[naturalmovement]

There's entire Reddit communities of these people where they encourage and validate their shitty behavior.

With some of the stories I've read, you'd have to be positively insane to be a small-time landlord these days, especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone.

Go watch Pacific Heights with Michael Keaton for a fictionalized account but this stuff absolutely happens every day.

I saw one recently where the renter has not paid rent for six years and is unable to be evicted. It made national news.

So where does that leave the industry? You eventually push out the mom and pop landlords by making the regulations so insane it only leaves behind the large corporate property management companies and their army of lawyers. Who will collude and drive rents up. It's a vicious cycle and these cities are not helping one bit.

[nradov]

Tenant "protection" laws are the type of idiocy that economically illiterate progressive politicians always produce. They end up having the opposite effect by making property owners less willing to rent out to anyone. The only effective way to protect tenants is to set public policies that encourage new housing development. When there is a housing surplus, the laws of economics force landlords to treat tenants well. Build more housing!

[toast0]

Tentant protection laws are always a matter of degree.

Requiring a process in order to evict tennants is a good thing. If the process is unsatisfyable or extremely lengthy, I don't think it's a good thing anymore. There should be a way to get destructive and severely disruptive tenants out in a hurry. Ordinary breach of contract things (failure to pay rent, problematic behaviors that violate the lease but aren't an immediate issue, etc) should have something like a 3-7 notice period and then be referred to court and figured out without undue delay.

I'm ok with limiting the reason for the landlord ending a lease, especially where the tenant has stayed there for a long time.

IMHO rent control/rent stabilization can be useful when the cap isn't set too low, and there's reasonable ways to pass through less predictable costs. If the cap is too low, rent gets significantly behind the market rent which causes trouble for landlords but also leads to situations where renters end up stuck where they are; maybe better than being forced out but not if the property deteriorates. If the cap is too high, it doesn't provide meaningful stability or a planning horizon for tenants. If it's in the right place, it gives renters reasonable time to adjust to market changes. Again, IMHO, 3% is probably too low, 10% may be too high, somewhere in the middle is nice to have.

Tenant protections setting deposit limits and process for assessing against the deposit seem reasonable to me. Landlords are going to screw tenants out of deposits if they can, regardless of the market realities, because the relationship is over, the renter is busy with other stuff, and the landlord has the money.

[woodruffw]

There's an economic floor for the price of housing: the amortized cost of the building and its maintenance, plus taxes and overhead imposed by governments, utilities, mortgages, etc.

In other words: even in a plentiful housing market, there will always be someone who struggles to pay rent (including transiently), because a rational housing market can't offer $0 rents. Tenant protection laws exist to protect that person from a landlord who would otherwise be incentivized to throw them onto the street.

[itake]

Yeah… these laws for private landlords to subsidize housing for other families.

If you only have 1 rental property and your tenant doesn’t pay, that’s a 100% loss of revenue while your family personally bears the cost of supporting this other family.

Whereas corporate landlords can absorb these losses by raising rents on 100 doors to cover the families that refuse to pay

[senectus1]

sure because a property owner is going to not rent out a property and just take the month on month hit for having an empty property. They'll either rent it or sell it.

There is a middle ground, just need to find that point.

[nradov]

Apparently you haven't been paying attention to what's happening in the rental market. Landlords in cities with strong tenant protection laws will absolutely leave a unit vacant for months until they find someone with a high income ratio and credit score. This leaves poorer people stuck with no options.

[mmooss]

Do you have evidence? There is evidence that RealPage software illegally coordinated (maybe coordinates) landlords in keeping units off the market in order to reduce demand and increase prices for everyone.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/technology/realpage-doj-s...

[itake]

Me (and others in this thread).

I have a 5 bedroom house that I rent out 2 rooms, but not interested in accepting more people unless they are friends or have a very high income.

At my home’s peak, we had 6 adults living there, now its at 50% capacity.

[verall]

How many high income individuals want to share a house with 5 strangers?

[archagon]

Vacancy tax. No one should have the right to buy multiple, rentable homes and keep them unused in the middle of a housing crisis. It’s sociopathic.

[mx7zysuj4xew]

So in the Netherlands, For many years any property left vacant and unused dor more than a year could be legally squatted.

it forced landlords to keep their properties on the market and insured full usage of the severely limited available housing stock

[archagon]

Do you own your own house? Are you rich?

I’ve known acquaintances who got de facto evicted without warning just because their landlord decided to make a few extra bucks. Were that to happen to me, I would not be able to rent in my current city at all due to the recent influx of wealthy tech workers. (Read: extremely high rents with ridiculous income requirements.) Fortunately, my city has robust tenant protections and rent control, so I don’t have to live my life in fear of ending up on the curb. Some people see that as a bad thing; I guess they think I should save up a few million dollars to buy a condo or abandon my community and move to the boonies.

This would be less of an issue with more housing stock, but that takes decades to build. As a city resident inconveniently living in the present, that does not help me much.

Obviously, I’d never vote for a politician who would make it easier for a landlord to evict me arbitrarily. And I’d eagerly vote for the same protections for any other renter.

[itake]

I think you’re leaving details out of your story. If the landlord wants to make a few bucks, then they keep their good tenants (lowers vacancy rate, keeps repairs low, etc).

Kicking out good tenants cost landlords money.

[archagon]

It’s pretty simple. There’s a tech boom or similar, a bunch of rich workers move in, rents go up. Landlord spikes rent by 30% to take advantage. You can see this happening in r/sanfrancisco today, for non-rent-controlled units.

[itake]

Sf is kinda a mess. Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave (locking up more housing, reducing supply, forcing everyone else to pay more), thus continue to discourage rent controlled tenants from moving since moving means even higher prices.

The property tax situation in SF is a mess.

SF also requires a lot of expensive regulations (earthquake proofing, renovation permits, rising California insurance costs, etc).

Also… the unfortunate reality is there is only so much space and the capital markets determine who gets to live where. If you’re not able to keep up in a city, then there are better places for you.

[craftkiller]

> Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave

They have exactly as much freedom to leave as they would without rent control. They _choose_ to stay because rent control has made it advantageous to stay. The way you phrased it implies you're suggesting this is a bad thing for renters but that is strictly a positive. Without rent control they'd have zero affordable options, with rent control they have 1 affordable option. Woe to the inhabitants of rent controlled apartments with their golden handcuffs.

[majormajor]

> Sf’s rent control also means tenants can’t leave (locking up more housing, reducing supply, forcing everyone else to pay more), thus continue to discourage rent controlled tenants from moving since moving means even higher prices.

This is disingenuous. In the absence of rent control (or prop 13 for property owners) you famously get a situation where tenants ALSO can't afford to leave... but have to anyway.

Why should anyone be forced to leave just because someone richer wants to move in?

You don't have to support someone being unable to evict people who don't pay to believe that there should be limits on how much landlords (or the state, in the case of prop 13) should be able to force current residents to leave just to make a quick buck.

[nradov]

It sounds like you're living in a badly governed city. Have you considered voting for politicians with an abundance agenda? Or moving to a city with more intelligent housing policies such as Dallas?

[majormajor]

NIMBYism and single-family zoning are alive and thriving in Dallas; what Dallas has is this thing called a huge-fucking-flat-prairie all around it that means Frisco, Addison, etc, have been able to add to the low-density car-centric sprawl and help keep prices down some.

(But even then, plenty of Dallas residents have been upset in the past decade by what happens to rental prices when a bunch of higher-income folks move to town!)

One wonders why the people who don't want to have to leave a city like San Fransisco just cause some other people have more money than them and want to raise their rents out of their reach are the ones who should move to Texas. Why shouldn't the would-be newcomers just be the ones go to all those cookie-cutter new developments?

If you jumped back in time 20 years ago and were able to ensure that YCombinator, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, and other high-paper-valuation companies, and they all had imported their from-out-of-town high-income-or-equity-leveraging employees to McKinney, Texas, not much materially would prevent those companies from still doing what they did. But people who already lived in SF or on the peninsula but didn't own much land there would have a materially better standard of living due to their costs not running away from their existing incomes. And the Texas burbs happily would've built a shit-ton of houses and apartments for the startup workers, because of the aforementioned giant quantities of near-empty land. Greenfield businesses for greenfield real-estate. Much better fit than force-transforming cities.

[sp527]

> I guess they think I should save up a few million dollars to buy a condo or abandon my community and move to the boonies.

If you can't afford to live in your city, what distinguishes you from the people in the boonies? Why should they be relegated to the boonies while you successfully game the system?

[archagon]

I can afford to live in my city. I’m living in it right now! The nice thing is that I don’t get pushed out by arbitrary economic fluctuations completely out of my control.

[ekelsen]

If only we could all get free protection from economic forces we don't control.

That kind of insurance is usually pretty expensive. Why should you get it for free?

[majormajor]

> If only we could all get free protection from economic forces we don't control.

> That kind of insurance is usually pretty expensive. Why should you get it for free?

Protecting its constituents from the whims of out-of-town money seems like an excellent purpose for a local government. Especially if some of that money wants to move in so badly that it can be very profitably taxed!

Why shouldn't local government try to serve its constituents like that?

[sp527]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but your comment suggested you'd be unable to afford market rent.

[archagon]

I can afford to live in my city because my landlord isn’t able to tack an extra $2000 to my rent due to the sudden influx of AI bros.

[pixelatedindex]

> The only effective way to protect tenants is to set public policies that encourage new housing development

Which the local landowning population promptly block with NIMBY tactics. Have you wondered if that has any impact? Not everything is some progressive boogeyman.

[rationalist]

I have friends and coworkers that want to have rental properties, and I advise them it's not worth it.

I don't want to be in a position where I have to pay more to fix damages than I collectected in rent if I accidentally rent to deadbeats. Or in a position where I have to provide services to someone not paying me.

One of those friends has parents that rented out their old house to deadbeats at the top of the housing market instead of selling it. Those deadbeats have been nothing but trouble and yet my friend still wants to be a landlord.

Somehow the idea of owning rental properties became a pervasive notion in the U.S.

[cherry_tree]

Landlords typically have insurance coverage for damage by tenants, including lost rent.

[bombcar]

This form of insurance is exceeding expensive and exceedingly rare. Large buildings self-insure (by having a ton of doors) and small landlords don't want to pay it.

[itake]

It’s hard for new landlords. People that bought houses to rent compete against property owners of paid off homes or people with 3% mortgages.

Tacking on optional insurance products on a property that’s already in the red further encourages landlords to push up rents prices.

[_DeadFred_]

Wage theft is the number one form of theft in the USA at around $15 billion. Hopefully you advised your friends to avoid working for wages as that is the number one way to be ripped off by deadbeats in the USA.

Somehow the idea of working for wages became a pervasive notion in the U.S.

https://www.denver7.com/news/national-politics/the-race/wage...

[pixelatedindex]

Doesn’t help that the landlords want to squeeze the renter for what they are worth. It’s weird to me that shitty landlords are normalized but shitty tenants get a (rightfully) bad rap.

These laws become the way they are because landlords brought it upon themselves for the most part - they’re keeping assets that have massively increased in price and want to extract more and more out of the tenant.

If you have a home that’s paid off your expenses are basically just property taxes, maybe they should do what they can to keep good tenants instead of chasing profits.

[jjav]

> These laws become the way they are because landlords brought it upon themselves for the most part

These laws seem quite unrelated to the problems.

There needs to be laws to protect the renter against bad landlords and there needs to be laws to protect the landlord against bad tenants.

Nowhere there it implies there should be insane laws that make no sense. Such as creating a system where someone can skip paying rent for many years and continue to live there.

Landlords need laws that hold their feet to the fire to maintain the properties to a livable standard (the state/county should define) and fulfill any other obligations of the lease. At the same time there need to be laws that force the renters to pay on time and not destroy the property. It's not a case of one or the other.

[bombcar]

Rental prices stay surprisingly steady even when house prices go insane - compare similar apartments/houses in major expensive cities and cheaper ones.

[pixelatedindex]

Sure but the rent will follow the increased purchase price. They also don’t go down, or at least they’re extremely sticky.

[bombcar]

They're limited by what people will pay - and "techbro" cities have people with insane salaries willing to fork over big bucks. But there are similarly expensive areas that don't support the income necessary, and there often you find huge rental inversions.

[ethbr1]

> especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone

The problem is that there will always be more voting renters than voting landlords. So in a purely democratic system, policies which favor renters at the expense of landlords will always be supported.

And that said, some renter protections are definitely needed, because there is a subset of landlords that engage in flat out illegal behavior.

Deposit withholding, making illegal demands, illegal renter selection practices, etc.

Imho, that tends to be concentrated in the "1-5 unit" landlord range, because those landlords are usually (a) not lawyers & (b) treat their properties like pets instead of a business.

[pixelatedindex]

> The problem is that there will always be more voting renters than voting landlords. So in a purely democratic system, policies which favor renters at the expense of landlords will always be supported.

I don’t know about that… the voting landlords (NIMBYs) sure make it a point to reduce development “to preserve their neighborhood character”.

[BrenBarn]

The way to handle this, which no one seems to be willing to face, is to make laws that are not wealth-neutral. If you are a mom-and-pop landlord (with a relatively low net worth), your should have more leeway in dealing with tenants. If you are a large landlord, you should have very little. Couple this with ruinous penalties (e.g., full forfeiture) for attempting to hide the true beneficial ownership of the property.

[bombcar]

In many locations, this exists in practice - especially if you rent parts of a building that you reside in (one half of a duplex or 1/4th of a quadplex, etc).

In some cases, anti-discrimination laws don't even apply.

[jen20]

If you think the Reddit communities of tenants are bad, you should try reading the Reddit communities of landlords (at least the UK ones).

[mc3301]

Yeah.... So many bad tenants. So many bad landlords... So many weird laws protecting and hurting both.

What if we shifted to a different system?

[weakfish]

The question that many do not want to think about. We (as a society (referring to all Western Liberalism, not just the US)) are so thoroughly convinced that Liberal Democracy is the End of History, and it's the 'flawed but best,' as many say, but refuse to imagine something better.

It's puzzling that a system that is supposed to reward creativity and genius like capitalism limits it's inhabitants in their imagination when it comes to how one might structure society.

I don't claim to have the answer, and _no,_ my issues with Liberal Democracy/Capitalism don't mean I'm a communist / socialist / thing-people-don't-like.

[_DeadFred_]

It's not Liberal Democracy that is the problem but a society where all of the slack has been optimized out, every extraction maximized, every infraction forever a scarlet letter on an individual, zero stability but constant crisis inflicted on individuals. There is no room in modern day America for people in the margins. Society needs to make a place for them and a path out of constant crisis, or the homeless problem will continue to grow.

Another hidden issue in the USA is many households are dependent on contributing income from a retired/disabled/working past retirement age elderly parent/family member. Those people are going to start passing in mass, and a lot of households will become even less resilient.

[nradov]

What would you like us to imagine? So far everything that we've tried at scale other than liberal democracy and capitalism has inevitably led to war, famine, and genocide. Western liberalism appears to be the only system that empirically works. Some would claim that "socialism with Chinese characteristics" works better, but if you look below the surface prosperity in first-tier cities the actual economic situation is rather grim and the human rights situation is horrific.

[margalabargala]

Arguably, benevolent dictatorships tend to be the best. Singapore is a good example.

The trouble is making a system that can guarantee the "benevolent" part in the longer term.

[mmooss]

Make an argument, beyond one city (if it's true there - Singapore might be better off, on some of the best real estate in the world, with free elections)? All the most free, wealthy, safe, creative, innovative societies in the world are democratic.

And on what basis does some dictator get to tell others what to do? OK, I am the dictator and I'm telling you to give me 10% of your income and never post this nonsense in HN again. :)

[8note]

This is a bit of an intentional result, no?

the goal is for peoppe to own the places they live in

[nradov]

Why should that be a goal?

[fyredge]

To discourage rent seeking behaviour?

[CursedSilicon]

Because every human being needs shelter?

[nradov]

Having shelter is not the same as owning real estate.