This is a weird position: it sounds like you’re saying the problem is enforcing laws irrespective of the merits of those laws. I would respectfully suggest that people reporting code violations their landlord is abetting is not the same as authoritiarian military rule.
Note the kind of conditions here:
> Tenants living among empty apartments have described trash, mold, open windows, leaky gas pipes and rodents as scourges in their buildings.
All this bill does is increase the odds of that neglect having consequences for the landlord, and it seems especially fair when there’s been a noted trend of units being left empty during a housing crisis hoping to jack the rent up in the future. This kind of thing has a real impacts on people because the rent controlled apartments they’re talking about are the only option for a lot of working poor.
> I would respectfully suggest that people reporting code violations their landlord is abetting is not the same as authoritiarian military rule.
There are two orthogonal concerns:
authoritarian vs. democratic: whether ordinary citizens have a say in which laws are passed
Centralized vs decentralized reporting: whether primary responsibility for discovering whether the law has been broken lies with the police (e.g. conducting patrols), or with citizens making reports (e.g. 911 calls).
To be fair, neither extreme is desirable - 911 is a life-saving measure in the case of violent crime. But turning everyone into their neighbor's spy is deeply detrimental to social cohesion. We see that deep social divide here, turning tenants against landlords, the continuation of American class warfare. Of course, enabling tenants to report on their landlords is not the cause of that social divide - it is simply a step in the wrong direction.
> Tenants are already against landlords, that's how it works.
I'm sorry you feel that's an inevitability. There's the economic agreement, where it's mutually beneficial for the tenant to receive housing and the landlord to receive a rent check, and then there's civil relations. Better civil relations improve the economic agreements.
"Allowing workers to report their employers for labor violations is only deepening the social divide between labor and management."
Again, the social divide is not inevitable. There isn't even a clear line where someone switches from labor into management, and your sarcasm left out the divide between management and ownership/capital. The CEO of a Fortune 500 is not in the same position as the CEO of a struggling one-office startup who basically answers to her investors. Should early employees overlook small offenses committed by founders? With the emphasis on the caveat "small", absolutely yes. What matters more, true in general but especially in early stages, is trust.
If you cannot trust your leaders, start planning an exit. You are not doomed to spend your life working for only one employer in whom you have lost faith, and thus require the assistance of the law to protect you. Life is too short to force yourself to work for people like that.
Not inevitable, just the default and probably(?) the majority, in both the landlord case and the employer case.
> There isn't even a clear line where someone switches from labor into management, and your sarcasm left out the divide between management and ownership/capital.
I mean labor vs management in the union/labor-relations sense of the words, where the management is representing the interests of the owners.
> Should early employees overlook small offenses committed by founders? With the emphasis on the caveat "small", absolutely yes. What matters more, true in general but especially in early stages, is trust.
In the early stages of a company, I might be inclined to overlook things if I had equity, as is common in the industry. And there's a reason for that: my labor is creating profit partly for my own gain — so I'm not being exploited.
If a small-time landlords want their tenants to overlook issues that they can't reasonably fix, maybe they should be offering their tenants equity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
One can decide whether to respond optimistically or pessimistically to that reality.
> union/labor-relations sense of the words
I disagree that unionization fundamentally sets interests of labor against their employer. Sure, sometimes they diverge, but happier labor is more productive. Having a channel to communicate common grievances, so they can be addressed, is a key ingredient for also making labor happier and improving profits.
> my labor is creating profit partly for my own gain — so I'm not being exploited
You're rationalizing. Without equity, you're still gaining - it's called your salary. You don't actually get equity in early stage companies; you get options on equity, and even if you decide to pay money to exercise those options, you have no vote in board elections, dividends are highly unlikely to ever be issued, and you cannot sell your shares unless a highly unlikely exit (which you have no control over) occurs.
> If a small-time landlords want their tenants to overlook issues that they can't reasonably fix, maybe they should be offering their tenants equity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
A, not all landlords suck; it is possible to find a small-time landlord who cares about the property and finding a good tenant (my mother, who owns a studio apartment she inherited, happens to be one of them). If you don't like your landlord, you should consider moving. B, splitting equity in real estate amongst several / dozens of people is a really bad idea; since everyone gets a veto, the more people who get a say, the more unlikely it is to achieve consensus on anything from repairs to renovations to selling to a developer so that land which has a few housing units on it can have dozens or hundreds of housing units on it.
Abusing the market is also deeply detrimental to social cohesion.
Many market actors have an expectation of fairness with the parties they transact with, but this expectation can only be realized if parties maintain some degree of honesty with each other.
One set of actors (some landlords) is not being honest by withholding a very constrained resource (housing) from the marketplace. Their dishonesty is causing a direct impact to many tenants by artificially raising rents.
The increasing cost of rent is very noticeable and only encourages a growing adversarial relationship between tenants and landlords.
> 911 is a life-saving measure in the case of violent crime
Is it really though? Where I live (major US metro area with 4-5m population, middle of the city), response time from 911 if you're actively being murdered is like... 6-7 minutes on average. If it's not a tier 1 call, response time is slower than that.
6-7 minutes is an eternity during the act of a violent crime. Police don't have the capacity to save your life from violence.
That's a fair point, and I'm not arguing people should rely solely on police for their personal security. I'm more pointing out that it's clearly correct and appropriate to report crime when your safety is in danger; that I'm not trying to argue for some extreme where crime is never reported to the police.
> But turning everyone into their neighbor's spy is deeply detrimental to social cohesion. We see that deep social divide here, turning tenants against landlords, the continuation of American class warfare.
I just want to second all of the other people pointing out the logical flaws here. It’s rare for people to be neighbors with their landlords and almost non-existent for the large multi family buildings this is targeted at: if your grandmother is renting out a room, she’s probably not leaving the rest of the house empty hoping to creatively renovate out of rent-control laws. This is going to be used against landlords who’ve already broken the “neighbor” contract by letting their buildings decay to the point where it’s affecting other people, and refusing to rent rooms to people who need them because they don’t make as much profit as they want. Those are wealthy people looking for tax shelters, not your neighbors!
As to the class war claim, I believe it’s been noted how the right-wing only deploys that particular distraction when it’s something which helps poor people. I would suggest that starting point for any skirmish in that war might be when a landlord lets their property decay to the point where it no longer meets the minimum legal standard but still expects people to pay full price to live there. Having to clean up the mess they created seems like an impressively mild form of warfare.
> continuation /kən-tĭn″yoo͞-ā′shən/: The act or fact of going on or persisting; the state of continuing in the same condition, capacity, or place; an extension by which something is carried to a further point.
"I spent 1 word giving lip service to side A and the rest of my post scolding side B. I am very fair and balanced."
I admit, I could be wrong. Maybe if I go through your history I'll see attention paid to the prior rounds of class warfare in proportion to their severity rather than in proportion to your opinions. But I doubt it and it's getting late.
To pick favorites, selective attention is all you need.
It's really amazing that we've gone full 180 on "see something, say something" being good and not a horribly dystopian reaction to 9/11. These kinds of laws are the human equivalent of recruiting every Amazon Ring to detect and report crimes. The intent might be noble and it might even be in response to a epidemic of break-ins but turning all eyes into a tool of the state is not a can of worms we should be opening.
Even worse is this, making everyone not just the eyes but the prosecutors themselves.
> The new bill also empowers tenants to sue landlords to force owners to open up vacant apartments for inspection.
Literally using citizens to do something the state is legally not allowed to do. It was bad when the abortion law did it and it's bad here. Throwing away our principles as long as the right people get hurt makes us no better than those far-right nutjobs.
> These kinds of laws are the human equivalent of recruiting every Amazon Ring to detect and report crimes.
Well, let’s step back and look at impact. If we used Ring cameras to have 100% enforcement of jaywalking laws, that’d be widely recognized as extreme because there’s no damage to everyone else. If we used the same cameras to have 100% enforcement of mugging, the reverse would be true because the only consequences are on people who everyone agrees deserve punishment. This seems to be in the latter camp: buildings whose owners have neglected them to the point that there are actual hazards to the residents. It isn’t some vague hypothetical future risk but a very clear question: the citizens of New York have decided that nobody should have to live in a building with rats or mold, should landlords be required to follow that law?
The other concern with Ring cameras is that they could be misused for other purposes. That’s real there but not applicable here because this isn’t general data collection and everything funnels through a city office with a neutral third-party. The government can only get data when someone is bothered enough to report it, and if a report is specious the city inspector is going to quickly realize this.
I'm not keen to report my neighbor, but my landlord is not my neighbor. They could hardly be more not my neighbor if they tried.
When my rent skyrockets amid lots of vacant new construction (I'm not in CA, we're actually building around here), "gee, I'd like to help these fine fellows cheat on their taxes" is not the first thought to cross my mind.
It is saying remarkable things about the human condition that we have a tenant and a landlord, their only interactions are to organise the world so that there is somewhere for the tenant to live, and the default relationship is adversarial.
Landlords do have an unfair advantage; see also Georgism. Trying to make a land value tax work will get good results. Reporting people to mother will lead to a lot of fighting and the economic market rates are still going to win in the end.
The system is run by the rich, for the rich. The unfair advantage is the entire point. You will run face-first into a titanic wall of money if you try to deprive capital of the various rent-seeking advantages it grants itself.
Sometimes naïvety is a superpower, so godspeed on the Georgism but I will not hold my breath and I will enjoy my wins where I can find them, thank you very much.
The 3-step plan you just outlined is: (1) Identify a group of people with insurmountable, systemic advantages that you don't expect can be overcome. (2) Develop an adversarial relationship with them. (3) Assume you're going to get some wins from time to time.
You should reflect on that. There are a surprising number of problems in the approach you're going with there - both logical and strategic. Picking fights is actually a political tactic for preserving the status quo; it creates a force to oppose the change you want. If you don't like the status quo you should avoid taking adversarial stances. Like setting up hotlines to report people to the government; it rarely ends well.
> If you don't like the status quo you should avoid taking adversarial stances.
This is ahistorical. And it’s essentially the argument which has always been used by defenders of the status quo to avoid taking responsibility for the defense as such. But worse, you’re conflating mere recognition of an extant adversarial relationship with initiating it in the first place. You’re arguing that it’s strategically superior to unilaterally concede not just tenants’ interests but any acknowledgment that there even are tenants’ interests.
It is fairly pro-historical, take the development of democracy as an institution - it depends on an understanding that we'd really all rather see ourselves on the same side and trying to get the best outcome for everyone. Compare that to communist revolutions where they overthrew the hated landlords, then everyone starved. It isn't a be-all and end all, sometimes the only option is to fight. And on the small scale I've had mostly good results by being friendly towards my landlords.
But I don't think real estate in New York is the place to draw that line. I suspect the regulation of the market is creating these toxic relations and it is making everyone worse off, except for a few lottery winners presumably.
> You’re arguing that it’s strategically superior to unilaterally concede not just tenants’ interests but any acknowledgment that there even are tenants’ interests.
I think it is implicitly obvious that the tenants have interests. What I'm saying is if I'm living in someone else's house and my interests don't align with there interests, plan A is to find a way to align our interests. Taking it as a given that our interests conflict then picking a fight, on the other hand, strikes me as dangerously stupid.
what about the capitalist revolutions where they started murderous authoritarian “helicopter rides” and burning people alive inside oil barrels and stuff, or generally just starving or mistreating the populace? funny how that always gets left out of the example, some of these killings likely range into the millions, many backed by US taxpayers.
“helicopter rides for leftists” is very much a meme for a reason, after all. And many of those that receive such rides or are burned alive in oil barrel are not, in fact, insurgents, they’re just ordinary citizens who might have spoken out against the regime etc.
yes, “tu quoque”, but these things do happen after many social upheavals, the framing of capitalism as being a bulwark against authoritarian repression is fundamentally misplaced. Many of those capitalist upheavals do go on to oppress their populations too, whether acutely or chronically. The us has hundreds of thousands of people dying from lack of access to health care and general poverty-related deaths every year, our own ongoing holodomor.
Violence after a political upheaval is, in fact, rather orthogonal to what system it is rebelling against or who is in control afterwards. Like it’s not tu quoque, it’s just an irrelevant red herring. Plenty of people get murdered by authoritarian capitalist regimes after upheaval too. Because it’s social/political upheaval.
Holy shit your fevered imagination came up with a bad plan. But they are your words, not mine. Your plan, not mine. You should reflect on that. There's nothing insurmountable about the fights I'm picking and that's the entire point.
> Picking fights is actually a political tactic for preserving the status quo
> If you don't like the status quo you should avoid taking adversarial stances
Oh, tell me about your plan for winning without picking a fight. I'll wait.
Fights are inherent to good political strategy, it's quite silly to suggest otherwise. Politics when people agree isn't politics, it's administration.
Strategy is about picking the correct fights or inducing your opponent to pick the wrong fights. Georgism and socialism and other causes that strike at the heart of the ownership issue are the wrong fights because the opposition is too entrenched. You will lose. If you win it will be by destroying the country, but realistically speaking, you will lose. If I wanted to be politically ineffective, I might join you in your cause, because in principle we agree, but I don't want to be ineffective.
Instead, I will continue to go after the tax and zoning laws. There is a lot of good to be done on that front. It's messy, dirty, non-utopian, and has no use for someone afraid of a fight -- but these are fights that can be won and that makes them infinitely better fights to pick.
> Oh, tell me about your plan for winning without picking a fight. I'll wait.
The obvious approach to me would be to put together a plan for how to implement a land value tax, then propose bringing it in in exchange for dropping some other property-based tax or removing rent control so that in the short term landlords get a slightly good deal. Maybe try to get it implemented in a few districts first to see what happens so it doesn't get scaled up if it turns out to be a bad idea; these things are tricky.
Then with luck that'll be enough because the unfair part of rents is dealt with. If it isn't, get some people like you together to figure out what upsets them and keep tweaking policies to line incentives up. There is probably a lot to do around construction that is not getting done because people keep trying to fight instead of turn comfortable living into an administrative matter.
> Fights are inherent to good political strategy
They aren't. That is how you get all the pointless grudges that go back centuries, never get resolved and don't let people get ahead. People end up with multi-generational conflicts over trivia or long-gone disputes that are wasteful and destructive. Great political leaders tend to be the people who hammer out compromises and balance different interests without letting things spill over into conflict. Great leaders period are the people who heal rifts and promote reconciliation and peace.
There are occasional political battles, but it is nearly always better when there is a space devoid of them. Compromise, tolerance and all those sort of concepts lead to better living standards. most people persue policies of destruction and end up much poorer for it. But they have enemies to blame so they feel good about having less than they could. I'd rather be live in a wealthy society myself.
> Politics when people agree isn't politics, it's administration.
I dunno, I still see you taking a position there where you seem to expect housing policy to be a fight and don't see a world where it can become just a quiet administrative matter. I continue to put it to you that this is a terrible approach to securing somewhere to live. Everyone getting a fair deal on somewhere to live should be a quiet administrative matter. As principles go, I don't think there is a lobby group that wants people to be homeless.
Housing is exactly the sort of thing where it really is better to de-escalate tensions and set up win-win situations. This is a situation where incentives can be bought into alignment. There is no need for conflict.
> ...the opposition is too entrenched. You will lose...
US government spending is 40% of GDP and has been steadily rising for around 100 years. The evidence that taxes are hard to bring in is thin; all that money is coming from somewhere.
There is a lot of room there to negotiate tax reform. Tax increases are probably a no-go, the burden is already high. But change is possible, and realigning incentives is an option.
> Georgism and socialism and other causes that strike at the heart of the ownership
Georgism isn't socialistic, it is a profoundly capitalistic policy. And it isn't striking at the heart of ownership; although it is meddling in the market. But far less invasively than the average policy.
Actually the landlord. He hires a separate management company that we deal with for maintenance, but when they've messed up we've dealt with him directly. It's a small building - just 4 units. (This is in Japan)
Japan is a special case where housing is largely a depreciating asset and small-time landlording isn’t a very profitable business. Small-time landlords in Japan couldn’t collude to screw over renters like they did in the US with RealPage even if they wanted to. There are also strong renter protections relative to the US, including fairly limited ability (by law) to raise rents on existing tenants without justification.
I don't have hard figures on this but I've been in the sphere long enough to gather some knowledge.. in NYC there are a few orders of magnitude more apartments owned by corporate rentseekers than there are tenant-landlords, but there are a few orders of magnitude again between the number of tenant-landlords greater than the number of corporate rentseekers.
The solution has always been to build more housing. Onerous zoning laws are preventing supply and demand from coming into balance. Single-family zoning needs to be banned. It's not actually that complicated, and to your point, it doesn't involve reporting your neighbors to the authorities.
A surprising amount, but of course that's not the only way of impeding construction. See San Francisco's shadow aversion.
New York City is around 15%. Note that Manhattan has among the lowest prevalence of single-family zoning in the US, and a density of almost 70,000 people per square mile.
83% of the Bay Area is zoned single-family and has a density of just 400 people per square mile.
[edit] If you look at NYC-adjacent counties, Bergen, Fairfield, Nassau, and Westchester the numbers get far worse. About 56% of all housing near rail stations in these counties is classified as detached single-family houses. [1]
> About 56% of all housing near rail stations in these counties is classified as detached single-family houses.
That could be totally fine. Many people like living in detached housing and having that near rail service to a major city seems like a good thing.
If the concern is zoning that precludes other uses, that’s a different thing, but a mere observation that X% of housing in some area is of a particular, often very desirable, type isn’t conclusive to me.
If you want public transport to be seen as something everyone uses, it’s probably good that outlying counties like Westchester have detached SFRs in addition to the 44% higher density housing.
If detached single family homes are so popular, you wouldn’t need the government to prevent people from building what they want. Those rules were designed to ensure that certain neighborhoods were only for “the right kind of people”, not because Moses came down from the mountain with a single-family zoning plan.
They are wildly popular. It's not the government preventing people from building what they want (though that's the proximate mechanism).
It's people who live there and voted in the government and advocated for those policies. This is not a government problem, but a people's preferences problem.
You have to consider selection bias here: people live where they can afford to, not necessarily where they’d like. You aren’t seeing what people who were excluded on price or racial lines would want, and you’re not seeing how many people truly want only that style versus not disliking it enough to organize a political movement, since depending on the area that can require things like supermajorities and even nullifying covenants in deeds.
This also hits the tension cities have for balancing the interests of long-term residents against the future. Lots of places have this dynamic now where old retirees block any changes either because they’re opposed to change or fearful of losing the equity which is most of their retirement, but anyone looking at the city finances knows that they need more residents, especially of working age, and that includes lower income families if you want to be able to have service workers, city employees, etc. actually live there. This is especially true in places like California where old residents pay far less in taxes but have equally high, if not higher, expectations for city services.
> You can't ever build enough housing in dense cities. It will ALWAYS be expensive.
Interesting, Tokyo hasn't seen house prices increase since 1995 in either nominal or real-dollar terms.
One of the most affordable major metros in the US is Houston.
One thing they have in common is no real constraints on zoning.
> The US has more than enough housing, and very cheap at that. You can buy a house for $1 in some places.
The problem is supply and demand have to be co-located. You can't commute from Iowa or Detroit to the Bay Area or Manhattan for work.
Studies show the US is short about 5-6M homes thanks to a decade of under-building. [1]
> However, toxic policies lead to over-concentration of housing in a small number of cities. This drives up prices in a never-ending spiral.
Concentration of housing is good, actually. It's far more efficient in every way, it's environmentally friendly and gives us access to all sorts of services and social groups. Concentration of talent makes the Bay Area the Bay Area.
Yeah the existence of a cheap house doesn’t make housing cheap, or even scalable at that cheap price, since things are priced at the margins, if suddenly a few people flocked to cheap town it’s prices will go up fast.
> Moreover, land cost outside of big cities is pretty much nothing. It's cheap to build new housing as needed.
This is far too sweeping a claim. It’s comically untrue unless you’re defining “outside” as multiple hours of driving, and “big cities” as anywhere over, say, 50k people.
It’s also obviously untrue once you learn that people leave their houses. Yes, you can build new housing cheaply in a rural area but for people to live there you also need stores, schools, jobs, etc. and that means things like roads. Now your cheap house involves buying a car for each resident, paying for a lot of gas and tires, paying for road construction and maintenance, and not having anything you’d prefer to be doing other than spending all of those extra hours driving (don’t forget the increased health care costs). Things like utilities, roads, snow plowing, etc. all cost most on average because that low density means more infrastructure but the costs are spread over fewer people.
You can save money that way but it’s nowhere near as much as portrayed.
> This is far too sweeping a claim. It’s comically untrue unless you’re defining “outside” as multiple hours of driving, and “big cities” as anywhere over, say, 50k people.
I haven't looked at _every_ city, of course, but it's generally true in many areas. For example, the same-sized plot of land will be 20 times less just 1 hour away near Seattle.
> It’s also obviously untrue once you learn that people leave their houses. Yes, you can build new housing cheaply in a rural area but for people to live there you also need stores, schools, jobs, etc. and that means things like roads.
Schools, stores, and roads are, in general, either cheaper (roads) or cost insignificantly more (school), or about the same (stores).
I did the math. The city efficiency peaks around 200k population, and then it starts to go down. Mostly because you need extra layers of bureaucracy and/or fall down the rabbit hole of mass transit.
And then the denser the city, the more money it needs to maintain itself. And new infrastructure quickly becomes overwhelmingly expensive.
Think about this: one mile of Manhattan subway costs about the same as 1000 miles of a modern new 6-lane freeway.
> You can save money that way but it’s nowhere near as much as portrayed.
By not forcing the densification, you WILL save money and make peoples' lives better. The main issue is job availability. We need to make sure remote jobs and distributed offices have more advantage, via cap-and-trade or taxes.
If anything, Tokyo is a fucking horror show. It shows the result of failed "urbanist" policies. They managed to force people to jam-pack into "microapartments" where you can sit on a toilet, while cooking food _at_ _the_ _same_ _time_. All while a couple of hours away, beautiful traditional houses are falling down.
And the punchline: this is all while the overall population is dropping.
> One of the most affordable major metros in the US is Houston.
Yes. Guess why? You have three guesses.
> The problem is supply and demand have to be co-located. You can't commute from Iowa or Detroit to the Bay Area or Manhattan for work.
Yes, that's why we must stop new offices from opening in Manhattan. Tax the office space, or do a cap-and-trade based on the city area.
> Studies show the US is short about 5-6M homes thanks to a decade of under-building. [1]
> It's interesting that Tokyo is used by people all the time after just quick googling. Probably because it's an "exotic" location.
Also, if GP wants to make a point that housing prices can be stable somewhere, they probably shouldn’t pick a spot in a nation with a legendarily stagnant economy. 23Q3 even showed a contraction.
> Also, if GP wants to make a point that housing prices can be stable somewhere, they probably shouldn’t pick a spot in a nation with a legendarily stagnant economy. 23Q3 even showed a contraction.
I disagree. The argument that I was pushing back on is that it's somehow impossible to balance supply and demand in a major city in such a way that housing prices are stable. This is false by counterexample.
By picking somewhere in Japan you’ve left yourself open to the counter-argument that you have to kill economic growth to do it. If you want to prove your point without implying the necessity of unacceptable sacrifices — in other words, if you want somebody to be persuaded — cite some high density locations where economic growth was strong but housing prices were stable.
> It's interesting that Tokyo is used by people all the time after just quick googling. Probably because it's an "exotic" location.
lol, it's not that it's 'exotic' it's that they are a major metro in a country that has federalized zoning that city councils can't make capricious decisions in. There aren't many to pick from. Also Japan housing CPI [1] vs US housing CPI [2].
That's a great opinion for you to have, but that's not one most people share. You know everyone in these cities could live elsewhere. They elect to live in cities. In fact they pay through the teeth to live in most of these cities. Don't project. If you want to live out in the middle of nowhere, by all means do so, but don't force everyone else to through anti-development policies.
