[colechristensen]

It's just rent.

Rent for the homes we live in (including "rent" as mortgage payments to the bank)

Rent passed through as costs to the consumer for the businesses we patronize.

We're stuck at home more affording to be able to do less so the people who own don't have to work.

[imightbebatman]

I have a similar PoV. I think rent seeking without sufficient checks is one of the biggest problems in our economy.

But the underlying problem that people aren't paid enough is still true. Outside a few fields, most people are underpaid. It's even more stark when measured against productivity increases during the same time periods. That wealth went somewhere. It wasn't to most people.

People have a tendency to get upset when they realize these kinds of things.

[colechristensen]

Restaurant operations is one of the places where it's most clear the rent is the biggest problem.

You can say restaurant workers need to be paid more, and ok sure, but where is that money coming from? You pay labor, food suppliers, rent, utilities, taxes, and... where exactly is the money to pay workers more coming from?

With the number of empty storefronts in my city (not to mention restaurant closures) it's clear owners aren't making money hand over fist or there would be many more restaurants.

Restaurant workers in my experience are more likely to go to more restaurants and they can't because... their rent is too high and the price of food at restaurants is too high.

The common denominator with all of it is money being sucked away from people doing work and people hiring work by... rent seekers.

The "labor share of income" is exactly this. How much money is getting sucked out of the rest of the economy to prop up the do-nothing class. Retired people whose retirement investment was selling a house for much more labor than they bought it for and real estate owners doing as little as they can to maximize income they aren't earning.

[Ekaros]

From outside it doesn't look like not being paid enough. It looks like affordability problem. Prices in general are too high.

Rents in general are part of this. Both for housing and commercial property. Somehow getting profit from both rent and appreciation is the goal of the system.

Well that is what population voted for and choose not to overthrow system for so maybe they deserve it.

[mancerayder]

Underlying rent are other things going up - property taxes, input costs like labor and materials, and insurance.

While we must be mindful of greed and abuse, we need to include all underlying costs before just assuming people are cranking up rents. I'm not a landlord but I own property and the costs are gotten vicious lately. Labor is expensive, materials are insane, energy costs, and now insurance are suffocating. And in states with high property taxes, watch out.

[Ekaros]

Energy is one variable. But have things gotten less efficient as things keep going up in prices? Is more labour needed to produce the same? There is stuff like regulation forcing more expensive things. But in general if there was efficiency gains things should keep the same price or drop. Somehow this isn't really happening very well.

But my thesis really is that these things are not underlying the rents. But rents are actually underlying these costs. And well in general the rent seeking economic process build on ever growing valuations of everything.

[mancerayder]

Your theory is just that - theory. Just talk to someone who owns property, or do the research. Insurance costs, Up, energy, Up, when something breaks, it costs more to fix it. It's basic input cost math.

I don't know what 'efficiency gains' means here. Maybe you're thinking of car production or software development. Insurance goes up due to climate change, due to insurance companies taking advantage of a poorly regulated environment, whatever other reasons. Energy goes up due to world events, due to more people, due to extreme weather. Labor costs go up due to inflation.

It feels as thought the 'rent is too damn high' crowd needs an enemy, and the enemy is landlord. And again, not a landlord, but I'm getting bitten by high costs of keeping property. I didn't even talk about the property taxes.

If I WERE a landlord, I'd either pass it along to the tenant as higher rent, or I'd sell the damn thing.

[colechristensen]

Times are getting worse and the landlord class is an unnecessary middleman.

And again, the headline is the labor share of income is at an 80-ish year low. The landlord class grew too big. We want many of them to be forced out of the business either by law or by economic loss forcing sale.

A home is a fundamental human right. Maintaining rental profits in the face of economic hardship is not.

[honeycrispy]

And it's wild to me how we can't seem to figure out how to bring the cost for this down. Building affordable houses should be our no. 1 priority.

[colechristensen]

Just tax corporate owned vacancy. In a slump there will be apartment buildings that are mostly empty because they refuse to lower the rent as lowering rent triggers property re-valuation.

Office buildings sit mostly empty for the same reason.

Tax the owners to punish the bad bets and eternal growth expectations of banks to force them to use the space to the benefit of the community or be forced to sell when they run out of money. Use zoning laws to prevent the destruction of units to avoid taxes.

[taiwan_num1]

We already don't have enough housing and you want to increase the cost of entry to build? This would just reduce competition and new builds even further. Hard to see this kind of policy coming out ahead if any increased utilization of existing buildings is cancelled out by the lack of new ones.

[colechristensen]

No, I want to crash the price of real estate, bankrupt the incumbents, and realign incentives to be focused on resident quality of life.

Percentage return on investment has nothing to do with the basis. Investors will have to serve a lot more people to get the same absolute return. The percentage return won't change all that much for actually building and operating. The year over year growth in valuation and rent is what needs to go (buildings go through several sets of hands over the first decade or so anyway).

[scottyah]

If you build plenty of houses, they become affordable. The latest Affordable Housing is mostly gov-enabled scams, at least in San Diego. They are being made for greater costs than the luxury housing since the funding is guaranteed. Then the same developers are incentivized to keep all rates high by building less.

https://sdhc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/107_Workshop_RAN...

[colechristensen]

I don't want affordable housing mandated, I want the opposite. Force builders to build 1500 sq ft three bedroom apartments. Flood the market at the top end with SPACE and then tax vacancies of these spaces aggressively.

This sets a price cap, makes these high density spaces affordable for people who want to live their whole lives there and not just their single 20's, brings diversity into communities and drops the floor out of the prices on these single occupancy closets going for $2000 per month.

[banannaise]

This isn't just about residential rent. Commercial rent squeezes businesses, forcing wages downward and prices upward.

[mistrial9]

repeated efforts to develop "dwelling units" on a large scale have collapsed in corruption. There are financial players who are very aware that there are vast amounts of monthly monies at play. This is not unique to the USA in fact it is a repeated theme in the capital economies.

The US Federal Housing and Urban Development Department was intimately involved in the Savings and Loan collapse of the late 1980s. It was punted around and repeated in the 1990s, but the stock market gains of the late 1990s diluted the news in public. That phase culminated with a dot-com bubble collapse and ultimately, the 2007 dollar credit crisis. Leveraged purchases of real estate were part of that financial soup. Many of the players from that time were "boomers" and their seniors, so living memory of those circumstances are now fading. There are many, many non-fiction books about these topics.

[deepvibrations]

Indeed. It's a game of monopoly where one person owns all the property, and everyone else is just rolling the dice and, paying rent every turn.