One landlord told me he had to charge so much because of his Asian wife was greedy.
Glad that old white landlord can hide is greed behind his racism for his wife’s ethnic background.
Rich people are shit people.
Imagine a hoard of people saying that in a drone similar to “this is extremely dangerous to our democracy”.
I mean, they’re sort of right.
If there’s 150,000 identical homes for rent in an area, and 200,000 people/couples/families want to live there, then 50,000 are going to be shit out of luck.
The going rate is going to be the maximum that the 150,000th person out of those 200k is prepared to pay.
How do you fight maths?
Build more houses. Less competition means lower prices.
Social housing schemes.
Work from home being a right so you don’t end up with everyone needing to work in a massive city to make ends meet.
Tax landlords. They’re already charging the most the market will bear, and taxes would mean they can’t just snap all those homes up and offer them for rent. If buying and renting homes is a valid business plan, then the tax isn’t high enough.
So you aren’t aware of the Homebuilder Cartel, I’m assuming?
This fundamentally misunderstands the way that the market works.
If you have 1000 people trying to rent a 1br apartment, and there are 500 1br apartments on the market, then yeah, the price is going to go up, because there’s more demand than supply. But supply is constrained by outside factors, like zoning, and neighborhoods that don’t want to ruin their “character” be someone building high-density housing next to their cute, retro bungalow. Sure, you can build your apartment complex out in BFE, but no one wants to rent a place out in BFE because now they can’t get to their job in a reasonable amount of time, and have to drive rather than take public transit (or walk, ride a bike, etc.). Plus, that creates sprawl.
If you really want more housing, blaming landlords–including corporate landlords–isn’t going to fix it. Blame the cities that won’t allow proper high density housing, blame the NIMBYs.
I don’t know where people think that more housing comes from; someone has to put up the money. I’m fine with it being the state, but someone has to front the money in the first place.
It’s really not that simple.
You can, for instance, buy land and build your own home. But if you do that, you’re likely going to end up paying prices that are very comparable–or much, much higher!–to the prices you would pay to get the mass-produced homes from one of a few companies that are building massive sprawl. Those companies have economies of scale working on their side; they have limited floor plans, and have more control over the cost inputs, because they can negotiate bulk pricing. If you break up the ‘cartels’, then you’re suddenly dealing with much, much more custom homebuilding.
(FWIW, I’m currently looking into custom homebuilding, so I’ve got a pretty decent idea on what some of the costs will be for even a fairly modest home where all I really want is a shell that’s stub plumbed and has a breaker box.)
Hey, stop shilling for landlords and join us down here in People Land. It’s not too late. Don’t be an apologist for the fucked-up systems ravaging our planet. Money sucks; we’re better off without it. People can care for each other like we’ve been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. Stretch your imagination a bit, friend. The system you’re defending is very recent, and it’s very fucked. It does not deserve your allegiance.