1. Bad tenants will have no incentive not to harm the property and the neighborhood.
2. Landlords will be forced to pay for insurance to cover all the bad things that tenants are now free to do.
3. Rents will rise to cover the costs of the insurance. Conscientious tenants will be penalized.
4. Even otherwise conscientious tenants will start to cut corners since they are having to pay for the insurance anyway and it’s clearly unfair.
What a nasty situation for conscientious tenants landlords and neighbors you are advocating.
Only the least conscientious people win.
The entirely predictable result is some very rich landlords and some very homeless people.
>1. Bad tenants will have no incentive not to harm the property and the neighborhood.
Of course they will: they may lose the security deposit, may be evicted, may be sued, and may even be arrested.
>2. Landlords will be forced to pay for insurance to cover all the bad things that tenants are now free to do.
They already pay for insurance.
>3. Rents will rise to cover the costs of the insurance. Conscientious tenants will be penalized.
Building more housing will make housing more expensive?
>4. Even otherwise conscientious tenants will start to cut corners since they are having to pay for the insurance anyway and it’s clearly unfair.
No, for the same reasons I gave before they still have an incentive to behave well.
1. That implies that home owners would not be permitted to rent only to family members (or friends), because that constitutes picking and choosing tenants.
2. Not being able to pick and choose tenants literally means you cannot evict existing tenants for any reason, like years of non-payment of rent, or damage to the unit or whatever. Such a move can be interpreted as trying to replace tenants with a better choice of tenants; i.e. picking and choosing tenants.
3. Only a complete fool or someone desperate would rent their home out under such a rule. (Even in a housing market in which you can screen tenants, you can still get awful tenants. Imagine if you had tenants foisted upon you by some rules. Yikes!) The result would be fewer rental units on the market.
4. But, in this imaginary world, banks would likewise not be allowed to pick and choose to whom they give money to buy a house, so there would be a lot less renting.
This is so silly.
Who's going to build these hypothetical housing units? So many that there are more houses than applicants.
While I sympathize with the logic, there is no reason to expect that.
For that matter, just ask your parents. It was national policy of the U.S. to build an overabundance of housing for the 50 years after the Great Depression, which is why landlords' income as a fraction of the national economy hit an all-time low in the mid 1980s. It has since rebounded to all-time highs, which is why nobody can find a place to live.
What? How? Real estate prices to income ratio in Austria is one of the worst in the EU. Few people can afford to buy without inheritance. Austrian real estate market is broken AF.
During this time, the world population has more than quadrupled.
Can you explain what you mean in more detail?
Growing by less than 40% in 100 years is slow. Austrians hardly had to scramble to provide housing for themselves.
(Now this line of reasoning is simplified quite a bit, because housing is area dependent. Even if the population in some country remains constant, say that everyone suddenly decides that a very tiny area of the country is the only worthwhile place to live. They all concentrate there and now there is a housing problem now. Well, not everywhere, just in that spot! In other spots there are empty, cheap houses.)
Can you point out exactly where they said that?
Having a liquid supply of decent rental apartments on the market is important for a dynamic economy.
General prices would drop, but renters would end up paying for something they are not using or even have access to...
Do you leave your domicile unlocked for anyone to visit, while you are elsewhere? No? A landlord doesn't want to do that, either.