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1. D Dino (garbados@toot.cat)'s status on Sunday, 22-Oct-2017 17:31:05 UTC D Dino

   they call it a housing crisis and hell it sure is a crisis, but the problem isn’t housing. there’s plenty of housing! more empty homes than all the people in need of them. the problem is we can’t afford those homes, so they stay empty. the problem isn’t housing. it’s the landlords.

   we have a landlord crisis.

   • Hallå Kitteh repeated this.
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Monday, 11-Dec-2017 06:11:29 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     • soybean
     @garbados What if the landlord is a person feeding a family, who bought the apartment at the currently reigning market price, expecting to rent it out at the currently reigning market rent? Should they be put at the mercy of the bank to give someone else housing?
     
     @popefucker
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Monday, 11-Dec-2017 06:25:00 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     • tekk
     @tekk
     
     a: Economics 101
     
     b: Should? Should not? Someone is in the situation of making valid choices within the system in place, trying to improve their life. Is it fair and just to make them into villains because the system makes inefficient allocations? "it's the landlords" implies "they should just rent it out at some price person X can afford", which means they would now be saddled with a property they could only sell at a fraction of the price they bought it at, and no money to pay the interest rate.
     
     c: Don't blame individuals and hang them out to dry, figure out a better system and carefully, iteratively move over to that better system.
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Monday, 11-Dec-2017 07:57:49 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     • tekk
     @tekk
     
     The problem with housing is insufficient housing to get an efficient market, period. This can be solved by ridiculously high prices or ridiculously long queues.
     
     Whether your apartment was built in the 70s and whether there is new construction is irrelevant as such.
     
     The rent is set in a multi-way interplay between several dynamic variables, but if we fix the price of the property, the rent is as high as it needs to have the property be profitable. If the opportunity cost of keeping the property rather than selling it exceeds the rent, the owner will sell the property. The main factor is the bank loan interest rate: Is it worth borrowing the money to buy the apartment and rent it out?
     
     In an efficient housing market like Hong Kong, where you can view an apartment one week and buy or rent it the next, the rent follows the interest rates slavishly. If you have enough income and savings to borrow money for an apartment and pay it off in 30 years, you buy one. If you don't, you rent one. The person renting it out charges a premium for the risk and for their privilege of being able to get a loan.
     
     But the property price isn't fixed -- there is an arrow in the other direction. If nobody wants to pay the rent, then nobody want to own the apartment at that price, and the price of the apartment falls until the apartment price and the interest rate meet the rent someone is willing to pay.
     
     Now, about that 70s apartment. If one apartment is nicer than the other, people are willing to pay higher rent to live there. This increases the market value of the apartment. Whether renovation is worth its investment depends on how much the potential renters would value the renovation.
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Monday, 11-Dec-2017 08:01:44 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     • tekk
     @tekk @garbados The only reasonable way we can assign a value to a given thing is an efficient market.
     
     Price-fixing doesn't work, it just creates queues or abandonment. Someone needs to own that property and have an incentive to put value into it.
     
     As we know in any software development environment, if a module is "everybody's responsibility", it is nobody's responsibility, and it accumulates broken windows until everybody want to tear it down and build something to replace it.
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Monday, 11-Dec-2017 08:04:15 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     • tekk
     • Not impartial
     @partial @tekk So then the bank should only charge the interest that the builder is willing to pay, the original land owner should only sell it for the price the builder is willing to pay, and then they won't sell it and you won't have a city.
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Monday, 11-Dec-2017 08:06:26 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     in reply to

     • tekk
     • Hallå Kitteh
     • Not impartial
     @tekk @partial So in the end, capitalism and rent-seeking is the difference between subsistence farming and skyscrapers.
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Monday, 11-Dec-2017 09:56:10 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     • Bob Mottram
     • tekk
     • Not impartial
     @bob @tekk @garbados The free software that works, works because there is someone who feels ownership for it and coordinates work. People submit patches because it is cheaper to do so than to not do it, and because of cognitive surplus and the status economy.
     
     The town house in the little town see maintenance for the same social reasons, and because it is cheap to maintain. But a high-rise without owners becomes like the Tower of David linked by @partial.
     
     The Kowlooon Walled City was not not-owned. There was no state law enforcement there, but people bought and rented apartments. Still, nobody owned the ground water and other shared infrastructure, *and* the state didn't act as proxy owner and regulate it, so the ground water was toxic and the whole place was a fire hazard.
     
     https://sealion.club/notice/8522156
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Monday, 11-Dec-2017 09:59:51 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     • Bob Mottram
     • tekk
     @bob @tekk @garbados The only major city that has a working property market, both rental and ownership, without major queues or high prices, is Berlin.
     
     The reason it works is not rent control. The queues are short *in spite* of rent control, which basically means the rent control is redundant. The reason it works is an abundant supply of apartments.
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Monday, 11-Dec-2017 10:13:01 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     • Bob Mottram
     • tekk
     @bob @tekk @garbados We are on both sides of this equation. We are an evil landlord of a place we could afford to buy and exploited renters of a place we couldn't afford to buy.
     
     We have the advantage of seeing both systems work in parallel, so we know that if this apartment had been under rent control, we would have had to wait 20 years to get it.
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Monday, 11-Dec-2017 12:52:40 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     • Bob Mottram
     • tekk
     @bob @tekk @garbados Obsessions against private property lead to the Politburo holding it all.
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Monday, 11-Dec-2017 12:57:56 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     • Bob Mottram
     • tekk
     • Not impartial
     @bob @tekk @garbados @partial
     
     For a company that makes money using the software, getting rid of the responsibility for maintaining and rebasing the patches they wrote is worth a lot.
     
     They would have written them anyway, as an investment in the tools they need. That's why companies upstream software, at least when it is not part of their core business.
     
     When the code itself is part of their core business, that's when we want copyleft.
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Dec-2017 16:29:05 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     • tekk
     @tekk
     
     http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/baa