Most people are not ok with cheating anywhere it's just in the west we don't have the concept public shame like you do, especially in regard to private relationship matters.
Most landlords arent big corporate in the USA either especially in areas where the housing crisis is the worst.
I think this narrative is just meant to distract people from questioning the necessity of the landlord class, they want people angry at a faceless corporate boogieman instead of local landlords (for obvious reasons)
The "mom and pop" landlord who owns a few houses is much less likely to keep a property vacant to support higher rents. They have taxes, insurance, and probably debt to pay off. They need cash flow; they'll be more likely to cut their rent a bit to get a tenant.
Show me the math where a large landlord can make money by keeping apartments intentionally vacant. Corporate landlords have no less need for cash flow than mom and pop landlords.
The cost of holding apartments intentionally vacant is large, and has a very tiny effect on pricing unless there's a single player with more market share than exists anywhere I have seen in the US.
In a different arena, parking, it's widely accepted that the best possible way to establish adequate parking is to set prices high enough that there's always a spot available. Anything less results in people not being able to park. Setting apartment prices similarly is beneficial to the public, in that there's always a place to move into.
We need apartment vacancies, they are beneficial to renters, because people need to find housing at all times. Ideally we have a surplus of apartments so that not only do renters have choices but so that prices fall to the cost of providing housing.
That's basically a listing search page that allows you to sort by price.
What else do you expect "collective bargaining" to do in a market where every tenant has a different landlord? Your landlord isn't going to care if the tenants of 10,000 other landlords threaten to move out. They only care if you threaten to move out, and then to credibly do that what you need is to show them the unit you could move into which is asking for less.
The real problem is that you need the unit you can threaten to move into to first exist, rather than its construction being inhibited by zoning etc.
> Collective bargaining your landlord can't ignore is you and your neighbors all withholding your rent payments until your leases are renegotiated.
How is that collective bargaining when your neighbors have different landlords?
All you're suggesting is to stop paying rent, which anybody can do on their own, with the usual consequences of your credit getting ruined and then the landlord serves you an eviction notice and changes the locks.
Consider the economics of what you're suggesting. Your unit costs $800k when it should cost $200k because of artificial scarcity (zoning), so then the landlord has to pay $800k for it and charge rents high enough to pay back that loan. The way you fix that is by getting the cost of the unit back down to where it should be, i.e. building more units to alleviate the scarcity.
Demanding that the landlords charge less without reducing what they have to pay for the building doesn't work, because then who is going to sink $800k to build a new rental unit? Who is going to keep renting out their existing units at a loss instead of turning them into condos or similar? Which then makes the scarcity of rental units worse and causes rents to go up.
You can't solve a supply problem by bargaining with someone the law still effectively prohibits from increasing supply.
The landlord class is very powerful and they use that power to suppress the housing supply so if collective bargaining puts them out of the game that's a good thing!
It still isn't "collective bargaining" when you all have different landlords.
On top of that, "puts them out of the game" means that there are no apartments to rent. And it wouldn't even work because you'd not only still have the non-landlord homeowners lobbying to suppressing the housing supply, you'd have the banks making sure you can't actually wipe out the landlords since the landlords owe them way too much money for things to happen that way.
> Less homes to rent = more homes to buy, how is that a bad thing?
Suppose you don't have a down payment to post immediately but you'd still like to sleep indoors over the next five or ten years.
> Less rent for landlords is more money in the hands of people to fund housing development, that's good for banks too!
The landlords were the ones using it for that to begin with. They use the profits from one building to buy another one, and "buyers able to pay the construction cost" is the thing developers need to build new housing.
Meanwhile the tenants would have just ruined their credit by defaulting on their lease and then can't get a mortgage to pay the developer even if they did have same down payment.
> Non-landlord homeowners have overlapping interests however they are not organized or politically powerful as the landlords are.
That doesn't really help you when they're two thirds of the voters and don't need to be organized to vote for the candidate who promises to screw you for their benefit.
There is such a thing as a Tenant Union, and in fact they are currently spreading across the country as renters turn to collective bargaining. It works!
In my town the biggest property developers are openly best friends with the county commissioners and planning / zoning board.
And by best friends I don't mean "run in the same circles" but "go on vacation together with their kids", "are in each other's wedding parties", "are godparents to each other's children".
And then they have the audacity to act surprised when the public is pissed that, despite traffic studies showing that there's no road capacity and no room for adding lanes to arterials, despite environmental impact studies about the shoreline showing negative effects, that the commissions sign off on their buddies and their developments without even a hint of hesitation.
Again, landlord is a customer service job. It's developers that build housing, not landlords. Developers have representation landlords don't. After my city passed new tenant laws the city lost ~15k units which increased rents. In response the city asked landlords how to improve the market then proceeded to do nothing with what they were told.
Basically everyone in the US even kind of wealthy or with any political power owns property. When you own property, the best move in your self interest is to not build more property. Many upper-middle-class peoples wealth is held entirely in their property.
There’s basically no political will anywhere to make it easier to build.
They lost them?! Did the landlords pick their apartments up and move them to a new city? Or can they actually afford to hold out just to make a point?
If the sold them off as condos that's a good thing, we want more owners and less landlords.
More wealth in the hands of workers let's them fund their own housing needs and less wealth in the hands of landlords prevents them from obstructing housing development.
More cities need to be looking at non-market housing as a solution to the housing crisis. There is no getting around the need to build more and landlords just don't want that to happen.
There's more housing than people. What's artificially limited is salaries. Higher salaries would mean massive benefits for workers and businesses. And catastrophe for non workers and real estate.
There is not more housing than people in places where people have the highest income. The median income of Sunnyvale is twice that in the US, but the median house is 5x more expensive there.
Higher salaries = everything which is produced by working becomes more expensive. That is not a problem for people who work for a living, because they have higher salaries and can afford it. But it is a problem for those who do not work, because they'll might have to sell their surplus real estate to afford cost of living.
But mainly it is that you would need to remove or decrease benefits for those who do not work in order to have room for higher salaries. That is not a problem for the unemployed because higher salaries means that the only people without work are those who do not want to work. But it is a big problem for those who do not want to work and for example would like to live off their real estate.
The gut reaction to higher salaries is that people would have more money to purchase real estate or pay rent, but I think the downwards effects for real estate are much stronger. And the evidence is that in every country which has seen a period of high salaries for workers, real estate has been cheap during that period for workers to buy.
> And the evidence is that in every country which has seen a period of high salaries for workers, real estate has been cheap during that period for workers to buy.
Real question. Do we have evidence of this from anything except developing economies pulling countries out of poverty? Like a first world country sort of thing. Because to me it seems like higher salaries comes first, and the property would lag for a bit while the market reaches its new level. Does that make sense?
I think that high salaries / increasing salaries is the foundation for an economy developing at all. So cause and effect are reversed from what you mention, if I understood correctly.
High salaries and cheap housing was the reality in I think every first world country when they developed after WWII.
Why would the landlords not raise their rents just like everyone else? When everything is multiplied by the same factor, nothing changes. You might have 2x the salary but if rent and food and everything else is 2x also, your buying power stays the same.
When salaries are high enough, more people can invest in building more housing. So as landlords drive up the prices, the market balances.
But since the wealth gap keeps widening, fewer and fewer workers can afford this, as they get priced out of locations that offer good employment. At the same time the rich keep investing their money into higher-margin industries. Consider that for landlords owning enough housing, building more can have a negative RoI, and they all know that they all know this!
If you don't believe me, think about just how quickly the datacenter boom became reality. All that money was waiting around, and evidently could have been turned into a lot of building activity in a short amount of time.
I don’t think this is really true. It’s naively true if you just look at the number of homeless people vs the number of empty units, but misses:
1. That markets need some portion of empty units for fluidity.
2. That many people aren’t homeless, but living in situations where they would take more housing if it was available. (Living with roommates, ex-partners, family, etc.)
3. Many places simply don’t have enough housing for everyone who wants to live there. If they did, people would move from other places.
You know, this is actual economic orthodoxy. The government is supposed to stimulate the productive economy (the part that's not rent-seeking like landlords) by causing inflation by overpaying it's employees (and hire). Which then forces private employers to pay more and causes high inflation. Why? This haircuts existing debts, both public and private and is very bad for rent-seeking, and good for anyone productive (making money).
Of course, that also shows the problem: it haircuts pensions as well, since they are a large part of the rent seeking class.
There are other good reasons to have a reasonable amount of inflation.
If inflation is too low or doesn’t exist, then there’s less incentive to do anything with your money. If I have bunch a money that I don’t need to spend immediately, and I just want to keep it secure, why would I not keep it in a safe or non-investment account if it’s not losing value over time? What’s my incentive to risk it by lending it out to someone else?
Sure, I could say that my incentive is the interest rate, but my alternative is zero risk. Inflation turns “zero risk” into being more like a certainty of slow value loss, so that holders of capital are incentivized to do something at least minimally risky with that money (e.g., lend it to the government in the form of treasury bonds or deposit it into an insured bank account).
Debt has something of a bad reputation and obviously it can be overused and abused, but it’s also something that helps the efficiency of economies. It maximizes the amount of money actively participating in the economy rather than sitting.
> Sure, I could say that my incentive is the interest rate, but my alternative is zero risk.
The risk of missed purchases isn't zero and the risk of missing investment profits isn't zero either. From motivational point of view, inflation and deflation aren't different, they're the same thing in a mirror image.
Deflation is rare as hen's teeth, harmless and extremely easy to fix. Inflation, on the other hand, is the most corrupt economic phenomenon by far, it's hard to fix and it has ruined numerous economies, caused wars, destruction and famines.
> Debt has something of a bad reputation and obviously it can be overused and abused, but it’s also something that helps the efficiency of economies.
This is a strawman, nobody said debt as such was bad. However, since you started, let me correct you - as it is, debt not only "can be overused and abused" - it is routinely abused and overused and inflation is a huge part of it.
> Inflation, on the other hand, is the most corrupt economic phenomenon by far, it's hard to fix and it has ruined numerous economies, caused wars, destruction and famines.
Could you explain? If you work. You're not renting. You're not on a pension. You're not ... then what is bad about inflation?
Work or no work doesn't matter, inflation steals everyone's savings, wages grow slower than inflation - so they get stolen too, it causes a run on assets, feeds on itself and feeds corruption-driven bubbles, the funds extracted via inflation lead to monopolization and oligarchy-zation, inflation can be used to install Hitlers and manipulate elections, the list goes on.
> You're not renting. You're not on a pension. You're not...
Right, if you're not living, inflation doesn't matter, in all other cases it does. I don't know what you are talking about here or rather, I know that you don't know what you're talking about.
It's crystal clear that you have no idea what the role of banks in the economy is and what it's supposed to be. Without that understanding you're going to keep presenting pompously mysterious arguments which are nonsensical even by the low-bar measure of mainstream economics. I cannot type a whole econ 101 course here, you're supposed to figure out on your own why we have banks, how they work and what they're supposed to achieve.
> Work or no work doesn't matter, inflation steals everyone's savings ...
Luckily working people's savings are essentially nothing and you have a wage. Which means it won't affect poor working people. But yes it will destroy savings, which is why it hurts rich people and doesn't hurt poor people: the rich have savings you and I don't have. The rich have savings the state does not have.
Wages grow slower than inflation - that's the point, the government would shortcut this by overpaying, so that wages would grow at the pace or even faster than inflation.
> to keep presenting pompously mysterious arguments which are nonsensical even by the low-bar measure of mainstream economics ...
Still have my original (1970) economics textbook. This is what it says should be done. Explicitly raising inflation to 10% or so helps poor people by destroying their debt, and it hurts every kind of savings in the economy, which is why rich people don't want it. It equalizes everyone.
Besides I don't understand why you're even making this argument. Neither the US nor EU governments will balance the budget. Both are ~4 years off from the point where they will need to pay back more than they can lend, in other words, the point where NOT having something like 10% inflation will directly hurt their budget. And then they'll do what every big organization does when hit in the budget: do whatever to increase inflation. And if the government tried to cause inflation ... it's easy. Very, very easy.
In other words: you can't stop it. I can't stop it. One of 2 things will happen: either governments balance their budgets NOW or 10% inflation will happen. Since the idea of a balanced budget is laughable, that only leaves option 2.
> Luckily working people's savings are essentially nothing and you have a wage.
Lucky them, due to inflation constantly eroding their incomes, they can't save. I repeat, wage growth trails inflation, see housing and everything else.
> Which means it won't affect poor working people.
Untrue, as I've explained twice already.
> But yes it will destroy savings, which is why it hurts rich people and doesn't hurt poor people: the rich have savings you and I don't have. The rich have savings the state does not have.
Untrue, rich people don't have savings, they have properties and investments, inflation is how they acquire more of them, the poor are forced to sell cheap to survive, the rich swallow it all.
> Explicitly raising inflation to 10% or so helps poor people by destroying their debt,
More falsehoods from you - poor people, poor on collateral, borrow small amounts all the time, think payday loans at rates rising with inflation and several times higher than the rates for the rich - inflation does help the rich who borrow large sums at long intervals but it doesn't help the poor at all, for them, it's more inflation -> more wage erosion -> more (and more expensive) debt. You can't outrun your shadow, do you understand?
> and it hurts every kind of savings in the economy
It doesn't hurt the assets of the rich because they appreciate faster than inflation, especially if you include their siphoning of more assets due to the financially depressed poor.
> which is why rich people don't want it. It equalizes everyone.
The falsehoods are getting out of hand. The rich have vastly more debt than the poor, they borrow against their appreciating assets at vastly better interest rates and longer terms, so the more inflation - the less they repay, they love inflation more than anything, it makes them richer. If you're incapable of understanding my words, hear an authority with experience - by Trump's words: "Inflation made me very rich"
> Still have my original (1970) economics textbook.
Shoddy econ books are a dime a dozen. Give me the author and title, I love to make fun of sloppy econ books, there are so many of them, so much fun.
> Besides I don't understand why you're even making this argument... You can't stop it
Finally a sensible argument, kinda, as much as inevitability can be an argument. However, I'm not trying to stop inflation, I'm analyzing its systemic origins with an eye on systemic fixes. If it can't be stopped this time around, we should not allow it to happen again. Besides, I want to explore all options.
> I repeat, wage growth trails inflation, see housing and everything else.
Seriously? I mean first of all you must see that on a large timeframe this claim is beyond bullshit. Economists claim that essentially from the beginning of time until 1972, and for a lot of people more like 1990, wages grew faster than inflation. Probably since before the Ziggurats went up.
Second you must understand this can be shortcut. If the government explicitly hires and raises wages, obviously it determines 100% by itself if wages trail inflation or not.
> Untrue, rich people don't have savings, they have properties and investments
No they don't. Look at some properties and check if this is true. Rich people only really directly own private houses and only a few. And the superrich ... maybe a dozen. But that's it. All properties are financial constructions because of the massive liquidity advantages that has: Let's say you're rich, and you need money. If you own a shopping mall, you're screwed. But if the shopping mall is constructed using debt and you get 8% interest on that debt. First, it can be divided amongst ... anyone you like really. Second you can sell 1%, 10%, ... whatever you want to raise money. Or you can have them buy out the debt. Or ... The ability to raise money, to control where money goes is what really makes someone rich, it's what high middle class "climbers" don't have. Most properties work like companies do, except much more debt much less equity. One superrich who (has to) be pretty public with what he owns and how it's structured is the king of England. And while due to his special tax situation it is not 100% typical, it's still very instructive. So look at how it works. He owns companies (just because it's called "duchy of ..." or something like that doesn't mean it's not a company), and they own massive debt in properties that others manage for him.
> More falsehoods from you - poor people, poor on collateral, borrow small amounts all the time ...
There are TWO sides to debt. The person who borrows, and the person who lends money and gets the interest. If you have large inflation, on BOTH sides the numbers "go down" (compared to wages, because wages go up, loan amount don't)
The rest is making the same mistake as you keep making here. High inflation provides a (partial) reset. Existing loans become much easier to pay for, and worth much less. Poor people pay. Rich people receive the interest. Both become less compared to wages. Obviously this helps the poor and fucks over the rich.
Before I continue, look at this video from a rich man who admits everything I said and then some, applicable to himself and others like him. Don't skip it, look at the comments too:
Strawman. Nobody claimed there's only one. My explanations considered both sides while you use banalities as distractions.
> The rest is making the same mistake as you keep making here. High inflation provides a (partial) reset.
I'm not making any mistakes, I explained why the poor gain nothing from inflation - because of their high interest rates and frequent borrowing at interest rates rising with inflation. On the other hand, the rich having plenty of collateral, borrow a lot more, locking in low interest rates for long term loans which lead to them gaining significantly from the erosion of the interest they pay. Moreover, the rich have pricing power too, they increase the price of their assets output, including rent, while they suppress wages with their wage-setting power - they control the game.
So if the rich gain from this purely financial, zero sum scheme, somebody's got to lose and there's nobody else in it besides the wage earning poor and middle class.
You mistake is to think that you can cure the effects of high cost of living with inflation. But the high cost of living is due to inflation... so you are trying to convince me that we can cure inflation with more inflation. In other words you're like a firefighter who puts out gasoline fires with more gasoline. Nice try.
Apparently you grok neither economics nor logic, so you have to rely on insiders to tell you the truth every now and then. I quoted Trump, you skipped that, but don't forget to see the video I linked above.
But housing supply is not constrained. There is more housing than people.
You could build as much more housing as you want, but if those houses only become accessible to purchase for those who already own real estate instead of for those who work, then nothing will change.
Housing that is near jobs and other amenities like grocery stores is certainly constrained.
It is true that "housing in trollbridge's front yard" is not constrained. If you need a place to live and show up here with a camper, or plans to get one, I can probably set you up for a while. It is not a lifestyle most people are interested in.
I think the best has yet to come in open source.
Now that language models can translate machine code into human programming languages Pandora's box has been opened.
Steve Ballmer called Linux users a bunch of communist thieves and saw open source as a cancer, however it really ended up being a win-win scenario for labor and business. IT workers could take these tools with them and improve upon them throughout their careers, business benefited from the massive pool of talent and avoided the licensing headaches.
As it turned out the Ballmerists were a bunch of landlord thieves and closed source software was the economic cancer all long :)
If government is unwilling to meditate these kinds of conflicts then people are naturally going to take matters into their own hands, what other outcome would you expect?
Obviously the threat of prosecution wasn't enough of a deterrence so now what?
No, the country shouldn't be held hostage by a small group of agitators. They can vote like the rest of the country, and if they don't convince enough people to join their cause then they should suck it up and try to be more convincing.
Liberal democracy sounds nice in theory but it doesn't work in practice. Like it or not populism is a powerful force that must be reckoned with, always has always will.
Liberal democracy works fine in that it makes people less miserable than the alternatives, but there are many other sources of misery from which it can't protect a society. It takes more than a good system of government for things to 'work'.
I don't believe there is enough historical evidence to make such a bold claim, it could just be a phase for all we know.
What it couldn't protect us from is becoming infiltrated by a foreign government, and that's a pretty basic function of any government, so I think y'all need to humble yourselves.
The claim is that it makes a person happier to have a say in who governs their society, and the freedom to believe and express what they want, as long as it doesn't hurt their neighbor.
That is not a bold take.
A feature of democracy is that a majority can set the course of their society by voting.
A feature of liberalism is that a minority can attempt to become a majority by argument.
If there were a nefarious foreign power pulling the strings of my Western-style democracy (which, where I live, would be an unhinged belief), I'd use my vote and my voice to oppose it, not jettison the vote nor jettison my rights.
reply