[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

[inigyou]

Don't rent it then. All these laws are designed to make being a landlord hell so that people won't be landlords.

[halfxing]

So, you would like there to be less housing, which makes housing more scarce and raises prices on everyone else?

[itake]

My house fits up to 6 adults, but only 3 are living there now because I don’t want to be a landlord.

Having 3 empty rooms helps no one except corporate landlords that can navigate and scale (and collude…).

[asdff]

Maybe the lesson is just to not be so overleveraged.

[itake]

If grandma pays 90% less taxes than me (prop13), where is the leverage?

If grandma bought the the house in 1990 and property values have risen faster than wages and inflation, where is the leverage?

If grandma is under insured, either due to the insurance company not updating coverages with inflation or no insurance bc she isn’t required to, where is the leverage?