That argument is way too theoretical. Some people want to own their home and others want to rent. The optimal amount of rental housing is not zero. Whether there is too much or not enough rental housing is an empirical question that depends on local conditions.

The cost of housing rising above median livable wage is not theoretical. We're well past that in some parts of the country.

But does that mean there is too much rental housing available or not enough, versus owner-occupied housing? If you want rents to be lower, it’s strange to argue against an increase in rentable housing.

Rent has also skyrocketed, so your framing as some trade-off between availability of rent or buy does not seem correct.

All else being equal, do you think JPMC building $1B of new rental property to raise or lower rents?

Depends entirely in the property they use to create those units doesn't it? If they demolish 10,000 low end rental properties to build 1,000 high end properties, the answer seems obvious. Equally obvious, if they could create property out of thin air then more supply lowers prices, but property is finite.

If they could buy 10K on-rental-market units at an average price enough under $100K each to leave room to build luxury housing there, it would make a hell of a lot more sense to just continue to rent them.

Well someone is paying it, or else the prices would come down. The middle and lower class are just being pushed out

There should not be megalandlords that can control a significant portion of housing anywhere. "Some people want..." is a lot more theoretical argument than gp. There needs to be limits on the power of landlords. I am curious as to what other countries have done to avoid it. Monopolies are illegal in the US, but it seems difficult to bring anti-trust against landlords.

>Monopolies are illegal in the US

If Comcast isn’t a monopoly for many in this country, I don’t know what is. Serious question: what are some notable examples of the government taking actual action against monopolies in a meaningful way that made them no longer monopolies?

There are no examples in the past 40 or 50 years. The country is infested with illegal monopolies. At this point there really aren't any industries left that aren't completely dominated by 3 or 4 massive companies. This has even spread to industries which have been historically immune to monopolies for various reasons, such as local news, FM radio, primary care practicianers, hardware stores, textbook publishing, car/heavy equipment mechanics, etc.

There are regulated monopolies. (For example, power companies.) They aren't illegal.

There are some business practices that are illegal, but the companies themselves are not.

That's a good point. There are regulated monopolies. But if a monopoly does not have specific legal endorsement to operate (eg NFL, power company for a region, etc) then it is illegal.

Reminds me of this 10 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34073880

Sounds about right.. we're seeing the first steps toward a return of Madame Guillotine already. Reddit is flooded with populist rage subs like AntiWork. Angry populist candidates (Trump and Bernie) dominated the 2016 election cycle

The less positive view is that when boomers begin to leave the housing market, it won't release housing pressure by putting more homes on the market, but rather create a wealth transfer to their children who may just rent out the homes for more than the equivalent sale.

> Local government will not be able to compete.

Local government is, by and large, NIMBY and thus on the side of the megalandlords.

Local government does not compete with property investors, it is already controlled by them.

That's not my experience; that is, it happens, but certainly not always. Look at major cities with rent control, for example.

Rent control is, I regret to inform you, also NIMBY; it benefits current residents at the expense of future ones.

Agreed. Whether there is rent control, the local authority should be obliged to offer to let houses at the controlled rent to people wanting them, building new houses if necessary.

I don't think there is any way to get a voting system to stop favoring people who vote in the current election over people who can't or don't, but the OP was talking about something different: local governments favoring a slight minority of voters (landlords, some of whom are nonresidents and can't vote at all) over the larger number of tennants. I say "slight minority" because quite a few "landlords" are not the Victorian aristocrats our cultural legacies from Marx's time make them out to be but rather individual people who saved up and now let one property.

The "problem of faction" is theoretically solved via representative democracy. That was the idea in the Federalist Papers.

It's not perfect but absolutely works better than direct democracy which has led to things like Prop 13 and it's endless extensions

> any way to get a voting system to stop favoring people who vote in the current election over people who can't or don't

Would that even be desirable? I feel that serving the desires of the voters is an essential (and desirable) property of democracy.

We do want majority decision making, but Democracy, outside a theoretically extreme sense, is self-determination for all, not just the majority.

That's the reason for rule of law, human rights, and limited government - to protect those without power. The people with power always have had self-determination.

Totally agreed; nevertheless, any voting system capable of expressing the desires of voters should result in an outcome that better meet their desires than the desires of non-voters. If it didn’t, why would anyone vote?

> I don't think there is any way to get a voting system to stop favoring people who vote in the current election over people who can't or don't

The purpose of human rights is to protect those people.

> I say "slight minority" because quite a few "landlords" are ... individual people who saved up and now let one property.

I agree, but that seems to be changing as these large investors buy up homes. That change is the point.

The question was, 'are local governments controlled by landlords?' Rent control is an evidence that they are not.

Local governments are controlled by property owners. Rent control harms landlords but they are still property owners and the lack of competition makes selling apartments more lucrative.

You repeat the claim, but the evidence says otherwise.

More often I'd say they're on the side of all local landlords, not necessarily megalandlords specifically. But your point is correct and I have yet to see a city council that wasn't stacked with property investors.

Counterpoint: NIMBYs in SF preventing development of new housing by even a small entrepreneur: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4

Something tells me JP Morgan would have an even tougher time getting past the NIMBYs.

I'm saying local government is generally heavily influenced by local property investors and will thus try to block all development.

You are right that NIMBYism isn't good for developing new housing, which is what JP Morgan is trying to do. How do they get past that initial hump? I don't know, but they obviously think they can.

But once that housing is built, there will be every incentive for JP Morgan to go ultra-NIMBY to protect their investment. Luckily, local government is very easy to push in that direction.

Behold the rise of neofeudalism: you can already see it in California, thanks to Prop 13.

Land value tax would fix this.

> Land value tax would fix this.

The banks decide what your house is worth and the gov then tax you based on that. Seems like a way to force people into a never ending grind and kicking out seniors. No thanks.

Er, an LVT doesn't tax the house at all, that's precisely the point. It only taxes the land... It's literally just a property tax that doesn't tax the house.

So if I've got 10 acres that I'm keeping as an undeveloped wilderness to provide habitat for migratory birds to use during migrations and you've got 10 acres next to mine with a 200 unit apartment building on it we pay the same amount of tax?

That doesn't seem fair since your 10 acres is using way more of nearly every government service property taxes fund and requires more of nearly every government infrastructure that property taxes pay for.

In that case, I'd imagine the solution would be to ask for a zoning change to the land (changing it's value), or put it in a non-profit which could have special tax treatment - or transfer ownership back to give under specific conditions.

A LVT is a fixed tax per square foot of land. It incentivizes maximizing the property value on the land and building high density housing there.

To clarify, it's not a flat dollar amount per square foot, it's a flat percentage of value. An acre of land in Wyoming is not taxed the same $/sqft as an acre of land in NYC.

Why couldn't ther be a tax per sqft? LAT rather than LVT. Would it change incentives in the way gp hypothesizes? Seems like it would.

That would be a terrible idea, frankly, because it will cause gradients of overbuilding/land abandonment and underuse. Think about it this way: you have a city where land is worth $30/sqft/yr in the center, $10 at the edge and $20 in between. If you set the tax at $20/sqft/yr, you will not incentivize people to build enough in the center of the city. It will be just fine in the middle, but it would be impossible to earn enough money from land to pay the tax on the outside of the city, so people would just abandon the land or try to build way more than you would actually want there (in which case the supposed land tax is actually cutting in and taxing labor and property as well)

I didn't mean there would only be a sqft / yr based on the value. I meant there would be a sqft / yr + value. So the city center would still be a higher tax than the edge.

The edge would still be worth more to build on because of the lower base-dominant tax.

But it does make the edge less accessible to lower incomes due to the base tax.

It should probably be a max value or max sqft on a given entity than try to indirectly force that with tax values. There's a reason we have anti-trust laws.

How does "value" get defined here? In the context of LVT.

The same way we've been doing property assessments for decades. Just easier because there's no structure to assess

My understanding is that in most places taxes would go down for homes. They would go up massively for those with vacant lots or a lot of land in prime areas that is being underutilized, which is why LVT is great.

My understanding is that people try to live their life and than tech bros and yuppies move in and somehow the taxes go through the roof and you gotta leave.

I mean, you sell your house with a lot of lot for a lot to some Facebook manager and move to Florida, but the whole scheme seems sinister to me.

Somehow "not getting my neighborhood ruined" is labeled NIMBY:ism nowadays?

I was specifically responding to the actual effects of LVT in practice. I'm not sure what you mean by sinister and also 'neighborhood ruined'?

Prop 13 was a direct result of a California court decision.

I forget the 1960s case, but the gist of it was it instituted equalization in school budgets out from property taxes in the name of equity.

In other words, high property taxes in 1 town were forced to be transfered to the neighboring town with a lower budget, so much so that the transfer had to be make payments by pupil within a $100 band.

That was instituted blind to school performance of course.

This actually took hold in many states not just California, however CA was the o ly one that forced transfer payments within a $100 band. There are different flavors of this all accross the country

Of course, homeowners are not idiots. They dont want their tax dollars wasted. So soon after this case forced these transfer payments, there was a swell of home owners pushing for prop 13.

Makes sense. Local taxes to local benefit. If my taxes are going elsewhere, why should i pay more?

And so here we are. Almost 50 years later. Prop 13 is here to stay and is the only restraint that communities have against out of control state spending.

There was also the whole issue of older people being forced out of their homes due to the rising property taxes. Turns out they vote in high numbers.

Lies.

Since 1977 (before Prop 13) we've had the California Tax Postponement Program. Low income seniors, the disabled and the blind can defer taxes indefinitely. They have zero pressure from the state to move.

Also, the biggest winners from prop 13 are businesses like Disney: https://www.curbed.com/2020/10/prop-15-california-property-t...

Meanwhile, anyone who didn’t buy a house or property for a business 20+ years ago is priced out of the market, so we have tons of low-quality stores and businesses that are insulated from competition. It’s interesting how many free market advocates will throw their values out the window when it benefits them to do so.

Right. And consumers get none of this benefit. When was the last time you scored cheap gas because of station's property tax?

It’s hard to have a ton of sympathy for people paying very little tax on their 7-figure property. Sell it and move anywhere else…but the real pro move is to just rent it out and live somewhere else. We have neighbors in our Silicon Valley suburb who live in RVs in their driveway so they can rent the entire house and still “live” there. Great retirement plan / grift that will never be available to younger generations.

It's truly incredible the mountains that are moved in politics to ensure poor families attend inferior public schools since Brown v. Board.

Not sure what you mean by "inferior," funding levels have little if anything to do with school quality onve basic needs are met:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district

Serrano v Priest

This is the paper https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/NTJ4178881...

> And so here we are. Almost 50 years later. Prop 13 is here to stay and is the only restraint that communities have against out of control state spending

Nope, prop 13 (and the resulting income taxes) is somewhere between feudalism and class warfare, transferring money from the young who work to old people who pay nothing and spend their days at city hall making sure nothing ever gets better.

If you owned your home and someone made it easy for you to rent at high price, wouldn't you do the same?

Im a renter, not a homeowner.

But I didn't choose to move to SF as a settler when it was a polluted mess of a city with days you couldnt go out, and high crime.

I wanted to move to opportunity.. When incomes are high and the city was better (it is not anymore)

Id like for prices to go down but I dont blame those that benefitted from just being there. Instead I look at the enablers, there is plenty of blame to go around, and the homeowner is last in that list. Prices are not High due to just prop13.

Miami, NY, Boise, Nashville and a bunch of other cities have housing prices that are going for the moon relative to what its been. They have no prop 13

40% of land on 280, between SF and Palo Alto is undeveloped farmland.

Cows dont pay property taxes

There's a difference, as an individual you wouldn't own a large percentage of the local real estate, just a small part.

Investors who buy up 40% of the market, blacklist tenants, and price fix to set a price floor or remove supply by taking rentals off the market. Those are the main issues.

The state governments need to re-implement taxes such that deductions and write-offs do not apply beyond a certain number of properties that are not owner occupied.

As for prices, Prices are high because the banking sector has not been held to account for their unlawful actions, and politician's can't balance their budget.

They have used that to enrich themselves through various frauds, and kickback schemes. The land on 280 has little to no natural water, that's largely why its undeveloped, and job centers are scarce.

Property taxes don't work because you inevitably price locals out of homes and setting a maximum on the tax simply ensures local government increases to that max every year. Long term residents are left in the lurch.

I have parents who have a home up there and their property tax has increased 2% of the value every year for at least the last 10 years. They are paying almost a full salary ($40,000) to keep the home. That's just in property taxes each year and that is just for a single modest home with both having to continue working just to get by.

there is no reason why prop 13 should benefit corporate entities.

CA should amend the law to only apply to owners with a SSN and then thibgs make more sense

That land you describe has “semi-hidden” enclaves of some of the richest households in the entire country. There is a reason why it’s underdeveloped.

They don’t want you living near them.

Prop 13 also has the great benefit of keeping anyone new out of the neighborhood, as they’ll be paying potentially an order of magnitude higher tax on the same property. Meanwhile, folks living on the edge of poverty already can stay in their 7-figure homes, unable to afford anything locally as everything else has moved on price-wise, so we get underfunded schools surrounded by de-facto millionaires. Businesses benefit even more, just look up what Disney’s Prop13 benefits are like. This is a great idea too, as it ensures that land owners who have owned in a place for decades are untouchable in terms of investment performance due to the massive tax benefit, so they can charge market-rate rent while paying a small fraction of the tax that anyone else trying to do the same today would. /s

They mortgage their houses for huge sums and then buy cheaper homes elsewhere and then fill it with multifamily amounts of people who trash the area (bc it wasn’t engineered for this many people) all while blocking it’s redevelopment. This is why San Francisco is a disgusting mess.

San Francisco is a disgusting mess because of govt policies that directly incentiviE and subsizide fentanyl outdoor homelessness, and act such programs are magnet for others in the same situation .

Renters are not taking dumps in the street.

Homeless people are

> Prop 13 also has the great benefit of keeping anyone new out of the neighborhood, as they’ll be paying potentially an order of magnitude higher tax on the same property.

Prop 13 is around 45 years old, which is much longer than the median homeowner tenure in California. That suggests that new people are moving into neighborhoods.

But let me play devils advocate here.

50%+ of california decided for this. Have you pondered why? First, are we really talking a massive tax benefit? Prop 13 is about tax increases to be limited ? Is that insane? Or is it maybe housing prices that are insane? Something does not add up.

I dont control the price of my home. Why should I pay ever incessant amounts over something I dont control and is effectively, paper gains?

But, I'll tell you what does control prices. Whose fault it is that there is no property being built in all the farmland along 280 between SF and Palo alto or Menlo Park.. Sure it looks nice, but its 40% of available land. Just farms.

Worse...some of farming is almonds... which take so much (subsidized) water. Again, why?

Why are there no municipalities created in those areas? Why is there no competition in the bay area's overpriced land ? Look into who controls the creation of new municipalities. Thats where a key problem for CA.

65% of California voted to overturn the 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Act, thereby allowing property sellers, landlords and their agents to openly discriminate on ethnic grounds when selling or letting accommodations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_California_Proposition_14...

The supreme court had to overturn the law.

Direct democracy is an objectively horrible way to govern. The US realized this hundreds of years ago and The Federalist Papers explicitly called out the "problem of faction" which is why we have a representative democracy instead of US citizens voting on federal law directly.

Children, immigrants, future transplants and prisoners can't vote. Should we be okay to grind them into dirt if it'll enrich voting demographics?

Yet switzerland has the oldest continuing government in the world.

Meanwhile, we had at least 1 close brush with failure (civil war). And counting.

You need to take care of factions and you need big, heated arguments at the local level. So they dont end up scaled up at the federal level.

Otherwise those scaled up "solutions" ends up massive problems, such as the sudden reversal of abortion, foreign interventions, and housing/ credit meltdowns due to federal subsidies of mortgage insurance.

Worth noting is that this whole scam is arguably illegal under the Fair Housing Act.

Prop 13 rewards long time landowning families. Who's that? White people. Even if the law wasn't explicitly racist originally it's impact has been. And only impact matters in the law.

Here's a link to a good paper on it

https://twitter.com/jarosenthal/status/1328136286159261698

If the current court weren't a joke I think this would be worth pursuing.

2/3 of California voted for prop13.

Focusing on the beneficiaries misses the whole issue. No one voting for the law at the time was looking To benefit "whit people". The court case simply enforced a law that , as usual, with good intentions, created unintended winners and losers. Its just this time the incentives ended up going the wrong way.

People that passed the law, 2/3 of Californians, simply wanted to control how their money was spent. They wanted to do away with the Serrano vs priest decision.

Serrano vs Priest decision broke the link between housing taxes and local government. That court case was directly related to a law passed by the same proponents of aboliahing prop13 now.

In other words, it is the same people that created the perverse incentives of prop13 who now want to get rid of it

Why should they be trusted?

Mob rule doesn't make for good laws. Especially in California, example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_California_Proposition_...

Prop 13 is arguably illegal under federal law. Of course with the current court I wouldn't want to press it. After all Clarence Thomas loves Prop 13 so much that he refused to sign the majority opinion in Nordlinger v Hahn because it didn't go far enough in empowering landowners.

> No one voting for the law at the time was looking To benefit "whit people".

Again, the Fair Housing Act cares about "disparate impact". Intention is irrelevant.

(Though given that the 70s was the era of school bussing battles it's a bit of a stretch to say that people weren't thinking about race wrt Serrano and school funding)

Found it

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serrano_v._Priest

As I don't live in CA, explain to me how this would work? As an outsider, it sounds on the surface a lot like those people who advocate for a flat income tax, IE: you and I both own a half-acre, but I have a single-wide trailer and you have the Hearst Mansion, but we are both taxed the same amount.

That’s the point. If you own a valuable piece of land, the government needs to incentivize you to density so that the community has cheap housing. Putting a single wide on a in demand spot is wasteful and should be punished.

More generally, land value tax returns land to its rightful owner, the people in the community. No one created land so it doesn’t make sense to allow people to profit off it.

> returns land to its rightful owner, the people in the community.

if that was the case, why does somebody currently own it, and who did this current owner buy it from (ala, go up the purchase chain back to the first buyer).

Mistakes were made. They obtained it from someone who had no right to give it to them in my opinion, although of course rights are a tricky subject and many believe “might makes right”

Eventually going up the chain brings us to the government, which again, had no right to give that land away when it belongs to the people. Whether they did it because of corruption or ineptitude is irrelevant.

The idea is to tax land as a percentage of its value (notably, not its size). This is because land is a necessary good which is exclusionary: because there is a fixed supply of land, it can only be owned at the expense of someone else.

So, let's take the scenario you gave: it depends very much where the mansion and the trailer are. Generally, people build mansions on high-value land and trailers are on low-value land, so the mansion will be taxed more than the trailer (a half acre in LA has a much higher value than a half-acre in rural Nevada where I live). If they are on the exact same lot, though, then yes they would pay the same tax. The idea is that taxing this way incentivizes the best use of land. Imagine that you have identical plots in New York, one is a big apartment complex, and the other a parking lot. With a property tax, you take a huge tax penalty for building, and so the housing complex pays a lot of taxes and the parking lot almost nothing. With a land value tax, however, the parking lot and the housing complex pay the same amount in tax, so it incentivizes the owner of the lot to build a more profitable housing complex there as well, and they take no tax penalty.

Prop 13 in CA is a law that freezes property tax assessments at sale, so you have people who are paying taxes on a home currently worth $2 million as if it were only worth the $150k they bought it for in 1980. This means it is always better just to rent the house out than sell it, since you have a huge tax benefit, making housing almost impossible to buy. Worse, you can pass the frozen assessment on in your will. So it is almost literally creating a quasi-landed gentry class.

I’m having a hard time imagining how this would work in my real estate market, given that there are shacks less than a quarter mile from gated neighborhoods in vineyards… maybe this one works effectively in urban areas?

> Prop 13 in CA is a law that freezes property tax assessments at sale, so you have people who are paying taxes on a home currently worth $2 million as if it were only worth the $150k they bought it for in 1980.

This is absolutely not true. What prop 13 does is that it limits the yearly base property tax increase to 2%. It's not frozen, it still goes up every year, but only 2%. Note that this means it still goes up 2% even in years when the market is down. It's basically a damping fuction to absorb the wild fluctuations in market value.

Americans, by and large, don't own their homes. If you disagree, stop paying your property taxes and see what happens to your ownership.

There's a reason "real" estate derives from the term for "royalty".

No, home ownership in America is ~65%. You need to pay taxes to support the infrastructure and you need to pay the bank to service your mortgage, but both are proscribed by a clear and largely static legal framework that does not infringe upon your legal ownership of the property.

A steel man interpretation of GPs argument would be that payment mechanics of property tax and subscriber services are more alike than people want to admit. You own your Netflix movies and land alike as long as you pay the subscription cost. Both eventually will be revoked if payment is withheld. Why should we call one subscribing and one owning when the results are the same?

The results do not seem equal if you take account for the actual costs and privileges. Owning property has more rights and renting has more costs.

Rights: If you do not pay your property taxes, you will probably have 6 months to several years before your home is taken. If you do not pay your rent, the eviction process will likely start immediately and the landlord will probably make your life more difficult until you leave, even if you live in a state with stronger tenant rights.

Costs: Taxes are somewhere between $500-$5000 per year for an average home, while rent is more like $500-$5000 per month. Rent is on par or greater than the mortgage cost for an equivalent space, I have only seen lower rents when the home was not still mortgaged.

So while owning and renting may both theoretically be a subscription or a service with regular costs, the costs and benefits are not the same.

Yeah I'm not sure why their post is so heavily downvoted.

You pay property taxes or you lose your home. You also need to build your house to an exact specification that your local government came up with, of which you have no control over.

In other contexts this isn't classified as ownership. Ownership to me is if I spend $300 on a lawn mower, it's mine forever with no future costs associated to it beyond repairs. I can do whatever I want with it, including modifying how it works or smashing it into a thousand pieces. Both of which are true if you buy a lawn mower today.

With the house scenario there's also tons of things out of your control that could be classified as "well, you own your house but things are about to get drastically different for you". For example what happens if you build a house in a nice empty area of land but you don't own all of the land surrounding your property. Over the years a couple of new houses are built around you and things are fine. But then 5 years later the town decides to build a fire station across the street from your house. Your living conditions are now ruined. A deafening siren may go off at any hour of the day or night and there's going to be extremely loud fire trucks and sirens all around you.

I don't know what would happen in this scenario but something tells me it doesn't end well for you as the home owner? Something tells me the town isn't going to offer to buy every house near the fire station over the market's value then pay to re-locate you to a different part of town (because you don't want to leave a specific school district or move to a different town / state). It also kills the market value of your house for future sales. Maybe at best they'd offer you a relatively small lump sum of money which is no where near worth the noise pollution and future loss of value on the house.

> Ownership to me is if I spend $300 on a lawn mower, it's mine forever with no future costs associated to it beyond repairs. I can do whatever I want with it, including modifying how it works or smashing it into a thousand pieces. Both of which are true if you buy a lawn mower today.

This in old, tired theoretical argument. Your lawnmower won't have much impact on your neighbor, but there are things you can't do with it: (e.g., modify it to emit poisonous gas, make painfully loud noises, or fling objects at high speed through your neighbor's window).

The answer is simply, you are subject to the law. If that makes you not free and oppressed, then you are not free and oppressed.

There is a huge difference between being able to do basically whatever you want with your property pursuant to the law and being constrained by whatever a typical rental contract for that type of property is. To imply otherwise is lying just lying with some fluff on top.

> You also need to build your house to an exact specification that your local government came up with, of which you have no control over.

Things are much less dire than this. My city’s zoning doesn’t come anywhere near an exact specification for buildings. It sets certain minima and maxima, but to call those an “exact specification” is a gross exaggeration.

Further, even if you need a variance from elements of the zoning, those are generally easy to get if there’s good cause (or in practice in our city, merely a not entirely unreasonable reason).

No doubt. I was just pointing out that there is a very different dynamic than the colloquial definition of "ownership". Just like you don't "own" your digital Kindle library in the same way as if they were physical books. It's an entirely different framework of rights.

I will still have ownership of my car if I don't register it. I can still use it as long as it's not on public roads etc. This is entirely different than if I don't pay my property taxes. I don't maintain use (or even ownership) of the property. Just because this distinction is clearly spelled out in a legal framework doesn't negate the difference.

You're confusing Allodial Title with Fee Simple land ownership.

It turns out that Allodial Title is a terrible system and has largely been abandoned since the middle ages.

Luckily the US is a constitutional republic, not a democracy

It's both. I'm not sure what your understanding of these terms is that you don't realise they're orthogonal, but I'm afraid it's wrong.

There should be a Godwin's Law for "we're a republic, not a democracy."

I've been on the internet a long time and this meme feels like it's appeared out of nowhere in the last couple years, it's really off-putting. We're talking about the USA. America! Democracy is their brand in every speech and bit of media. They've been been showboating how awesome democracy is and how the free world would prevail the entire cold war. And now suddenly it's "yeah no we aren't actually a democracy"? This meme is the biggest narrative retcon I've ever seen.

> What if you have a dispute with this landlord - can you compete in court with their lawyers?

Bold of you to assume that they wouldn't just cancel your lease, share your do-not-rent status with the other mega-landlords, and hope that homelessness makes you go away.

I moved into a house from From a mega rental. All the windows were open when we did The inspection. Had a massive chemical smell after we closed it up. Company kept making excuses about smell. Well in 3 months family suffered a whole series of strokes and other issues. Eventually found a gas leak. It didn’t have the rotten egg smell so took awhile to figure out.

Plus we just were gone mentally.

Doctors wouldn’t fill paperwork saying that high levels of toxic gas caused medical issues, so lawyers wouldn’t take the case.

Why didn’t you just leave and stop paying rent?

Maybe it was in winter, alleyways are kind of cold to sleep in that time of year.

You can find another rent

We eventually did.

This is often hard. Even if you find a new place and move, your landlord will come after you for the remaining rent on the lease. If you don't succeed, you'll have a ding on your credit report that makes it harder to get a home loan and may make it nearly impossible to find places to rent.

Yep. Basically couldn’t move again for 3 years because we broke lease. Eventually went on an online campaign telling my tail. Company contacted me. They Agreed to remove negative remarks. And send me my deposit. They tried to get me to sign paper work saying I couldn’t talk about. I refused. They still sent sent Money and removed neg marks. Its not justice, but at least I can get housing again.

Damn. I never tried that in the US so I assume it would be fine, but I guess that infamous credit score system really is preventing you from doing that. When I was in England I just stopped paying my rent when I had issues with my landlord and they just fixed the issues. In France it’s also pretty common to not pay the last month when you want to leave so they’re forced to use the deposit for that. Unfortunately a lot of landlords are quite shitty and that’s a good way to deal with them.

Name and location? If you’re comfortable could you email me more details

Nullserver gmail Georgia

What kind of toxic gas leaks into households that can’t be detected by smell? Radon?

Natural gas. Some sort of butane. Leak was in attic.

Growing up gas had a rotten egg smell. So we didn’t realize. Also when we called they kept insisting it was the carpet, the floors, the paint. They would come out and say nothing was wrong and that smell would go away.

There was also a carbon monoxide leak that the dector was going off on. That was what make us stupid as shit while dealing with it.

Natural gas is odorless. It only smells when a odor agent is added to it.

I mean, this is presumably also something that you might attempt to contest in court.

Renters have abismal rights when it comes to property disputes. As a class, renters are more likely to be living paycheck to paycheck, they are less likely to be connected to government or local community, and are dependent on their current landlord/credit agencies to secure shelter in the future.

If you are paycheck to paycheck, a lawyer is a crazy expense at the outset. If suing your landlord means that you are out of a home… and their mention to the credit bureau or landlord friends kills your next lease. Then you probably aren’t going to be able to stay around long enough for the court case to play out.

Wouldn’t many of these disputes fall to small claims court? I thought lawyers weren’t a thing and big COs just settle in small claims

Small claims have dollar limits and most corporate landlords enforce arbitration agreements to prevent any possibility of a smaller court from damaging their interests.

Exactly— this stuff would end up in pro-corporate arbitration, depending on the jurisdiction.

Just for reference here's a list of small claims amounts by state (link below). I grew up in $rustBelt state where the small claims max is paltry. Then I moved to $coastalState1 and was surprised by how much larger their small claims maximum amount was. Then I moved to the other coast and was surprised AGAIN by how large their amount was.

TL;DR: Depending on the state you're in Small Claims max payouts range from $2,500 (Kentucky, Rhode Island) up to $25,000 in DE and TN. Also note that some localities such as NYC, Nassau, etc. have different amounts from the rest of NY State. Also note that there are some exceptions to the max. amount in some states for eviction claims and other special classes of [small] claims.

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/small-claims-suits-h...

Also, IANAL, but this "my home had poisonous gas in it that the owner knew about and was negligent in remedying" _is not_ a small claims case. Injuries / loss would, IMO, easily exceed any small claims amount.

Sure, you technically have the right to file a lawsuit, possibly in small claims court. The question is whether exercising your rights leaves you better off as a practical matter. Like, there's a similar issue with most credit-card based disputes with merchants, where you technically can file a chargeback, but practically speaking you'd rather not get blacklisted from Amazon/Uber/whatever so that's off the table completely.

Let's not forget that plenty of landlords will outright refuse to rent to anyone who has been in legal proceedings with a prior landlord. So having a landlord try to evict you (wrongfully or not) can often have the effect of leaving a renter unable to secure housing anywhere else.

The problem with America is that individuals are penalized for their history but corporations aren't.

If there was only a way to review landlords/owners.

It’s turtles. JPMorgan is publicly traded. The renter can just buy as many shares of it as he wants and pretend it’s his home equity.

This is nonsense. 99.99% of renters can’t buy enough JPMorgan to make a difference. They don’t have the money and that’s why they’re renting.

But if tomorrow JPM decides to invest like Kathy Wood and lose all the money, the renters will be without home equity and the JPM equity.

> It’s turtles. JPMorgan is publicly traded. The renter can just buy as many shares of it as he wants and pretend it’s his home equity.

Try asking your brokerage for $400,000 of margin at 5% on a $20,000 account and see what they say.

There's no financial instrument even remotely close to what a 30 year mortgage is for the average individual.

I believe you can get higher leverage on treasury bonds at your broker. My 1 year treasury bonds use less than 2% margin.

What's the rate? You're not getting free money.

It’s 1% above what you make on the treasury. Less than mortgage rates for sure, and if interest rates drop it might become free money, of course if interest rates go up you are swimming naked.

I suppose, but can't really beat 2.5% on a house (remember, if you're living there, you're not paying rent.. hopefully!)

Good luck getting 95% leverage to buy $500k worth of JP Morgan stock.

Equity is the part of the mortgage paid off (unleveraged value in the house).

Then everyone would have to rent.

Not if prices fell. And they’d save a small fortune in interest over the life of the loan.

A fortune? I'll be paying a little more than $100k over the life of my 30y mortgage. I think that is very fair for the amount I borrowed (3x that...)

What was the interest rate?

> We should bright back 50% down, five year mortgages and cut the rest of the stuff out.

Well, in that case, good luck convincing the majority of the population to adopt a policy that will catastrophically crash their net worth. Government involvement in mortgages is what keeps our society civil at this point.

How much of that profit is passed on to shareholders vs benefitting land owners directly? There’s also the matter of not being able to live in those shares, having to still pay rent, still pay massively inflated property taxes yourself…

I would imagine democracy is what makes this a precarious business decision for JPMorgan.

Currently, most people do not rent. If they did, then it would be much less lucrative for the landlord - especially if people are struggling.

“Vote for me and I’ll cap rents at (amount below cost)!” is a fairly easy solution to that problem in a democracy.

Yes. This should be illegal. Where are our politicians to step in and stop this?

The article said JPMorgan. No politician is stepping in anytime soon.

They are all complicit. At least in the UK, our politicians have a rich relationships with companies like these (ex - exployees, advisors, donors) and no one bat's eye.

The title has a made up word because it would never pass editorial to call it "fuedalism" as you rightly stated.

There is no discussion to be had here. It's the return of Europes peasant/aristocrat economy back in full swing. Only took a century to come back. Oh well...

> A crucial question is, is this part of the deliberate attack on democracy by the (unnamed) coalition of wealthy and corporations, or truly just an investment

These things are one and the same. There is nothing to do with billions of dollars outside of buying influence.

$1bn on rental homes

That's 10,000 $100,000 homes, or 5,000 $200,000 homes, or 2,500 $400,000 homes.

Is it just me, or when put like this it doesn't seem so many? The high rise where I live has, I estimate, 200 units. So at $400,000 per, they're buying roughly 12 high rises. Doesnt seem like a "threat to democracy". What am I missing?

When you're going to cook a frog, the water doesn't immediately start boiling does it? Extreme situations, often don't start extreme.

We need the Japan model to ease up the supply. That's the only direction to solve housing problem

Just got a bit closer to WEF's "prediction" for 2030.

"You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy"

Doesn't seem very... Democratic or even republic to me...

Source: https://twitter.com/wef/status/983378870819794945

> The megalandords are potentially a serious threat to democracy.

everything in today’s america seems to be “a serious threat to democracy”.

as such it looks like american democracy is too fragile.

"Blaming the victim" - commonly used abusive manipulation tactic used to reverse victim and offender. And you just did it.

The other option to why "everything in today's america seems to be a serious threat to democracy" is, obviously, that maybe that's because America's democracy is under attack.

$1B in real estate is less than one one-hundreth of a percent of all residential real estate in the US (estimated at $43,400 billion).

You really think that's a threat to democracy?

Shouldn't homeowners be able to sell to whoever they want?