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.
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.
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
So I think the current system in the US is better than what has been proposed. In general it should be fixed by a better social safety net and more progressive and higher taxation system. I would want little to change except a better housing subsidy for poor people (both more generous and easy to get).
I could probably be convinced that the government should invest more in public housing as a housing provider of last resort rather than a giver of subsidies, or that we should impose some type of tax that reduces incentives for foreign investors to buy property.
I still believe at the end of the day if people are able to own and rent out property that they need to be able to repossess it if the person renting does not pay their rent. The state supporting the eviction process is probably the least bad way for that to happen.
As far as the whole market goes, rent collections going down would lower the prices of income property and lower mortgage costs would compensate owners for the lower rent collection. As far as profitability goes, owning income property is in competition with other investments. If it became super profitable money would flood in and prices would go up. If it became less profitable properties would fall out of the rental market as investors took their money elsewhere, prices would drop and profitability would go up.
I assume you mean prices would go up, but at some point of creditworthiness there is no price of monthly rent that outweighs the likelihood that the owner permanently loses possession of their property. There is some group of people to whom who landlords feel they cannot rent property due to the risk and this group is much larger under the no eviction scenario due to the increased risk.
I meant prices would drop - the prices of rental properties, not rents. There would be less demand for rental properties because of less rent collection, so the prices would drop. Mortgage costs would drop. This would go on until either landlording were profitable or there were no landlording. Whether or not landlording could disappear would also depend on laws/zoning.
If prices can not go so low that people can not profitably be rented to, then no one will rent to them.
They turned capitalism off with a flick of a finger, because it is obviously just too wasteful to run during the pandemic. Well, it’s a new status-quo. The cat’s out of the bag. Eyes have been opened. People got a taste. The capitalists won’t be able to turn it back on quite that easily.
Now, here is where the chat is going to fall apart. I’m not going to “guess at a world”. Further, folks that don’t do DA don’t understand what we consider a “win” or a “lose”, and I’m going to ‘argue’ that either. But suffice to say that actions build upon other actions, and we take a long range view.
People, meaning some people, are going to try to hold the line, and not let things go back to the bad old days. I am one of them. We will be disruptive. Will we “win”? We care, but it doesn’t matter. We’re going to try anyways.
OK, I will make one tiny little “guess at a world”. I think the first real big deal will be the issue of a back rent amnesty, and the linked issue of no retaliation to rent strikers.
What amazes me is that the “free” marketeers throw there own dogma under the bus whenever it becomes inconvenient.
Let’s see… the landlord wants something: the possession of the rental. And renters always need something or they wouldn’t be renting: cash. So sing the song with me… a mutually beneficial trade, makes Jesus cum/etc/etc.
The landlord refunds a few months rent, and scrapes off all the poop she smeared on the victims credit report… and the keys are hers. And the great thing is she’s just handing back the same cash her victim handed her earlier… it costs the landlord nothing.
That’s what happened right before I took possession of my beach house. The renter was prepared to fight the eviction in court, the outgoing landlord wanted to close fast for tax purposes, and I LOL @ her for even imagining I’d close without taking possession. Both the renter and I got paid off.
Why stop at those silly invisible lines between nation-states? Obliviously the bigger the better… no separate peace, and all that. Anyone who says they know what’s going to happen is full of shit.
ETA: Legally at the state level. In the US the levels below the state don’t commonly have that power, and it’s not obviously a federal issue.
I guess I would see the last line as most likely outcome. At some point there are fixed costs to owning a residential property like property taxes, maintenance, etc. Even if the price of acquiring property dropped it may still not be enough for people to commit to owning a rental.
Also dramatic price drops would obviously have wide ranging negative impacts to the economy beyond what happens in the rental market (everything from bankrupt school districts to unemployed construction workers).
Also housing prices are somewhat sticky, after the 2008 bust we saw many houses just sitting empty because owners would not sell for a loss. Even if the market adjusts somehow in the long run, real estate is not a market where things quickly and efficiently adjust to market clearing price. So there could be something of a supply shock for several years and increase of the phenomenon where you have lots of empty housing and lots of homeless in the same place.