At worst, the landlord loses money. At worst, the tenant is on the streets. Emotionally, finding a new tenant is business (maslow level.. 4?). Emotionally, finding a new home touches on your core safety and wellbeing (maslow level 2). Switching tenants means a new contract and new risk to lose money. Switching neighbourhoods means losing your neighbours, your area, any ties you have there, and having to build it all anew.

And since we're talking about areas where rent control is necessary, a landlord can quite easily find another tenant and a tenant has a hard time finding another house. But as you can see above that's just a "bonus".

Economic analyses tend to discount emotional factors, by their very nature. Make no mistake about it: landlords have a massive advantage in any negotiation with a tenant.

This isn't a very strong argument because it applies to, eg, purchasing food at a supermarket. Worst case for a supermarket; wasted produce. Worst case for consumers; literal death. Yet the supermarkets are generally famous for being very low margin and cut-throat competitive. A tenant is only forced to move neighborhoods if the market is rising in lockstep; individual landlords can't force anything.

Moving neighborhoods due to financial stresses would be completely miserable. But unfortunately reality is unfair and if people want to live the way they like they also have to make a measurable contribution to the economy. If they are relying on the charity of other people, or the state, then they will have to put up with real inconvenience. If other people are bearing the cost, other people get to make the decisions.

On the other hand, if there’s a better deal on a different apartment, (1) it probably won’t be available; (2) even if it’s available, it probably won’t really be cheaper after accounting for the huge direct and indirect costs of moving; and (3) even if it’s really cheaper, people will still rightly be reluctant to upend their life to take advantage of it. It’s not “charity” when you’re paying through the nose for something that you don’t have a realistic choice about.

Now I'm not against charity as a concept, but we have a century or so of economic experience on this matter. If charity becomes compulsory, first people make stupid decisions and then the vulnerable have to live with the consequences of those decisions.

Being born gives everyone a right to dignity but it certainly does not give anyone a right to choose that someone else sets them up in a house and area of their preference. If somebody wants control of their own life, they are going to need to earn enough to either buy their own house, learn to build their own house or pay market rates for rent. It would be nice if there was a better way; but all the alternatives that are tried turn out worse than being honest about the economics of the situation up front.

> I’m pretty sure you lost track of your own analogy there. If there are better deals at a different supermarket, people will just go there...

If there are better deals in a rental market, people absolutely will go there. There are substantial costs of the order of a few hundred dollars to hire removalists, that isn't cheap but people aren't going to be so overwhelmed with emotion that they can't move a few blocks over for a $3,000 a year improvement in rents.

> It’s not “charity” when you’re paying through the nose for something that you don’t have a realistic choice about.

I've lived in 4 different communities in my life. I don't accept that moving somewhere with a lower cost of living is so terrible that people need to be protected from it - I can do it, it isn't bad. Somebody who can't afford to live in a neighborhood should be encouraged to move somewhere cheaper, and the idea that landlords should be protecting them from that outcome is a great way to set up a housing shortage. If they want to be part of a community then they should find a job that lets them rent in that community at the market rate.

> thanks in part to food safety regulations

You misunderstand; starvation from not being able to afford food. The point is that a vendor of a product can't unilaterally deny anyone access to market rates for that product because the competition will step in and undercut that vendor.

At worst, the landlord loses the money they were relying on to pay the mortgage on the property. Not every landlord owns hundreds of properties and can eat the cost of one sitting idle. Or worse, the cost of major damage to one by a bad tenant.

I'm biased. I have rented and owned. In both cases, it was what was right for me at the time. When I rented, I was happy to pay the money to my landlord in exchange for living in their property. Admittedly, I've had nothing but good landlords (with the exception of one), but I'm a very good tenant in exchange.

If a month of foregone rent was such a huge burden to landlords then it wouldn't be so common for them to keep their properties vacant.

Just recently, Los Angeles lawmakers have proposed a vacancy tax on the 111,000 vacant homes in the area.[1]

[1] - https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-vacant-housing-...

Landlords estimate a vacancy rate and keep that amount in reserves. However, they all earn more money if it's not vacant. It's almost never the case that they can make more money by keeping the rent high and units vacant.

Also, is they are using a property management company (which surprisingly many do), then turnovers are likely more expensive for the landlord than the tenant's cost to move - they usually charge 50% of one month's rent to find a new tenant for you.

If they're too optimistic in that vacancy rate, they will lose money.

For anyone thinking landlords have all the power, hang out on real estate forums. After all expenses (including vacancy), most RE investors target $100-200/month per unit. Now often, over several years, if rents shoot up in the city, they'll make good money from the increased rent. But they don't rely on that - their usual hope is the property's value will go up so they can sell it one day. The landlords who make huge piles of money are outliers. The vast majority of landlords do not make anything close to a SV SW developer and are not aiming to (of course, though, whatever they do make is almost "free", which makes the difference to them).

The top skill for a landlord is to estimate costs. At $100-200/unit, if they underestimate a lot, they are out of business. Surprisingly, most do not carry vandalism insurance. So if a disgruntled tenant trashes a place, they could easily lose the property. If they do not reserve money for evictions, they could easily lose the property.

That is the very definition of an outlier. Most landlords (easily over 90%) don't even have a 100 units. In fact, most landlords have a target number of units they need to "retire", and that number is usually less than 100.

Hypothetically, if 1 company managed 1,000 units and 1,000 people managed 1 unit then that outlier owns 50% of the market while representing 0.1% of the land lords.

Also, keep in mind that on the flip side, landlords likely view tenants the same way - looking at aggregates and not individuals: "Yes, lots of people can't afford the rent, but as long as I can get enough to make a profit, who cares about the rest?"

Unless they can hold out until property values rise and they can sell for a profit.

Sure, if they've got piles of cash sitting around to pay for the loan, insurance and real estate taxes.

Here's another tidbit people don't understand. If the property has more than 4 units, the value of the property is determined almost entirely by the revenue it generates.[1][2] The bank who will provide the loan to the buyer will look at those numbers, and the buyer will look at those numbers. In particular, what people will not look at are the comps (the value of nearby properties). So a "Let's lose money until the property values go up" strategy won't work there.

[1] https://theresabradleybanta.com/value-a-multi-unit-property/ [2] https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/2016-07-06-multifamily-re...

actually, that's pretty straightforwardly "income-based valuation", and it's logical because having more than 4 units means the property is primarily a business and not primarily a residence. businesses are valued by the income (i.e., profits) they generate. the sales comparison method (employing "comps") is primarily used with residences because the more accurate income-based valuation isn't available to residences, as non-income-generating assets. (the third valuation method is cost approach, which is used as a primary method of valuation in markets with low turnover/few comps, and in many tax assessment jurisdictions).

Do you have any data on how long properties are vacant? And if they’re vacant, are they vacant for a reason like renovations or construction?

Every landlord I’ve ever had has wanted to rent their place quickly. They hate missing a month.

This would have required me to take a huge loss on the property, which I would have had to pay out of pocket, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, which I did not have. I would have preferred to never rent at all.

If you can't raise rents, you'd be less likely to react to lower market rents. So prices stay sticky on the way down. Even if the laws are not in place now, there is a risk of them being in place in the near future and you'll be stuck at below market rents.

Also if you can't remove tenants then you'd be more selective and naturally that would increase vacancy rates.

A high vacancy rate doesn't prove that its not expensive to fill a rental. In fact higher vacancy rates means losing a tenant is even greater than if there were low vacancy rates. That means that an empty apartment is going to stay on the market even longer. And most landlords have some debt arrangement, are paying interest, taxes and insurance in addition to forgoing rental income.

Yes, but obviously people care most about the communities that they actually live in. "Absentee lords mainly want to extract cash" probably means that, as you say, a landlords interest in their community is related to their investment and the opportunity for the value to rise. People that actually live there have other interests, as the landlord does with the location they actually live. Someone renting out a room in their house or half of a duplex isn't absentee, and would have many non-profit interests in the local community. A landlord that lived a few hours away probably would not.

It is not necessarily easy to move. It can mean a longer or harder commute. It can mean changing which school your children go to (which can be a hardship for them). It can mean losing a connection to some social circle or religious organization (yes, this matters to some people). Trying to stay in the same neighborhood can mean dealing with the same management company, thanks to local governments giving developers effective monopolies over entire neighborhoods.

Landlords do not need to sell their property in order to enter a new market; they can use one property as collateral to take out a loan for another. That is more or less how real estate developers operate.

"Its very expensive to fill a rental. A landlord usually needs at least a month to find another tenant. That's a month of foregone rent"

In the NYC region every landlord I have dealt with has included a clause in the contract requiring 60 days notice before moving out, and reserve the right to bring potential new tenants into my apartment to show it off before I even leave (while I am still paying rent and living in the unit). It is also more expensive than one month's rent to move, at least in my experience in this area, and landlords are notorious for keeping security deposits as payment for "repairs" to their units.

"Landlords also have an interest in the community as they own equity in that community that would appreciate if the neighborhood gets nicer"

I have yet to see any landlord voluntarily do anything to improve a community. In every case where a property owner has done something to improve a neighborhood, it has been because they were forced in some way by the local government. When neighborhoods decline in ways that threaten their profits, landlords seem to just demand that the government step in rather than taking any action themselves.

"I don't see your point."

It is not hard to understand. Landlords, especially larger management companies with many large properties, have built-in advantages over their tenants that are not corrected by market forces.