Not better to cap it at 5% of the property value?
“Here old man, rattle off this list! It’ll save you! Get 'em, Joey!”
And then he screwed it up and read the teleprompter wrong as “capping rent at $55 dollars.” No joke.
I’m down
I think people are focusing quite a bit too much on Biden’s speaking abilities and too little on his policies.
I’ll take Biden’s policies any day over Trump’s policies and his toxic personality.
It’s over…
Pelosi privately told Biden polls show he cannot win and will take down the House
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/17/politics/nancy-pelosi-biden-conversation/index.html
Polls say different things. This one says the opposite: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-polling-data-five-thirty-eight-1926226
If you think Biden has any chance of beating Trump at this point then I’ve got a bridge to sell you
God this is embarrassingly lame.
You know what would get more votes? That student loan forgiveness thing! Maybe the kids who never graduated or used their expensive education should get their loans forgiven???
Remember that? Yeah?
Cuz 5% is not gonna do much if you got a 15% loan.
Seems kind of weird to blame the guy who is trying to do the thing you want and not the people who keep blocking it from happening.
I’m just reminding him since I got a certain loved one that I inherited a certain amount of this debt from. Like WTF. It’s like buying a slave…how much is that slave over there? Oh that one? Yeah that’ll be 5000 Dollars in student loans please!.
trying to do the thing you want
Except he isn’t, at this point all he’s doing is claiming to want to give the poor some crumbs, so that those who haven’t yet, don’t turn on him.
A 5% increase limit is still an increase, he’s not doing you any fucking favours by continuing to allow landlords to gouge you, only a little more conservatively.
He literally forgave my loan and the supreme court said no. fuckin pissed
the supreme court literally rewrote a law to prevent loan forgiveness.
Prices are already jacked up to an insane level compared to wages, the horse is already out of the barn: This is not going to fix the problem renters face.
A soft cap works as a ratchet. Downturns in the rental market are sticky while up turns are slow and marginalized.
It’s effectively the opposite of the way things are now, with cartelized units staying artificially high through downturns and prices skyrocketing during every shortfall.
Cool, but also cap property tax increases as well. Mine have increased over 10% for the last 3 years.
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.
These two things are not linked. Rent already is as high as the market will bear, property taxes will come out of landlord profits.
How are they not linked? The taxes have to be paid. The money comes from the rent.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Hasn’t rent control been shown to be ineffective at making everyone play nice? I feel like it’s much more effective to put your finger on the supply/demand balance by subsidizing the supply side.
And not by just giving handouts to corporate landlords, either.
That last sentence is all that ever happens in supply side economics. It’s the entire handbook.
They’ve had enough carrot. It’s time for the stick.
Hasn’t rent control been shown to be ineffective at making everyone play nice?
It’s proven effective at causing landlords to scream and cry and publish 10,000 word Op-Eds about how they’re going to do a capital strike if the rules aren’t changed.
But, when paired with new investment in public housing, its incredibly effective at keeping rental costs stable long term.
Just like with unions, you know it’s good for the common people, because the business and property owners speak out against it so strongly. If it’s pointless, they could just let it happen. But instead, they rally against it. So you know they’re lying when they say it won’t matter.
It will matter.
I think the problem is that once the government subsidizes anything it becomes all hands on deck peak business interest to exploit and steal said subsidies.
Some sort of enforced regulation might work, but the government doesn’t really like to do that.
Yeah. It has but stuff like this plays well in the echo chamber. Like most attempts at price controls it has a lot of unintended consequences such as fewer apartments built and rented out, landlords charging obscene amounts to a new renter knowing they cannot raise the prices as needed later on, landlords raising prices whether they need to or not because they can’t hike them quickly when needed, worse maintenance.
Okay then let’s just drop an anchor into the market. Have the federal government commit to buying and managing 50,000 units in every major city. They’re available on the open market at cost plus 100 dollars a month. The 100 dollars goes into a fund and the city with the highest rents gets more federally owned apartments.
We just keep dropping anchors until developers provide reasonable housing at reasonable prices or housing is no longer a private market.
Government has a really big damn stick. If people’s needs don’t start getting met then those developers are going to feel it, right in their profits.
It is set at 2.5% where I live.
Realistically that’s about what it should be. 3% tops. Average worker wages haven’t gone up that much yearly in forever.
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?)
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.
REITS benefit wealthy, not the commoner. I agree that it’s not the silver bullet to just ban corporations owning housing, as you often need an entity of some kind to manage MDU’s etc, but companies should absolutely be banned from owning SFU’s, and for that matter, landlords are bad for the country overall.
Instead of worrying about what this does for the wealthy, we have the issue of NIMBY assholes rejecting MDU’s in their areas alongside just a dearth of housing to meet the needs (I’m avoiding the use of demand because this isn’t just some “free market” dynamic, people fucking need a place to live and economics languages shouldn’t apply to human needs). For anyone who takes offense at “NIMBY asshole”, you can go and fuck yourself really fucking hard. I’m talking fire hydrant in the asshole, you motherfuckers deserve to burn in hell, you pieces of god-damn shit, I hate you all (applicable to people with the NIMBY attitude).
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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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 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
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.
exponentially would be e. g. 100%, 1000%, 10 000%, etc.
you meant geometricallly
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.
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.
Are corporations more likely to be slumlords? Pretty much everyone I’ve ever known who owns a rental property has been a complete asshole, but I’ve only known a few.
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.
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.
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?
Unless that also comes with a 5% raise every year, then it’s not as good
At least it prevents people getting a 20-30% increase one year
5% is crazy talk when workers wages are going up 2.5% per year. Landlords need at least 20% more every year.
Is 5% really that crazy when the current rate is 20% as you describe?
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.
But if it pass, then it is first win. I fear that landlord are not going to let it happen without a fight
I thought it was $55?
“politician expected to say that something we would want should be a thing”
why is this news?
Man this entire thread is just a perfect encapsulation of the perfect being the enemy of the good. What a bunch of useless chuds.
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 disgraceful that username.
I also stand corrected. I thought you might actually know something. But then you double down with a witty empty response: two sentences with zero information. What good is that? Grandstanding is boring and pointless.
And then you want to trash talk my username? Jesus. Have fun with that.
Some people are here to learn, some people are here to teach, some people are here to share, some people are here to build community. You’re not doing any of those things. Meh.
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.
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.
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.
that doesn’t sound very good to me
“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.
This guy really larps these this trust me bro jaja
Oh neat, now if you can’t afford rent (the issue) next year it will only be 5% more out of reach.
