Comment by pixelatedindex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pixelatedindex | Hacker News Reader

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> You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house. If you're a building owner, there are reasons that you might want to be able to have freedom of choice in choosing who you have live in your building.

That’s basically discrimination? Make a strict selection criteria, that’s fine. The city also has affordable housing for people who don’t qualify. You set what works for you, why do you care if it’s too strict?

I am not acting like there is an oligopoly, but not having tenant protections means tenants are at the mercy of shitty landlords. And there are a TON of them. Am I not supposed to have any rights, and the landlords gets to do whatever they want? Free market doesn’t mean regulation free.

Edit: you said “We should be creating incentives and making it easy for individual homeowners to become landlords (at least in Seattle) if we want the paradigm to improve.” - what do you propose? What about landlords who don’t want housing built because they like owning a scarce asset? What kind of rights do you think tenants should have?

Yes, discrimination based upon characteristics that aren't immutable is perfectly fine and something we do every day. I discriminate against my neighbor who invited me over drinks in favor of my best friend who invited me to his birthday. I discriminate against the potential hire who doesn’t have experience in this line of work in favor of the person who’s a nationally renowned expert. I discriminate against a tenant with a history of failing to make rent in favor of someone who consistently provides payment every month. People are different and valuing one over another in specific contexts is hardly scandalous. It only becomes a proble if you decide to discriminate against someone based upon immutable characteristics such as their race, sex, national origin, etc. because you’re not treating them as an individual.

I get where you’re coming from, but none of them are scarce inelastic resources. The work one especially doesn’t feel like discrimination.

It’s also very different - you’re hiring someone to do a job for you, vs wanting someone who’ll pay rent on time and not destroy the property. A mediocre employee vs an excellent employee can make any huge difference to a business.

That’s not the case with renters - if person A and person B both pay on time and don’t trash the place then they are quite fungible.

Your experience as a renter is not the same as the experience of a landlord. If you've been on your first job for a month and you pinky swear to pay rent on time and the next candidate has been on their job for 3 years then I'll take that candidate every time. It's a risk calculation. You are more likely to lose your job than the other candidate, and when you do and can't pay rent anymore and won't leave then that is a very expensive problem for me.

The same goes for savings, credit score, and other factors. These are not nearly as fungible as you seem to think.

If everyone did that then how’s the person with a new job able to get a home? They might not all do it but it severely affects choices.

You also have more capacity to absorb a short vacancy in case this person is to lose their job. Can’t derisk your way out of everything.

It sounds like you never had to deal with shitty landlords, or didn’t really struggle too much in life.

> If everyone did that then how’s the person with a new job able to get a home?

That's exactly my point. If the regulations weren't so insane and burdensome (see other posters' points on not being able to evict promptly for nonpayment, for example) then the person with the brand new job would be able to quickly rent a home because it's not an undue risk for a landlord.

You can't ask landlords on the one hand to open their home to anyone, and on the other hand deny them the right to remove tenants that don't hold up their end of the bargain. Do you not see how that's completely unfair?

> You also have more capacity to absorb a short vacancy in case this person is to lose their job.

That is not a universal truth. Landlords have debt service/mortgage payments, taxes, maintenance, insurance and other payments. Especially smaller landlords actually do not - at all - have the capacity to absorb a vacancy or (even worse) a non-paying tenant.

> Can’t derisk your way out of everything.

Yes, but unduly moving risk from one party (tenant) to the other party (landlord) is certainly not the way to go either. If I just take your car and you don't have any recourse to get it back for 6+ months because the courts are backlogged and everyone else goes "well, you have a car, so you must be wealthy, what are you complaining about?" how would that make you feel?

> if person A and person B both pay on time and don’t trash the place then they are quite fungible.

Based on those two sole criteria, no, they aren't. Person A might call weekly about trivial matters that they should be taking care of themselves (lightbulb burned out, oven needs cleaning, refrigerator water filter needs replacement, etc.), while person B just takes care of things and doesn't bother the landlord.

Yeah but you can’t eat your cake and have it too. Part of renting is responding to complaints. If you don’t want to do that then you shouldn’t be renting.

I had a landlord ask me “you’re not going to call me for basic things right?”. I’m paying you money, I’ll call you whenever I want. Didn’t rent from him. You can tell me do it yourself but why would I put money into someone else’s property?

This is such binary thinking. People have different ways of interacting with people. Some people are easier to deal with than others, and that was the parents' point, not that they never want to respond to reasonable complaints.

Landlords should provide well maintained housing and respond to reasonable complaints, and tenants should be swiftly evicted if they don't pay rent or destroy the unit they're living in. That's fair to both sides.

> That’s basically discrimination?

Discrimination is fine, as long as the discrimination is not based on protected classes. If I were a landlord, I'd discriminate against people who act like assholes, for example, regardless of their ability to pay the rent, my rationale being that an asshole will likely be a problem tenant. And that I just don't enjoy dealing with assholes. Not sure "no assholes" is a reasonable thing to list on an official rental advertisement.

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