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On March 31 2020 04:08 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2020 00:43 IgnE wrote:On March 30 2020 09:45 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 09:16 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 30 2020 08:59 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 08:35 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 30 2020 08:28 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 08:21 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 30 2020 08:07 ChristianS wrote:
So if your opinion is “fuck all landlords, everybody should just stop paying rent and landlords can figure it out,” I think your opinion sucks. I can understand why you feel that way but you also must see that this is literally something landlords can figure out themselves. I mean in your case you're not really a landlord imo as much as an agent of your landlord (the holder of your mortgage). The role you describe filling exists imo as a way to direct tenants anger at the rent-seeker they see rather than the rent seeker leeching off both of their (and other workers) labor and it gives the agent of the landlord a feeling of marginal social superiority over the tenants as well as practical control over others, vacillating them between petty nobility and freeman serf. How are you determining this distinction then? Most of the “landlords” you’re talking about probably have mortgages, so it’s a bank that really “owns” the property. If you’re calling for all mortgage payments to be cancelled, too, I can see a better argument for it; then it’s mostly the banks getting screwed. But if you’re just saying I’m not a “real landlord” so the policy wouldn’t apply to my situation (but would to the situation Emnjay is talking about), you’re gonna have to clarify how you’re making the distinction/what you’re actually advocating be done in such situations. You may have missed it (totally fair thread moves a lot) but I've expressed I support mortgage relief (not the government just paying banks off) on mortgages for houses where the person with the mortgage lives there. Your specific situation would fall under an "improving the land" category that would need to be handled slightly differently. But someone else paying the bill for the land you live on is what it is (if I understand your situation correctly). On March 30 2020 08:33 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:On March 30 2020 08:21 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 30 2020 08:07 ChristianS wrote:
So if your opinion is “fuck all landlords, everybody should just stop paying rent and landlords can figure it out,” I think your opinion sucks. I mean in your case you're not really a landlord imo as much as an agent of your landlord (the holder of your mortgage). and Emnjay808's mom isn't how exactly? This whole rant seems rather silly after this statement. I'm not saying she's not, but land hoarder lackey isn't common parlance here (and might be taken personally rather than as descriptive of the relationship as I see it) so I eased into it. Plus it wasn't completely clear how much of the property is mortgaged in her case based on what I read. She could have 3k worth of mortgages and 12k in rent income which would be significantly different than what ChristianS describes. So what do you do with people that improved the land? Again, I hate to make it personal, so let’s move to a simpler example. A guy bought an empty lot, bought materials, and spent a year building a house on it. Now he’s renting it to a family. What should happen? The family no longer owes rent, and he’s not allowed to evict them. Does he get... anything? Not even reimbursed for his costs, let alone for a year of his labor? If we agree that we shouldn't have land hoarders rent seeking and have to address it, is it fair to suggest the people in that hypothetical situation should be the first to offer up ideas on how they could/should be compensated under the agreed upon premise that we are reorganizing to rid ourselves of land hoarders? If not, I'd wonder why? Because if they don't even have an idea to disagree with, then simply sharing the common man's equitable society is balanced enough for me with consideration for advantages granted them by domestic and foreign policy with horrific consequences. I could come up with something that may or may not be satisfactory to you, but without your own proposal within the agreed premise of "no more land hoarders" (to be reductive), I don't see it as necessary. Now if you are making your recognition that we shouldn't have land hoarders conditional on how this hypothetical person is compensated given their specific circumstances, I think we gotta go back to justifying land hoarders as desirable to make the conditional rational. I admit I don’t have a good idea for the “right” way to reshape the financial system, and agree that as structured presently it’s deeply fucked. I also acknowledge that you’re basically being asked to design a reform that won’t unfairly rob anyone, even though their wealth was previously distributed by a system you consider unfair and immoral. That’s a big request, and probably impossible without retroactively going through everybody’s entire financial history and redistributing wealth based on how valuable their previous labor was to society. Without doing that, inevitably some people are going to either lose/gain unfairly, or be left with unfair gains/losses from the old system. If you want to say people like our hypothetical housebuilder (and maybe myself, too) are regrettable casualties of the transition to a better and fairer system, fair enough. Any systemic change will create winners and losers, and you do what you can to mitigate the worst of it but if the change is better for society overall at some point you have to just go ahead with it. But it’s worth talking about those winners and losers, and acknowledging when you think those outcomes were regrettable. As for ideas for reforming the system, I mentioned one the other day. I don’t think I support it myself, and Belisarius certainly didn’t like it, but I wonder what you’d think of it: a 100% tax on “unearned” increase in property value (that is, appreciation not due to land improvement). That way home ownership would be a way to have a place to live, but it wouldn’t be an investment. There’s a lot of negative side effects that I think probably outweigh the benefits, but it does negate the profitability of land hoarding, no? such people are casualties of the current system. this is a great deleveraging event. the reason i have little sympathy for the “small time landlords” that will go bust is because they treat leveraged returns in boom times as their right. oh you wanted to become a real estate mogul and own a bunch of properties? you leveraged yourself multiple times and took out 4 or 5 mortgages? welcome to capitalism. i feel some sympathy for the san diego resident trying to buy a home by renting it out. but is it that different from all the retirees who just lost 30% of their investment portfolio? if you play the game you might lose. the perverse thing is that if you dont play the game you usually lose by default. people who leverage themselves take advantage of rules and regulations during the boom times. complaining about tenants who avail themselves of pandemic policies is just the obverse of people in boom times complaining they cant get a bank loan. dont worry though, on a long enough time horizon capital lifts all boats. A lot of this sounds a lot like some version of “you knew the risks and agreed to them, so you can’t really complain.” That makes more sense on the stock market than it does in home ownership. Somebody with a significant portion of their portfolio in stocks (especially if they’re retired or close to retiring!) knew or should have known that was a high-risk, high-reward strategy. But home ownership is supposed to be low risk with low-to-moderate returns. Admittedly buying a house and renting it out is riskier. Anybody doing that should know that repair costs, a couple months of vacancies in between tenants, or drops in the rental value are risks they’re taking. So far this year I had 1.5 months w/o rent as old tenants moved out and we found new ones, and a couple thousand to repair the heating and A/C system. That’s okay, I know that’ll happen and I try not to count on more than 10 months rent per year. When possible I keep some savings in case of some expensive roof repair or something. But if the government were to announce “no more rent payments for 6 months, tough shit landlords” that’s not a risk I could have reasonably expected to anticipate. If I was expected to plan for something like that, I couldn’t have afforded the place at all, the house would still be a dilapidated wreck with no one living in it, and I’d be taking up one of the already-scarce apartments enjoying the free rent. If I’m understanding GH’s prescriptions correctly, the highly leveraged people would actually be just fine. Rent payments are cancelled, but they’ll get mortgage assistance. It’s the guy who bought a lot with his own money and built a house with his own hands, then rented it out, that will really be screwed. If he’d sold the house to some unscrupulous property management company, he’d be fine; he would have gotten to a chair before the music stopped. Again, any big transition creates unfair winners and losers; you can try to mitigate that, but if the change is good overall, you should go ahead with it and accept a few unjust outcomes. But I don’t think these specific outcomes are just, and I don’t think “they knew the risks, if you play the game sometimes you lose” is a good way to handwave that away.
I'm going to mostly ignore the mention of "transitions" (because I am not talking about transitions) and the case of the the "guy who bought a lot with his own money" (because he isn't that screwed, presumably he still owns the property) and just address the first part of your post.
I think you are viewing the "no more rent payments for 6 months, tough shit landlords" as some kind of unforeseeable act of god, rather than what it really is: an economy saving measure. Everything the government is doing right now is to save the economy. It's not to earn political points with voters, nor is it redistribution. They are attempting to short-circuit anything that would lead to a huge down spiral, where unemployment shoots up, bankruptcies and defaults destroy working businesses, and demand takes a very long time to come back.
So in my view, the "no more rent payments for 6 months" scenario is subsumed in the "once in a generation depression" that would leave a lot of heavily mortgaged land-lords similarly stranded. Low risk has never been "no risk" right? So I just don't buy your "how can we factor in unprecedented government intrusion into the rental market??" premise. What should people "reasonably" anticipate given that we've got hundreds of years punctuated by market recessions and depressions on record? It's only been 12 years since the last one, after all.
![[image loading]](https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2018/2/28/saupload_ca890be797a1cb072921ed1ec613043c.png)
What about that graph suggests that homes are not like stocks in the 21st century?
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On March 31 2020 10:46 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2020 04:08 ChristianS wrote:On March 31 2020 00:43 IgnE wrote:On March 30 2020 09:45 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 09:16 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 30 2020 08:59 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 08:35 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 30 2020 08:28 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 08:21 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 30 2020 08:07 ChristianS wrote:
So if your opinion is “fuck all landlords, everybody should just stop paying rent and landlords can figure it out,” I think your opinion sucks. I can understand why you feel that way but you also must see that this is literally something landlords can figure out themselves. I mean in your case you're not really a landlord imo as much as an agent of your landlord (the holder of your mortgage). The role you describe filling exists imo as a way to direct tenants anger at the rent-seeker they see rather than the rent seeker leeching off both of their (and other workers) labor and it gives the agent of the landlord a feeling of marginal social superiority over the tenants as well as practical control over others, vacillating them between petty nobility and freeman serf. How are you determining this distinction then? Most of the “landlords” you’re talking about probably have mortgages, so it’s a bank that really “owns” the property. If you’re calling for all mortgage payments to be cancelled, too, I can see a better argument for it; then it’s mostly the banks getting screwed. But if you’re just saying I’m not a “real landlord” so the policy wouldn’t apply to my situation (but would to the situation Emnjay is talking about), you’re gonna have to clarify how you’re making the distinction/what you’re actually advocating be done in such situations. You may have missed it (totally fair thread moves a lot) but I've expressed I support mortgage relief (not the government just paying banks off) on mortgages for houses where the person with the mortgage lives there. Your specific situation would fall under an "improving the land" category that would need to be handled slightly differently. But someone else paying the bill for the land you live on is what it is (if I understand your situation correctly). On March 30 2020 08:33 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:On March 30 2020 08:21 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 30 2020 08:07 ChristianS wrote:
So if your opinion is “fuck all landlords, everybody should just stop paying rent and landlords can figure it out,” I think your opinion sucks. I mean in your case you're not really a landlord imo as much as an agent of your landlord (the holder of your mortgage). and Emnjay808's mom isn't how exactly? This whole rant seems rather silly after this statement. I'm not saying she's not, but land hoarder lackey isn't common parlance here (and might be taken personally rather than as descriptive of the relationship as I see it) so I eased into it. Plus it wasn't completely clear how much of the property is mortgaged in her case based on what I read. She could have 3k worth of mortgages and 12k in rent income which would be significantly different than what ChristianS describes. So what do you do with people that improved the land? Again, I hate to make it personal, so let’s move to a simpler example. A guy bought an empty lot, bought materials, and spent a year building a house on it. Now he’s renting it to a family. What should happen? The family no longer owes rent, and he’s not allowed to evict them. Does he get... anything? Not even reimbursed for his costs, let alone for a year of his labor? If we agree that we shouldn't have land hoarders rent seeking and have to address it, is it fair to suggest the people in that hypothetical situation should be the first to offer up ideas on how they could/should be compensated under the agreed upon premise that we are reorganizing to rid ourselves of land hoarders? If not, I'd wonder why? Because if they don't even have an idea to disagree with, then simply sharing the common man's equitable society is balanced enough for me with consideration for advantages granted them by domestic and foreign policy with horrific consequences. I could come up with something that may or may not be satisfactory to you, but without your own proposal within the agreed premise of "no more land hoarders" (to be reductive), I don't see it as necessary. Now if you are making your recognition that we shouldn't have land hoarders conditional on how this hypothetical person is compensated given their specific circumstances, I think we gotta go back to justifying land hoarders as desirable to make the conditional rational. I admit I don’t have a good idea for the “right” way to reshape the financial system, and agree that as structured presently it’s deeply fucked. I also acknowledge that you’re basically being asked to design a reform that won’t unfairly rob anyone, even though their wealth was previously distributed by a system you consider unfair and immoral. That’s a big request, and probably impossible without retroactively going through everybody’s entire financial history and redistributing wealth based on how valuable their previous labor was to society. Without doing that, inevitably some people are going to either lose/gain unfairly, or be left with unfair gains/losses from the old system. If you want to say people like our hypothetical housebuilder (and maybe myself, too) are regrettable casualties of the transition to a better and fairer system, fair enough. Any systemic change will create winners and losers, and you do what you can to mitigate the worst of it but if the change is better for society overall at some point you have to just go ahead with it. But it’s worth talking about those winners and losers, and acknowledging when you think those outcomes were regrettable. As for ideas for reforming the system, I mentioned one the other day. I don’t think I support it myself, and Belisarius certainly didn’t like it, but I wonder what you’d think of it: a 100% tax on “unearned” increase in property value (that is, appreciation not due to land improvement). That way home ownership would be a way to have a place to live, but it wouldn’t be an investment. There’s a lot of negative side effects that I think probably outweigh the benefits, but it does negate the profitability of land hoarding, no? such people are casualties of the current system. this is a great deleveraging event. the reason i have little sympathy for the “small time landlords” that will go bust is because they treat leveraged returns in boom times as their right. oh you wanted to become a real estate mogul and own a bunch of properties? you leveraged yourself multiple times and took out 4 or 5 mortgages? welcome to capitalism. i feel some sympathy for the san diego resident trying to buy a home by renting it out. but is it that different from all the retirees who just lost 30% of their investment portfolio? if you play the game you might lose. the perverse thing is that if you dont play the game you usually lose by default. people who leverage themselves take advantage of rules and regulations during the boom times. complaining about tenants who avail themselves of pandemic policies is just the obverse of people in boom times complaining they cant get a bank loan. dont worry though, on a long enough time horizon capital lifts all boats. A lot of this sounds a lot like some version of “you knew the risks and agreed to them, so you can’t really complain.” That makes more sense on the stock market than it does in home ownership. Somebody with a significant portion of their portfolio in stocks (especially if they’re retired or close to retiring!) knew or should have known that was a high-risk, high-reward strategy. But home ownership is supposed to be low risk with low-to-moderate returns. Admittedly buying a house and renting it out is riskier. Anybody doing that should know that repair costs, a couple months of vacancies in between tenants, or drops in the rental value are risks they’re taking. So far this year I had 1.5 months w/o rent as old tenants moved out and we found new ones, and a couple thousand to repair the heating and A/C system. That’s okay, I know that’ll happen and I try not to count on more than 10 months rent per year. When possible I keep some savings in case of some expensive roof repair or something. But if the government were to announce “no more rent payments for 6 months, tough shit landlords” that’s not a risk I could have reasonably expected to anticipate. If I was expected to plan for something like that, I couldn’t have afforded the place at all, the house would still be a dilapidated wreck with no one living in it, and I’d be taking up one of the already-scarce apartments enjoying the free rent. If I’m understanding GH’s prescriptions correctly, the highly leveraged people would actually be just fine. Rent payments are cancelled, but they’ll get mortgage assistance. It’s the guy who bought a lot with his own money and built a house with his own hands, then rented it out, that will really be screwed. If he’d sold the house to some unscrupulous property management company, he’d be fine; he would have gotten to a chair before the music stopped. Again, any big transition creates unfair winners and losers; you can try to mitigate that, but if the change is good overall, you should go ahead with it and accept a few unjust outcomes. But I don’t think these specific outcomes are just, and I don’t think “they knew the risks, if you play the game sometimes you lose” is a good way to handwave that away. I'm going to mostly ignore the mention of "transitions" (because I am not talking about transitions) and the case of the the "guy who bought a lot with his own money" (because he isn't that screwed, presumably he still owns the property) and just address the first part of your post. I think you are viewing the "no more rent payments for 6 months, tough shit landlords" as some kind of unforeseeable act of god, rather than what it really is: an economy saving measure. Everything the government is doing right now is to save the economy. It's not to earn political points with voters, nor is it redistribution. They are attempting to short-circuit anything that would lead to a huge down spiral, where unemployment shoots up, bankruptcies and defaults destroy working businesses, and demand takes a very long time to come back. So in my view, the "no more rent payments for 6 months" scenario is subsumed in the "once in a generation depression" that would leave a lot of heavily mortgaged land-lords similarly stranded. Low risk has never been "no risk" right? So I just don't buy your "how can we factor in unprecedented government intrusion into the rental market??" premise. What should people "reasonably" anticipate given that we've got hundreds of years punctuated by market recessions and depressions on record? It's only been 12 years since the last one, after all. What about that graph suggests that homes are not like stocks in the 21st century?
I typed a long response and deleted it. It feels like we’re mostly bargaining over how much sympathy a person in my situation would be owed if the government hypothetically decided my tenants no longer owed me rent (without giving any similar assistance with my mortgage). That hasn’t happened, and doesn’t look likely to happen, and even if it had, I don’t really like the idea of spending my or the forum’s time begging for sympathy.
But to be clear, I don’t think me (and people like me) going bankrupt and defaulting is good for the economy either. I *did* anticipate that a once-in-a-generation depression might happen in the next few years when I bought the place. I figured the value might crash and I might have to stay in the house for the long haul. I figured rental value might go down, or there might be 2-3 month vacancies trying to find new tenants, or there might be expensive repairs needed. I did my best to anticipate and plan for those outcomes, and to date, none of them look likely to sink me.
If I had thought that in the next downturn, the government was likely to require me to indefinitely provide my property as residence to others free of charge, I wouldn’t have been able to plan for that. I would have just not bought the house. San Diego would have 2 fewer homes, and I’d be taking up an apartment somewhere enjoying free rent. Does that seem like it would have been a better outcome for the economy? For society? What about bankrupting me so my tenants (who are richer than me and aren’t having trouble making rent) can enjoy rent-free living? Does that seem like a good outcome to anyone? If it’s the only way to save a spiraling economy, and my financial ruin is collateral damage, fair enough. But is someone going to argue it’s actually a preferable outcome?
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On March 31 2020 12:46 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2020 10:46 IgnE wrote:On March 31 2020 04:08 ChristianS wrote:On March 31 2020 00:43 IgnE wrote:On March 30 2020 09:45 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 09:16 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 30 2020 08:59 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 08:35 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 30 2020 08:28 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 08:21 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]
I can understand why you feel that way but you also must see that this is literally something landlords can figure out themselves. I mean in your case you're not really a landlord imo as much as an agent of your landlord (the holder of your mortgage).
The role you describe filling exists imo as a way to direct tenants anger at the rent-seeker they see rather than the rent seeker leeching off both of their (and other workers) labor and it gives the agent of the landlord a feeling of marginal social superiority over the tenants as well as practical control over others, vacillating them between petty nobility and freeman serf. How are you determining this distinction then? Most of the “landlords” you’re talking about probably have mortgages, so it’s a bank that really “owns” the property. If you’re calling for all mortgage payments to be cancelled, too, I can see a better argument for it; then it’s mostly the banks getting screwed. But if you’re just saying I’m not a “real landlord” so the policy wouldn’t apply to my situation (but would to the situation Emnjay is talking about), you’re gonna have to clarify how you’re making the distinction/what you’re actually advocating be done in such situations. You may have missed it (totally fair thread moves a lot) but I've expressed I support mortgage relief (not the government just paying banks off) on mortgages for houses where the person with the mortgage lives there. Your specific situation would fall under an "improving the land" category that would need to be handled slightly differently. But someone else paying the bill for the land you live on is what it is (if I understand your situation correctly). On March 30 2020 08:33 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:On March 30 2020 08:21 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]
I mean in your case you're not really a landlord imo as much as an agent of your landlord (the holder of your mortgage). and Emnjay808's mom isn't how exactly? This whole rant seems rather silly after this statement. I'm not saying she's not, but land hoarder lackey isn't common parlance here (and might be taken personally rather than as descriptive of the relationship as I see it) so I eased into it. Plus it wasn't completely clear how much of the property is mortgaged in her case based on what I read. She could have 3k worth of mortgages and 12k in rent income which would be significantly different than what ChristianS describes. So what do you do with people that improved the land? Again, I hate to make it personal, so let’s move to a simpler example. A guy bought an empty lot, bought materials, and spent a year building a house on it. Now he’s renting it to a family. What should happen? The family no longer owes rent, and he’s not allowed to evict them. Does he get... anything? Not even reimbursed for his costs, let alone for a year of his labor? If we agree that we shouldn't have land hoarders rent seeking and have to address it, is it fair to suggest the people in that hypothetical situation should be the first to offer up ideas on how they could/should be compensated under the agreed upon premise that we are reorganizing to rid ourselves of land hoarders? If not, I'd wonder why? Because if they don't even have an idea to disagree with, then simply sharing the common man's equitable society is balanced enough for me with consideration for advantages granted them by domestic and foreign policy with horrific consequences. I could come up with something that may or may not be satisfactory to you, but without your own proposal within the agreed premise of "no more land hoarders" (to be reductive), I don't see it as necessary. Now if you are making your recognition that we shouldn't have land hoarders conditional on how this hypothetical person is compensated given their specific circumstances, I think we gotta go back to justifying land hoarders as desirable to make the conditional rational. I admit I don’t have a good idea for the “right” way to reshape the financial system, and agree that as structured presently it’s deeply fucked. I also acknowledge that you’re basically being asked to design a reform that won’t unfairly rob anyone, even though their wealth was previously distributed by a system you consider unfair and immoral. That’s a big request, and probably impossible without retroactively going through everybody’s entire financial history and redistributing wealth based on how valuable their previous labor was to society. Without doing that, inevitably some people are going to either lose/gain unfairly, or be left with unfair gains/losses from the old system. If you want to say people like our hypothetical housebuilder (and maybe myself, too) are regrettable casualties of the transition to a better and fairer system, fair enough. Any systemic change will create winners and losers, and you do what you can to mitigate the worst of it but if the change is better for society overall at some point you have to just go ahead with it. But it’s worth talking about those winners and losers, and acknowledging when you think those outcomes were regrettable. As for ideas for reforming the system, I mentioned one the other day. I don’t think I support it myself, and Belisarius certainly didn’t like it, but I wonder what you’d think of it: a 100% tax on “unearned” increase in property value (that is, appreciation not due to land improvement). That way home ownership would be a way to have a place to live, but it wouldn’t be an investment. There’s a lot of negative side effects that I think probably outweigh the benefits, but it does negate the profitability of land hoarding, no? such people are casualties of the current system. this is a great deleveraging event. the reason i have little sympathy for the “small time landlords” that will go bust is because they treat leveraged returns in boom times as their right. oh you wanted to become a real estate mogul and own a bunch of properties? you leveraged yourself multiple times and took out 4 or 5 mortgages? welcome to capitalism. i feel some sympathy for the san diego resident trying to buy a home by renting it out. but is it that different from all the retirees who just lost 30% of their investment portfolio? if you play the game you might lose. the perverse thing is that if you dont play the game you usually lose by default. people who leverage themselves take advantage of rules and regulations during the boom times. complaining about tenants who avail themselves of pandemic policies is just the obverse of people in boom times complaining they cant get a bank loan. dont worry though, on a long enough time horizon capital lifts all boats. A lot of this sounds a lot like some version of “you knew the risks and agreed to them, so you can’t really complain.” That makes more sense on the stock market than it does in home ownership. Somebody with a significant portion of their portfolio in stocks (especially if they’re retired or close to retiring!) knew or should have known that was a high-risk, high-reward strategy. But home ownership is supposed to be low risk with low-to-moderate returns. Admittedly buying a house and renting it out is riskier. Anybody doing that should know that repair costs, a couple months of vacancies in between tenants, or drops in the rental value are risks they’re taking. So far this year I had 1.5 months w/o rent as old tenants moved out and we found new ones, and a couple thousand to repair the heating and A/C system. That’s okay, I know that’ll happen and I try not to count on more than 10 months rent per year. When possible I keep some savings in case of some expensive roof repair or something. But if the government were to announce “no more rent payments for 6 months, tough shit landlords” that’s not a risk I could have reasonably expected to anticipate. If I was expected to plan for something like that, I couldn’t have afforded the place at all, the house would still be a dilapidated wreck with no one living in it, and I’d be taking up one of the already-scarce apartments enjoying the free rent. If I’m understanding GH’s prescriptions correctly, the highly leveraged people would actually be just fine. Rent payments are cancelled, but they’ll get mortgage assistance. It’s the guy who bought a lot with his own money and built a house with his own hands, then rented it out, that will really be screwed. If he’d sold the house to some unscrupulous property management company, he’d be fine; he would have gotten to a chair before the music stopped. Again, any big transition creates unfair winners and losers; you can try to mitigate that, but if the change is good overall, you should go ahead with it and accept a few unjust outcomes. But I don’t think these specific outcomes are just, and I don’t think “they knew the risks, if you play the game sometimes you lose” is a good way to handwave that away. I'm going to mostly ignore the mention of "transitions" (because I am not talking about transitions) and the case of the the "guy who bought a lot with his own money" (because he isn't that screwed, presumably he still owns the property) and just address the first part of your post. I think you are viewing the "no more rent payments for 6 months, tough shit landlords" as some kind of unforeseeable act of god, rather than what it really is: an economy saving measure. Everything the government is doing right now is to save the economy. It's not to earn political points with voters, nor is it redistribution. They are attempting to short-circuit anything that would lead to a huge down spiral, where unemployment shoots up, bankruptcies and defaults destroy working businesses, and demand takes a very long time to come back. So in my view, the "no more rent payments for 6 months" scenario is subsumed in the "once in a generation depression" that would leave a lot of heavily mortgaged land-lords similarly stranded. Low risk has never been "no risk" right? So I just don't buy your "how can we factor in unprecedented government intrusion into the rental market??" premise. What should people "reasonably" anticipate given that we've got hundreds of years punctuated by market recessions and depressions on record? It's only been 12 years since the last one, after all. What about that graph suggests that homes are not like stocks in the 21st century? I typed a long response and deleted it. It feels like we’re mostly bargaining over how much sympathy a person in my situation would be owed if the government hypothetically decided my tenants no longer owed me rent (without giving any similar assistance with my mortgage). That hasn’t happened, and doesn’t look likely to happen, and even if it had, I don’t really like the idea of spending my or the forum’s time begging for sympathy. But to be clear, I don’t think me (and people like me) going bankrupt and defaulting is good for the economy either. I *did* anticipate that a once-in-a-generation depression might happen in the next few years when I bought the place. I figured the value might crash and I might have to stay in the house for the long haul. I figured rental value might go down, or there might be 2-3 month vacancies trying to find new tenants, or there might be expensive repairs needed. I did my best to anticipate and plan for those outcomes, and to date, none of them look likely to sink me. If I had thought that in the next downturn, the government was likely to require me to indefinitely provide my property as residence to others free of charge, I wouldn’t have been able to plan for that. I would have just not bought the house. San Diego would have 2 fewer homes, and I’d be taking up an apartment somewhere enjoying free rent. Does that seem like it would have been a better outcome for the economy? For society? What about bankrupting me so my tenants (who are richer than me and aren’t having trouble making rent) can enjoy rent-free living? Does that seem like a good outcome to anyone? If it’s the only way to save a spiraling economy, and my financial ruin is collateral damage, fair enough. But is someone going to argue it’s actually a preferable outcome?
What do you think individual bankruptcy means in a socialist economy? Even under a capitalist system bankruptcy protections typically allow you to keep a home (provided you have a mortgage and not rent).
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On March 31 2020 13:34 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2020 12:46 ChristianS wrote:On March 31 2020 10:46 IgnE wrote:On March 31 2020 04:08 ChristianS wrote:On March 31 2020 00:43 IgnE wrote:On March 30 2020 09:45 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 09:16 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 30 2020 08:59 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 08:35 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 30 2020 08:28 ChristianS wrote:
[quote]
How are you determining this distinction then? Most of the “landlords” you’re talking about probably have mortgages, so it’s a bank that really “owns” the property. If you’re calling for all mortgage payments to be cancelled, too, I can see a better argument for it; then it’s mostly the banks getting screwed. But if you’re just saying I’m not a “real landlord” so the policy wouldn’t apply to my situation (but would to the situation Emnjay is talking about), you’re gonna have to clarify how you’re making the distinction/what you’re actually advocating be done in such situations. You may have missed it (totally fair thread moves a lot) but I've expressed I support mortgage relief (not the government just paying banks off) on mortgages for houses where the person with the mortgage lives there. Your specific situation would fall under an "improving the land" category that would need to be handled slightly differently. But someone else paying the bill for the land you live on is what it is (if I understand your situation correctly). On March 30 2020 08:33 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:
[quote]
and Emnjay808's mom isn't how exactly? This whole rant seems rather silly after this statement. I'm not saying she's not, but land hoarder lackey isn't common parlance here (and might be taken personally rather than as descriptive of the relationship as I see it) so I eased into it. Plus it wasn't completely clear how much of the property is mortgaged in her case based on what I read. She could have 3k worth of mortgages and 12k in rent income which would be significantly different than what ChristianS describes. So what do you do with people that improved the land? Again, I hate to make it personal, so let’s move to a simpler example. A guy bought an empty lot, bought materials, and spent a year building a house on it. Now he’s renting it to a family. What should happen? The family no longer owes rent, and he’s not allowed to evict them. Does he get... anything? Not even reimbursed for his costs, let alone for a year of his labor? If we agree that we shouldn't have land hoarders rent seeking and have to address it, is it fair to suggest the people in that hypothetical situation should be the first to offer up ideas on how they could/should be compensated under the agreed upon premise that we are reorganizing to rid ourselves of land hoarders? If not, I'd wonder why? Because if they don't even have an idea to disagree with, then simply sharing the common man's equitable society is balanced enough for me with consideration for advantages granted them by domestic and foreign policy with horrific consequences. I could come up with something that may or may not be satisfactory to you, but without your own proposal within the agreed premise of "no more land hoarders" (to be reductive), I don't see it as necessary. Now if you are making your recognition that we shouldn't have land hoarders conditional on how this hypothetical person is compensated given their specific circumstances, I think we gotta go back to justifying land hoarders as desirable to make the conditional rational. I admit I don’t have a good idea for the “right” way to reshape the financial system, and agree that as structured presently it’s deeply fucked. I also acknowledge that you’re basically being asked to design a reform that won’t unfairly rob anyone, even though their wealth was previously distributed by a system you consider unfair and immoral. That’s a big request, and probably impossible without retroactively going through everybody’s entire financial history and redistributing wealth based on how valuable their previous labor was to society. Without doing that, inevitably some people are going to either lose/gain unfairly, or be left with unfair gains/losses from the old system. If you want to say people like our hypothetical housebuilder (and maybe myself, too) are regrettable casualties of the transition to a better and fairer system, fair enough. Any systemic change will create winners and losers, and you do what you can to mitigate the worst of it but if the change is better for society overall at some point you have to just go ahead with it. But it’s worth talking about those winners and losers, and acknowledging when you think those outcomes were regrettable. As for ideas for reforming the system, I mentioned one the other day. I don’t think I support it myself, and Belisarius certainly didn’t like it, but I wonder what you’d think of it: a 100% tax on “unearned” increase in property value (that is, appreciation not due to land improvement). That way home ownership would be a way to have a place to live, but it wouldn’t be an investment. There’s a lot of negative side effects that I think probably outweigh the benefits, but it does negate the profitability of land hoarding, no? such people are casualties of the current system. this is a great deleveraging event. the reason i have little sympathy for the “small time landlords” that will go bust is because they treat leveraged returns in boom times as their right. oh you wanted to become a real estate mogul and own a bunch of properties? you leveraged yourself multiple times and took out 4 or 5 mortgages? welcome to capitalism. i feel some sympathy for the san diego resident trying to buy a home by renting it out. but is it that different from all the retirees who just lost 30% of their investment portfolio? if you play the game you might lose. the perverse thing is that if you dont play the game you usually lose by default. people who leverage themselves take advantage of rules and regulations during the boom times. complaining about tenants who avail themselves of pandemic policies is just the obverse of people in boom times complaining they cant get a bank loan. dont worry though, on a long enough time horizon capital lifts all boats. A lot of this sounds a lot like some version of “you knew the risks and agreed to them, so you can’t really complain.” That makes more sense on the stock market than it does in home ownership. Somebody with a significant portion of their portfolio in stocks (especially if they’re retired or close to retiring!) knew or should have known that was a high-risk, high-reward strategy. But home ownership is supposed to be low risk with low-to-moderate returns. Admittedly buying a house and renting it out is riskier. Anybody doing that should know that repair costs, a couple months of vacancies in between tenants, or drops in the rental value are risks they’re taking. So far this year I had 1.5 months w/o rent as old tenants moved out and we found new ones, and a couple thousand to repair the heating and A/C system. That’s okay, I know that’ll happen and I try not to count on more than 10 months rent per year. When possible I keep some savings in case of some expensive roof repair or something. But if the government were to announce “no more rent payments for 6 months, tough shit landlords” that’s not a risk I could have reasonably expected to anticipate. If I was expected to plan for something like that, I couldn’t have afforded the place at all, the house would still be a dilapidated wreck with no one living in it, and I’d be taking up one of the already-scarce apartments enjoying the free rent. If I’m understanding GH’s prescriptions correctly, the highly leveraged people would actually be just fine. Rent payments are cancelled, but they’ll get mortgage assistance. It’s the guy who bought a lot with his own money and built a house with his own hands, then rented it out, that will really be screwed. If he’d sold the house to some unscrupulous property management company, he’d be fine; he would have gotten to a chair before the music stopped. Again, any big transition creates unfair winners and losers; you can try to mitigate that, but if the change is good overall, you should go ahead with it and accept a few unjust outcomes. But I don’t think these specific outcomes are just, and I don’t think “they knew the risks, if you play the game sometimes you lose” is a good way to handwave that away. I'm going to mostly ignore the mention of "transitions" (because I am not talking about transitions) and the case of the the "guy who bought a lot with his own money" (because he isn't that screwed, presumably he still owns the property) and just address the first part of your post. I think you are viewing the "no more rent payments for 6 months, tough shit landlords" as some kind of unforeseeable act of god, rather than what it really is: an economy saving measure. Everything the government is doing right now is to save the economy. It's not to earn political points with voters, nor is it redistribution. They are attempting to short-circuit anything that would lead to a huge down spiral, where unemployment shoots up, bankruptcies and defaults destroy working businesses, and demand takes a very long time to come back. So in my view, the "no more rent payments for 6 months" scenario is subsumed in the "once in a generation depression" that would leave a lot of heavily mortgaged land-lords similarly stranded. Low risk has never been "no risk" right? So I just don't buy your "how can we factor in unprecedented government intrusion into the rental market??" premise. What should people "reasonably" anticipate given that we've got hundreds of years punctuated by market recessions and depressions on record? It's only been 12 years since the last one, after all. What about that graph suggests that homes are not like stocks in the 21st century? I typed a long response and deleted it. It feels like we’re mostly bargaining over how much sympathy a person in my situation would be owed if the government hypothetically decided my tenants no longer owed me rent (without giving any similar assistance with my mortgage). That hasn’t happened, and doesn’t look likely to happen, and even if it had, I don’t really like the idea of spending my or the forum’s time begging for sympathy. But to be clear, I don’t think me (and people like me) going bankrupt and defaulting is good for the economy either. I *did* anticipate that a once-in-a-generation depression might happen in the next few years when I bought the place. I figured the value might crash and I might have to stay in the house for the long haul. I figured rental value might go down, or there might be 2-3 month vacancies trying to find new tenants, or there might be expensive repairs needed. I did my best to anticipate and plan for those outcomes, and to date, none of them look likely to sink me. If I had thought that in the next downturn, the government was likely to require me to indefinitely provide my property as residence to others free of charge, I wouldn’t have been able to plan for that. I would have just not bought the house. San Diego would have 2 fewer homes, and I’d be taking up an apartment somewhere enjoying free rent. Does that seem like it would have been a better outcome for the economy? For society? What about bankrupting me so my tenants (who are richer than me and aren’t having trouble making rent) can enjoy rent-free living? Does that seem like a good outcome to anyone? If it’s the only way to save a spiraling economy, and my financial ruin is collateral damage, fair enough. But is someone going to argue it’s actually a preferable outcome? What do you think bankrupt means in a socialist economy?
Uh... that’s kind of a broad question. I assume our system would not qualify as a “socialist economy” to you, so you’re talking about if we hypothetically reworked the economy a lot more radically than just a temporary rent freeze. Presumably it would depend on how you implemented bankruptcy law in that system?
Edit to your edit: don’t know much about bankruptcy law, but obviously a lot of people lost their homes and had to start over after 2008. I’d like to avoid a similar outcome if I can, ya know? I’m not asking for a bailout or anything, but if the government decided to rip up my rental agreement with the tenants and compelled me to provide the same service free of charge, that’d be a pretty big hardship.
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On March 31 2020 13:38 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2020 13:34 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 31 2020 12:46 ChristianS wrote:On March 31 2020 10:46 IgnE wrote:On March 31 2020 04:08 ChristianS wrote:On March 31 2020 00:43 IgnE wrote:On March 30 2020 09:45 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 09:16 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 30 2020 08:59 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 08:35 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]
You may have missed it (totally fair thread moves a lot) but I've expressed I support mortgage relief (not the government just paying banks off) on mortgages for houses where the person with the mortgage lives there. Your specific situation would fall under an "improving the land" category that would need to be handled slightly differently. But someone else paying the bill for the land you live on is what it is (if I understand your situation correctly).
[quote]
I'm not saying she's not, but land hoarder lackey isn't common parlance here (and might be taken personally rather than as descriptive of the relationship as I see it) so I eased into it. Plus it wasn't completely clear how much of the property is mortgaged in her case based on what I read. She could have 3k worth of mortgages and 12k in rent income which would be significantly different than what ChristianS describes. So what do you do with people that improved the land? Again, I hate to make it personal, so let’s move to a simpler example. A guy bought an empty lot, bought materials, and spent a year building a house on it. Now he’s renting it to a family. What should happen? The family no longer owes rent, and he’s not allowed to evict them. Does he get... anything? Not even reimbursed for his costs, let alone for a year of his labor? If we agree that we shouldn't have land hoarders rent seeking and have to address it, is it fair to suggest the people in that hypothetical situation should be the first to offer up ideas on how they could/should be compensated under the agreed upon premise that we are reorganizing to rid ourselves of land hoarders? If not, I'd wonder why? Because if they don't even have an idea to disagree with, then simply sharing the common man's equitable society is balanced enough for me with consideration for advantages granted them by domestic and foreign policy with horrific consequences. I could come up with something that may or may not be satisfactory to you, but without your own proposal within the agreed premise of "no more land hoarders" (to be reductive), I don't see it as necessary. Now if you are making your recognition that we shouldn't have land hoarders conditional on how this hypothetical person is compensated given their specific circumstances, I think we gotta go back to justifying land hoarders as desirable to make the conditional rational. I admit I don’t have a good idea for the “right” way to reshape the financial system, and agree that as structured presently it’s deeply fucked. I also acknowledge that you’re basically being asked to design a reform that won’t unfairly rob anyone, even though their wealth was previously distributed by a system you consider unfair and immoral. That’s a big request, and probably impossible without retroactively going through everybody’s entire financial history and redistributing wealth based on how valuable their previous labor was to society. Without doing that, inevitably some people are going to either lose/gain unfairly, or be left with unfair gains/losses from the old system. If you want to say people like our hypothetical housebuilder (and maybe myself, too) are regrettable casualties of the transition to a better and fairer system, fair enough. Any systemic change will create winners and losers, and you do what you can to mitigate the worst of it but if the change is better for society overall at some point you have to just go ahead with it. But it’s worth talking about those winners and losers, and acknowledging when you think those outcomes were regrettable. As for ideas for reforming the system, I mentioned one the other day. I don’t think I support it myself, and Belisarius certainly didn’t like it, but I wonder what you’d think of it: a 100% tax on “unearned” increase in property value (that is, appreciation not due to land improvement). That way home ownership would be a way to have a place to live, but it wouldn’t be an investment. There’s a lot of negative side effects that I think probably outweigh the benefits, but it does negate the profitability of land hoarding, no? such people are casualties of the current system. this is a great deleveraging event. the reason i have little sympathy for the “small time landlords” that will go bust is because they treat leveraged returns in boom times as their right. oh you wanted to become a real estate mogul and own a bunch of properties? you leveraged yourself multiple times and took out 4 or 5 mortgages? welcome to capitalism. i feel some sympathy for the san diego resident trying to buy a home by renting it out. but is it that different from all the retirees who just lost 30% of their investment portfolio? if you play the game you might lose. the perverse thing is that if you dont play the game you usually lose by default. people who leverage themselves take advantage of rules and regulations during the boom times. complaining about tenants who avail themselves of pandemic policies is just the obverse of people in boom times complaining they cant get a bank loan. dont worry though, on a long enough time horizon capital lifts all boats. A lot of this sounds a lot like some version of “you knew the risks and agreed to them, so you can’t really complain.” That makes more sense on the stock market than it does in home ownership. Somebody with a significant portion of their portfolio in stocks (especially if they’re retired or close to retiring!) knew or should have known that was a high-risk, high-reward strategy. But home ownership is supposed to be low risk with low-to-moderate returns. Admittedly buying a house and renting it out is riskier. Anybody doing that should know that repair costs, a couple months of vacancies in between tenants, or drops in the rental value are risks they’re taking. So far this year I had 1.5 months w/o rent as old tenants moved out and we found new ones, and a couple thousand to repair the heating and A/C system. That’s okay, I know that’ll happen and I try not to count on more than 10 months rent per year. When possible I keep some savings in case of some expensive roof repair or something. But if the government were to announce “no more rent payments for 6 months, tough shit landlords” that’s not a risk I could have reasonably expected to anticipate. If I was expected to plan for something like that, I couldn’t have afforded the place at all, the house would still be a dilapidated wreck with no one living in it, and I’d be taking up one of the already-scarce apartments enjoying the free rent. If I’m understanding GH’s prescriptions correctly, the highly leveraged people would actually be just fine. Rent payments are cancelled, but they’ll get mortgage assistance. It’s the guy who bought a lot with his own money and built a house with his own hands, then rented it out, that will really be screwed. If he’d sold the house to some unscrupulous property management company, he’d be fine; he would have gotten to a chair before the music stopped. Again, any big transition creates unfair winners and losers; you can try to mitigate that, but if the change is good overall, you should go ahead with it and accept a few unjust outcomes. But I don’t think these specific outcomes are just, and I don’t think “they knew the risks, if you play the game sometimes you lose” is a good way to handwave that away. I'm going to mostly ignore the mention of "transitions" (because I am not talking about transitions) and the case of the the "guy who bought a lot with his own money" (because he isn't that screwed, presumably he still owns the property) and just address the first part of your post. I think you are viewing the "no more rent payments for 6 months, tough shit landlords" as some kind of unforeseeable act of god, rather than what it really is: an economy saving measure. Everything the government is doing right now is to save the economy. It's not to earn political points with voters, nor is it redistribution. They are attempting to short-circuit anything that would lead to a huge down spiral, where unemployment shoots up, bankruptcies and defaults destroy working businesses, and demand takes a very long time to come back. So in my view, the "no more rent payments for 6 months" scenario is subsumed in the "once in a generation depression" that would leave a lot of heavily mortgaged land-lords similarly stranded. Low risk has never been "no risk" right? So I just don't buy your "how can we factor in unprecedented government intrusion into the rental market??" premise. What should people "reasonably" anticipate given that we've got hundreds of years punctuated by market recessions and depressions on record? It's only been 12 years since the last one, after all. What about that graph suggests that homes are not like stocks in the 21st century? I typed a long response and deleted it. It feels like we’re mostly bargaining over how much sympathy a person in my situation would be owed if the government hypothetically decided my tenants no longer owed me rent (without giving any similar assistance with my mortgage). That hasn’t happened, and doesn’t look likely to happen, and even if it had, I don’t really like the idea of spending my or the forum’s time begging for sympathy. But to be clear, I don’t think me (and people like me) going bankrupt and defaulting is good for the economy either. I *did* anticipate that a once-in-a-generation depression might happen in the next few years when I bought the place. I figured the value might crash and I might have to stay in the house for the long haul. I figured rental value might go down, or there might be 2-3 month vacancies trying to find new tenants, or there might be expensive repairs needed. I did my best to anticipate and plan for those outcomes, and to date, none of them look likely to sink me. If I had thought that in the next downturn, the government was likely to require me to indefinitely provide my property as residence to others free of charge, I wouldn’t have been able to plan for that. I would have just not bought the house. San Diego would have 2 fewer homes, and I’d be taking up an apartment somewhere enjoying free rent. Does that seem like it would have been a better outcome for the economy? For society? What about bankrupting me so my tenants (who are richer than me and aren’t having trouble making rent) can enjoy rent-free living? Does that seem like a good outcome to anyone? If it’s the only way to save a spiraling economy, and my financial ruin is collateral damage, fair enough. But is someone going to argue it’s actually a preferable outcome? What do you think bankrupt means in a socialist economy? Uh... that’s kind of a broad question. I assume our system would not qualify as a “socialist economy” to you, so you’re talking about if we hypothetically reworked the economy a lot more radically than just a temporary rent freeze. Presumably it would depend on how you implemented bankruptcy law in that system? Edit to your edit: don’t know much about bankruptcy law, but obviously a lot of people lost their homes and had to start over after 2008. I’d like to avoid a similar outcome if I can, ya know? I’m not asking for a bailout or anything, but if the government decided to rip up my rental agreement with the tenants and compelled me to provide the same service free of charge, that’d be a pretty big hardship.
We have to rework the economy, this one is unsustainable and leading to ecological catastrophe.
Sounds like you want a socialist economy or to push that suffering (bankruptcy and homelessness) onto someone that can't effectively defend themselves under this system in my view. I think you should fight for the former rather than the latter. Because the fact of the matter is that the system that provides for you to own a home you don't live in leaves hundreds of thousands dying in the streets, millions food insecure, and tens of millions unable to earn a comfortable living with 80hrs/wk of work in the wealthiest country in the world
EDIT:compelled me to provide the same service free of charge services like maintenance would be compensated work, owning something isn't a service.
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On March 31 2020 13:54 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2020 13:38 ChristianS wrote:On March 31 2020 13:34 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 31 2020 12:46 ChristianS wrote:On March 31 2020 10:46 IgnE wrote:On March 31 2020 04:08 ChristianS wrote:On March 31 2020 00:43 IgnE wrote:On March 30 2020 09:45 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 09:16 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 30 2020 08:59 ChristianS wrote:
[quote]
So what do you do with people that improved the land? Again, I hate to make it personal, so let’s move to a simpler example. A guy bought an empty lot, bought materials, and spent a year building a house on it. Now he’s renting it to a family. What should happen? The family no longer owes rent, and he’s not allowed to evict them. Does he get... anything? Not even reimbursed for his costs, let alone for a year of his labor? If we agree that we shouldn't have land hoarders rent seeking and have to address it, is it fair to suggest the people in that hypothetical situation should be the first to offer up ideas on how they could/should be compensated under the agreed upon premise that we are reorganizing to rid ourselves of land hoarders? If not, I'd wonder why? Because if they don't even have an idea to disagree with, then simply sharing the common man's equitable society is balanced enough for me with consideration for advantages granted them by domestic and foreign policy with horrific consequences. I could come up with something that may or may not be satisfactory to you, but without your own proposal within the agreed premise of "no more land hoarders" (to be reductive), I don't see it as necessary. Now if you are making your recognition that we shouldn't have land hoarders conditional on how this hypothetical person is compensated given their specific circumstances, I think we gotta go back to justifying land hoarders as desirable to make the conditional rational. I admit I don’t have a good idea for the “right” way to reshape the financial system, and agree that as structured presently it’s deeply fucked. I also acknowledge that you’re basically being asked to design a reform that won’t unfairly rob anyone, even though their wealth was previously distributed by a system you consider unfair and immoral. That’s a big request, and probably impossible without retroactively going through everybody’s entire financial history and redistributing wealth based on how valuable their previous labor was to society. Without doing that, inevitably some people are going to either lose/gain unfairly, or be left with unfair gains/losses from the old system. If you want to say people like our hypothetical housebuilder (and maybe myself, too) are regrettable casualties of the transition to a better and fairer system, fair enough. Any systemic change will create winners and losers, and you do what you can to mitigate the worst of it but if the change is better for society overall at some point you have to just go ahead with it. But it’s worth talking about those winners and losers, and acknowledging when you think those outcomes were regrettable. As for ideas for reforming the system, I mentioned one the other day. I don’t think I support it myself, and Belisarius certainly didn’t like it, but I wonder what you’d think of it: a 100% tax on “unearned” increase in property value (that is, appreciation not due to land improvement). That way home ownership would be a way to have a place to live, but it wouldn’t be an investment. There’s a lot of negative side effects that I think probably outweigh the benefits, but it does negate the profitability of land hoarding, no? such people are casualties of the current system. this is a great deleveraging event. the reason i have little sympathy for the “small time landlords” that will go bust is because they treat leveraged returns in boom times as their right. oh you wanted to become a real estate mogul and own a bunch of properties? you leveraged yourself multiple times and took out 4 or 5 mortgages? welcome to capitalism. i feel some sympathy for the san diego resident trying to buy a home by renting it out. but is it that different from all the retirees who just lost 30% of their investment portfolio? if you play the game you might lose. the perverse thing is that if you dont play the game you usually lose by default. people who leverage themselves take advantage of rules and regulations during the boom times. complaining about tenants who avail themselves of pandemic policies is just the obverse of people in boom times complaining they cant get a bank loan. dont worry though, on a long enough time horizon capital lifts all boats. A lot of this sounds a lot like some version of “you knew the risks and agreed to them, so you can’t really complain.” That makes more sense on the stock market than it does in home ownership. Somebody with a significant portion of their portfolio in stocks (especially if they’re retired or close to retiring!) knew or should have known that was a high-risk, high-reward strategy. But home ownership is supposed to be low risk with low-to-moderate returns. Admittedly buying a house and renting it out is riskier. Anybody doing that should know that repair costs, a couple months of vacancies in between tenants, or drops in the rental value are risks they’re taking. So far this year I had 1.5 months w/o rent as old tenants moved out and we found new ones, and a couple thousand to repair the heating and A/C system. That’s okay, I know that’ll happen and I try not to count on more than 10 months rent per year. When possible I keep some savings in case of some expensive roof repair or something. But if the government were to announce “no more rent payments for 6 months, tough shit landlords” that’s not a risk I could have reasonably expected to anticipate. If I was expected to plan for something like that, I couldn’t have afforded the place at all, the house would still be a dilapidated wreck with no one living in it, and I’d be taking up one of the already-scarce apartments enjoying the free rent. If I’m understanding GH’s prescriptions correctly, the highly leveraged people would actually be just fine. Rent payments are cancelled, but they’ll get mortgage assistance. It’s the guy who bought a lot with his own money and built a house with his own hands, then rented it out, that will really be screwed. If he’d sold the house to some unscrupulous property management company, he’d be fine; he would have gotten to a chair before the music stopped. Again, any big transition creates unfair winners and losers; you can try to mitigate that, but if the change is good overall, you should go ahead with it and accept a few unjust outcomes. But I don’t think these specific outcomes are just, and I don’t think “they knew the risks, if you play the game sometimes you lose” is a good way to handwave that away. I'm going to mostly ignore the mention of "transitions" (because I am not talking about transitions) and the case of the the "guy who bought a lot with his own money" (because he isn't that screwed, presumably he still owns the property) and just address the first part of your post. I think you are viewing the "no more rent payments for 6 months, tough shit landlords" as some kind of unforeseeable act of god, rather than what it really is: an economy saving measure. Everything the government is doing right now is to save the economy. It's not to earn political points with voters, nor is it redistribution. They are attempting to short-circuit anything that would lead to a huge down spiral, where unemployment shoots up, bankruptcies and defaults destroy working businesses, and demand takes a very long time to come back. So in my view, the "no more rent payments for 6 months" scenario is subsumed in the "once in a generation depression" that would leave a lot of heavily mortgaged land-lords similarly stranded. Low risk has never been "no risk" right? So I just don't buy your "how can we factor in unprecedented government intrusion into the rental market??" premise. What should people "reasonably" anticipate given that we've got hundreds of years punctuated by market recessions and depressions on record? It's only been 12 years since the last one, after all. What about that graph suggests that homes are not like stocks in the 21st century? I typed a long response and deleted it. It feels like we’re mostly bargaining over how much sympathy a person in my situation would be owed if the government hypothetically decided my tenants no longer owed me rent (without giving any similar assistance with my mortgage). That hasn’t happened, and doesn’t look likely to happen, and even if it had, I don’t really like the idea of spending my or the forum’s time begging for sympathy. But to be clear, I don’t think me (and people like me) going bankrupt and defaulting is good for the economy either. I *did* anticipate that a once-in-a-generation depression might happen in the next few years when I bought the place. I figured the value might crash and I might have to stay in the house for the long haul. I figured rental value might go down, or there might be 2-3 month vacancies trying to find new tenants, or there might be expensive repairs needed. I did my best to anticipate and plan for those outcomes, and to date, none of them look likely to sink me. If I had thought that in the next downturn, the government was likely to require me to indefinitely provide my property as residence to others free of charge, I wouldn’t have been able to plan for that. I would have just not bought the house. San Diego would have 2 fewer homes, and I’d be taking up an apartment somewhere enjoying free rent. Does that seem like it would have been a better outcome for the economy? For society? What about bankrupting me so my tenants (who are richer than me and aren’t having trouble making rent) can enjoy rent-free living? Does that seem like a good outcome to anyone? If it’s the only way to save a spiraling economy, and my financial ruin is collateral damage, fair enough. But is someone going to argue it’s actually a preferable outcome? What do you think bankrupt means in a socialist economy? Uh... that’s kind of a broad question. I assume our system would not qualify as a “socialist economy” to you, so you’re talking about if we hypothetically reworked the economy a lot more radically than just a temporary rent freeze. Presumably it would depend on how you implemented bankruptcy law in that system? Edit to your edit: don’t know much about bankruptcy law, but obviously a lot of people lost their homes and had to start over after 2008. I’d like to avoid a similar outcome if I can, ya know? I’m not asking for a bailout or anything, but if the government decided to rip up my rental agreement with the tenants and compelled me to provide the same service free of charge, that’d be a pretty big hardship. We have to rework the economy, this one is unsustainable and leading to ecological catastrophe. Sounds like you want a socialist economy or to push that suffering (bankruptcy and homelessness) onto someone that can't effectively defend themselves under this system in my view. I think you should fight for the former rather than the latter. Because the fact of the matter is that the system that provides for you to own a home you don't live in leaves hundreds of thousands dying in the streets, millions food insecure, and tens of millions unable to earn a comfortable living with 80hrs/wk of work in the wealthiest country in the world
I don’t think I disagree with any of that. I think I’ve said several times, if you’re transitioning to a better system some people are gonna wind up with big windfalls or setbacks in the transition. That’s not fair, but it’s not a reason to not do it. I might get screwed in that transition, or I might come out ahead, depending on the specifics, but either way I’m not saying “this is why we shouldn’t do it.”
All of my experiences with the financial system as part of this homeownership adventure make me think the present system is deeply fucked. It’s not my area of expertise, and as I said financial system talk makes my mind go fuzzy, but I think the present system promotes artificial and unsustainable rise in cost of living while effectively prohibiting the types of land development that would bring those costs down. That’s part of why I went with the plan I did: I wanted to avoid being subject to rising rents, and I wanted to increase the housing supply to make the problem a little better for everyone else.
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I can't really dig in right now, but it's worth pointing out briefly that Seeker spun off a housing thread earlier:
https://www.liquiddota.com/forum/general/558213-housing-rent-mortgage-land-ownership-discussion-thread
It may be worth porting this discussion there and quoting a couple of helpful posts from the last few pages, like IgnE's. It would be a shame to lose them as I think this has been quite interesting.
That way, with the virus discussion and the housing discussion both out of the way, we can go back to using this thread to complain about Trump and push for socialism, like every good US political commentator should.
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Can we move the landlord discussion to the other thread now lol? Literally that's all this discussion has been about now for like 20 pages. Wasn't there a debate recently? How'd that go. Dafuq Biden been doing other than look like he belongs in a nursing home.
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Jesus, there’s so many threads these days. I get the urge to compartmentalize, but it’s also hard to imagine any topic in US politics right now coming close to the importance of topics like “the coronavirus” or “the economic impact of the coming recession/depression.”
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
To me, it feels like the discussion has run its course at this point. We've had it out and it doesn't seem like any new points are really being made. Guess we'll just see how bad this all gets April 1, when rents come due.
On a somewhat different topic. It's surprising how much cognitive dissonance there is around this whole situation in the US regarding the virus, its infectivity, and the economic fallout thereof. At this point we have enough evidence to put to rest all doubt that this virus is every bit as dangerous as it looked when it was starting to get serious in Wuhan and slowly creeping into Italy. And yet, to this day it seems like half the country is still going about their lives as if there is no risk, spreading the disease freely. The same people insist it's "not so bad" because look at how few cases there are, but that's an illusion stemming from the fact that there aren't enough tests to go around.
And then there's every strange hot take regarding the economy. How we can't jeopardize our economy over this, how every business anyone can dream up is somehow "essential" in the shelter-in-place classification, and so on. The one that most interesting to me is the one about how the moment that this crisis is over, we're going to unlock this giant wave of demand and every restaurant, hotel, plane, etc, is going to fill up to the brim and the economy is going to be great again. Somehow, it seems to be that that's just not how people work.
As I've mentioned before, there's a lot of people in the world that simply cannot contemplate the existence of a genuine crisis (health, economic, or otherwise) as a viable reality. It's really strange how far that goes sometimes.
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On March 31 2020 15:55 LegalLord wrote:+ Show Spoiler +To me, it feels like the discussion has run its course at this point. We've had it out and it doesn't seem like any new points are really being made. Guess we'll just see how bad this all gets April 1, when rents come due.
On a somewhat different topic. It's surprising how much cognitive dissonance there is around this whole situation in the US regarding the virus, its infectivity, and the economic fallout thereof. At this point we have enough evidence to put to rest all doubt that this virus is every bit as dangerous as it looked when it was starting to get serious in Wuhan and slowly creeping into Italy. And yet, to this day it seems like half the country is still going about their lives as if there is no risk, spreading the disease freely. The same people insist it's "not so bad" because look at how few cases there are, but that's an illusion stemming from the fact that there aren't enough tests to go around.
And then there's every strange hot take regarding the economy. How we can't jeopardize our economy over this, how every business anyone can dream up is somehow "essential" in the shelter-in-place classification, and so on. The one that most interesting to me is the one about how the moment that this crisis is over, we're going to unlock this giant wave of demand and every restaurant, hotel, plane, etc, is going to fill up to the brim and the economy is going to be great again. Somehow, it seems to be that that's just not how people work. As I've mentioned before, there's a lot of people in the world that simply cannot contemplate the existence of a genuine crisis (health, economic, or otherwise) as a viable reality. It's really strange how far that goes sometimes.
Doesn't bode well for climate change. Means Florida will be underwater and they'll just advertise how spring break will be held at "ALL-NEW BEACHES!! with exclusive VIP underwater ruins tours"
"See Miami like never before!"
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@LegalLord
Many people have been brought up in very prosperous times with very little hardships. There are so many safety nets for these people so they just live in denial/can't fathom a world where it all crumbles down.
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Don't click on those spoilers, waiting for a mod to clean things up.
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On March 31 2020 17:10 Uldridge wrote:
@LegalLord
Many people have been brought up in very prosperous times with very little hardships. There are so many safety nets for these people so they just live in denial/can't fathom a world where it all crumbles down.
Don't think anybody alive right now consciously lived through a pandemic. Ebola was pretty bad, but it happened in Africa. SARS and MERS were bad, but also limited locally. AIDS was scary, but STDs are very limited in their scope. Some flu epidemics scared people, but death count and infectiousness were both FAR smaller than for this virus. The last time there was a pandemic of this magnitude was (slightly) over a 100 years ago. So even those who lived through wars haven't seen something like this and probably can't wrap their heads around it. People dying by the dozens to infectious diseases is something that just doesn't happen in first world countries. It's not easy to wrap your head around something like this if you were brought up with the idea that we don't really have to fear disease anymore, because antibiotics, vaccines and proper hygiene made us impervious to them. Turns out that just plain isn't true.
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On March 31 2020 12:46 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2020 10:46 IgnE wrote:On March 31 2020 04:08 ChristianS wrote:On March 31 2020 00:43 IgnE wrote:On March 30 2020 09:45 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 09:16 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 30 2020 08:59 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 08:35 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 30 2020 08:28 ChristianS wrote:On March 30 2020 08:21 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]
I can understand why you feel that way but you also must see that this is literally something landlords can figure out themselves. I mean in your case you're not really a landlord imo as much as an agent of your landlord (the holder of your mortgage).
The role you describe filling exists imo as a way to direct tenants anger at the rent-seeker they see rather than the rent seeker leeching off both of their (and other workers) labor and it gives the agent of the landlord a feeling of marginal social superiority over the tenants as well as practical control over others, vacillating them between petty nobility and freeman serf. How are you determining this distinction then? Most of the “landlords” you’re talking about probably have mortgages, so it’s a bank that really “owns” the property. If you’re calling for all mortgage payments to be cancelled, too, I can see a better argument for it; then it’s mostly the banks getting screwed. But if you’re just saying I’m not a “real landlord” so the policy wouldn’t apply to my situation (but would to the situation Emnjay is talking about), you’re gonna have to clarify how you’re making the distinction/what you’re actually advocating be done in such situations. You may have missed it (totally fair thread moves a lot) but I've expressed I support mortgage relief (not the government just paying banks off) on mortgages for houses where the person with the mortgage lives there. Your specific situation would fall under an "improving the land" category that would need to be handled slightly differently. But someone else paying the bill for the land you live on is what it is (if I understand your situation correctly). On March 30 2020 08:33 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:On March 30 2020 08:21 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]
I mean in your case you're not really a landlord imo as much as an agent of your landlord (the holder of your mortgage). and Emnjay808's mom isn't how exactly? This whole rant seems rather silly after this statement. I'm not saying she's not, but land hoarder lackey isn't common parlance here (and might be taken personally rather than as descriptive of the relationship as I see it) so I eased into it. Plus it wasn't completely clear how much of the property is mortgaged in her case based on what I read. She could have 3k worth of mortgages and 12k in rent income which would be significantly different than what ChristianS describes. So what do you do with people that improved the land? Again, I hate to make it personal, so let’s move to a simpler example. A guy bought an empty lot, bought materials, and spent a year building a house on it. Now he’s renting it to a family. What should happen? The family no longer owes rent, and he’s not allowed to evict them. Does he get... anything? Not even reimbursed for his costs, let alone for a year of his labor? If we agree that we shouldn't have land hoarders rent seeking and have to address it, is it fair to suggest the people in that hypothetical situation should be the first to offer up ideas on how they could/should be compensated under the agreed upon premise that we are reorganizing to rid ourselves of land hoarders? If not, I'd wonder why? Because if they don't even have an idea to disagree with, then simply sharing the common man's equitable society is balanced enough for me with consideration for advantages granted them by domestic and foreign policy with horrific consequences. I could come up with something that may or may not be satisfactory to you, but without your own proposal within the agreed premise of "no more land hoarders" (to be reductive), I don't see it as necessary. Now if you are making your recognition that we shouldn't have land hoarders conditional on how this hypothetical person is compensated given their specific circumstances, I think we gotta go back to justifying land hoarders as desirable to make the conditional rational. I admit I don’t have a good idea for the “right” way to reshape the financial system, and agree that as structured presently it’s deeply fucked. I also acknowledge that you’re basically being asked to design a reform that won’t unfairly rob anyone, even though their wealth was previously distributed by a system you consider unfair and immoral. That’s a big request, and probably impossible without retroactively going through everybody’s entire financial history and redistributing wealth based on how valuable their previous labor was to society. Without doing that, inevitably some people are going to either lose/gain unfairly, or be left with unfair gains/losses from the old system. If you want to say people like our hypothetical housebuilder (and maybe myself, too) are regrettable casualties of the transition to a better and fairer system, fair enough. Any systemic change will create winners and losers, and you do what you can to mitigate the worst of it but if the change is better for society overall at some point you have to just go ahead with it. But it’s worth talking about those winners and losers, and acknowledging when you think those outcomes were regrettable. As for ideas for reforming the system, I mentioned one the other day. I don’t think I support it myself, and Belisarius certainly didn’t like it, but I wonder what you’d think of it: a 100% tax on “unearned” increase in property value (that is, appreciation not due to land improvement). That way home ownership would be a way to have a place to live, but it wouldn’t be an investment. There’s a lot of negative side effects that I think probably outweigh the benefits, but it does negate the profitability of land hoarding, no? such people are casualties of the current system. this is a great deleveraging event. the reason i have little sympathy for the “small time landlords” that will go bust is because they treat leveraged returns in boom times as their right. oh you wanted to become a real estate mogul and own a bunch of properties? you leveraged yourself multiple times and took out 4 or 5 mortgages? welcome to capitalism. i feel some sympathy for the san diego resident trying to buy a home by renting it out. but is it that different from all the retirees who just lost 30% of their investment portfolio? if you play the game you might lose. the perverse thing is that if you dont play the game you usually lose by default. people who leverage themselves take advantage of rules and regulations during the boom times. complaining about tenants who avail themselves of pandemic policies is just the obverse of people in boom times complaining they cant get a bank loan. dont worry though, on a long enough time horizon capital lifts all boats. A lot of this sounds a lot like some version of “you knew the risks and agreed to them, so you can’t really complain.” That makes more sense on the stock market than it does in home ownership. Somebody with a significant portion of their portfolio in stocks (especially if they’re retired or close to retiring!) knew or should have known that was a high-risk, high-reward strategy. But home ownership is supposed to be low risk with low-to-moderate returns. Admittedly buying a house and renting it out is riskier. Anybody doing that should know that repair costs, a couple months of vacancies in between tenants, or drops in the rental value are risks they’re taking. So far this year I had 1.5 months w/o rent as old tenants moved out and we found new ones, and a couple thousand to repair the heating and A/C system. That’s okay, I know that’ll happen and I try not to count on more than 10 months rent per year. When possible I keep some savings in case of some expensive roof repair or something. But if the government were to announce “no more rent payments for 6 months, tough shit landlords” that’s not a risk I could have reasonably expected to anticipate. If I was expected to plan for something like that, I couldn’t have afforded the place at all, the house would still be a dilapidated wreck with no one living in it, and I’d be taking up one of the already-scarce apartments enjoying the free rent. If I’m understanding GH’s prescriptions correctly, the highly leveraged people would actually be just fine. Rent payments are cancelled, but they’ll get mortgage assistance. It’s the guy who bought a lot with his own money and built a house with his own hands, then rented it out, that will really be screwed. If he’d sold the house to some unscrupulous property management company, he’d be fine; he would have gotten to a chair before the music stopped. Again, any big transition creates unfair winners and losers; you can try to mitigate that, but if the change is good overall, you should go ahead with it and accept a few unjust outcomes. But I don’t think these specific outcomes are just, and I don’t think “they knew the risks, if you play the game sometimes you lose” is a good way to handwave that away. I'm going to mostly ignore the mention of "transitions" (because I am not talking about transitions) and the case of the the "guy who bought a lot with his own money" (because he isn't that screwed, presumably he still owns the property) and just address the first part of your post. I think you are viewing the "no more rent payments for 6 months, tough shit landlords" as some kind of unforeseeable act of god, rather than what it really is: an economy saving measure. Everything the government is doing right now is to save the economy. It's not to earn political points with voters, nor is it redistribution. They are attempting to short-circuit anything that would lead to a huge down spiral, where unemployment shoots up, bankruptcies and defaults destroy working businesses, and demand takes a very long time to come back. So in my view, the "no more rent payments for 6 months" scenario is subsumed in the "once in a generation depression" that would leave a lot of heavily mortgaged land-lords similarly stranded. Low risk has never been "no risk" right? So I just don't buy your "how can we factor in unprecedented government intrusion into the rental market??" premise. What should people "reasonably" anticipate given that we've got hundreds of years punctuated by market recessions and depressions on record? It's only been 12 years since the last one, after all. What about that graph suggests that homes are not like stocks in the 21st century? I typed a long response and deleted it. It feels like we’re mostly bargaining over how much sympathy a person in my situation would be owed if the government hypothetically decided my tenants no longer owed me rent (without giving any similar assistance with my mortgage). That hasn’t happened, and doesn’t look likely to happen, and even if it had, I don’t really like the idea of spending my or the forum’s time begging for sympathy. But to be clear, I don’t think me (and people like me) going bankrupt and defaulting is good for the economy either. I *did* anticipate that a once-in-a-generation depression might happen in the next few years when I bought the place. I figured the value might crash and I might have to stay in the house for the long haul. I figured rental value might go down, or there might be 2-3 month vacancies trying to find new tenants, or there might be expensive repairs needed. I did my best to anticipate and plan for those outcomes, and to date, none of them look likely to sink me. If I had thought that in the next downturn, the government was likely to require me to indefinitely provide my property as residence to others free of charge, I wouldn’t have been able to plan for that. I would have just not bought the house. San Diego would have 2 fewer homes, and I’d be taking up an apartment somewhere enjoying free rent. Does that seem like it would have been a better outcome for the economy? For society? What about bankrupting me so my tenants (who are richer than me and aren’t having trouble making rent) can enjoy rent-free living? Does that seem like a good outcome to anyone? If it’s the only way to save a spiraling economy, and my financial ruin is collateral damage, fair enough. But is someone going to argue it’s actually a preferable outcome?
Hey man, I hope you keep your house. I sympathize with you and with a lot of people who have or have yet to lose money this year.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On March 31 2020 21:06 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2020 17:10 Uldridge wrote:
@LegalLord
Many people have been brought up in very prosperous times with very little hardships. There are so many safety nets for these people so they just live in denial/can't fathom a world where it all crumbles down. Don't think anybody alive right now consciously lived through a pandemic. Ebola was pretty bad, but it happened in Africa. SARS and MERS were bad, but also limited locally. AIDS was scary, but STDs are very limited in their scope. Some flu epidemics scared people, but death count and infectiousness were both FAR smaller than for this virus. The last time there was a pandemic of this magnitude was (slightly) over a 100 years ago. So even those who lived through wars haven't seen something like this and probably can't wrap their heads around it. People dying by the dozens to infectious diseases is something that just doesn't happen in first world countries. It's not easy to wrap your head around something like this if you were brought up with the idea that we don't really have to fear disease anymore, because antibiotics, vaccines and proper hygiene made us impervious to them. Turns out that just plain isn't true.
This pandemic is certainly unprecedented in modern times. It's becoming clear to people far too late that that's the case considering some people still haven't caught on. Only one I remember that seemed this scary at first was swine flu, but it didn't have anywhere near the lethality that this coronavirus does.
On a related but different topic, it also strikes me as quite bizarre how the perception of the associated economic fallout is. I suppose it's not that surprising when the so-called "great recession" is the worst economic downturn many people have seen in their entire lifetime, but you'd have to be quite arrogant to think that that's as bad as it can get and that it can't fall further. Nothing has even actually started to fail and the US already has 3 million newly unemployed people in a week. There's a stimulus, sure, but it also seems like in response to the various crises and non-crises of the past decade and a half that were addressed with massive stimulus packages, the "economists" of the US (and likely many other places in the world) have devised some really convoluted logic to try to convince themselves that racking up massive debt and printing money aren't a bad thing and aren't going to have the effects they've traditionally had.
Hell if I know where either the pandemic or economy are going to go, but it's hard not to be quite confused by this "bad things aren't bad" self-delusion that much of the world subscribes to.
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Cuomo is really wishing he had a nationalized healthcare system right now and it is kinda weird to watch. Also just completely not concerned about who is paying for all this until afterwards.
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On April 01 2020 01:16 GreenHorizons wrote:
Cuomo is really wishing he had a nationalized healthcare system right now and it is kinda weird to watch. Also just completely not concerned about who is paying for all this until afterwards.
I mean it's not like he has a choice. A few hundred people are keeling over every day, and thousands more testing positive in his state. Given the federal government response(basically none), he's trying to be accountable for every death that happens. As much as he might be a prick sometimes, he's not Trump who can write off 100k deaths as a success. Every death probably eats away at him and he's trying his best to keep people alive.
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EPT
