I guess this post started the whole roof roads thing? I am unfamiliar with Vegetarian’s body of work as a poster, but it seems like one ACer made a stupid suggestion as a response to a hypothetical and the idea became a meme on the site as various non-ACers asked ACers, especially Proph, to defend the idea and none of them would do so, perhaps because they thought it was part of a stupid game that they refused to play.
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When I said I was prepared to answer questions about the eviction-free zone I currently occupy, I meant exactly that, so let’s modify this:
Just imagine yourself as a landlord. Evictions are banned. You own a €400,000 bungalow in Dublin that you want to rent out.
Assuming that’s cool, I’m imagining away.
Are you renting it to the minimum wage worker (has references and qualifies income wise but works in a factory), or are you renting to the wealthier tenant?
So we’re assuming that I’ve acquired this information about the two prospective tenants, in spite of the prohibition on requiring employment references, and that I do not fear a case being brought to the Residential Tenancies Board for discrimination. Jolly times for Landlord Flynn. I cheerfully and wholeheartedly choose the wealthier tenant. every single time.
But again, I really did more mean questions about the moratorium.
Well 90% of thread is bad faith. But of the other 10%, that’s a fair summary IMO.
It was a local 2+2 thing.
That said, I did a tiny amount of google trends looking, and it seems that 2+2 was already completely infested with ACers long the before the ACers short blip of trendyness (which pretty much coincided with the R.Paul Revo-scam-lution). Also, 2+2’s very own Nielsio created the banal square-v ACer logo.
Seems like a good faith attempt to engage you should include laying out a vision of what regulated landlords look like for you to react to instead of you having to provide a target for other people to take shots at.
Hi Sabo. Sorry for grunching a bit, but I’m curious to get your take on the argument I’m going to try to outline below. Note that I’m sure a lot of the points have been raised previously, but I’m curious whether you find this particular presentation at all persuasive.
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Outlawing eviction disincentivizes the provision of for-profit housing
a. Without eviction for non-payment, profit is much more difficult to guarantee.
b. The impact is not equal across all for-profit housing; the role of the state, through eviction, in guaranteeing profits is much more pronounced in rentals targeting poorer, working class people. So forbiding eviction discincentivizes the provision of for-profit housing targeting poorer people in particular.
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If there is less incentive to provide for-profit housing, then the supply of for-profit housing will decrease.
a. I think that if this were not true, it would call into question a lot of the premises in the anti-capitalist argument against landlordism.
b. This outcome is, in and of itself, a good thing. Especially because the particular type of for-profit housing that is most impacted (1b) is also the most exploitative, reducing the supply of this type of for-profit housing is a reasonable goal. Reducing the supply of for-profit housing might be an anti-capitalist goal in general.
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If the supply of for-profit housing is reduced, and nothing else changes, then the total supply of housing will also be reduced.
a. While the reduction of exploitative for-profit housing is good, a reduction in the total supply of housing is probably counterproductive.
b. This leads to the conclusion that a ban on eviction is probably not enough by itself to achieve the overall goals of reducing homelessness or ending exploitative landlordism.
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It is possible to reduce the supply of for-profit housing, especially of the most exploitative flavors, without reducing the overall supply of housing.
a. Banning evictions reduces incentives by making it more difficult to earn a reliable profit. But it’s not the only way of reducing the margins of the business.
b. One other way is to increase the supply of not-for-profit housing, e.g. through public housing programs.
c. While there are undoubtedly various issues with public housing, it’s also possible to separate public management of housing from public supply. In this argument, it’s the increase in supply of not-for-profit housing which has the effect of reducing the supply of exploitative for-profit housing. In terms of eliminating evictions, i’m interested in possibilities where government provides for construction but then hands over ownership in some way.
The conclusion of this line of reasoning, for me, is that it may make more sense to approach the evils of landlordism by promoting the supply of more not-for-profit housing, which at the very least is less exploitative, rather than trying to ban evictions directly.
There are many things I agree and disagree with ITT regarding capitalism, but not sure I should opine because title is specifically about landlords. I’ll just say that many don’t seem to understand what real capitalism is or at least my view of it. We do NOT live in a capitalist society now. We live under socialism for the wealthy. Airlines just got a huge tax cut and now two weeks in they want a bailout? Give me a break! in 2008 I thought the banks, auto industry etc., should be not just allowed, but forced to fail. And I feel the same way now. Capitalism was never meant to be designed to bail out billionaire shareholders and execs. The system we have now is fucked, but I don’t find true capitalism to be the culprit. Yes. I am a progressive who is also a capitalist just as I’m a social Democrat. I don’t feel that they are necessarily oxy-morons
This is the key point with the “what are you” game.
This is the situation the bad faith posters want to set up. That’s their interwebs “win”. My interwebs win is to frustrate them (while assiduously posting in good faith, although that shouldn’t need be said). Notice: I clipped out the part prior to the above quote. It doesn’t matter, it never does. Only the form matters.
To do this the bad faith posters need to get their victim contemporaneously “guessing at a world”. And to avoid the tables being turned, they need to avoid staking out any position themselves.
I frustrate them by refusing to “guess at a world”, by staking out a well sourced position, and by demanding that they stake out a position too.
And that’s why “I’m for X, you’re for ___” sends their lawnmowers into orbit.
We even have a pretty good example in the owner market. Right now the PMI insurance runs between 0.5% of the value of the property and 1% of the value, and this basically assume the lender can evict you and market the house. They probably expect to lose around 25% of the house’s value in an eviction between taking a loss on the sale and the costs of the eviction process itself.
In a world where the occupant can stop paying and the owner or lender cannot recover anything, it stands to reason the risk premium would be at least 4 times as high since the loss is 4 times as big. In reality it would likely be higher because the occupant has less skin in the game than the 3.5-19% equity a normal PMI payer has to lose from going into foreclosure. Perhaps higher, but 4 times as high would mean a non payment insurance of something like $500 to $1000 per month on top of the rent for a residence valued 300,000 per month. This is of course for people who have good enough credit to qualify for a mortgage today, for those that don’t, there is pretty much no risk premium that would be worth the owner’s time.
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Why?
Does Sabo want no landlords? They certainly exist in the status quo he has been talking about. He has not chosen to defend another alternative for who pays the builders. Seems like he wants landlords to invest purchasing properties as before but not be able to get any return on that investment.
I think most of the A->B->C logic part makes sense. But as far as peeps like me are concerned it’s kind of a “so what”. It also is good example to demonstrate how the capitalist have ~400 names for yellow snow.
Well, “disicentivizes” is just another way of saying “makes less profitable”. 400 words for yellow snow. The words “the provision of” are filler. What we got is “Outlawing evictions makes less profitable for-profit housing”. Or conversely: Evictions make for-profit housing more profitable. Or more general: Violence ‘creates’ profits.
Which is obviously true. We’re talking about capitalism.
First, the supply of everything decreases. That’s called entropy. A whole lot of this econ babble is an attempt to make capitalism seem like a natural process. It is not. Once again, “incentive” here just means less profit. 400 words for yellow snow. Setting aside the alchemy of “growth”/etc (another of those ~400 words), I don’t think the whole premise makes sense at all.
I’m pretty sure that historically, when renting folk are making relatively poorer hosts for these parasites, the landlords didn’t downsize quantity, they downsized quality. Homes to tenements. And that makes sense. Homeless folks don’t pay rent. Every homeless folk is “one that got away” to the landlords.
Holy tautology Batman.
Trivially true.
Er no. How does going back to evictions make any sense at all? What is the “good” that you feels out-weights the violence and cruel gratuitous homeless inflicted upon renting folks. If there even is such a “good”, why do only renting folks bear that violence and cruelty? None of these Qs really matter however.
The real Qs are why should rental folks permit any of this to happen? And why should rental folk allow anyone but themselves to make any of these decisions?
I think you err by starting out thinking about the supply of for-profit housing. The problem seems to be a misallocation of housing supply, so that there is too much unaffordable housing and not enough affordable housing. I’m assuming that, even in Sabo’s’ world, money is still a thing that is used and that one use of money is for people to pay for shelter.
Car companies like building trucks and SUVs instead of compact cars because they make more money on those. Landlords like owning housing that is less affordable instead of housing that is more affordable because that is where the greater profits are. So how can we change that?
We can simply restrict landlords from building housing that is too unaffordable. That is the option that would draw the most protest from those who wish to live in McMansions. We can try to make building unaffordable housing more costly. It doesn’t seem like you can do that in a way that doesn’t also make building affordable housing more costly. We can take away some of those greater profits. Redistribution, baby!. We can make affordable housing more profitable. Government subsidies for affordable housing are another form of redistribution.
If we combine the latter two, so that we tax for-profit landlords and use that money to subsidize affordable housing, we have a funding mechanism for government becoming a non-profit landlord and building affordable housing.
Everything is interconnected. Trying to stay strictly on-topic is how they control you. Derails (in moderation) enrich the conversation.
Well, I consider myself a capitalist. There. I said it. I’m a Bernie bro who’s a capitalist. But not the crony capitalism we have now. That’s a whole different matter
What do you want? You said that it seems like Sabo only wants to argue against things but doesn’t really have a credible position in mind. Is your position that the current system is as perfect as we can get or are you really only interested in having Sabo give you something that you can argue against?
If this were a formal debate over landlordism and you were going first, what would be your opening statement?
It’s a figure of speech. Aside: you said you were in Germany? Are you a US ex-pat? Just curious because you have perfect US English.
It doesn’t really matter what I wanted to ‘argue’ about anymore, because the time for ‘arguing’ ITT has passed. I prefer just chatting like we are now anyways.
Yeah “why” indeed, this seems trivially false to me.
Eviction is certainly not gratuitous. It has a specific purpose of returning possession of property to it’s owner.
They don’t, it is also borne by people who buy housing and are foreclosed upon. But the basic answer is because they are the folks that are keeping possession of other people’s property without paying for it.
Renters are maybe not the overwhelming majority that you think they are, and the system with evictions is working fine for most of them. Some renters also own property that they rent out to other people or their friends and family do. Some may agree with the current system of property rights regardless of whether they see it as in their immediate personal best interests
Yes i live most of my life in the US and the last few years in Germany