How have your property taxes and/or insurance changed during that period?

I have a rental (family living in it) where the insurance has changed a few percent in the last 5 years but the property taxes are up 5x. Yes, 5x in 5 years between the rate and appreciation.

What started as a small net loss is getting bigger and bigger so I hope you're not in the same boat.

Property taxes have gone up, about double what they were. I just lose more money on my rentals, and to top it off I pay for private school, so don’t even get the benefit :/

I propose that all landlords start offering two lease agreements. One that is let’s say $2000/month, and another that is $1600/month plus whatever property taxes are, which happen to be $300/month currently.

Then tenants might think twice before voting for higher property taxes since it will directly affect their rent instead of indirectly.

If your tenant moved out and a new one moved in, would you charge more?

Macroeconomic shifts seem like they would be biased towards transient transactions, and resisted by steady-state.

Probably. Though the last time that happened I didn’t. The family had less income, so while I was losing more money now due to property taxes, my income had gone up so it was kind of a wash.

Becoming a landlord means more buyers for the same houses, thus pushing the housing prices instead, possibly taking them off the market for other's that want to own their own.

There will always be those who have and those who do not, the weak and the strong, the poor and the rich.

The question is, will those with power (money, connections, education) use it to gain more for themselves or to lift up the poor.

The idea that a homeless person’s problem is just, that they can’t afford rent or a mortgage is absurd, and would just prove that you’ve only ever dealt with homeless people at an abstract level.

I never talked about homelessness. I had young renters in mind, wanting to buy but seeing the prices skyrocket away.

Ahh I see. I’d probably consider selling my house cheaper to tenants if they’re good.

Though I guess this is a little bit of the “to he who has more will be given, to he who doesn’t have, even what he does have will be taken from him”

this is an example of "price stickiness." People selling goods tend to let the price stay at whatever level it's currently at longer than is strictly rational. Because prices tend to be sticky, wage-driven inflation tends to result in real gains for wage-earners.

(Temporarily)

Correct, because nothing lasts forever in this fallen world. That said: the amount of time spent in a state of wage-driven inflation -- setting up the situation where temporary moments of price stickiness result in increases of effective demand that in turn hot up the economy as a whole -- is the thing we want to maximize.

Totally! We can also go ahead and tax away all the gains captured by landlords on the unimproved value of their land (definitionally price movement that is not due to them).

found the Georgist!

I am a landlord! Breaking the cycle is a farce: why do you think it’s a cycle? It’s self-reinforcing and resilient to small changes (like a few landlords here and there delaying rent increases for a few years).

Well have you charged less than market rate for rent? I had a place for 10 years that I was charging about 60% market rate on because the lady was old and lived off social security. I had negative cash flow on it.

My other rental has a negative cash flow as well.

I make good money so I can afford it.

If every single person who complained about the plight of the poor actually physically went and helped the poor, their plight would be less, instead you do nothing and go vote for the politicians to do something.

You wanna talk about a farce, how about this one - the politicians care about the poor.

Talking to immigrant Uber drivers in SF, ironically they hate the government there and it reminds them of the corrupt ones in their own country, the one the “caring progressives” keep voting for.

You blew right past "It’s self-reinforcing and resilient to small changes". The two underlying problems here are zoning policy and macroeconomic policy (ZIRP), both only changeable through politics. Directly helping other individuals doesn't stop the overall trickle-up economy from doing its thing of skimming wealth upwards. Yes, you personally can alleviate some other individuals' suffering by not turning the screws as hard, and I agree that you should where you can. But it's foolish to think that the systematic problem could be solved by everyone just choosing to go against the gradient.

Also I presume when you say "negative cash flow" you are leaving out the bit about your equity increasing due to mortgage payments and bubble inflation. So you can get off your performative high horse as well - you aren't describing a charity project, but rather an illiquid savings account.

>the one the “caring progressives” keep voting for.

And the alternative is what?

Keep on hoping the oligarchs will share their wealth and it will "trickle down"?

It’s boggles the mind how one can look at the long arc of history and come to the conclusion caring progressives were the problem all along.

Good for you, but it doesn't seem realistic to expect large numbers of landlords to do this.

I’m a landlord too and this sounds suspiciously like an excuse for bad behavior. You can make a big difference in peoples lives by not being a greedy a*hole. Delaying rent increases for a few years can have huge positive impacts on individual lives.

No it won’t change the system but a bad system shouldn’t be used to justify personal bad behavior.

You don’t have any information whatsoever about my personal behavior.

Even if I hypothetically did raise rent with the market, I don’t find it compelling to say doing so is “bad” behavior. This is what a market is, and prices are very important for allocating resources. “If you’re a landlord, don’t raise rent” is not a society-level solution, let’s not waste too much time on it :)

Be honest its greed.

Yep! And here in reality, the question cannot be, “how do we eliminate basic human instincts like greed,” and instead, “how do we direct our instincts toward positive outcomes?”

It’s a violation of basic logic to allow greedy people to just indefinitely claim stake of something they had no part in creating (land) so they can indefinitely reap rewards from activity on that land which they have no part in (rent).