavior is only really banned from interference with whatever resources are seen as natural, which is primarily land. I dunno. I think as I slowly go more insane and become more cranky, I find myself increasingly wanting a horrible authoritarian state that just does exactly what I want, because everything I like is awesome, and everything everyone else thinks is bad and evil or whatever.
Mood 😅
I get your skepticism, but I do think there is some value in specific ideologies like Georgism, namely that you can actually try them out slowly and reverse course if needed. I'm mostly against a wide scale federal land value tax at a high percentage off the bat, but I do think its probably worth trying it out locally or at a low percentage to see what happens.
Singapore has a good social housing system as far as I know but the government has to be pretty authoritarian in order to pull it off
I dunno if that's a super necessary element, really. I think they could probably get off better, actually, if they had a more lenient prison system, and, say, didn't execute people for minor weed possession or like, being gay. But then I also think their economy relies on a large portion of oppressed migrant labor, if I remember right? I dunno, somebody fact check me on that
Yes in a marginalist framework (the supply and demand people) the solution is to increase the housing supply to a permanent slight excess. Preferably in a way that is least damaging to the economy.
However the old commie block approach created a consecrated symbol for the forces of capital to attack, and ultimately dynamite.
The problem is the rentier class has the most resources to throw against this and they still can find other ways to rescarcify housing unless forced building programs are big enough to over power them.
Yeah, we probably just need to get rid of the rentier class. I don't like them very much, I think they might be bad.
Not better to cap it at 5% of the property value?
God this is embarrassingly lame.
I thought it was $55?
It is set at 2.5% where I live.
Realistically that's about what it should be. 3% tops. Average worker wages haven't gone up that much yearly in forever.
Weird, I just bought a house and to be on the safe side I consulted with a real estate lawyer before signing the purchase agreement. I plan to rent it out for a couple of years before moving into it myself, and the lawyer offered me a copy of his standard rental lease agreement. The lease called for an automatic annual renewal with a 5% increase in rent, and I was shocked because in 30 years of renting I've never been hit with an increase anywhere near that (almost every renewal I've ever agreed to was at the same rent). It's weird to think of increases even larger than that, such that a 5% cap would be beneficial.
Biden should eliminate density restrictions in zoning if he wants to help with the housing crisis. Making housing less profitable is going to help for about 6 months then make things worse.
"Here old man, rattle off this list! It'll save you! Get 'em, Joey!"
And then he screwed it up and read the teleprompter wrong as "capping rent at $55 dollars." No joke.
I’m down
I think people are focusing quite a bit too much on Biden's speaking abilities and too little on his policies.
I'll take Biden's policies any day over Trump's policies and his toxic personality.
It's over...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/17/politics/nancy-pelosi-biden-conversation/index.html
Polls say different things. This one says the opposite: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-polling-data-five-thirty-eight-1926226
If you think Biden has any chance of beating Trump at this point then I've got a bridge to sell you
I didn't say it, the poll said it.
Prices decreased last month. Not inflation decreased...prices. Deflation happened last month.
Inflation has been tamed.
Groceries are still more than double the price than they were 5 years ago. A slight back tick isn't "tamed".
That's like saying a dog isn't trained because the total number of times it peed in the house is still high. I get why you don't like that thing that happened in the past, but the point is that it isn't happening anymore.
Lol yes it is. Go to the store and look at the prices. They are demonstrably higher than they were.
Also that was a terrible analogy.
Sounds like you didn't understand it. I'm not saying prices aren't higher than they were years ago... prices always go up long term, the target is 2% per year. That's not the question. The question is whether inflation has been tamed, meaning will prices rise wildly in the future or are we back to normal inflation rates. So going forward, will inflation be 2% like normal? Or are you claiming it will be higher?
Right now you're not even answering the question you're just saying it was higher in the past, which isn't relevant to whether it is tamed now.
Good lord.
No I don't think that there will be another huge swing because no one would buy things.
Having inflation just slowed down instead of reversing it is not tamed.
Pedantic mother fucker.
You know what would get more votes? That student loan forgiveness thing! Maybe the kids who never graduated or used their expensive education should get their loans forgiven???
Remember that? Yeah?
Cuz 5% is not gonna do much if you got a 15% loan.
Seems kind of weird to blame the guy who is trying to do the thing you want and not the people who keep blocking it from happening.
Except he isn't, at this point all he's doing is claiming to want to give the poor some crumbs, so that those who haven't yet, don't turn on him.
A 5% increase limit is still an increase, he's not doing you any fucking favours by continuing to allow landlords to gouge you, only a little more conservatively.
I was responding specifically to the implication that Biden isn't trying to do loan forgiveness, which is factually incorrect. It's the courts that keep blocking the plan and forcing it to be narrower in scope, not Biden.
As for this proposed cap on rent increases, I fail to see how a limited increase is worse than an unlimited one. Is it less action than we need? Definitely. Is it insulting that it took the credible threat of a fascist dictatorship to extract this tiny concession? Absolutely. Am I going to kick and scream because it isn't everything I wanted? Hell no! Just the fact that the President is seriously discussing this is an improvement, and we need all the leftward momentum we can get if we ever want to start pushing the Overton window on economic issues.
I used to scoff like this at early efforts to decriminalize marijuana. "Lower penalties? State-issued medical cards with heavy restrictions? None of that actually solves anything! It needs to be completely legal!" Now look at where we are: Fully legal in 24 states, partially legal in most others, and the DEA has started the process for rescheduling to a less-restricted category. It was slow going and we're still not quite where we need to be, but that's way more progress than I ever thought we would get!
I'm just reminding him since I got a certain loved one that I inherited a certain amount of this debt from. Like WTF. It's like buying a slave....how much is that slave over there? Oh that one? Yeah that'll be 5000 Dollars in student loans please!.
He literally forgave my loan and the supreme court said no. fuckin pissed
Basically, if he loses, I gotta pay someone's loan. WTF!
the supreme court literally rewrote a law to prevent loan forgiveness.
Such buttholes! Gurr. The supremes and the president electoral college. I tell you, we got no say at all.