I don't think it's just code enforcement anymore. People are worried about families being outbid by corporations and being forced to rent.
As far as the code enforcement thing goes, I thought that part of the problem was that slumlords somehow got away with just not ever paying the fines or fixing the problems.
I agree with 1 as well. Lots of people would like to purchase, but can't compete with cash offers or infinite bidding wars.
2: but why? Why can't cities just levy increasing fines or somehow rein that in?
Homeowners would block any serious enforcement here. So, so much deferred maintenance. Calling code enforcement is a tactic of flippers trying to force a sale by making it impossible for an owner to stay.
have to leave Providence when their current leases end
We are but renters on the lands of an angry god.
The 1% (or some low percentage of the population) is pretty openly trying to create a serf class with not even a small ownership stake in society.
4, 5: As I understand it (which is not very much), opaque ownership by LLCs is part of the problem, and the distant, hard-to-identify owner just allows fines to rack up and eventually lets the property fall into foreclosure with huge liens against it. Efforts to step up code enforcement end up hurting owner-occupiers more than slumlords.
I doubt large corporate landlords are letting houses fall into disrepair and then abandoning them if they are properties in a appreciating market
Big corporate landlords say in their prospectuses exactly what will thwart their profits: and maybe make them get out of the business: building a ton more housing.
Just restricting the terms on which they can rent may at best make them sell back to individual investors who will be just as extractive landlords.
It seems like we don't have to let corporations and LLC's own every single type of thing that a regular human is allowed to own. One could just ban LLCs from owning single-family homes and it would go a long way. But I guess its wrong to discriminate against corporate people, so whatchagonnado?
It lets the olds cash out without having to deal with a market where housing prices are limited by the relatively lower wealth of the younger generations who weren't able to accumulate assets the way earlier generations could.
One could just ban LLCs from owning single-family homes and it would go a long way.
I don't think it would hurt, assuming you mean ban owning them long-term to rent out as opposed to owning them at all, even to redevelop or expand. I would support it; I've also put in some work to support de-anonymizing corporate RE beneficial owners so they can be held to account. But I think the help would be small to medium, and temporary. Prices and rents have been going up too fast for decades with largely non-corporate ownership. Big corporate money got involved relatively recently, when they realized how much individuals were cleaning up on it. Push them out, you get some easing of in price wars and maybe prices and rents go down for a bit. But then they'll rise again as the underlying supply-demand mismatch keeps ratcheting up.
And I wouldn't put it past Blackrock, if banned from direct ownership, from making arrangements where individuals are owners of record and maybe are investing a little but not the majority.
15: I'm not sure that would be a ratchet in the other direction. Median wealth may be declining, but it's not declining in aggregate, rather further concentrating, putting plenty of buying power in the hands of fewer individuals.
14 and 16: I'm just curious how you would do that on a technical level. For example, the same family lived in the house we bought since it was built in 1957, and they weren't rich, because there was a reverse mortgage on it, but as part of their Medicaid planning, they had transferred ownership to a trust. I'm betting that some individuals and families have structured ownership in different ways and are not massive corporations.
17: which means that real estate in high status areas will find purchasers, but middle market areas may find that real estate can't be sold to individuals for what it's "worth".
19: Rich people don't just buy high-status homes - they know middling homes can be good investments too, because, again, supply.
18: I don't feel so strongly about it as amelioration or as approximately achievable that I'm going to put in a lot of work on the policy, but I could imagine something along the lines of, exemption for entities that own one home and that are owned by a person or family that owns nothing else. There have been some exemptions with that general mechanic for statewide rent control in California.
I do appreciate the language in the linked article. "Majority white enclave" reminds me of those things Slate used to do to describe American news events the way the American media would describe them if they happened in another country.
23. But the events are in Texas, not America.
20: I meant for owners to occupy.
Kind of already been said by Moby & J, R, but: homeowners want rigorous code enforcement the way they want misdemeanor enforcement: for Those People, not for themselves. So no regime is likely to be popular. Meanwhile, landlords absolutely don't want enforcement, and they have a lot of political power. It's a very rare landlord who can't imagine being on the receiving end of nitpicky enforcement.
So the political will is pretty weak: mixed feelings from homeowners, opposition from landlords, and ambivalence from renters who don't vote in local elections anyway.
Greenfield tried to outlaw exterior paint, probably.
I have personally gotten a snarky, semi-anomymous complaint about my landscaping.
There's also the unproblematic scenario where LLCs buy houses, where Jes/se Eisen/berg doesn't want it to be public knowledge which house is his. It's somewhat remarkable just how public and easily searchable housing records are.
To the OP, code enforcement is often viewed as picking a fight with taxpayers -- you're telling people how they have to handle a thing they own, which is a terrible infringement on freedom!
There's some applause when a slumlord is brought down on the TV news, but ongoing maintenance is hard to keep up, particularly if your unit is rented (so you have to schedule around the tenant). The codes also change with time, so even when something looks wrong (like a balcony rail that is too low), it's permitted to remain until "touched" by a later project. So you can't just hire people to drive around and look at things that are "obviously wrong" under the code - because they might have been legal when built, which isn't a required upgrade.
Honestly, the fines are typically small, and the cost of employment + research time makes it hard to balance out. You don't want it to look like a profit center for the city - for the same reason that hitting people with nuisance tickets in policing is a sign of a poorly run jurisdiction. The solution is to partner with tenants - have them identify problems, ask for repairs, then kick the problem to the city if they're not fixed... but that's a pretty direct line identifying the tenant as a troublemaker.
Arguments on why the world woudl be better if more LLC's and corporate entities to bought single family homes and rented them out:
First, as distinguished from a world where all homes being owned by their residents:
For families who can't afford down payments, it's nice to be able to rent a single family home rather than an apartment.
Also true for families who don't expect to stay in the area for long, for families who anticipate a change in their wealth level in the next few years, families who aren't excited about handling all of the maintenance etc. of being a homeowner.
On the other side of the equation, people who need to move, or want to cash in on their inheritance, are better able to sell if there's competition from a corporate buyer. And if a distant company pays a local guy a few hundred thousand for a home, money is coming in to the community.
Generally, going deeply in debt to buy a home is a bad financial move, since it's the opposite of a diversified portfolio: All of your wealth is tied up in just one thing, and its value is correlated to your other large variable asset: your job. This sucks, since the most likely reason you will lose your job is the local economy going bad, in which case you have to move at the moment in time that your home has lost value.
West Virginia has the highest home ownership rate in the US, South Carolina not far behind, New York and California have by far the lowest home ownership rates.
Second, as distinguished from a world where local landlords own all rental properties:
Anonymous corporations don't vote, don't run for local office, and if they're really anonymous, they don't get involved in local politics. Local landlords do all fo those things, and they always oppose real estate taxes. This is a problem where real estate taxes pay for schools, or anything else that costs money and benefits local people.
The places in the US with the most absentee and corporate landlords generally have the highest real estate taxes, and the highest spending on municipal services (not always well spent): San Francisco, Manhattan.
I've heard similar arguments, but it's hard for me to get around the fact that I'm paying the same housing cost as I paid twenty years ago and it's really fucking great.
The only reason people actually need to own a house: insurance against price increases
Me too, but we're both in places with relatively healthy economies. The problem with putting all the money into a single asset isn't that you will definitely lose, it's that there's a risk that you could lose the investment, which is correlated with the risk of losing one's job.
Also what makes it fucking great is inflation, but "inflation is good" is an entirely different rant of mine.
Well, not only can I afford avocado toast, but I can pay $5 to get Dave Ramsey to text me that I can afford avocado toast. But I do need to do my own home repairs.
32: Anonymous corporations don't vote, don't run for local office, and if they're really anonymous, they don't get involved in local politics.
Begging to differ from Berlin, where Germany's largest landlord companies got deeply involved in local politics (including a local lawsuit pursued to the highest national court), mainly to tell the city that there was nothing they could do about companies raising rent as they pleased.
By my calculation, the city's plans should have increased my disposable income by 1/3 to 1/2, so I am kinda salty about the whole thing, even as a non-citizen. I need to talk to an MdB, because my One Weird Trick to fuck over the rental companies help tenants is federal legislation to establish a sliding scale of rents that can be charged above a locally measured prevailing rent. The more units an entity (or group of related entities) owns or is responsible for, the less it can deviate above the general local rent. In due course, the marginal profit of adding new units should become negative. In fact, I'd like to see rental companies prove their efficiency claims by being legally required to set rents below the local average.
That plan might even make it onto my first day as Kaiser, which is generally reserved for fixing K-12 education. I've passed 30 kid-years with that system, and I have Views.
32: Anonymous corporations don't vote, don't run for local office, and if they're really anonymous, they don't get involved in local politics.
Begging to differ from Berlin, where Germany's largest landlord companies got deeply involved in local politics (including a local lawsuit pursued to the highest national court), mainly to tell the city that there was nothing they could do about companies raising rent as they pleased.
By my calculation, the city's plans should have increased my disposable income by 1/3 to 1/2, so I am kinda salty about the whole thing, even as a non-citizen. I need to talk to an MdB, because my One Weird Trick to fuck over the rental companies help tenants is federal legislation to establish a sliding scale of rents that can be charged above a locally measured prevailing rent. The more units an entity (or group of related entities) owns or is responsible for, the less it can deviate above the general local rent. In due course, the marginal profit of adding new units should become negative. In fact, I'd like to see rental companies prove their efficiency claims by being legally required to set rents below the local average.
That plan might even make it onto my first day as Kaiser, which is generally reserved for fixing K-12 education. I've passed 30 kid-years with that system, and I have Views.
(Reposted because I forgot to close a tag.)
26: I always voted, but figuring out town meeting is hard!
33: Don't your taxes go up though? Less than rent would, of course.
They can't, for sound political reasons of not want to lose the next election, fairly reassess property here. Also, my house hasn't really appreciated much compared to most other neighborhoods.
41: Even without reassessing property to fill market rate (and they don' do that in my town) taxes still go up, because municipal expenses increase, particularly healthcare and teachers' salaries.
I think a lot of what I half remembered on this topic comes from some combination of City Pages coverage of a notorious MPLS slumlord, S/piros Z/orbalas, and Matthew Desmond's Evicted. Conveniently, Desmond wrote an inspiring update on MPLS tenant organizing around properties secretly owned in large part by said slumlord. I think my favorite part is when the tenant organization goes to protest at the co-slumlord's church festival.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/rental-housing-crisis-minneapolis.html
Speaking of code, I can't embed links using the old "a href" method anymore (i.e., it's been a few years but I was too lazy to ask until now). Suggestions?
It's still been working for me. I don't know, are you putting the URL in quotation marks?
I think it's a phone vs computer thing. It still works on a computer.
I've definitely done it on my phone (Chrome browser, Android) in the past few years; I know because it's such a pain to find the > and < on the keyboard.
The problem might be that I'm doing it on an iPhone.