I don't think landlords are saying "I can't risk evicting a poor tenant, I'll make my unit unaffordable" - it's a market. If the neighborhood is gentrifying, rent to gentrifiers. If the best you can do is Section 8, take section 8.

Depending where you live, if you attend some landlord association meetings, or read any popular literature about real estate investing, you'll see that this is basically what happens. The common advice is to try to bring your units higher up in the market as much as possible, to minimize risk because folks with higher incomes are seen as less likely to trash the place, less likely to sue, less likely to stop paying. Books go on for hours about how you should keep your unit vacant instead of renting to a risky tenant.

I'm not making this up and these are not my rules or opinions. It's just the logical conclusions these people come up with, given the environment they're faced with.

I don't think that you're making this up. I think that the advice would still be to leave units vacant and bring them up market even in the presence of extremely landlord-friendly eviction policy...

this dynamic will always be true: "folks with higher incomes are seen as less likely to trash the place, less likely to sue, less likely to stop paying"

I think government incentive should focus on changing this, as I attempt to describe in https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=AYBABTME#29087565

Basically, this is somewhere I think govt. _constructive/supportive_ intervention is needed, because today's punitive policies creates economics that don't allow a humane end result.

Government just needs to crank out large volume affordable housing. With modern tools and methods (+R&D), enough scale and a long term plan for maintenance this is entirely doable. The goal shouldn't be to house everyone but to create a surplus. (Lots of empty homes) Popular locations with insufficient space will continue to get more expensive, as it should be.

I like the idea but I think the concept of using technology to build big, low cost volume housing is mistaken. The act of concentrating affordable housing is not desirable and easily forgotten about. It creates ghettos. Watching interviews about homelessness, a lot of homeless folks will talk about how dangerous it is to hang out in places like Skid Row. That it's dangerous to be surrounded by other people with problems. Read about the struggle faced by youngsters in poor neighborhoods, about how their surrounding were a huge strain on their ability to develop and escape. The environment in which you are located, when you're facing economic struggle, really dictates your odds of recovering. I grew up poor in a single-mom family, and lived in lower income neighbourhood and know first hand how their influence is bad for kids. My mom did all she could to pull us out of there, so we wouldn't be influenced too much by the neighbourhood. Still, had plenty of time to see sad things and be originally influenced in suboptimal ways.

I think we should build more single unit affordable housing! And shove it all over the place, in affluent neighbourhoods! Help people leave their problems behind.

This thread is getting deep for HN and it's hard to respond, but I had shoved my random thoughts on this in https://twitter.com/AntoineGrondin/status/145489614700107776...

> The act of concentrating affordable housing is not desirable and easily forgotten about.

We know how to plan this properly. Mistakes will no doubt be made but there is no reason to think they will be this obvious.

Almost everything you describe is the effect of a housing shortage. The new houses wont happen overnight, it takes quite a bit of time to create a surplus.

creating housing by the the government is a possibility. (a ton of plattenbau build straight after ww2 is still used in my country).

if they could fix the housing crisis my bombed out city straight after ww2, I'm pretty sure the US is able to do so 80 years later with modern construction methods.

Its a race to the bottom (section 8 is guaranteed money) or top (high income homes tend to be more stable).

No one wants a medium income rental due to that. And I'm thinking about being a landlord - as I'm moving - and evicting a tenant that refuses to pay for 6 months while I still need to maintain the property and pay mortgage is prohibitive. The risk there is scary high for what shouldn't be risky.

The ones who are doing that are talking from experience. E.g. they had to evict a poor tenant and now they are overreacting for an understandable reason.

This is why I advocate removing the market and doing a substantial fraction of housing as public housing. Other countries like Sweden (iirc) do this.

The total value of all US real estate is $50 trillion. There's not a lot of situations in life where you can say, even the United States government doesn't have enough money to make a dent here- but....

That's only if they buy it. In the civil war, we took the slaves and land of the confederacy without making the owners whole. Landlords may not be slaveholders, but they are parasites and exploiters, even Adam Smith said so of the big landlords (in fact he was against the modern incarnation of our economy which is highly concentrated way beyond imagining in his time). Rentiers make money by simple ownership and exclusion, not by their labor. It is not socially beneficial. The word "lord" is part of their name and most Americans, at least the common people in 1776, understood the American project as the destruction of the nobility and aristocratic privileges. While the formal titles are gone, the plots of land that were the source of the nobility's power remain.

https://www.quora.com/Was-Adam-Smith-against-landlords?share...

Eh, I would be very careful about incentives and side effects. Confiscation of property never quite goes the way you expect, and is usually semi-impossible without a preceding war (see: 1917 Russia).

The Soviet Union didn't have landlords to deal with, but the housing situation was not any better - just instead of apartments being unaffordable, you'd get in a queue for public housing that was like 20 years long...

Our situation seems quite bad and deteriorating, so I am open to reopening the book on the Soviet idea. I think a careful analysis of why their housing was not ideal is needed.

At the beginning of their project, many people lived in huts so the step up to small stark apartments was a huge step up for millions. After a few decades though, they appear to have failed to improve their housing infrastructure at a fast enough rate. I don't know exactly why.

Some sources I've read say that once Krushev (and his base of support) were in power, they redirected resources into consumer goods to try to match western lifestyles too early. The previous plan was to constantly reinvest in heavy industry which creates exponential growth by providing the material basis for more heavy industry. This shifting of resources away reduced the rate of growth as the population continued to grow and resulted in a stagnating standard of living.

This makes intuitive sense to me so far, but I have not done enough research to say this is conclusive.

I would point out that in the US, we have the perception of being able to move wherever you want given enough money. However, in reality we are restricted (queued) by the affordability of housing and moving. The people at the top do have real freedom, but the bottom sections (most of them not present in this highly paid programmer forum) have very little.

Soviet economy was tilted very heavily towards heavy industry until the very end. For very simple reasons: that's what makes tanks and bombs.

That aside, you can't look at economics of USSR in isolation from its politics. For example, under Stalin, most peasants were effectively tied to their land in kolkhozes and sovkhozes - they couldn't freely move to the cities where the better-paying jobs were, and thus couldn't compete for housing there.

Tanks and bombs (something the US also produces in spades (why would the USSR need an equipped military??)) are also consumables, they aren't additional investment in core heavy industry. They detract from economic growth and civilian improvements (though some military technologies do come back and help other areas of technical development).

The urban centers had something like 10-20% of the population. If the peasants all moved to the cities, there would a) be not enough jobs and b) no food as no one would be producing it.

I'm talking about tanks and bombs as proportion of the overall economic output. It was higher in USSR than it was in US, or indeed any other country.

And I'm not saying that producing those things is an investment, but rather that Soviets consciously invested into heavy industry to the (rather significant) detriment to the rest of the economy, so as to have manufacturing capacity to produce them.

> The urban centers had something like 10-20% of the population. If the peasants all moved to the cities, there would a) be not enough jobs and b) no food as no one would be producing it.

Well, the peasants wanted to move to the cities because the pay and the overall quality of life there was better. Peasants in kolkhozes were essentially serfs, with the government coming and literally taking the "excess" of their food output away. This could have been solved by, you know, actually paying them properly for that food. But why pay when you don't have to, and would rather spend that money elsewhere - e.g. on industrializing the cities?

One thing to keep in mind here is that Bolsheviks were very much not a peasant party. In the Constituent Assembly (which was directly elected by the population), they were a minority, and the most numerous party was the Socialist Revolutionaries, who actually represented the immediate interests of the peasants. Which is precisely why the Assembly did not rubber-stamp the Bolshevik government, and was forcibly dissolved.

Similarly, in village councils, Bolsheviks rarely had a majority - so they introduced kombeds to override those unruly councils. Also, when the council system was first codified in the 1918 Soviet constitution, the Congress of Soviets (i.e. the ultimate legislative body) had one representative for every 25,000 constituents of urban councils, and one representative for every 125,000 constituents of rural councils - i.e. one factory worker effectively had the same voting power as 5 peasants .

These kinds of things is why there were so many large peasant uprisings in Soviet Russia early on, to the point where they had to use poison gas to effectively suppress some of them.

If you want to have a fair society just make the holders of capital pay for the privilege of owning it. This is commonly known as a wealth tax but there are two taxes whose introduction leads to no economic dead weight losses.

Taxes on money and land holdings. If you spend your money you do not "win" because you pay transaction taxes (VAT etc) or you increase your exposure to risk in the financial markets. If you don't spend your money you lose because you pay the wealth tax for nothing.

The reason why a land value tax works is that land already exists. It's supply is inelastic. The owner of the land did nothing to create it. So taxing the owner for holding onto land will not discourage him from working (building a house and renting it out). The tax revenue can be used to pay for public infrastructure like transportation then the value of the land goes up which will directly fund the infrastructure. A holding fee on land discourages speculation because the expected value of holding onto land without utilizing it is negative. The reason why land speculation is so profitable is that location is a monopoly. As the community around the land develops the speculator benefits off the work other people while doing no work himself. It's especially bad when income taxes are used to fund infrastructure. As the government does more infrastructure projects and charges higher income taxes your rent will go up as the value of the land goes up.

Just a thought experiment: A single tax implementation of land value taxes implies that you've paid your taxes by paying rent. Rent would still be expensive but products and services would be cheap and your income would be higher.

Seeing as how he has demonstrated the ability to read, it's obvious he's old enough to know better.

When I was in my teens, I was a conservative. As I get older, I become more leftist as I read more history books. Entire countries have been formed on the basis of similar ideas. It's childish to think they can be dismissed flippantly.

I like to pretend that I don't pick sides. I might be left leaning because the existing system clearly isn't efficient enough to be left alone.

Not flippantly, no. But USSR and its authoritarian ilk can be dismissed on the basis that they ended up worsening the conditions of their residents relative to similar countries that didn't try such experiments.

OTOH there's still the libertarian left. But Soviets and other leftist authoriarians were always as hostile to it as they are to anyone right of them.

This is a cheap shot. If you have a point to make, you should make it directly.

My personal opinion is that governments should provide a backstop guarantee for tenants, to bear the risk instead of forcing landlords into making cruel choices.

I think it'd make sense. It's beneficial to govt. to keep people productive and ultimately off the street. Hence (in a capitalist system) they want to encourage the market to provide housing to people who would otherwise not get it. If the government came involved into transactions as a guarantor for people in need, and provided incentives and reassurances to landlords that they would not be disadvantaged if they provide housing to those in needs, I believe there would be less homeless people in the street, and more generosity from landlords.

E.g.:

(1) if I have no upside and a high risk exposure in providing housing to a recovering addict, will I do it if I'm then unable to evict that person when they fall back down into addiction? No, I wouldn't, even if in my heart of heart I wish I could help them.

(2) if on another hand, the government came and said "we'll guarantee this market rate, and will facilitate eviction proceedings and pay for repairs if things don't work out", would I be willing to risk it and rent to that person? Probably yes, there would be enough structural support to encourage me to do some goodwill help.

The problem is that the stick presented in (1) is what's going on right now, and there's no carrot (2). It's basically the policy makers telling landlords: all you, don't you dare taking in tenants who are a higher risk! Because if you do, we'll be watching!

* * *

In coordination with this, I think a smart policy would be to combine this idea with something else: instead of trying to build affordable housing projects, try to spread these initiatives around. Avoid the creation of ghettos. If a govt. agency was to support someone's tenancy, the agency should try to spread these people uniformly around town, mixing them with all strata of society, instead of putting all these people in the same geographical area. This would encourage reintegration in a constructive environment. People living in their walled gardens would be annoyed, but ultimately, the people in need of help would be allowed a chance to heal in a safer environment.

First, density is obviously cheaper, and many people already begrudge homeless people sleeping outside even though that doesn't cost anything. Second, even if a person is addicted to drugs, they still need a place to live. So evicting them doesn't actually solve anything except your business risk. Third, NIMBYism is almost omnipotent as a political force in most parts of the US worth living in. You aren't going to convince people to let poor people or people with problems live near them. They will fight like hell to stop it, and many will be wealthy or influential.