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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

There's an economic floor for the price of housing: the amortized cost of the building and its maintenance, plus taxes and overhead imposed by governments, utilities, mortgages, etc.

In other words: even in a plentiful housing market, there will always be someone who struggles to pay rent (including transiently), because a rational housing market can't offer $0 rents. Tenant protection laws exist to protect that person from a landlord who would otherwise be incentivized to throw them onto the street.

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Yeah… these laws for private landlords to subsidize housing for other families.

If you only have 1 rental property and your tenant doesn’t pay, that’s a 100% loss of revenue while your family personally bears the cost of supporting this other family.

Whereas corporate landlords can absorb these losses by raising rents on 100 doors to cover the families that refuse to pay

Don't rent it then. All these laws are designed to make being a landlord hell so that people won't be landlords.

So it's better that huge corporate landlords own all the rentable housing stock?

You seem to be assuming that if we, say, just made renting illegal, everyone would a) want to own a home, and b) have the finances necessary to do so. That's not the case.

So, you would like there to be less housing, which makes housing more scarce and raises prices on everyone else?

My house fits up to 6 adults, but only 3 are living there now because I don’t want to be a landlord.

Having 3 empty rooms helps no one except corporate landlords that can navigate and scale (and collude…).

Maybe the lesson is just to not be so overleveraged.

If grandma pays 90% less taxes than me (prop13), where is the leverage?

If grandma bought the the house in 1990 and property values have risen faster than wages and inflation, where is the leverage?

If grandma is under insured, either due to the insurance company not updating coverages with inflation or no insurance bc she isn’t required to, where is the leverage?

The leverage I am talking about is being a landlord where most of your cash flow is dependent on one or a handful of tenants reliably paying rent. Maybe it would have been better to not be a single owner of a fourplex, but to go in with 20 other people on ownership of an underlying llc of that fourplex, and invest in another 19 similarly structured fourplex llc's. Same investment but de risked due to spreading it across some 80 people paying rent vs just four people. Or you can just put that money into REITs where now its what several hundred or maybe thousands of people in the tenancy pool you are investing in.

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