Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

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I'll take a shot and someone with domain expertise can opine on my low-effort take.

In kaibee's first paragraph, there's a missing question: Is it collusion to pay someone to set rates accordingly by using information and decision-making processes you yourself could not have gotten on your own?

I think this is the key. E.g., looking at Zillow could tell a given landlord that they need to charge more rent for a given unit. But looking at Zillow couldn't tell that same landlord to, say, keep that unit vacant for months in the hopes there is a multi-landlord unit-vacancy plan to increase prices across a city. And IIRC, these kinds of decisions have been made by a lot of landlords in a lot of these markets.

In fact, if I'm a landlord, I'm not going to take that risk unless I've got a good reason to believe that a) the software I'm relying on is used by the vast majority of other landlords, and b) the software is advising and strongly incentivizing everyone else to do the same thing. (And possibly that there are penalties if the other landlords don't make that move.)

I think the problem here is that marketplaces need to be neutral and regulated as public utilities.

The same thing happens with amazon stealing vendor business, and arbitrarily banning people without legal recourse. When you set the market, you can't be allowed to dictate who participates.

Its the same core problem. These private marketplaces grow to the point where everyone depends on them and then shenanigans ensue

I agree. I think the crucial functionality is the common knowledge of common knowledge that no one else will renege on the deal. That’s effectively cartelization.

Part of this may be driven by the laws that prevent landlords from evicting tenants or raising rates.

The US court system is really dropping the ball here. Simple evictions for nonpayment should take a week and almost no legal costs. Instead, I am looking at 6+ months of lawyer and court costs in some of the states.

And this is at hotels. Our solution? Force all hotel guests to checkout before reaching the statutory number of nights that afford them tenant protections. Which is massively inconveniencing responsible people, all because the government wants to protect scammers.

In general, all of these "protections" just result in higher costs for everybody.

Somewhat, some people suffer more costs than others. Scammers benefit from the protections, and responsible people shoulder the cost.

Politicians should be providing housing to people if they want them to not be homeless, or paying the housing vendor. It’s easier to get elected by promising housing and low taxes though, and punt the costs onto select portions of the populace who play a game of trying to determine who is going to use the laws to scam them, which ends up resulting in discrimination.

What do you think would happen if the government offered free middle class housing?

Conversing about anything involving the term “middle class” without an extensive definition of it is a waste of time.

Obviously, free too much of anything skews incentives. But the consequences of homelessness should not be borne by select portions of the population.

We all know what the middle class is.

No, no they shouldn't. We don't really want folks who lost their job last week to be out this week with all their possessions on the sidewalk. Everyone should have the option of a court date and some degree of legal help before ending up on the street in case they are getting cheated even if some people misused this.

It is absolutely impossible to ensure good faith and lawful process by having the landlord make an unverifiable assertion followed by the cops kicking people out a week later. This isn't enough time to schedule a hearing let alone have the counter party getting representation. Furthermore factually society as a whole is better off as a whole if we have fewer people with crashed lives living like hobos on the sidewalk so its advantageous for such a process to be orderly and slow enough that people land somewhere other than flat on their back.

People staying long term in hotels is an extreme edge case we shouldn't optimize the rest of the system for.

What the law is telling you is that if you offer long term tenancy you are a landlord even if you call yourself a hotel. This and your decision not to get into the landlord business both seem to me perfectly acceptable. To quantify this let me ask you a question.

How many of your folks staying over 30 days were planning on staying indefinitely? If the majority of the folks planning on staying 30 days were planning to leave in 90 perhaps the threshold should be increased to accommodate contractors and students who might need accommodations.

If most of the folks over 30 days are lifers then maybe the threshold is already accurately set.

> We don't really want folks who lost their job last week to be out this week with all their possessions on the sidewalk.

Cool, then that “we” (government, voters, taxpayers), should pony up for all the time that a tenant ends up staying and not paying.

Otherwise, what “we” want is for a certain subset of society to subsidize not having people out on the sidewalk, as opposed to having it come from government coffers where everyone’s taxes would pay.

Another option is for the government to provide housing for people.

>It is absolutely impossible to ensure good faith and lawful process by having the landlord make an unverifiable assertion followed by the cops kicking people out a week later. This isn't enough time to schedule a hearing let alone have the counter party getting representation.

I disagree. We have computers, broadband, and electronic databases. It takes 2 minutes to prove if you did or did not pay someone.

Hell, in my case, I have an email from the squatter explicitly stating they will no longer pay unless they get a reduced price AND that they have done this to other hotels in the past AND that they waited until the statutory time passed so they could take advantage of eviction wait times.

Most of the negative things that can happen to a business aren't covered by uncle sam.

Broadband and computers make it easier to transmit an unverifiable assertion prepared wholly by one side. The way you verify this is you have a human being listen to both sides.

Without this we wouldn't capture

- failure to keep proper records

- recording the payment in the wrong account

- inappropriate or illegal charges

- rent being legally withheld

- lost or stolen money orders including stolen by employees of landlord

- disputes over whom was supposed to get paid in situations where custody of property was disputed

- malicious lies

Again its pretty clear that your accommodations for the night and your home ought to be treated substantially differently. For 36% of American households their home is the linchpin of their life and livelihood. I don't think we ought to undermine a process essential to the lives of tens of millions of people to help out a couple of hundreds of low rent hoteliers deal with squatters.

We already normally deal with hotel guests who won't leave substantially different then tenants in most states usually by establishing a threshold beyond which one goes from A -> B and a simple process by which one removes unwanted guests different from the process to remove tenants.

I do have to wonder if complainants are dealing with situations arising effectively providing long term housing in fact if not in law eg slum level accommodations rented cheaply by the week or if the process of removing non-paying guests in hotels in your state is just well and truly broken and instead of fixing it you are suggesting breaking the process which tens of millions rely on instead for the benefit of mere dozens of hoteliers

> Broadband and computers make it easier to transmit an unverifiable assertion prepared wholly by one side. The way you verify this is you have a human being listen to both sides.

And this should not take months. Otherwise, all this technology society has developed is all for nought. You can literally take a laptop or phone into court and login to bank accounts to prove payment. If someone wants to bribe or hack into bank servers and commit fraud, then obviously we can get higher powers involved at that point.

> I don't think we ought to undermine a process essential to the lives of tens of millions of people to help out a couple of hundreds of low rent hoteliers deal with squatters.

I agree, and the government should pay for it, not “a couple of hundred low rent hoteliers” (not sure what purpose the denigrating adjective serves, as if a business providing lower priced services is somehow bad for society).

> instead of fixing it you are suggesting breaking the process which tens of millions rely on instead for the benefit of mere dozens of hoteliers

I never suggested “breaking” the process. I suggested fixing the legal system, which is clearly understaffed or overly bureaucratic. And it helps everyone, not just a “few dozen hoteliers”.

What you (and current politicians) seem to want is a “few dozen hoteliers” to provide housing for free for the benefit of all taxpayers, allowing you to have lower taxes.

> I never suggested “breaking” the process. I suggested fixing the legal system, which is clearly understaffed or overly bureaucratic.

That bureaucracy is called process and it exists for reasons that are out of scope of your deadbeats.

> I never suggested “breaking” the process. I suggested fixing the legal system, which is clearly understaffed or overly beauricrafic.

There is no way to fix the process that would allow you to remove a long term tenant in a week and there isn't a political will to sink millions to billions into staff to allow such matters to be handle them much more expeditiously. Society wouldn't experience a net gain and has finite resources.

> not sure what purpose the denigrating adjective serves

It serves to identify the nature of the problem. You have a problem in that you are offering long term tenancy to people who don't qualify for long term tenancy other places. You are trying to do that by pretending its short term tenancy and are frustrated that the rules of long term tenancy applies. Instead of calling the cops to roust a trespassing guest who didn't pay for this 3rd day you are having to evict folks who can't or wont pay after months or years.

You have deliberately adopted a known broken niche and in a way are providing a valuable service to society and are pissed that society neither wants to fix the niche nor acknowledge that value.

> There is no way to fix the process that would allow you to remove a long term tenant in a week and there isn't a political will to sink millions to billions into staff to allow such matters to be handle them much more expeditiously. Society wouldn't experience a net gain and has finite resources.

So then society can pay the rent if it is determined that the tenant is not paying. Problem fixed.

The reason this does not happen is because society wants to get away with sticking certain subsets of the population with the cost who don’t have the political capital to fight it.

This is untenable it would incentivize landlords in your position to carry nonpayers indefinitely at everyone's expense. All your problems aren't societies to fix.

It is if society is the one enforcing the requirement to keep someone on my property.

Also, the simple solution is that the government pays the rent only for time after the business files an eviction claim with the court. After that, the ball is in the court’s court.

Society doesn't pay folks to install fire doors or sprinklers even though it makes you have them. It doesn't pay for the requirements for a restaurateur to follow food safety guidelines.

Not analogous to litigating theft.

There is no analogous situation in law or American history in which private loss is put upon the public merely because the public made you go through proper procedures.

The tenant caused your loss and you can't recover it from the people. Any such procedure would entirely break the model whereby landlords select tenants based on the expectations of remuneration. If the entire government could be made to bear the cost upon request of unpaid rent landlords would be substantially less apt to be careful in their selection.

>If the entire government could be made to bear the cost upon request of unpaid rent landlords would be substantially less apt to be careful in their selection.

This would be a good thing, usually people denounce it as “discrimination”. It’s why you “need” a credit card to stay at a decent hotel, it is a credit check by proxy because the hotel operator cannot count on the police to do their job and remove people.

These types of government policies only end up hurting poorer people who have no credit.

If we are going to go out of pocket 10s of billions of dollars per year I'd rather it be in help to keep people in their homes rather than largess paid out to a class of people that by and large are already in the top 10%.

You made an investment decision (allowing hotel guests to legally become tenants) and it ended poorly for you. Why should the government bail you out for “almost no cost”? The legal system doesn’t exist to insulate you from risk.

It did not use to take 6+ months to evict a non paying tenant. This is a post Covid phenomenon. That is an insane amount of time to prove that someone did not pay you. How can anyone trust in the legal system if such a simple thing takes so long to get resolved?

The legal system should exist to remedy legal disputes, for everyone, in a timely manner. Whether it be a big business or a small business or a personal dispute.

A clogged legal system where simple disputes take an inordinate time to resolve is a sign of decay and corruption. You end up with people losing trust in the system, so now you have an incentive to take advantage, because others are going to take advantage of you. And then it becomes a game of who you know (more than it already is), or taking matters into your own hands.

I’m sorry you failed to react to changing market conditions. Have you considered reinvesting in a less risky sector, like index funds?

We did react once we had the information. Do you expect businesses to monitor how long court cases take on a regular basis?

Now, our many long term hotel guest have to pack up all their shit after a certain number of nights and go stay at a different hotel. So society inconveniences productive people, and conveniences a scammer. Does not sound like a net win for society.

I don’t know if you are trolling, but if you are not, trust is worth a lot. Trust is what makes businesses in the developed world so productive, and lack of trust is what makes business so costly in the developing world.

I’m not trolling. I’m treating your business no different from any other business. You don’t deserve even more special treatment from the justice system merely because you’re a landlord.

One company I partly own sued a customer for nonpayment several years ago. Customer declared bankruptcy. Sucks for all the same reasons as your relatively tiny tenant dispute. At the next board meeting, we didn’t waste our time bemoaning the existence of bankruptcy protection—after all, we may benefit from it ourselves someday. Instead we developed plans for how to mitigate the risk of nonpayment in the future.

You run a business; act like it. Accept the inherent danger of swimming or get out of the pool.

> You don’t deserve even more special treatment from the justice system merely because you’re a landlord.

I never wrote that I did. I merely provided an example showing the consequences of not having properly functioning courts.

I am not bemoaning protections for tenants. I am bemoaning not clearing the dispute for inordinate amounts of time. Which leads to discrimination.

> Accept the inherent danger of swimming or get out of the pool.

I would rather not see my country become the developing country my parents moved away from, hence spreading an opinion about this issue (which is broader than just tenant laws).

By adding risk to being a landlord, the result is higher rental rates to cover the risk.

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