LogFAQs > #986071913

Zora_Prince posted...

My way of getting around this is to meal prep on my days off. Make a big batch of meals for lunch at work and even extra that I can easily heat up after work. Even a few simple things like eggs and toast or tuna on toast are kept around if Id like to mix it up. I get it. I work 10 hour shifts and dont want to make a big meal after work either, so this has been good for my wallet and waistline.

Indeed. Meal prepping can go a long way to reducing the amount of eating out you do, even if you don't have much time/energy after work. It's also pretty trivial to whip up simple side dishes like rice or noodles if you want those to be fresher than whatever you're reheating, which can open up a lot more variety in what you prepare.

willythemailboy posted...

This is why I question your contact with reality

Well, I did just make up numbers to illustrate the point of "making less money>making no money," so I'm not terribly surprised they aren't an accurate representation of actual figures. Obviously, the exact figures need to be analyzed in greater depth than anyone is going to do for a post on GameFAQs to figure out what limitations will be appropriate. I'm not specifically suggesting that profit margins be reduced by 50%.

willythemailboy posted...

It won't and you damn well know it won't. Certainly it never has in any currently existing rent control scheme.

I mean, yeah, but it's also kind of a given that rent control with any real bite is pretty unlikely in the first place. Too many politicians are also landlords for them to ever get behind legislation that would put any real limits on their ability to make money. There's nothing intrinsic in the concept of rent control that means it can't keep up with the costs of renting out a place, but like my algorithmic minimum wage idea earlier, there isn't much incentive to figure that out because then politicians can't get elected on the basis of how they argue for it (to say nothing of the personal conflict of interest, in this case).

Off-hand, though, one easy provision is to restrict the amount property tax can go up annually on a rent-controlled property, reflective of the limits that rent control places on owners' ability to cover tax increases.

willythemailboy posted...

The institutional investors owning 4% does not in any way imply that those properties are empty. Institutional investors are generally in the market for returns, not speculation. That means keeping those units occupied as much as possible.

I was specifically talking about speculators and not just any large corporation owning a bunch of rentals, so it seems we may be talking at cross purposes here. Data on speculation seems to be hard to find, though. I'm just seeing some things about the impact of vacancy taxes, which isn't tremendously useful for drawing definite conclusions.

Anecdotally, though, I've definitely seen substantial amount of property bought up by investors that sits vacant while they buy up the rest of the block in hopes that they can knock the whole thing down and either develop something large themselves or sell the land to a developer that will do so. Sometimes, they're fully vacant, other times they abuse weak lease protections to be able to kick people out on short notice, but either way they aren't available for use as stable housing and that unavailability contributes to housing accessibility issues. Long-term, that large building will provide a bunch of new housing, but it's usually priced well outside of what existing residents of the neighbourhood can afford, and it'll be several years before that's realized even after all of the properties have been bought/demolished (which can itself take several years). That's an issue, one that's resolved by disincentivizing (or outright prohibiting) that kind of long-term speculation in favour of short-term plans for smaller developments that require fewer land purchases and can be built faster. Demolishing 20 single-family houses to build a 200-unit condo building is obviously a net gain, but so is replacing one pair of those houses at a time with an 8-unit building. Long-term, obviously, 200>80, but that 200 requires there to be 20 fewer homes for 5+years. Each smaller building requires there to be 2 fewer homes at a time for 1-2 years.

That, really, is the issue I have with current development strategies: They're all aiming big and not for the "missing middle" sort of housing that cities generally need more of. More housing is needed *now*, not in the 5-10 years it takes to buy up a block and build an apartment tower. By pushing for smaller, quicker developments, you get that response faster, plus you end up with more local investors instead of large corporations that will be siphoning their revenue out of the community (since you don't need as much capital to buy two houses for a 2-year plan as you do to buy 20 for a 10-year plan).

willythemailboy posted...

How does your utopian plan deal with one totally uninhabitable, economically nonviable apartment in a building full of otherwise rented apartments - knowing that whoever is dumb enough to buy the building is going to be in exactly the same position in six months because your solution doesn't in any way address the issue?

I'm inclined to guess that if one unit is uninhabitable beyond economically viable repair, the rest of the building probably isn't far off and demolition/replacement may be on the horizon as the only route forward (let's be real: if a single unit needs 50k in repairs, it's probably not viable to repair that unit with or without rent control), but putting that aside, the most obvious solution seems to be to sell that unit as a condo. Obviously, the administration of that gets fiddly (off-hand, the best approach would probably be to redefine every unit in the building as a condo, currently owned by the building owner, and with the newly-defined condo fees included in the rent they're currently paying), but the ultimate result is that somebody looking to get onto the property ladder gets a cheap fixer-upper, the owner gets the sale price and condo fees for a unit that would otherwise have just been a drain, and the unit becomes usable and inhabited.

As it stands, I don't think zoning laws typically allow for a building of apartments to have units sold individually as condos, but that's not that hard to change, and treating apartment buildings as a collection of individual properties is kind of a prerequisite for any sort of legislation that requires individual properties to be occupied. Other alternatives would be to instead set a minimum occupancy threshold that does treat buildings as a single entity and not a collection of individual properties (like 90%, which gets rounded up so that buildings under 10 units are expected to be fully occupied), or to exempt a unit from being counted by having it formally condemned.

I do agree with your overall point of "it doesn't make sense to force somebody to sell a whole building because they have trouble renting out one unit," but I also don't expect to solve the housing crisis with two sentences. This is a broad concept, aiming to crush vacant speculation and short-term rentals with a much harder application of the sort of sentiment behind vacancy taxes (which can act as an incentive, but are too easy to pass on/circumvent). Obviously there's a need to iron out the details to cover fringe cases and ensure the concept isn't applied inappropriately.