Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

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> and property owners provide almost no value, but to provide access to housing for people who has no capital for it, which is service that could be perfectly provided by a state entity.

Property of course requires maintenance and management, so the sleight of hand here is to define away all those aspects of ownership so that by definition all that's meant by "landlord" is "old guy who cashes checks."

But somebody has to maintain the property, somebody has to prioritize upgrades and improvements, somebody has to cut the grass, somebody has to pay the taxes, somebody has to -- yes -- collect and cash the checks. Somebody has to respond to tenant requests and emergencies. Somebody has to advertise the property when it's vacant. Someone conducts showings and screens tenants. And, maybe most important, somebody assumes the risk of a bad tenant or a down market or a declining neighborhood. And so on and so on.

Whether all this is done by the owner personally or hired out is irrelevant. There's no reason to believe government can perform these functions better than private owners in a market.

A simple proof that landlording is not free/easy money is to realize that millions of middle- and upper-middle class Americans who -- if not today, certainly 5 years ago before this most recent run-up in prices -- could, if they wanted to, afford to buy property and become landlords, but they mostly do not do it. And since nobody turns down free/easy money, landlording simply cannot be free/easy money. QED.

I've repeatedly been told by people who've done it (including my parents) never to become a landlord, because it's absolute hell and you'll end up making under minimum wage and tenants will fuck you over until you're even in the red and it's impossible & expensive to evict anyone even when they're not paying and causing more and more damage to the house with each passing day.

Then again, I've had others tell me it's awesome, you just have to pick your location carefully (one exclusively bought very close to nursing schools, which seemed to select for tenants who'd stick around at least a couple years and who'd pay their rent and not run a meth lab or smear shit on the walls or anything like that).

Yes, because one thing a landlord does is assume the risk of bad tenants and high-turnover. Good, stable, long-term tenants hate this -- "Why am I paying so much for rent, when my landlord doesn't seem to do anything?" -- but as long as you're a renter you're going to pay for this risk one way or another. And it's not at all clear that you can socialize this risk and still end up with units anybody in their right mind wants to live in. Yes, I know about Vienna. This ain't Vienna. There's very little evidence the U.S. is capable of doing it. Public housing here is inevitably a race to the bottom.

Found the landlord XD.

FWIW, I'm with you, I think rental income ("landlording") and airbnb-ing are both legitimate demand, and the system would work fairly if we didn't have artificial constraints on supply.

Insofar as landlords actively work to constraint supply to artificial inflate rents, it is immoral behavior (but 'muh' neighborhood) and we should not allow it.

Technically true. I owner-occupy a duplex, so I maintain exactly one rental unit. Unfortunately for me, I'm too high in conscientiousness to be a cutthroat landlord and I keep dumping money into improvements without raising rents, even though I could easily do nothing and raise my tenant's rent hundreds of dollar per month in this market. What I would like is for my work on this property to mean something and for all my competition to lose their shirts in a market that wasn't artificially supply-constrained.

> But somebody has to maintain the property, somebody has to prioritize upgrades and improvements, somebody has to cut the grass

In many buildings these things are simply not done.

Now that I've said some nice things about landlords, I'll say something less flattering: bad landlords find convenient cover in supply-constrained markets. Which, of course, is what we have. If you want to stick it to lazy, cheap, do-nothing landlords, then let somebody build a brand-new apt complex right next door to their crappy units and see how long they can get away with their insouciance in that kind of market.

If a landlord does not maintain the property, over the long run they will not be able to charge the same rent versus a similar, maintained unit.

I've used this to my advantage before. I moved into a building that needed a fresh coat of paint and had poor reviews of their maintenance and saved ~10-15% from market rent because I didn't care about appearances and am handy enough to fix a leaky faucet, etc. myself.

Sure they’ll lose relative to the place next door, but they’ll win relative to their same unit 10 years ago because the land underneath their building (and the amenities around it) have increased in value so dramatically.

Right, but who cares? Are we trying to soak rich people or are we trying to make sure there's an abundance of housing? Are we trying to help the poor? Or are we mostly concerned with knocking the rich down a peg?

Uhhh, I care that we create incentives that yield desired behavior: building high quality housing that supports growth and mitigates urban squalor.

The current state is the actual opposite of that incentive. You can just buy up a parking lot in downtown Manhattan, pay ~$0 taxes on it, and keep it off the market while people continue to struggle to find housing and prices continue to climb. Then when the land has appreciated (through no actions of your own, in fact in spite of your own actions) you can sell for millions of dollars of upside.

Maybe I don't do it because I find it morally questionable, not because I don't think it's free and easy money. I'll absolutely turn down free and easy money for something I think is wrong.

Maybe they realize that being a landlord is an economically and societally destructive measure that saps productive capital from working and middle class. It’s vampiric. And awful.

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