I agree and I think rental housing built by profit motivated developers would have to be replaced by charity or anarchy. Both work to some degree anyway.
This is also done in the US with private owners (landlords) through subsidised rents (section 8). I had a building with section 8 tenants. One tenant had an $8/month rent for her portion - which I never asked for.
Yeah, we have that too. Millions a month in public money spent maintaining Dublin as livable for non-rich people. Eventually you realise the actual subsidy is for landlords, not their tenants. Itās there to artificially maintain a rate of profit for private landlords. A sane system would acquire the properties through a CPO, tell the landlords to enjoy their one-time payday and carry on just as before*.
*Theyād have to hire more staff to administer them of course, which per certain posters ITT appears to be conceptually impossible.
Surely the subsidyās benefit is split between the tenant and landlord. The person in microbetās building who had all but $8 of her monthly rent covered didnāt benefit from the subsidy?
Iāve seen and worked on a fair amount of low income housing.
Private housing with government subsidies for rent (as I said I owned such a building) and I also worked for a developer who built projects like this partially with low income housing tax credits
Housing developed by non-profits, built with government grants, with section 8 rents - highly regulated by terms of the grants. (I was a consultant for such non-profits for 3 years)
Public housing (mostly just 2nd hand experience through my Dad who worked at the Department of Housing and Urban Development - but I have spent some time at such projects).
The best run projects were the non-profits - usually faith based groups, but they all had professional/professionalized managment and were quite thoroughly vetted and regulated by the government.
Certainly tenants are subsidized in all those options - much more so than the landlords. Whether the profit that goes to landlords in the privately owned system is greater than the expenses incurred by the government in the non-profit or public system, I donāt know. Itās not obvious what is better for the government or the tenants. I think in theory public housing could be better, but thatās very theoretical.
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Itās good for the tenants, yes. The systemic aim is not to be good for tenants, itās to maintain a housing market that looks boom-ish from a distance. Public policy ā in many areas, but egregiously so wrt housing ā has been centred around an unofficial policy of āPretend itās still the late '90s and maybe it will be eventuallyā.
Iām not saying tenants donāt benefit from it, they obviously do. Iām saying their benefiting from it is incidental to the actual aim of the policy, which is to create a floor below which the profitability of letting units canāt fall.
The big problem with Section 8 is that thereās not enough of it. The waiting list for a Section 8 voucher in Los Angeles county is 11 years.
We donāt have that issue, we have landlords who wonāt take the payment because the kips they let out wouldnāt pass inspection. Pretty sure weāre still doing fire safety self-certification, too, Grenfell be damned.
Which probably comes back to zoning and NIMBY?
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The lack of vouchers? Not really. Itās a lack of funding. Itās not NIMBY (back yard) because itās not tied to particular neighborhoods or cities. Itās lack of political will to fund affordable housing generally.
It is NIMBY in San Fran contributing to the housing crisis, due the restrictions on developing high rise rental properties.
OTOH, I agree about Section 8, since that money comes from the Federal budget.
I think the most anyone paid was about $250/mo and these were pretty big (up to 4bd) apartments.
do you have any recommendations on articles or books to read?
David Ricardo literally wrote the book on this shit.
To what degree does AirBNB and the ability for property owners to act as unregulated hoteliers contribute to the problems of landlordism?
In a nod to an old 2+2 thread, it pisses me off that every time I see the word Airbnb I think it says āAir nub.ā
LOL landlords.
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This comment perfectly encapsulates what I came here to say today.
I just spent 2 hours of my Saturday on the phone trying to play mediator for a unit who cannot get their shit together. Three girls and their gay best friend have been creating enormous headaches going back 4 months now, to the point where we finally said enough is enough back in early March and simply cancelled their unexecuted lease renewal and rented the unit to a different group.
We have a very strict policy of not getting in the middle of tenant disputes, but in spite of what most of you believe, Iām a nice guy and have tried helping as best I could through their entire spat. I feel badly for their parents, mostly, but also for the one girl who seems to mostly be an innocent bystander in all these and now has to find a new place to live for senior year.
Iāve seen this before and Jackās not really gay.
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Iām 99% sure Phil is gay in this case.