Comment by TimPC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TimPC | Hacker News Reader

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These laws are hard to get actually correct. The major problem is court delays. There is a very high bar for kicking someone out before they get their day in court about whether it is fair to do so. This seems eminently reasonable but there is also a severe shortage of judicial services that result in court dates over a year out to resolve such issues. In that year of time, it's quite possible for a tenant with maybe $5K to their name to accumulate $500K in damages and debts. For many such tenants it is a cost they could never repay in their lifetimes which means even if the landlord gets the desired verdict they'll never see the capital they wanted.

I agree there are places in the world that are so biased against landlords that they don't even try to get this problem correct but I think for many cases the problem isn't bad laws but rather the delays to being able to execute reasonable actions to limit damages. I'm not sure what a good solution is for many cases because I think it would take fairly extreme evidence to kick someone out without their day in court if they decided to fight it. I do agree with landlords it should be easier to kick someone out if they stop paying rent and that fact is adequately documented. I mean stop paying rent in the sense of an appropriate pattern not a single late payment.

A side effect of tenent friendly laws is that owners get more and more picky about who they rent to in the first place. It's cheaper to have a place empty for a few months than to take a risk on a potentially bad tenant.

Ultimately this is creating a class of people who can't rent. Their track record is poor - or if not them specifically they are in a group with a poor track record.

Not surprisingly this mostly affects the poorest and most vulnerable - those with the least job security - those with health/work issues and so on.

This overlaps with the group least likely to actually be able to purchase a home to begin with.

This issue will not be solved with free-market economics. Either one accepts the need for some layer of free social housing, or one accepts that a decent chunk of society will be homeless.

From what I've heard is a common thing for landlords to do is a "pay to vacate" where they show up at the door with $1k in cash if the tenant will just leave.

> show up at the door with $1k in cash

In SF, there have been six-figure buyouts to remove tenants from rent-controlled properties.

Sure, because those tenants signed contracts with perpetual leases (as also understood by the landlords who provided the contracts). Evicting in SF means you can't turn your property into a Condo (only a TIC) - so to maintain the value of the condo conversion option, landlords pay tenants to leave. The buyouts are proportional to the rent difference so it's not surprising that someone who's rent is increasing from say $1k/month to $4k/month would need a large sum of money (that's taxable!) to be convinced to leave.

Call the buyout $100k -- best case scenario, it's taxed as capital gains so you'd take home $85k. At $3k/month increase in rent, you'd be looking at a little over two years before you're below water.

Housing in California is broken in 1,000 different ways but the tenant buyouts seem to be pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.

if you go onto /r/landlord, you'll learn that "cash for keys" is (a) usually way more than $1k, and (b) not a fool-proof way of kicking someone out (since the squatter still need a place to live, and they know that the cash won't cover it). this was/is a huge HUGE issue with the COVID real estate moratoriums that popped up.

My ex got about $40k cash to vacate her rent-controlled studio. Because turning off the heat during winter, greasy trashbins in the hallway, and holes in the staircase weren't doing it. The building was mostly elderly NYers and she was one of the few millennials so waiting for her to die wasn't going to work either.

How does one accumulate $500K in damages and debt in 1 year? That's like $41k/month.

Some people don't take kindly to being kicked out, even if they're in the wrong, and there's not a lot you can do to stop them from causing hundreds of thousands in damages while you go through the process of evicting them.

The first house I lived at in California was part 2 of that - previous owners destroyed the place during a foreclosure, so we got what was previously an $800k house for $400k in a short sale by a bank. Took ~$50k to fix up because we were willing to do the work ourselves over about a year.

It was disgusting. Glass and other obstructions flushed down the pipes, literal feces on the walls, holes everywhere, missing parts of the ceiling, fixtures ripped out, etc.

Move-in process was essentially move all our stuff to a storage area, continue renting until we'd made the place no longer a biohazard, then we moved in slowly as we fixed up rooms.

But hey, a few hours of work a day for a year essentially saved a year of a FAANG salary on the place.

Damn. Props to you but i would rather be 400k poorer instead of doing that.

Was told by local sherrif who handled judgment related asset seizures as well as foreclosure sales that in our state the original owner can do as they wish, even after a court ordered foreclosure sale, until they day they are required/made to vacate. He had seen all kinds of wanton destruction by the outgoing former owners simply out of spite with repair bills likely in the 10s of thousands, if not more.

That's a little different than a tenant who is renting wrecking someone else's property though, as the sheriff said in the case of foreclosures it's still their property up until the forced vacate date and they can technically do whatever they want and can't be sued for the damages, whereas tenants can but in most cases it's simply not worth it because the people you're suing usually don't have any assets or positive net worth in the first place.

Legally different but still grudge and destruction with no or negligible chance of recourse.

buy three cats, and zero litter boxes, and zero litter. make sure they aren't neutered. get a single male cat since, hey, he's got needs.

cook lots of greasy ass food and drain that oil straight down the sink. toss condoms, paper towels, hell, ANYTHING, down the toilet, since it's basically a trash dispenser, right?

once you're done having the cats pee their way through the foundation (cat urine DESTROYS houses) and destroying the plumbing, steal some copper on your way out with some friends.

oh, and this is a pre-war establishment where everything is absolutely not up to code.

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