Treating the symptom.
Okay I guess. I’ll get excited when I see a plan to treat the disease.There’s no reason to get excited at all. Biden can call for it, but Congress has to write and pass the legislation. Republican House majority won’t let that happen.
Vote in November.
Not even. Can’t charge more for rent when it’s already max out against income. It’s a placebo that’ll have zero effect. Don’t get too excited about a “plan”. This is the plan.
What world are you living in when they can’t raise rates too high for your income level? Not the one the rest of us are living in.
The vast majority of individuals must be able to afford to house, feed, and cloth themselves, as well as travel to and from work. If not they will riot. This is bad for economic growth, the mandate of capitalism. It’s particularly bad when the market is still significantly inflated relative the economy.
It’ll never be written into law. However, Biden’s proposed rent caps under projected inflation, signifying rent has fully saturated its allocation of income. Housing began balancing systemically naturally, human sellers drying up. Landlords have no obstacles.
I live in a world of nuance. The rent sucks.
Historically that’s actually not what causes people to riot. The slow chipping away actually almost never causes riots. It’s the immediate stripping of a right or privilege. Look back at history that’s how it Works nearly every single time. You’re basically making the same argument people who you sanctions as a political tool make. That if you keep making life shittier and shittier and shittier slowly the people will riot. Doesn’t work.
Furthermore capitalism does not possess the capacity to change in that manner. It does not possess the capacity to adjust to the needs of the masses. Thinking capitalism will fix this is insane.
If you look at history, the last half century is far from “slow chipping away”.
The last half century of political sanctions? What does that even mean? I feel like you were trying to be clever and you lost the point somewhere. If you ever had one.
I responded to the part that wasn’t strawman with a response of equivalent quality, simple clarification of the point of disagreement.
Why do you expect more than you give?
Cool, my rent is still 70% of what I make in a month. It’s almost like it’s already too late, but I’m too poor and uneducated to be an expert. Got any other ideas?
The best time to do it was any point in the last 100 years. The second best time is now.
Move to another country
If only it were that easy I totally would. Trust me I’ve tried looking into it before.
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Woah, an actual campaign promise? Maybe the Dems do want to look like they’re trying after all.
If Democrats kept their promises we’d have codified Roe, have free healthcare for all, and literally no one would carry student debt but those that haven’t yet had time to graduate.
If Republicans kept theirs, we’d be living in a christofascist, ultra-capitalist, white ethnostate.
We’ve got this instead. Behold the power of compromise.
It’s not compromise. It’s only turning right. They’re just arguing about how fast and which corporations should get the money.
Man this entire thread is just a perfect encapsulation of the perfect being the enemy of the good. What a bunch of useless chuds.
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard that phrase. Do you mind explaining what you mean? (Just to be clear, I’m not trying to be combative. I just have no idea how to read that)
In simple terms, the failure to do something absolutely perfectly shouldn’t stop you from doing something that will still be better than the status quo.
What if the act of doing something carries a cost with a negative expected return on investment?
…then the original saying doesn’t apply, does it? Is this some kind of “gotcha” I’m not understanding?
…then the original saying doesn’t apply, does it?
And that’s the million dollar question. I’m not arguing the perfect should be the enemy of the good. I’m questioning how much “good” I get by aligning myself with a fundamentally bad dude. Biden’s played this bait-and-switch game before, and there’s a real reason to believe 2025 Joe Biden won’t be willing or able to deliver on his 5% rent cap promise. In exchange, what is he asking you to give up?
An hour of your life in line to vote on election day? A small recurring donation to his campaign? A week block-walking your neighborhood to canvas for him? Three months volunteering to work for his reelection campaign?
Presidential elections aren’t cheap. I have to wonder what would happen if all the money and manpower pouring into Biden’s coffers was simply directed towards Habitat For Humanity instead. Would we get more bang for our bucks?
Dawg, I’m not even the OP. I was just explaining an idiom, and you expect me to answer a humanist philosophical question as if I’m the greatest thinker of our generation 😭
I can’t help you decide what extent you’re willing to compromise to vote Biden/democrats. I can’t even vote in the US.
“Don’t make perfect the enemy of good” essentially says that it’s better to do what you can in the short term to reduce harm or make positive change than to wait for the perfect solution and do nothing in the meantime. The idea is that the good is still going to help some people while we wait for the perfect solution to the problem- which, crucially, may never come, or come too late for a whole bunch of people.
One example would be letting a parent having their kid eat fast food instead of a perfectly healthy diet because their parents live in a food desert; not ideal, but it’ll keep the kid fed and alive.
What BS. This is like arguing that “trickle down economics” is good because money eventually trickles down to us plebs. We’re in a sinking boat filled with holes and you’re trying to argue that we should be happy that 1 of 1000 holes got patched up even though there isn’t time to patch the other 999 holes before the ship sinks because the crew would rather sit on their ass and drink martinis.
No this is like y’all getting mad at someone working on patching a hole because he’s not simultaneously patching every hole in the exact same instance. All why you sit there and don’t work on anything. Get a mallet get some wood get to work or shut up.
Cheap vodka comes in plastic bottles and landlords are faceless corporate entities on the other side of the country (if they’re in the country at all). So my ability to help is limited.
Except that you’re not in a sinking boat and you’re in the top 5% of the richest people in the world.
We want actual change.
Not this half-assed thing of “oh shit Biden isn’t polling well. Quick, do something popular!”.
Seeing this honestly frustrates me more because we all know they could do better than this.
Interesting. We all have the same feeling about you. The sad part is that you might actually know something. Maybe you could say something constructive, if only you cared to do so.
You could have made an argument about how aiming for perfection is a bad strategy here. But you didn’t, so let me show how you’re wrong. The proposed solution doesn’t address the underlying problem, and it adds complexity. Rent can only go up by 5%, sure, but what happens if you sell the property you move into it or other exceptional circumstances happen? Then you can raise the price. Or perhaps you rent it through Airbnb, so the rules don’t apply either. It doesn’t really matter what the special cases are, because finance folk love complicated solutions. They’re always going to find ways to game the system at our expense.
But let’s suppose the 5% solution is somehow good. If it’s good for rent then it should be good for other things too, right? You can’t let electricity or gas prices go up faster, or people won’t be able to heat their homes. You can’t let food prices go up faster, or people won’t be able to eat. Oh, and you certainly need minimum wage to be going up 5%, for any of that to make sense.
So if we consider all of that, and we find the aforementioned proposal slightly lacking, maybe it’s not because we’re seeking perfection. Maybe it’s because you have no idea what problems we are trying to solve.
I stand corrected, this is the perfect encapsulation.
Also you are a disgrace to that username.
Lol it’s like you summoned the ancient spirit of not understanding incremental improvement, who then wrote a short essay to explain to you just how much they don’t understand the concept.
Where I live we’ve had a 4% cap for a long time. It just means tenants get evicted to increase the price. It’s illegal, but the procedure to after landlords cheating the system is so grueling and adversarial, it puts justice beyond the reach of many victims. I can only imagine this being even worse in the US.
If this caps rent even if the tenant changes it’d be something. I don’t see how this passes an R house or gets through the “moderate” Dems in the senate.
It’s certainly an essential piece of the puzzle, but without the other puzzle pieces it is only going to have a minimal effect and is easy to abuse. Better than nothing nothing though, it won’t be a wasted effort if it passes, it just won’t fix anything or curb rent prices on the whole. But it will help people out here and there.
I don’t see how a national rent cap survives even the most liberal courts either.
It’s not a cap on rent it’s a cap on raising it. Not much different than setting interest rates imo. I don’t know enough law about it but at least it’s an attempt? There’s a lot of talk here about how it doesn’t solve the underlying problem but I don’t see people providing another solution.
I’d like to see property taxes increased with more single family homes owned. Let businesses keep the apartments let homes become a place to live and not an investment though.
The problem is rent isn’t interstate commerce. There isn’t a way to justify that there is a national mandate for this, it’s a matter left to states.
As for property taxes, many states already do this with exemptions for a primary residence that reduces taxes.
I’m talking about increased taxes for each additional home so that owning more than 2 or 3 homes becomes financially unviable. This causes an incentive to sell if you own a lot and prevents someone wanting to own a lot in the first place.
We have rent stabilization in nyc (for some buildings). It caps the increases, and landlords are obligated to renew your lease if you want to unless you violated it in some serious way. In returnfor haveing a building stabalized, the landlord gets tax incentives.
3 years of absurd rent prices and we are just now seeing legislation, wonder why…
Usually just need to see what Reps have blocked to find out.
As if it would ever last the captured supreme court.
Would be good if he coupled it with a promise to stack the Supreme Court
That’s great!!!
Need to stop corporations buying houses next, and tamper foreigners buying up houses too (almost every country I’ve traveled to won’t let me buy so why not do the same?)
I feel like banning corporations from owning housing isn’t the panacea people expect it to be. It’s pretty impractical when you start talking about larger buildings and mixed use housing, and I’m not convinced it’s really a big driver of the problem.
I think a steep land value tax is a more workable solution. It incentivizes anyone who holds non-productive property (vacant homes in this case) to either make better use of the land or sell it. This also has the benefit of impacting individuals who own second homes or have mostly empty airbnbs.
Property taxes are insufficient for this purpose because they are generally based on the value of the home rather than just the land, so not only are they easier to game, but it disincentivizes improving the property.
I agree about taxes. Tax the ever loving bejesus out of vacant rentals or speculative residential real estate. That will keep them from buying in the first place or deeply incentivize them to keep them rented out.
I disagree. No need to force development to destroy natural landscapes just to avoid a tax. Simply tax multiple residential properties somewhat exponemtially.
100%, 133%, 200%, 350%, 500% or something
Generally it’s not destroying undeveloped land, but fixing up dilapidated houses so that they are livable.
Having a progressive tax based on number of homes owned may work, but you would need to rewrite quite a bit of real estate law to make it actually effective. Obviously corporations would not be allowed to own houses to avoid people owning through shell companies, but you would also have to draw a line so corporations could own larger apartment complexes and mixed use buildings. You also do want builders to be able to temporarily own houses for the purpose of building and selling them as well as corporate flippers.
Frankly, I think it’s too complicated to expect on a national level.
Right.
Owning one or two residential properties is fine, more is problematic.
I say “two” to handle the very common case of children putting their parents’ homes in their own name because Medicare clawback rules will take the home after they die if you don’t do it early enough.
The Medicare clawback crap is why we can’t expect to fix one issue with capitalism without addressing all the issues simultaneously. Can’t just raise minimum wage because landleeches will raise rents. Can’t just have universal healthcare because a lot of people would become unemployed when the insurance industry dies its overdue painful death.
Universal healthcare, student loan cancellation (and free state university), UBI, and the elimination of for-profit housing. All within one president’s term to have a chance of sticking past four years.
Crazy idea.
How about instead of corporations owning the unit, maybe the person who lives in the unit gets to own part of it.
I know crazy.
Owning part of a larger building is actually much more complicated than simply owning a house. I’m not sure everyone would actually want that even if they could buy the unit they live in at a low price.
I almost bought a condo in a multi-story building a couple of years ago and I’m glad as hell I didn’t. It was a one-bedroom unit for $125K, which is fine except that the monthly condo fees are $1000 (which includes utilities, at least), property taxes plus insurance are another $400, and the last three consecutive years residents have been hit with a special assessment of about $10K - which means I would have been paying around $2500 a month to live in a one-bedroom apartment that I’d already paid $125K for.
The biggest issue with corporations owning low income multifamily housing is that they act like slumlords. When you have nowhere else to go and the landlord won’t fix major issues then it takes a toll on you. When a kid sees this growing up, then it leads to antisocial behavior. Investors think that “passive investment” means no input at all when it requires a great deal of active management if contracts are being followed. They just know that the residents have no reasonable way to enforce the contract.
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Some countries have a large yearly tax if you leave a house vacant for longer than 6 months or a year without a valid reason. More countries need to do this.
Not sure about the USA, but it’s a big problem in Australia. Foreign investors (that don’t live in Australia nor have any intent of moving to Australia) buy properties then just hold them as speculative assets. They don’t want tenants, because they don’t want to go through all that effort. All they want to do is hold them and watch the value go up, in the same way you’d hold stock or Bitcoin.
Strong disagree. Can you imagine what red states will do with the power to demand proof of citizenship to own property? Or all the hell couples where one is a Permanent Resident the other a Citizen will go through?
You should be terrified of someone like Jeff Session or Kris Kobach able to just veto any random person from owning land. You can see it now in your head
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Them drafting letters on government stationary to real estate agents demanding paperwork from anyone with a Latino or Chinese name. Effectively making agents terrified of dealing with minorities.
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Random spot checks, having deputies show up to open houses asking for papers or waiting until after closing then interrogation of the family
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Activists courts arguing that all members of the household must be citizens based on vague feelings
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New rules that state that the entire inheritance path must all be citizens
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Non-citizens being forced to sell at a 1/10th the value
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The lawsuits from groups like the ACLU pointing out that it is a obvious violation of the civil rights act, which goes to the Supreme Court who then declares the Bill of Rights only applies to citizens
If you are interested the experiment has been run already. Go read up what Kris Kobach did when he got a town to pass a law requiring citizenship tests to rent. He not only near bankrupted the town due to lawsuits he personally sent threatening letters to Latinos who lived there.
ve traveled to won’t let me buy so why not do the same?
The standard is good behavior, not other people.
Have you traveled much? More countries do this than don’t. The trump nazis will abuse everything yes. But people not being able to afford a place to live is also giving us trump nazis in the first place
Have you traveled much?
Again
The standard is good behavior, not other people.
Must I repeat it again?
The trump nazis will abuse everything yes.
And yet you want to give them more? You don’t hand a gun to a person who went to jail repeatedly for using a gun.
But people not being able to afford a place to live is also giving us trump nazis in the first place
Assertion, please demonstrate it. Also demonstrate that your method of handing Nazis more power will make them less powerful. Lastly compare the US grabbling with fascists to other nations who have rules like you are advocating for and how they are also grappling with fascists.
It’s a little thing but I kinda want you to acknowledge that the one time this idea was tried in diet form in the US it not only didn’t work it also legalized racism. You are suggesting an idea that we tried and it not only failed in the task it was meant to perform it also created a host of new problems.
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I really didn’t mention a word about anything you are saying to me now. I am pro-development anti-nimby and admit I haven’t studied the issues of corporate housing enough to weight in on it.
My apologies if that came across as challenging your point with the nimby stuff. It’s like a fuselight, it wasn’t for you but just directed out in the open. Retracting the comment. Housing is something that’s sensitive to me because we just lost a family member to suicide, and while not solely that person’s rationale, among many factors housing was a significant one.
Housing and healthcare on the trajectory it’s pointed at today, robs our youth of their hope, and signifies quite loudly that we as a society do not love or value the futures of our children, however people may feel internally.
My only message for NIMBY people is that of hate and revulsion.
Right but I am on your side about this. I want everyone to have housing that is awesome and within their price range. I just don’t agree that finding ways to punish immigrants and minorities is the best way to go about it. There is a difference between me saying “I want X and don’t think Y is the best way to get X” and me saying “fuck your family, I hate Y and lets do X to hurt them”. Me discussing how to solve a problem is not me denying the problem exists or should not be solved.
Also you and me are good. I am sorry for your loss. I imagine I would be very sensitive to this subject in your situation.
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tamper foreigners buying up houses too
Who do you consider a foreigner though?
- Foreign citizen living outside the USA
- Foreign citizen living in the USA, with temporary residency (eg a work visa)
- Foreign citizen living in the USA, with permanent residency
- US citizen with dual citizenship, permanently living overseas, buying property remotely for renting out
The first case is clear, but the others less so. A foreign citizen living in the USA to live in is a better scenario than a US citizen permanently living in another country buying a bunch of houses just to rent them out.
It should be reciprocal IMO for each country. The ones I’ve looked at buying in I couldn’t because I’m not a citizen
If not too personal, which countries have you looked at?
Let’s build a million new homes and sell them to people that don’t currently own any homes.
Let’s
buildseize a million new homes and sell them to people that don’t currently own any homes.FTFY
Fuck these ogres hoarding real estate.
There’s no shortage of homes in the US. They’re just being hoarded for their increasing value.
I don’t believe that is the case. There is no value in letting a property sit empty accumulating value, when it could be doing exactly that while pulling in a hefty monthly rent.
It may well be the case that there’s enough homes empty to house everyone, but only if they’re happy to move somewhere they don’t want to be, and where there’s no jobs to pay for them.
renters bring risks. if the home is on the market, they also make it a half to sell
Eliminate zoning and force cities to build up. Nobody wants a house in the middle of nowhere
This guy is clearly not scared of “crime”
Edgelord
Please expand on what you mean.
For context, I live in greater Boston. The state here has actually forced towns and cities in the inner belt around Boston to remove their zoning laws anywhere within a mile of a train or subway stop. Thousands of additional condos and apartments have been (and are being) built as a side effect and we will have dozens of new squares with shops and businesses on the ground floor and tens of thousands of new residences surrounding our transit hubs.
It’s not been smooth. Some towns are suing the state and doing other random bullshit to slow the process. Pushing these rules to the federal level would actually help states and metro areas consisting of multiple connected cities address the issues more efficiently.
“Crime” is code word for boomers and nimbys to block proper development
Doesn’t help if there is housing available but it’s 3 hours from where my work is :/
I suppose he has to do something to signal to voters that he’s going to try to fix the housing affordability crisis, but this is pretty meaningless. But, what can he say? The truth? That the housing crisis is an extremely complex problem that will take decades to fix? Probably not going to go over very well.
Not allowing landlords to drive people into homeless on speculation and greed is a good first step to solving the very complex problem that will take decades.
How is this meaningless?
Well, for one, it almost certainly won’t pass. So the chances of it becoming law in the first place are pretty low. But even if it were passed, I think it would be difficult to enforce. Even if it were enforced, landlords would just hike the rent 4.99% every year.
4.99% is way better than the 50% my previous landlord tried. You can always vote Republican if you want. See what they’re going to do for you.
You can always vote Republican if you want.
No thanks.
Not to mention that unless wages also rise by 5% per year, which mine haven’t recently not sure about others, then it’s still unsustainable for renters.
That the housing crisis is an extremely complex problem that will take decades to fix?
No? There’s currently no cap on single housing investments, and at the very least private equity needs to be banned from buying housing in any form.
A sensible, too-little-too-late rule, probably full of carveouts and exceptions, that I nonetheless feel really relieved to see. Delayed and watery regulation is better than none, I suppose.
5% is crazy talk when workers wages are going up 2.5% per year. Landlords need at least 20% more every year.
But if it pass, then it is first win. I fear that landlord are not going to let it happen without a fight
You gotta get something that will pass
This is what happened in California. The statewide rent control is 5% plus inflation per year, capped at 10% per year. There’s a bunch of exclusions too, like the property has to be at least 15 years old, and single-family homes that aren’t owned by a corporation are excluded too. I think the builders and landlords had quite a bit of a say in it, hence the limit being so high above inflation (assuming inflation of <=5%).
Still a lot better than it used to be. It applies to month-to-month rentals too, so you can get the flexibility of a month-to-month rental while still having a limit on the rent increase per year. Evictions also need to have just cause and there’s a notice period of 60 days if the tenant has lived there for longer than a year.
Is 5% really that crazy when the current rate is 20% as you describe?
Timely.
That translates into rents doubling in less than 15 years
Well mine went up 28% in a year so I’ll take 5%
Good thing wages are going up!
Where I’m at it’s indexed to inflation (but circumvented by evicting renters then raising rates illegally like someone else mentioned). Setting a target higher than the target inflation is mostly symbolic. Outside of specific situations like Covid, it is not likely to change much materially at 5%.
I was being sarcastic, wages have not really gone up inflation adjusted for majority of people over last 40 years in the US.
Cool, but also cap property tax increases as well. Mine have increased over 10% for the last 3 years.
They did this in California and Oregon, then the schools went to shit.
Also, property taxes are a good way to encourage density, which is necessary to fight climate change
Can they even cap that? That’s a state tax, I feel like that’s one that you would need to deal directly with your state to resolve. As someone who lives in one of the highest property tax states, I also wish this could happen…
Be careful what you wish for. California capped property tax increase since 1978 with prop 13 and most experts say this is a major factor in their insanely expensive housing market. Most people are heavily incentivized to never move to keep their low property tax rate, but this in turn prevents most new development and upzoning while simultaneously leading to the worst sprawl in the nation.
It also starves the state of tax revenue requiring them to levy the tax further for new buyers and seek other income streams like heightened income and sales tax. Policies like this somewhat unintuitively only benefit those who are already well off. Renters and younger people gain no benefit and ultimately pay higher property taxes than those who already are financially established enough to own a property.
A healthy property tax disincentivizes housing as a speculative investment, improving the overall market for people who actually live there. There should certainly be breaks for poverty and financial distress but capping or cutting rates broadly encourages speculation. For a basic human need such high degree of speculation benefits nobody.
Isn’t that due to the reassessment of property tax when a new owner purchases the property? And wouldn’t that be solved if the cap persists regardless of ownership change?
That just puts an insane value premium on older housing stock
That’s how it’s done in Oregon and we also have high housing costs. The housing costs are more likely tied to the massive demand of people moving to the coasts and lack of housing than property tax rates. The above argument doesn’t even make sense to me as someone who moves within California is still only going to own one house so how does that make housing cheaper and more available whether they move or not? It only works if they move out of state and if that’s the case, they aren’t going to be affected by the property tax increase on a new purchase anyway.
Did those “experts” note that the rest of the country, that people want to live in, have the same insane high prices and yet don’t have that cap? No, don’t bother I already know the answer and so do you.
Economics isn’t a science, it is playtime daydreaming. Which is fine, I enjoy my weekly D&D session. The thing is I know I am not a lvl 12 mountain dwarf fighter.
Is the property tax rate that’s increasing or your home’s appraised value? My home has doubled in appraised value since we bought it in 2016, so our taxes have doubled as well.
No, property tax is basically the only direct motivation in place for home owners to vote for politicians and policies that will keep housing affordable for future generations and people who don’t already own a home. Otherwise why wouldn’t home owners want to see housing prices skyrocket in value if there’s no financial downside for them (and a giant payout when they do sell)? As mentioned in other comments, some states have tried property tax caps, and the result is creating a system of haves and have nots based entirely around who was lucky enough to buy into the market before it shot to the moon.
I agree that’s the problem. Property taxes go up, rent has to go up to cover it. If property taxes go up by X amount but you can’t raise rent the appropriate amount then there’s a problem.
We need to cap both.
You could just make slightly less money. It is allowed. It isn’t like chemical reaction balance thing. It isn’t even that they are losing money, they are just making less than they want.
Make slightly less is one thing. Going negative is another. Many landlords work on a shoe string budget.
I am sure with all the lawyers and accountants that work in Washington DC they can easily structure it to deal with a few edge cases. I am pretty sure my dumbass could figure it out. Maybe a tiered system looking at the last few years, ones that are on there verge of failure have more control compared to ones doing well.
Oh darn. Maybe they should get jobs if money is so tight!
These two things are not linked. Rent already is as high as the market will bear, property taxes will come out of landlord profits.
Likely not, I think if taxes go up 10% rent will go up 10%+ percent.
Yeah, that doesn’t math out.
Also, my rent got hiked 13% last year, despite the taxes remaining the same. Which is why I threw everything I had into getting out of renting.
How are they not linked? The taxes have to be paid. The money comes from the rent.
