Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- People can't afford to live and food comes before paying your landlord? Economy is fucked right now. Income inequality pushes any gains into the hands of the wealthy.
And frankly, more and more people are willing to stuff their landlord if they feel their landlord isn't holding up their end of the deal.
by gacgacgac - the article said asset managers claimed rent collections went from 94% to 89% - wow such a drop! they fail to highlight that these assets are theirs to own indefinitely!by RAGcontent
- Your employer should pay you 5% less then they are legally obligated to. See how flippant you are then.by the_doctah
- Given the absence of other data, I’d say the lack of consequences is the driver.
https://www.macrotrends.net/4694/new-york-city-area-unemploy...
NYC even before covid was renter friendly and difficult to evict, so things must have taken quite the turn.
Which sucks because—and the essay doesn’t specify—rent stabilized apartments remain one of the few ways for lower income to make it into the middle class.
It’s not all pleasant (mice and cockroaches measured in inches) but it’s what allowed me to save, invest, and get out.
- Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working.
Also perhaps there should be a new field for startups (yes i'm aware of 'proptech' but there has to be more than that), that will collect dirt on tenants to threaten them with legal consequences unless they pay.
by anovikov - > Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners has an excellent scene where something like this happens to a kid down on his luck.
by jquery - > Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working.
1) Because screw you, that's horrible and you shouldn't do it.
2) Because all these digital key systems are horrendously insecure and much more open to thieves and crackers than than a plain old door key anyway.
by eli_gottlieb - Good idea. Also a robot drone should come and sell your stuff on eBay.by inigyou
- Every day I doubt why I even bother reading this site. Then anovikov reminds me why. It's so I can keep on top of the creativity/depravity my fellow engineers are capable of.by ares623
- It sounds like an ad-hoc rent strike. Not a great sign for an economy.by djeastm
- If history teaches anything, it's that people are so afraid of striking they only ever do it when the alternative is death.by inigyou
- There's a limit to every city, and just building new infrastructure won't solve everything. It always lags behind demand and there are space constraints, budget constraints and countless other limitations.
At the same time, expectations keep rising for everyone (myself included): not wanting to spend one or two hours commuting to work, not wanting to live 45 minutes away from a large supermarket and not wanting to spend three hours or more just to meet friends or family among others. The problem is that it simply doesn't scale, and every country/city faces different challenges so there is no single universal solution.
I'm afraid the real discussion can't happen outside of small circles at this time because it'd involve highly controversial topics that much of the population in Western democracies (can only talk about what I know) isn't ready to confront. We have deeply ingrained ideas that are difficult to challenge so instead we'll probably watch cities fully collapse before anything.
by outime - What makes you think our current cities are anywhere close to the limit you propose?by wffurr
- > We have to consider what the unintended consequences are of public policies or practices where there are no immediate consequences for someone who falls behind on rent
> Many [landlords] say they don’t actually intend to evict anyone, but that filing these cases is the most expedient way to get emergency rental aid from the city.
Economics in one easy lesson: incentives matter.
by delichon - While that is certainly true, it's a very narrow view disconnected from the reasons for the policies. The most likely explanation for more people not paying their rent is that even fixed rents have become increasingly unaffordable because other costs have risen faster than wages. So yes, people are "choosing" not to pay rent because the consequences of not paying the rent lag substantially behind the consequences of not eating or buying gas. But it's an absolutely rational decision. FTA:
>...plenty of economic indicators suggest worsening financial duress for people already struggling. Costs are going up faster than wages, and inflation that took hold after the pandemic has proven painfully persistent.
by vannevar - All slack has been removed from society. All pricing has been maximized. Every interaction capitalized. Every point of extraction extracted from.
People living in these situations now live from crisis to crisis. Not paying rent/dealing with the consequences is just another on the list. At some point people just become numb. Modern society at the peripherals is not sustainable. There will always be people in the peripherals, but society is now structured to require middle class type stability as the bottom baseline for an individual to survive.
by _DeadFred_ - and the middle class is being destroyedby kbar13
- i occasionally come across some of the forums and online groups of landlords and the things they have to deal with, particularly in cities with strong protections for the tenants and its interesting to watch the perspectives.
on one hand i feel for some of the landlords who have to deal with some of the very real slacks who go out of their way to be difficult tenants.
on the other we’re talking about homes, by this i mean to stress home over investment. i think we’ve made a terrible mistake in incentivizing people to use homes as an investment. it should be difficult to evict someone from their home, and it should be risky and a pain in the ass to use someone else’s home as an investment.
i feel bad for _some_ of the landlords but from a larger societal perspective we’re going to look back at incentivizing so many people to invest as a landlord as a massive mistake.
by toofy - The landlord can divest themselves of the property. It's also ok if people lose money on investments. I don't think you have to feel especially bad for landlords.by dfxm12
- > “There is a subset of people, maybe the smallest subset, who are literally making a choice not to pay rent, and we don’t do well with acknowledging that but there is a subset for whom that is the case,” [...] Others bristle at the notion that some tenants are not paying rent just because they may be able to get away with it.
These people absolutely exist. To pretend that they don't is willful ignorance. They are, however, indeed a "small[est] subset" to quote the gentleman in the article. In the era of $4 McDoubles and $6 gallons of gas I have trouble believing that one in four people is my burnout college roommate who spends on Fireball shots and Xbox games instead of paying rent. Life is expensive these days.
by alexjplant - Someone I know rented a flat in Draguignan to a "friend" of a "friend". After some time he stopped paying the rent and bought alcohol instead. It was a tiny rent but it lasted for a long time. She didn't have a mortgage on it but still I don't think I would be that patient as a landlord.by dominicrose
- In my city, and I assume many others, there's an informal landlord's group that shares lists of problem tenants to avoid renting to. While problematic, I wonder if it's made any impact.by morkalork
- There's entire Reddit communities of these people where they encourage and validate their shitty behavior.
With some of the stories I've read, you'd have to be positively insane to be a small-time landlord these days, especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone.
Go watch Pacific Heights with Michael Keaton for a fictionalized account but this stuff absolutely happens every day.
I saw one recently where the renter has not paid rent for six years and is unable to be evicted. It made national news.
So where does that leave the industry? You eventually push out the mom and pop landlords by making the regulations so insane it only leaves behind the large corporate property management companies and their army of lawyers. Who will collude and drive rents up. It's a vicious cycle and these cities are not helping one bit.
- > They are, however, indeed a "small[est] subset" to quote the gentleman in the article.
The numbers don't have to stay small because this behavior is not generated independently in a population. Multiple people may become aware of it by talking to each other, social media, forums, some crazy news event that refers to it, etc. All of the sudden a lot more people decide they can do it as well and tell their friends.
I am not defending it or saying one side is right or wrong just that when it comes to things like this there may be a different model at play on how this behavior is generated.
by rdtsc - I anecdotally know of a few cases in Seattle where tenants with high incomes that could easily pay just don't. There is a subculture that actively encourages this type of behavior and the laws are setup such that there are almost no consequences for it. I've also met people who bragged about doing it. While rare, it is still common enough that it has become a real problem and has become socially acceptable in some circles.
It is corrosive to the social contract when government policy tacitly encourages this behavior.
- > The uptick in rental delinquency isn’t new. It started six years ago
It has nothing to do with Mamdani, for those of who don't want to bother to read. Most of this occurred under Eric Adams's watch.
Anecdotally, I do think covid made people a lot more aware of how deeply backlogged the housing courts are. It seems like a lot of people (like the anonymous one in the article) realized they could not pay rent and avoid being actually evicted for quite some time.
This is a recurring theme in city problems: Backlogged courts. Sometimes that's to the benefit of the less fortunate (here), but it also often results in terrible outcomes (see: Kalief Browder).
by BoxFour - Politico is an Axel Springer rag, in case anyone was wondering why they would put a photo of mamdani in the article. It's propaganda.by lyu07282
- So say they do get evicted eventually, what are their chances of getting the next rental?by manyatoms
- It’s fascinating that America can be the world’s superpower(?) and yet huge swathes of society still live in unstable conditions like this.by vachina
- You can't blame Adams for delinquent payments. He dramatically expanded housing vouchers (the source of the budget crisis) which in theory should have reduced delinquency.
Moreover rents for affordable housing haven't kept up with inflation while benefits have.
Arm chair speculation like what's in the article won't suffice. People need to be surveyed and interviewed to get to the bottom of this.
by fny