Sure that’s the capitalist narrative explanation. The actual, human, explanation is that landlords see that they can get away with charging absurd rates because consumers are willing to make dumb decisions to get what they want, so they do it.
I’m sick of these economic abstractions that constantly try to explain away our problems, and take away the responsibility from the human actors that cause these effects. It’s not some abstract “supply and demand” that we should focus on—it is the landlords and renters and their decisions that are to blame. We need to introduce some agency and accountability back into our discussions of economics otherwise capitalism will continue to be an abstract machine in which horribly unethical actions are justified by removing human actors and human culpability from the equation. Belief in “the market” is not dissimilar to religious belief. Furthermore, analyses in capitalist terms often lead us to more problems. If the problem is “supply”, people will say “ok build more homes”, but that first of all never seems to actually work and secondly has a large number of additional negative effects such as increasing overcrowding and climate problems.This ridiculous tendency to not actually blame the people responsible for these negative conditions is ridiculous. It’s a large part of the reason we’re in this mess.
I mean sure, if you want to address it from the demand end of things that would work if there were a viable solution.
The hard fact is that people want to live in large cities.
Even if you were to legislate that all landlords had to provide housing at cost + 5%, there would still be a demand for more housing as people desperately bid to enter those areas. Further more, you'd see people never give up those rentals because there would be a mile long waiting list for every property that is under rent control.
I have a lot of sympathy for people disgusted by the greed landlords display, but at the end of the day, the issue here is that more people want to live in these places than there are homes for them. So the wealthy bid their way in and everyone else be damned or destitute in order to compete.
If you want radical policy, eminent domain low density housing in city limits and build apartment rises on them.
That’s fair, but I don’t see how it would prevent similar effects from eventually spidering out to those city limit properties once the demands propagate to those areas.
I think the solution will require a mix of infrastructure solutions (building more homes) and regulatory solutions. I’m not saying landlords can’t make money, but there should definitely be greater restrictions around how much they can raise rates (which did exist, but which NYC is steadily removing) and renters need to be afforded more rights and protections too.
First off, city limit property is already seeing this effect.
Tenant protections in the USA suck. Big Time.
However landlords raising rates are a great signal that your infrastructure is failing somewhere. This is useful because it means you can look for and address the problem.
Some locations are going to be incredibly desireable and thus expensive, and that's okay, as long as there are options available for everyone else who can't afford them.
And as far as regulation solutions, removing mixed zoning restrictions would be a massive step forward in allowing development of construction that could address some of these issues. Being able to live within a minutes walk of groceries, restaurants etc. is such a freeing experience that is taken from too many due to zoning restrictions. Regulatory reform could fix that.
There is no system that can work in large scale and depend on the good will of all (or the majority of) participants.
If your system only works when everyone cooperates, you don't need the system in the first place. Believing that we can all live in this utopian ideal is more religious than "believing in the market"
I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s quite possible to introduce regulations into the existing system that force certain actors to behave. I’m not expecting anyone to behave without such restrictions, in fact this article is precisely the evidence that people will exploit others and the system when no such restrictions exist.
Many of these landlords are up charging on properties that have not been materially improved at all, because, as I said, people are making dumb decisions to live where they want to, so they can arbitrarily increase the price up to the limit of what someone will pay. This is great for landlords since they can double their money without doing any work.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m really frustrated by these incoming renters too. A lot of these people fled and abandoned the city like complete cowards when the pandemic hit and suddenly they want to return while they left the responsibility of keeping the city going on all the rest of us that are actual residents that stayed. These semi-nomadic people are just as bad as the landlords and want to live somewhere only so long as it benefits them—they have no allegiance to a community. This, in conjunction with land owners behavior creates disastrous effects for actual long-term residents who invest in the local communities and don’t run away the second things get hard.
>I’m saying it’s quite possible to introduce regulations into the existing system that force certain actors to behave.
Tell me how you want to reinvent taxes and rent control, without knowing that you want to reinvent taxes and rent control.
> I’m really frustrated by these incoming renters too.
You are passing judgment to all these different groups of people, without any shred of fundamental principle to justify why they need to act the way you want.
They don't owe anything to you or the city. Stop complaining like a spoiled child.
Of course not. And I don’t owe them anything either. By the same terms of your argument there’s no reason I should be satisfied with just letting them do what they want when it affects me directly since you’re stating that I should not try to do anything that affects them directly. I have my desires, which requires placing demands on their behavior since they are ignorant of the conditions of other human beings, act entirely selfishly and in a vacuum, and ruin things for the rest of us.
The fundamental principle is that people that are short-term renters disrupt communities in negative ways by having economic effects that harm long-term residents and ultimately break the existing community. I’m passing judgement on them because I witnessed the mass exodus that happened in 2020 and I witnessed all the struggle those who stayed had to endure and I witnessed the mass return of people that fled to “safer” spaces come back as though nothing happened and absolutely screw over everyone that stayed.
You must not have ever been subject to gentrification. You’ve got a real empathetic heart. I’m not “complaining” I’m trying to speak to the problem and suggest that existing solutions clearly are not enough. If anything is childish it’s your post, which tries to effectively say “we tried everything, there’s no possible other solution” and “in spite of the insane number of problems currently evident in our economics capitalism is fine and people should be able to manipulate the market without bound”. Your post has effectively no intellectual content. Being upset about something, evoking an opinion, and trying to advocate that we need a solution that will not only benefit myself but also the thousands of others affected by insane rent costs is not “acting like a spoiled child”, in my opinion. Do I have that solution? No, of course not. I’m not qualified. But if we restricted commentary on hacker news to professionally qualified individuals this thread would have close to 0 comments.
> just letting them do what they want when it affects me directly
Unless someone straight up breached their contract to evict and give "your" apartment to someone else, you were not affected "directly" by anything.
> I have my desires, which requires placing demands on their behavior
Desires? Is this really the word that you want to use? The more you write, the more you are displaying your sense of entitlement.
> (your post) which tries to effectively say “we tried everything, there’s no possible other solution”
There is absolutely no point where I said anything like that. Please stop assuming things. If you want to restart the conversation around that, by all means let's do it. But if you want to argue by baseless statements, I'm not your person.
EDIT: Ok, after the parent edit I am convinced you’re a little bit more reasonable, however, I can tell you’ve already made up your mind and are more interested in defending your position (which you haven’t actually ever elaborated) and making reductive claims about the character of your opponents (that they are just “complaining” or “entitled”) than actually having a discussion. You seem to want your interlocutor to follow all the polite rules of discussion while abandoning them all yourself.
My rent increased significantly for no reason other than a shift in market rates. I struggle to see how this does not count as being directly effected.
Yes. Desires. People have them. Usually they dictate behaviors. It’s why people move to New York. It’s why you’re quoting my comments and writing replies—you want to show me that you’re “smarter” and that my dissatisfactions are illegitimate and you think a great way to do so is to write targeted quips that take one or two lines of text out of context, but unfortunately you’re not succeeding. It’s clear you have no interest in actual persuasion or discussion—if you do, I highly recommend taking a few writing or debate classes, maybe brushing up on what it means to empathize, learn about logos/ethos/pathos, read some philosophy, things like that.
When this is your first statement following your attempted "apology", how can anyone be interested in continuing with the conversation?
> You seem to want your interlocutor to follow all the polite rules of discussion while abandoning them all yourself.
It's not about "politeness". It's about honesty. I'd rather have a honest-but-dry conversation than a pleasantly-dishonest one.
> your position (which you haven’t actually ever elaborated)
My position (if it couldn't even be called that) is that NYC is a victim of its own (relative) success compared to all the other cities in the US. The best way to get NYC to become more affordable would be to rescue other cities. There are just too many people with too much money chasing not enough houses in urban areas that are desirable, so of course the prices will go up in the places that are.
Rent control is not going to solve this. It's only going to create a privileged class that is going to cling on to their old leases. Landlords will have zero incentive to invest. Developers will have less incentive to build, and then only the existing stock will continue to be around.
It's supply that needs to be fixed. Also, it may seem counter-intuitive at first, but to fix cities in North America you need to get rid of suburbia.
Ok, we’ll now I feel that I was mistaken earlier, and want to offer an actual apology. I think our discussion got off on the wrong foot and some of the ad hominem involved annoyed me. I think this post (that I’m replying to) shows that I was wrong in my judgements, and I think your idea to rescues other cities is a good one.
I think NYC’s location is one of the difficulties involved with such a plan. NYC is partly desirable because its locality makes it an easy hub for travel to and from Europe. You can make other cities attractive by other means, but it will be hard to beat this and the entrenchment of current residents and businesses.
The idea of eliminating suburbs to fix supply is interesting. I do think that could be beneficial, but at the same time, that also would require regulations or policies that push development away from suburbs and into cities. Either way you’ll need some kind of regulatory intervention.
The question is whether or not supply increase is sufficient to alter the market, I’m skeptical of such a claim because new residential developments crop up in NYC all the time but it doesn’t seem to help drive down rates at all. Furthermore, NYC’s population for the decade had its peak in 2016, yet prices then were more affordable[1]. Maybe there’s data that shows there’s an extreme influx of individuals now and the population in NYC surpassed this number in 2022, but I’d be surprised if that were the case esp. when you factor in new building developments that occurred in the meantime. I don’t think it boils down to a simple supply problem. It may be due to the fact that brokerages are snatching up properties and charging more than individual landlords, it may be a side effect of inflation, it may be predatory profit seeking after the pandemic. I don’t know, but I don’t think merely throwing up a bunch of new buildings will necessarily fix things, and as I mentioned before, we need to consider the other negative consequences of such a plan (density, the consequent environmental impacts etc.)
> regulations or policies that push development away from suburbs and into cities.
I misspoke. By "getting rid of suburbia", I mean getting rid of American-style, car-centric suburban development. You'll absolutely want to have development in the suburbs.
And to do that, you don't need a lot of changes in regulations. Surely, you'll have to fight with NIMBYs, but these changes do not require massive regulations:
- Upzoning all R1 zones, and abolish Euclidian Zone. Just by getting rid of exclusive single-family zones that are so prevalent in the US, and start allowing multi-family townhouses, mixed-use areas, you could recover basically every city that is not part of coastal metro area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ
Let them charge what they want if it's theirs. Otherwise, your demands on what they charge amount to asserting that what is theirs isn't really. And, to put responsibility on the actor in question, you're asking that the lost potential value be stolen from the owner, for the benefit of non-owners. Can people own stuff, or not?
If you’re renting out basic needs like housing I’d argue the terms of ownership should change.
We all have dependencies on one another to get access to our basic needs. If your ISP, gas or whatever provider decided to suddenly charge you double for no apparent upgrades you would not be happy. You might have to option to go to another provider. If you didn’t, you’d have to move somewhere that has cheaper services. Moving is not zero cost. It both financially and emotionally affects people depending on how tied they are to their communities. The problem with rentals is that this is happening to long term residents that have no other option because the overall market price for the area is crazy. People are being removed from their communicates because there are no restrictions on landlords that make money will producing nothing the vast majority of the time. Capitalism is supposed to reward production, products. In most cases renting is a parasitic form of raising capital that doesn’t contribute to any material improvements, it just uses existing scarcity of resources of basic needs and exploits the fact to make capital without producing anything.
I’m sick of these economic abstractions that constantly try to explain away our problems, and take away the responsibility from the human actors that cause these effects. It’s not some abstract “supply and demand” that we should focus on—it is the landlords and renters and their decisions that are to blame. We need to introduce some agency and accountability back into our discussions of economics otherwise capitalism will continue to be an abstract machine in which horribly unethical actions are justified by removing human actors and human culpability from the equation. Belief in “the market” is not dissimilar to religious belief. Furthermore, analyses in capitalist terms often lead us to more problems. If the problem is “supply”, people will say “ok build more homes”, but that first of all never seems to actually work and secondly has a large number of additional negative effects such as increasing overcrowding and climate problems.This ridiculous tendency to not actually blame the people responsible for these negative conditions is ridiculous. It’s a large part of the reason we’re in this mess.