Yep, easy come easy go. The quickest way to get landlords to become less selective would be to let them toss freeloaders on their ass on day one of delinquency.
I've wondered about taking a different approach: The landlord is free to evict on the day of delinquency, but must move the possessions to a storage facility (paying a month's rent at that time) and they must post a substantial bond. If the tenant shows the eviction was improper they get the bond + costs. (And I would apply the same thing to foreclosures.)
Instead of a long process of showing that they are acting properly they are putting up a substantial financial promise that they are acting properly. Make improper actions a costly mistake and there will be few of them.
The quickest way to get landlords to become less selective is to say "any vacant apartment/home not occupied by at least one fulltime resident can be claimed by someone homeless as of [date]." You'd have landlords begging people to sign leases (and people would because then they would get a sure nice apartment as opposed to a lottery for one of the few ones left).
Now, that produces bad other results, but so does allowing people's homes to be ripped away from them at a moments notice.
This is basically extreme squatter's rights. Places which have those produce some combination of people paying guards, those who can't afford guards taking matters into their own hands, people demolishing perfectly-good housing to avoid risking the land, et cetera.
You’re proposing to reassign millions of dollars of property based on various levels of evidence for whether someone was physically present? That’s basically the 90s in Russia.
It’s certainly a neat fictional universe. I imagine everyone who can afford to would live in a hotel, leaving the scramble of defending your property to those who can’t. Also, fraud. Lots of fraud.
After a couple years, nice family leaves, so you spend long time to find another nice family to fit into the house you worked hard to provide. Instead Kommisar come along, give house to homeless in name of proletariat. Social welfare bureau hold lottery, and the neighborhood violent drunk under the bridge is ecstatic his number came up, as he was very sad he no longer has home to beat wife in. Much vodka is drunk while copper piping is gutted and appliances scrapped to dealers in nearby Ossetia.
Sit back and cry: I work on potato farm for 15 years to build nice second home to house hard working families! Instead government create lottery and hands to drunk who destroys house in only 15 days. Decide to stop trying. Start drinking everyday. Become a drunk yourself, enter the lottery, now you gut houses of others to survive. Process repeats -- now all units look like Grozny in the late 90s.
Mission accomplished.
Responsible people who don't rip up housing are sought after and pay a reasonable rental rate. People who buy and sit on property are taken out of the system. A new equilibrium is reached and most people take reasonable care of their rental properties they are given because they don't want to have to enter lotteries that will likely end them up in a slum. Homeless people end up in better than the street.
Everyone has a primary residence. I'm saying, if the only goal is to force landlords to rent out houses, simply have any residential property without at least one person identifying it as their primary residence given away by the state, ideally in a lottery. It would only change things for landlords. And I don't know what "fraud" would be engaged in. I suppose a couple could rent two apartments only needing one, but I don't see why a landlord would do that as opposed to renting to someone who presumably wants it and would pay money.
You’re not sure they will pay the money or not trash the place. Same reason landlords are hesitant about renting in the real world.
In any case, this would be defeated by enlisting family members as back-up primary residents. (As in the old world, when property rights were enforced at sword point, sucks to be someone without a dependable family.) Though, again, the wealthy would likely opt out of renting and favour not owning or just own a single massive house and opt out of renting.
The fraud would be in people lying about their primary residences. Also, people lying about others’ lack of primary residence to appropriate their homes for their cronies. The injured family would be homeless while fighting for their property back, which somewhat compromises their ability to engage.
I don't see how. The family members still have to live somewhere. Oh no, the person rents to their kid as opposed to a stranger! It still means that wherever that kid was going to live otherwise isn't rented out to them and is on the market.
> fraud would be in people lying about their primary residences.
Yeah, I don't see how. Everyone gets one. So, if you don't need a home and are responsible maybe you get hired to rent out an empty place? It doesn't scale.
> people lying about others’ lack of primary residence to appropriate their homes for their cronies.
That's stupid. It seems just as possible as people lying to get your bank account. There are all kinds of ways that people have to let the government know where their primary residence is.
The kid could have been living at home. One spouse in one house, one spouse in the other. Et cetera.
> just as possible as people lying to get your bank account
You're proposing an ad hoc centralized mechanism for expropriating and re-assigning a multi-trillion dollar asset class. This has clear and one-way precedence in history.
Yes. If the "super-fraud" is that 18 year olds move out to unclaimed apartments or that couples can have a vacation house, I am remarkably okay with that.
> You're proposing an ad hoc centralized mechanism for expropriating and re-assigning a multi-trillion dollar asset class. This has clear and one-way precedence in history.
Except for the ad-hoc nature, the fact that property records and ownership (as well as lists of people's primary residences) are already centralized, that centralization and decentralization of real estate have precedence within the same society at different times, I totally agree. So I guess that's "multi-trillion dollar asset class" I agree with.
What an entitled viewpoint. It's not their home; an entirely different person owns it and they failed to hold up to their end of the contract for the terms under which the owner agreed to let them occupy it. The person having their home ripped away at a moment's notice is the landlord.
It's not their house. It certainly is their home. I would prefer those be the same person as often as possible to align incentives.
> they failed to hold up to their end of the contract for the terms under which the owner agreed to let them occupy it
Tenants, like many contract participants, have legal rights that cannot be waived (see also minimum wage.) They also have contractual rights due to the contract.
It's not uncommon for landlords to be the first party to breach the contract either intentionally (e.g. losing checks to move a tenant at below market rates out), neglectfully (e.g. ignoring upkeep or repairs) or unintentionally (e.g. entering at will).
Certainly, withholding rent from a breaching landlord is appropriate while the breach is resolved.
> The person having their home ripped away at a moment's notice is the landlord.
Unless the landlord lives there, the landlord's home is unrelated to the property.
If you take something you're obliged to pay for without paying for it, it isn't "yours."
>Tenants, like many contract participants, have legal rights that cannot be waived (see also minimum wage.) They also have contractual rights due to the contract.
Minimum wage is another thing that crushes the poor, as do eviction protections. Both serve to make jobs/housing (respectively) more difficult for the poor to acquire via regulatory barriers.
>Certainly, withholding rent from a breaching landlord is appropriate while the breach is resolved.
Conversely, withholding housing from a breaching tenant is appropriate.
>Unless the landlord lives there, the landlord's home is unrelated to the property.
In the US, "Home" can simply mean a house [1]. My apologies if you're using a different dialect of English and I misunderstood; I was using home as it's used in one common interpretation of the word in English in my country.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/home : refer to 1b
Although I don't see how that clause would be enforceable. A tenant almost certainly doesn't have enough assets to go after to make up for a building. Otherwise they could have bought the home for their own use.
Unfortunately, temporarily homeless people have a habit of turning into chronic homeless people. And living in a city that's full of chronic homeless people, I don't think we need more.
Your comfort and convenience as a landlord does not rank higher than my desire to not step over human shit on my way to work.
Your comfort and convenience to have the option not to pay a landlord does not rank higher than the desire of homeless to have better access to housing. Places with homeless problems badly need to remove these protections from renters.
Eviction protections are incredibly helpful at preventing people on the margin from ending up homeless, by increasing the friction of evictions for landlords. This is absolutely necessary, because the cost to the tenant of getting kicked out of where they live is enormous - doubly and triply so if you are the kind of marginal person that gets kicked out of their home. It is incredibly disruptive to their life - much moreso than for someone in a stable situation not being able to find a different place to live.
Remove friction from evictions, and everyone on the margins is constantly at risk of losing their home - and once you do so, your ability to stay afloat becomes incredibly precarious.
If, on one extreme, tenancies were for life, and you had no way to kick someone out of a unit, you'd have an 'unfair' but stable distribution of housing. There would be very few life disruptions to people's lives, at the cost of housing being stuck in a local optimum.
If, on the other extreme, tenancies were day to day, and you constantly had to outbid other contenders for your apartment, you'd have a 'fair' but incredibly unstable distribution of housing. Between the incredibly high pain of moving/looking for a new place to live, anyone on the margins would suffer incredibly from this.
Economists rage against a stable but 'suboptimal' distribution of goods. But people whose lives constantly get upended from the instabilities of an 'optimal' distribution of goods are the ones who will suffer.
Harm minimization is exactly why there is more friction to throwing someone out of their house than 'the landlord feels like it'.
These protections determine that quality of tenant preferred is higher, thus vulnerably are forced away during a shortage. For those who are accepted, risks mean increased housing costs and thus lower access to the poor.
>Eviction protections are incredibly helpful at preventing people on the margin from ending up homeless, by increasing the friction of evictions for landlords. This is absolutely necessary, because the cost to the tenant of getting kicked out of where they live is enormous. It is incredibly disruptive to their life - much moreso than not being able to find a different place to live.
Eviction protections are incredibly _harmful_ at allowing those on the margin to avoid homelessness, by increasing the friction of becoming a tenant. This is absolutely unnecessary, because the cost of a tenant refusing to leave after non-payment can be _enormous_. It is incredibly disruptive to the housing market -- much more so than not being able to find a different tenant to rent to.
>Remove friction from evictions, and everyone on the margins is constantly at risk of losing their home - and once you do so, your ability to stay afloat becomes incredibly precarious.
I'd argue the opposite, those at the margins who are able to meet their commitment but otherwise look bad at paper are at incredibly higher likelihood to gain a home -- and once you gain a home, your ability to stay afloat becomes much less precarious.
>If, on one extreme, tenancies were for life, and you had no way to kick someone out of a unit, you'd have an 'unfair' but stable distribution of housing. There would be very few life disruptions to people's lives, at the cost of housing being stuck in a local optimum.
This is achievable via something close to the 99-year leases available in many nations, where you prepay the lease up-front. You can negotiate for one of these if you can find a voluntary counterparty.
>If, on the other extreme, tenancies were day to day, and you constantly had to outbid other contenders for your apartment, you'd have a 'fair' but incredibly unstable distribution of housing. Between the incredibly high pain of moving/looking for a new place to live, anyone on the margins would suffer incredibly from this.
That's basically what a hotel is, which those on the margins often end up in due to renter protections that introduce risk for landlords to take in those on the margins.
>Economists rage against a stable but 'suboptimal' distribution of goods. But people whose lives constantly get upended from the instabilities of an 'optimal' distribution of goods are the ones who will suffer.
Renter protections make it look more 'optimal' to rent to the rich and stable. We're actually in a suboptimal state that disfavors the homeless, and allowing a freer market would give better opportunities to the homeless.
>Harm minimization is exactly why there is more friction to throwing someone out of their house than 'the landlord feels like it'.
Increasing regulatory barriers to homeless gaining housing is harm maximization, and should be eliminated. These renter protections maximize harm.
I am sirry but this sounds like youve never seen the bottomn of the housing market and what actually goes on there, and basically live in cloud coocooland.
I know a landlord who should be in jail for abusing student tenants, commiting fraud on deposits, renting out houses with mold, rats and leaking riofs, without working heating. Safety railing on stairs sre attached with hot glue. After years of criminality she got a RangeRover and a small fine.
>I am sirry but this sounds like youve never seen the bottomn of the housing market and what actually goes on there, and basically live in cloud coocooland.
Well at one point (and not so long ago) I lived in a closet in a basement for ~$100 a month in a relatively nice part of Oregon, and frankly I was damn happy someone was willing to look beyond the "formal" means available. Had only the "legitimate" means been available to me, I definitely would have been homeless. Renter protections would have eliminated the only housing available to me. I'm definitely no stranger to "substandard" housing.
>I know a landlord who should be in jail for abusing student tenants, commiting fraud on deposits, renting out houses with mold, rats and leaking riofs, without working heating.
Agree that elimination of renter protections should go hand in hand with elimination of landlord protections: that is, if someone moves out because the landlord hasn't held up to his end of the contract (provide habitable housing), then there should be no protection for that landlord in the courts to force the tenant to continue paying.