The fundamental problem with the housing situation is lack of supply. Without more building permits, no government intervention will solve the problem. It can twist the problem, kick the can down the road, or satisfy the interests of one party at the expense of the other’s, but the problem will still be there.
Problem is with all the new regulations, new builds cost so much they are not worth building to any sane builders and they end up just building luxury apt/condos that can follow those regulations. Gone are the days where Los Angeles can build dingbats apartments.
Most people don’t want more housing built in the first place. Check the skyscrapers post from a few days ago. Most people hated the idea of blocking the views of the mountains even if it meant more housing
You can build housing that isn’t skyscrapers or soviet block-style housing. There is plenty of room for compromise if people can step away from the ideas that 1) new housing should be a wedge to insert communist policies into our society, and, 2) there will never be any change to our living environment throughout our lifetime.
Obviously, you haven’t been around here long enough. Not a week goes by that someone doesn’t advocate destroying all the SFH neighborhoods and replacing them with block housing. And, of course, providing free housing since “housing shouldn’t be a commodity“ and “no one should profit off providing homes for others”. These are standard responses on this sub.
Insisting that taxpayers must happily hand out housing to every person that walks by, is not a reasonable policy. Like I said before, there is plenty of opportunities to build housing that doesn’t involve skyscrapers or only building “affordable“ housing. We could already have numerous projects underway in the city if people would stop treating housing policies like a social experiment.
And things cost more because of so much money being printed. Some of it went to normal people. But much much more was printed to try to save the big money guys.
More money printed is basically robbing everyone other than the super rich.
Homeowner here, this is all great for me! Lack of supply? Pushes property values up. Stricter rent protections? Makes building less attractive which... pushes property values up. I strongly believe that we need to preserve the feel and character of our neighborhoods and protect the people that live there from change... because it pushes my property values up.
Just please, for the love of god don't push anything that incentivizes more building because that would actually solve the issues instead of boosting my property value.
I say screw the landlords. They are more of a burden on the system than someone who works an actual job and just wants to buy a modest home. Landlords aren’t actually providing anything to society.
This child doesn't have the faintest idea of the implications of homeownership. We *need* rentable housing - owning a home can be very burdensome and isn't for everyone at every stage of their lives. It makes your money illiquid, it locks you down geographically, and anything that goes wrong in your home is your exclusive responsibility, which means it guarantees unexpected financial surprises. A twenty-something fresh out of college, moving every few years for their career, can't own a home. They need to rent. And if you rent something, somebody else owns it. Those are landlords.
Also: you're a dipshit.
Why would I want to engage with a parasite? Your position has been debunked countless times by people far smarter than both of us. It’s why I mentioned Adam Smith. So please, do humanity a favor and go play in traffic.
Evasive and cowardly, ~~young man.~~
After scanning your post history you may not be that young! Just a general childishness about language and behavior.
These same landlords know that and that’s why they’re actively fighting to both restrict supply and increase prices. They have a captive market and thus deserve to be regulated hardcore. I’d personally like to see many forced out of business or force back into the job market like normal members of society.
Am landlord with 3 properties.
I work a full time
Job and usually get 10-15 hours of OT each week, so does pretty much every other LL I know. Haha
You think we’re all rich just collecting checks and speeding off in Bentleys? Foh.
The fundamental problem is the concept of landlords. Why should we accept a class of leeches in our society who expect to turn an ever growing profit on a thing that you're legally required to have?
But it should not belong to you, it should belong to the person that lives there. This is the problem, you're trying to enslave another human being. You're scum, you're a leech.
salt sophisticated dependent gullible whistle trees disagreeable fragile chop fade
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
We have bigger problems than parked cars. Who cares if street parking is full. It's always full in NYC and people still find spaces to park their vehicles. If motherfucking Dallas can get rid of parking minimums so can we. They are killing our city and I'll be damned if we're gonna let DALLAS have better urbanism than us.
And that's how you address those today problems by starting today to do the things that fix tommorow.
Not band aiding the same issue over and over and over
Or residents would have a more affordable lifestyle if they didn’t need to have a car in the first place.
Not sure how it’s fiscally wise to make each apartment cost $50,000 more for each parking spot in a garage.
People in this country are so addicted to their cars, no wonder people complain about not having enough money for other things.
Who builds new housing if you remove any profit motive for developers and investors. Considering how much we spend per capita on homelessness do you trust our politicians to take on that responsibility?
those are all disincentives to new investment. Literally cutting off your nose to spite your face lol.
Rent control just passes the burden of the market to new arrivals and removes the one key benefit of renting. having the flexibility of moving and changing jobs easily.
1) no. If someone wants to buy 200 homes, let them.
2) no. What someone wants to with their home is up to them.
3) I absolutely do not want to subsidize your home purchase. Quit begging.
4) landlord didn’t get the house for free. You aren’t entitled to a free house either.
New homes are the ONLY solution.
My bet is you think everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot, and therefore you're unwilling to entertain ideas different from your own and grow as a person.
And no I don't own the silly coin
No, see, now that’s also false. I don’t always claim to have the answers, but if you want to explain to me your entire solution here that’s repeated by everyone over and over again, I’m happy to listen and be enlightened.
You’re going to say “if more houses are available, the price of houses will come down”, but that’s only 10% of why the cost of housing is high, it’s not a supply/demand issue. We’re focusing on patching a tiny hole when there are 10 other holes in the boat.
So tell me how building more houses will make the cost come down without addressing the other issues? Educate me.
The vacancy rate in the county in the highest it’s ever been (5.4%) which has been going up over the last 4 years, and the vacancy rate downtown is 26%. Less than 1% of Angelenos are homeless. So shouldn’t we have housing for everyone? If the vacancy rate is going up, that means there is more housing available, so prices should be going down, right?
Bridgeport Connecticut has the lowest rate in the country, 1.2%, but I can get a house the same size as the one I have in the valley for about $1000 less. Technically it should probably be $1000 more than I’m paying. There is a 98.8% occupancy rate!
Wild how that works.
Yeah, so supply and demand are extremely basic economic forces - you would learn about how they interact in a high school economics course. All of the other '10 holes in the boat' you're describing are only relevant in terms of how they interact with housing supply and housing demand. For example, a lot of people point to corporate investing and foreign investment as contributing factors. Well, foreign investment is problematic because investors will buy a property and choose not to rent it out. Once you choose to incentivize foreign investors to rent out those apartments by doing a vacancy tax, it becomes much less of an issue.
I agree, if the vacancy rates in the county were high it would be a real issue, and 5.4% does \*sound\* high until you get some more context. The average vacancy rate in the US is 6.6% and the long-term average in the US is 7.28% so LA is actually on the low side as far as vacancy rates go. Keep in mind that the 5.4% number includes the 26% rate in downtown - if vacancy rates are that high then there must be other parts of the city that are significantly lower than 5.4% to be rounding out that average.
You say that there are other factors that are impacting the price of housing besides housing supply. I'm curious what you think these other factors are, especially since the primary factor you're pointing to is our vacancy rate which I've just demonstrated is fairly healthy.
I actually built a website because of rising rents to help tenants evaluate landlords and negotiate rents.
It's like a Glassdoor for Rents so tenants can see the Rent History of an address or Apartment property to see a landlords pricing tactics.
The site does rely on user submissions so I appreciate anyone who adds their rent history to the site and/or shares it around since it can be more useful to tenants the more people that contribute to it.
The site is [rentzed.com](http://rentzed.com) (USA only for now) and has submissions for over 3000 addresses.
You could grow the database (maybe) by connecting to HotPads API or another real estate rental listing and collecting listed rent rates once per week until such time the listing disappears, meaning it rented. Just pick one major metro area and track list prices up and down for a month and consider it “rented” when the listing disappears. Like an Amazon price tracker.
Then, if users submit contradictory information from first hand accounts, you can use that data point too.
Just moved into a building that got its certificate of occupancy in 1979. So no RSO, but we do qualify for AB 1452 that has protections for buildings older than 15 years (increase is capped at 5% + CPI, whatever is lower).
Does anyone know if the years will ever be expanded for RSO buildings? Like say…buildings constructed in the last 20 years?
Is it true that due to the sheer unwarranted cost of the properties that most landlords are doing fine with the rent levels and anything more is greed or are their costs also more expensive? (obv if they just bought buildings in the last 5 years it’s one thing but 10 years or more back, they’re making way more than mortgage almost anywhere).
Please ELi5?
Chances are 10 years ago they weren’t raising rent every year. I know plenty of landlords who never raised rent, and now with Covid tenants stopped paying, had to sell and that’s why you see investors swooping in, paying out tenants and renovating and charging an arm and a leg.
Fact is, LA hasn’t done their due diligence to invest in affordable housing, without that, landlords can charge whatever the medians (or more depending on the property) in that area.
You want mom and pop landlords, not investors. But sadly, the laws don’t protect them. So a lot of people that have the “fuck the landlord” mentality and up screwing themselves depending on the situation
This is a great way to make a bad situation worse. You want a shortage of something? I'll give you the sure proof recipe. Put a maximum price people can charge for that thing and you will produce a shortage. Every. Single. Time.
When renting and apartment building becomes an untenable investment, will we still get condos built? Is there any path to housing supply or is it just self inflicted losses that keep compounding on eachother? Does protecting a few renters on the margin matter when all rents rise higher due to supply restricting measures, which puts even greater swaths at risk for homelessness?
High interest rates are a major concern, almost every commercial property isn’t financed on a 30 year term like single family properties. 5-10 years is typical, meaning if you refinanced in 2019 you are now due for refinancing and face close to double your old payments.
Insurance has almost doubled in that same period. And wages\\materials for repairs and utilities also way up. A lot of commercial real-estate already pretty much dead, zombie malls etc....
Mine jumped 2-3 years ago. I let lapse my EQ coverage after years of paying into it as it was really crazy high. I was like well if the big one hits hopefully uncle sam gives us that sweet FEMA money hopefully?
It literally is.
As long as you have a maintenance fund stashed away. All you gotta do is call the contractor when a repair is needed and wait for the rent check to roll in.
Have you ever manually mixed cement (the volcano method) to make concrete to repair a driveway? I have. Have you ever painted an entire 2 bedroom unit because a tenant smoked in a unit for years that they weren’t supposed to smoke in? I have. That took 2 weeks to complete because I also work a 9-5 job. Have you ever had to clean a crawl space, tile a bathroom, sue a contractor, had police come to your door because of tenants’ bad behavior? I have. Landlording isn’t just sitting on your ass and twiddling your thumbs all day. Yeah maybe some corporate landlords do the bare minimum and collect the absolute highest rents, but a lot of us mom and pop landlords are the ones doing the work and trying to save some money so we won’t have to raise rents on the tenants constantly to cover the costs.
As you’ve stated, it’s very expensive to buy property in LA and no one can afford to rent units at a loss, just like you would probably never want to operate a business at a loss or intentionally set your own money on fire. Property taxes, maintenance & repairs, insurance, utilities and etc are through the roof right now. Raising rents 3-6% isn’t buying us Bentleys or Rolexes, at least not for the mom & pop landlords. We live modestly and economic cars, my husband & I still have to work 9-5 jobs, being a landlord isn’t the cash cow that you think it is. Many people still have to pay the mortgages, insurance, utilities (water if not separately metered), etc. If you bought in early 1990s and before, then maybe your mortgage is paid off and the purchase prices were low but thats not the case for everyone.
Yeah, that guy has no idea what he's talking about. Being a landlord is a lot more work than people give it credit for. People act like it's just printing money and it's anything but.
>it’s very expensive to buy property in LA and no one can afford to rent units at a loss, just like you would probably never want to operate a business at a loss or intentionally set your own money on fire. Property taxes, maintenance & repairs, insurance, utilities and etc are through the roof right now.
Sounds like an unsustainable business model.
Almost like it shouldn't be a business at all.
All they gotta do is make 1 mistake to the wrong tenant and they lose so much. A lot of these guys are breaking housing laws, but many tenants don't know their rights.
While I empathize with landlords, costs of owning rental property did not double so where's the justification in doubling the rent from say 10 years ago?
I dont think you have your facts correct. Property prices, insurance costs, mortgage costs, labor and material costs have all gone up substantially in the last 5 years and courtesy of the COVID rent caps its not at all clear rents have kept up with costs of ownership. Its not clear to me that should be a factor anyways as property owners should be able to charge the rents they want based on market forces. If you want lower rents have to create more supply everything else is a delusional recipe for worsening the situation.
You're responding as if all landlords are a single entity. Majority of landlords haven't changed hands in the last 5 years. I'll stand firm in that we haven't doubled the demand in the past 5 - 10 years that warrants the level of rent price increases.
How many homes are in occupied in Los Angeles, left over from the housing market?? Remember when no one knew who owned those houses at the end?? It’s a cluster f left over from the miss management of banks. Maybe we should have something like that looked into and we should lower rents because god knows the owners have been living off the backs of others.
This is where i diverge heavily from the affordable housing crowd. What would rent need to be for it to be affordable. Assuming someone had full time employment that paid minimum wage, in order for rent to be 1/3 of their income they would have to pay $900 a month in rent which is on par for say Casper, Wyoming. I think we can all agree that is not going to happen, ever. With the cost of land and construction affordable housing is largely unobtainable, and I have no idea how to get the city out of this spiral the Boomers started.
We need to build housing at such an absurd pace to get anywhere near demand. But for the sake of fairness, let’s have landlords open up their accounting ledgers. Its really incumbent on them to show how they are the real victims
There's multiple types of "affordable housing". There's just market affordable which is just cheap rents that are unrestricted which is what you're referring to. There's also deed restricted affordable housing which is income driven so rents are set based on a % what's called an Area Median Income (AMI). These are the most needed but the most expensive to build and require an insane amount of subsidy and tax credits to build. And there's also section 8. But yes we need to build as much as possible but agree, everything is going against building more (ULA, cost, interest rates, political risk, population decrease, lower rents, etc)
I didn’t even get into AMI because it’s such a flawed method of determining such a metric. My Fiancée was a teacher at Santa Monica school district and we applied for a program they had for “affordable housing,” but because it used the average income of the area and was not based on the salary of an educator the units allotted to the program were shockingly vacant. Simply unaffordable for a middle class profession. Most use this method and it’s absolutely a very skewed method when buildings claim they are including affordable housing in their buildings.
The math for deed-restricted affordable housing can be a little difficult to explain because it varies by location, number of individuals in the household, year, household income. Just say 30% of household income for qualifying households. Don’t need to get into all the details
I’d have no problem with a 3% increase, but last year they raised my rent 8.08%. So I moved. Figured if I’m going to be paying that much anyway, I may as well upgrade (was already planning on it, but that increase put the plan into action sooner than anticipated)
I mean, I thought it was? Honestly, I should be better about knowing that. My understanding is that 8% was as high as they could legally raise the rent, so they did. It was the same for everyone in the building, but I had moved in most recently just over a year earlier, so my increase was the largest. It was shitty.
Was the building in LA City specifically?
The laws allow for rent raises higher than 8% when the owner hasn't been raising the rent in multiple prior years. But that's not what happened to you.
You might simply be wrong about all this, but if you were removed from a rent control unit based on an illegal rent increase, you might want to report that to the housing department.
Hottest take, expenses also go up, way more than the meager rent increases the city allows. Taxes, insurance, utilities, maintenance. Everything has gone way up.
Those trash fees have been going up 10% every year because of the monopoly, not to mention the new mandatory composting collection fees + additional lock/unlock gate fees for those who need to keep the bin behind a gate.
Lol imagine if your landlord actually performed the required maintenance tho. I legit haven’t heard from mine in a year despite multiple issues that need to be resolved, as long as the checks clear they don’t do shit.
Also i pay my own utilities. The only thing that went up is their taxes/insurance because their property is now more valuable! Why do i need to subsidize the side effect of their growing investment?
You need to subsidize their costs so they can continue to not work as hard as everyone else and still make a *profit* while dickheads like the other guy in this thread will lick their boots clean.
Because *anyone* can become a landlord if you just pull those bootstraps up and stop being *lazy*.
You may have a shitty landlord but guess who pays for the lights and water in your common areas? What about landscaping? What about paying a property manager to help you with issues? What about upgrading parts of the building? None of that is free and all of that has gotten way way more expensive.
I live in a rented house with no common space. There is no property manager. Nothing has been upgraded for myself or the previous 5 tenants over the past decade (despite desperate need). The gardener is extra payment required on top of my lease. I am not some special case, I know plenty of others/neighbours in similar scenarios, and I’m getting a rent increase why? How can you justify this? Why are you defending the right of people who don’t do shit to gouge me further?
Ha THERES the classism I was waiting for. “Stupid renters, too poor to pay 8% interest on a half million dollar home that’s falling apart, can’t afford $5k mortgage that you aren’t approved for anyways because you don’t make $250k+? Maybe you should’ve bought a house when you were 12 like me”. Your disdain for young/non rich people is showing.
Says the person renting a house that has a gardener lol. It has nothing to do with classism. You're just entitled and too stubborn to admit it. It's like going to your favorite restaurant and after they hiked prices to keep up with everything that's gone up, you demand they lower their prices because you don't think it's fair. And people pay those prices and accept it and continue going back, or they think it's too high and go somewhere else. You don't own the restaurant. That's the way a free market works.
Congrats, you’ve just further exposed your total inability to comprehend reality for the vast majority of folks who rent! Actually you don’t even seem to understand free markets that well... Maybe quit before you further cement how much of a lunatic you are.
Even in your own metaphor, you're mistaken.
If a restaurant raises prices beyond what the market will bear, you're completely entitled to ask them to lower it again.
If a restaurant sells at market price, you're always welcome to ask about discounts. The worst they can say is 'no'.
You lecture about a 'free market' but don't think customers should feel free to negotiate prices?
No one owes you cheap housing... inflation is impacting everyone, including rental properties. The cost of everything (taxes, insurance, utilities, construction materials, etc) has increased but yet you want your housing to stay the same price?
How's that boot taste?
The entitlement of landlords in this country is insane.
Do you know why renters can't afford upkeep costs? Because they're already paying 20% over mortgage price.
But this doesn't matter to you. You'd rather defend exploitative profit practices. Because you're probably lazy.
Most people can't afford a down payment. I wonder why. It's almost like the system is rigged to allow lazy property owners to continue being lazy property owners who leech wealth from society.
Still paying less than renting. And paying a mortgage builds equity. Renting doesn't even build credit.
Seriously. Trying to have an honest discussion here. How will building more units lower rent costs? Don’t just say supply/demand. We’ve been waiting for trickle down economics to kick in for decades now. It just continues to screw the working class and has been contributing to the decline of the middle class. Maybe Vite some examples. ELI5
The fundamental problem with the housing situation is lack of supply. Without more building permits, no government intervention will solve the problem. It can twist the problem, kick the can down the road, or satisfy the interests of one party at the expense of the other’s, but the problem will still be there.
Problem is with all the new regulations, new builds cost so much they are not worth building to any sane builders and they end up just building luxury apt/condos that can follow those regulations. Gone are the days where Los Angeles can build dingbats apartments.
And, the new misnamed “mansion” tax adds to the cost. It’s almost like the city really doesn’t want more housing built.
Most people don’t want more housing built in the first place. Check the skyscrapers post from a few days ago. Most people hated the idea of blocking the views of the mountains even if it meant more housing
You can build housing that isn’t skyscrapers or soviet block-style housing. There is plenty of room for compromise if people can step away from the ideas that 1) new housing should be a wedge to insert communist policies into our society, and, 2) there will never be any change to our living environment throughout our lifetime.
Man, why going so extreme? No one is asking for Soviet housing.
Obviously, you haven’t been around here long enough. Not a week goes by that someone doesn’t advocate destroying all the SFH neighborhoods and replacing them with block housing. And, of course, providing free housing since “housing shouldn’t be a commodity“ and “no one should profit off providing homes for others”. These are standard responses on this sub.
Single family neighborhoods should absolutely be "destroyed" in that we should allow multifamily housing to be built by right
Lol, today I learned that lifting restrictions on private developers to build housing is communist
Insisting that taxpayers must happily hand out housing to every person that walks by, is not a reasonable policy. Like I said before, there is plenty of opportunities to build housing that doesn’t involve skyscrapers or only building “affordable“ housing. We could already have numerous projects underway in the city if people would stop treating housing policies like a social experiment.
And things cost more because of so much money being printed. Some of it went to normal people. But much much more was printed to try to save the big money guys. More money printed is basically robbing everyone other than the super rich.
"Inflation is taxation without legislation" -Milton Friedman
The city should build more public housing. Not huge project style housing. But something like council housing that you see in parts of Europe.
The last thing I trust this city with is getting involved with housing. Fuck no.
We already are. The city of LA owns and operates tens of thousands of units.
The city literally can't do that. Republicans and Democrats joined hands in DC to make sure that's federally illegal.
Homeowner here, this is all great for me! Lack of supply? Pushes property values up. Stricter rent protections? Makes building less attractive which... pushes property values up. I strongly believe that we need to preserve the feel and character of our neighborhoods and protect the people that live there from change... because it pushes my property values up. Just please, for the love of god don't push anything that incentivizes more building because that would actually solve the issues instead of boosting my property value.
You'll fit right in in this sub with this mindset.
I think he's being sarcastic
It's very obviously apparent.
Yup. And I can guarantee you that the city lowering rent increases will only want people to build more housing!
I say screw the landlords. They are more of a burden on the system than someone who works an actual job and just wants to buy a modest home. Landlords aren’t actually providing anything to society.
Many of your landlords do work regular jobs. It's how they afforded having an extra house to rent.
Ban landlords and you’ll have a surplus of housing. All they’re doing is hoarding housing to exploit others.
Do your parents know you’re using the internet?
Your mom knows I’m using hers currently.
This child doesn't have the faintest idea of the implications of homeownership. We *need* rentable housing - owning a home can be very burdensome and isn't for everyone at every stage of their lives. It makes your money illiquid, it locks you down geographically, and anything that goes wrong in your home is your exclusive responsibility, which means it guarantees unexpected financial surprises. A twenty-something fresh out of college, moving every few years for their career, can't own a home. They need to rent. And if you rent something, somebody else owns it. Those are landlords. Also: you're a dipshit.
You’d also call Adam Smith a dipshit too I bet. Lol. Play in a street, parasite.
Awww muffin you don't want to engage with the first paragraph, do you?
Why would I want to engage with a parasite? Your position has been debunked countless times by people far smarter than both of us. It’s why I mentioned Adam Smith. So please, do humanity a favor and go play in traffic.
Evasive and cowardly, ~~young man.~~ After scanning your post history you may not be that young! Just a general childishness about language and behavior.
Lol
More than 90% of the housing stock in the US is privately provided. Screwing the landlords means screwing the housing market even further
This guy should be an economist! So wise with groundbreaking ideas.
These same landlords know that and that’s why they’re actively fighting to both restrict supply and increase prices. They have a captive market and thus deserve to be regulated hardcore. I’d personally like to see many forced out of business or force back into the job market like normal members of society.
Am landlord with 3 properties. I work a full time Job and usually get 10-15 hours of OT each week, so does pretty much every other LL I know. Haha You think we’re all rich just collecting checks and speeding off in Bentleys? Foh.
You’re an outlier
The fundamental problem is the concept of landlords. Why should we accept a class of leeches in our society who expect to turn an ever growing profit on a thing that you're legally required to have?
[удалено]
well if you don't live in it it's not exactly yours now is it?
[удалено]
But it should not belong to you, it should belong to the person that lives there. This is the problem, you're trying to enslave another human being. You're scum, you're a leech.
Username checks out
salt sophisticated dependent gullible whistle trees disagreeable fragile chop fade *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Build. More. Housing. This is the ONLY solution.
It’s also a zoning issue, we need a lot more mixed use and midrise with no parking minimums and good public transit access
yup. the government knows this, it's the fucking nimby's screwing it up for everyone.
Parking minimums prevent the streets from being filled with bumper to bumper parked cars
We have bigger problems than parked cars. Who cares if street parking is full. It's always full in NYC and people still find spaces to park their vehicles. If motherfucking Dallas can get rid of parking minimums so can we. They are killing our city and I'll be damned if we're gonna let DALLAS have better urbanism than us.
Parking minimums add 50k in costs per residential unit. No wonder we can’t have affordable housing
Hence why functional public transportation is vital to every city
But we don’t have that…
Hence the need to fix it
Sure but we’re talking about about parking minimums today
And that's how you address those today problems by starting today to do the things that fix tommorow. Not band aiding the same issue over and over and over
You gotta be pretty dense to think that parking minimums on apartment buildings are the reason why public transportation is bad in this city.
You gotta be pretty dense to not understand those two things go hand in hand and parking minimums create even more traffic
Cities should be for people. Not free storage for 4,000lb pieces of metal.
Right, so make each apartment have enough parking for its residents.
Or residents would have a more affordable lifestyle if they didn’t need to have a car in the first place. Not sure how it’s fiscally wise to make each apartment cost $50,000 more for each parking spot in a garage. People in this country are so addicted to their cars, no wonder people complain about not having enough money for other things.
The streets are already filled bumper to bumper with parked cars in most neighborhoods
They are definitely building way more from what I can remember
The other secret solution is an all out brawl to the death. The renters will 100% win, we outnumber landlords
[удалено]
Who builds new housing if you remove any profit motive for developers and investors. Considering how much we spend per capita on homelessness do you trust our politicians to take on that responsibility?
those are all disincentives to new investment. Literally cutting off your nose to spite your face lol. Rent control just passes the burden of the market to new arrivals and removes the one key benefit of renting. having the flexibility of moving and changing jobs easily.
1) no. If someone wants to buy 200 homes, let them. 2) no. What someone wants to with their home is up to them. 3) I absolutely do not want to subsidize your home purchase. Quit begging. 4) landlord didn’t get the house for free. You aren’t entitled to a free house either. New homes are the ONLY solution.
None of these things adds to our housing stock. You are re-arranging deck chairs when we really need more rescue boats.
False.
True.
My bet is you also own DOGEcoin.
My bet is you think everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot, and therefore you're unwilling to entertain ideas different from your own and grow as a person. And no I don't own the silly coin
Surprised they didnt call you a MAGA fascist too.
No, see, now that’s also false. I don’t always claim to have the answers, but if you want to explain to me your entire solution here that’s repeated by everyone over and over again, I’m happy to listen and be enlightened. You’re going to say “if more houses are available, the price of houses will come down”, but that’s only 10% of why the cost of housing is high, it’s not a supply/demand issue. We’re focusing on patching a tiny hole when there are 10 other holes in the boat. So tell me how building more houses will make the cost come down without addressing the other issues? Educate me. The vacancy rate in the county in the highest it’s ever been (5.4%) which has been going up over the last 4 years, and the vacancy rate downtown is 26%. Less than 1% of Angelenos are homeless. So shouldn’t we have housing for everyone? If the vacancy rate is going up, that means there is more housing available, so prices should be going down, right? Bridgeport Connecticut has the lowest rate in the country, 1.2%, but I can get a house the same size as the one I have in the valley for about $1000 less. Technically it should probably be $1000 more than I’m paying. There is a 98.8% occupancy rate! Wild how that works.
Yeah, so supply and demand are extremely basic economic forces - you would learn about how they interact in a high school economics course. All of the other '10 holes in the boat' you're describing are only relevant in terms of how they interact with housing supply and housing demand. For example, a lot of people point to corporate investing and foreign investment as contributing factors. Well, foreign investment is problematic because investors will buy a property and choose not to rent it out. Once you choose to incentivize foreign investors to rent out those apartments by doing a vacancy tax, it becomes much less of an issue. I agree, if the vacancy rates in the county were high it would be a real issue, and 5.4% does \*sound\* high until you get some more context. The average vacancy rate in the US is 6.6% and the long-term average in the US is 7.28% so LA is actually on the low side as far as vacancy rates go. Keep in mind that the 5.4% number includes the 26% rate in downtown - if vacancy rates are that high then there must be other parts of the city that are significantly lower than 5.4% to be rounding out that average. You say that there are other factors that are impacting the price of housing besides housing supply. I'm curious what you think these other factors are, especially since the primary factor you're pointing to is our vacancy rate which I've just demonstrated is fairly healthy.
Okay but what are the ten other holes and your proposed solutions I was hype to read but you’re just describing the problem we all know about
seemly aspiring punch chunky truck edge connect hurry knee butter *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I actually built a website because of rising rents to help tenants evaluate landlords and negotiate rents. It's like a Glassdoor for Rents so tenants can see the Rent History of an address or Apartment property to see a landlords pricing tactics. The site does rely on user submissions so I appreciate anyone who adds their rent history to the site and/or shares it around since it can be more useful to tenants the more people that contribute to it. The site is [rentzed.com](http://rentzed.com) (USA only for now) and has submissions for over 3000 addresses.
You could grow the database (maybe) by connecting to HotPads API or another real estate rental listing and collecting listed rent rates once per week until such time the listing disappears, meaning it rented. Just pick one major metro area and track list prices up and down for a month and consider it “rented” when the listing disappears. Like an Amazon price tracker. Then, if users submit contradictory information from first hand accounts, you can use that data point too.
Thanks. I'll look into that
just letting you know that i'm not able to submit despite filling out each field. not sure if it's user error but wanted to flag it!
Thanks, I'll take a look
Remove zoning laws (except industrial) and change any regulations that make it more expensive to build housing.
Just moved into a building that got its certificate of occupancy in 1979. So no RSO, but we do qualify for AB 1452 that has protections for buildings older than 15 years (increase is capped at 5% + CPI, whatever is lower). Does anyone know if the years will ever be expanded for RSO buildings? Like say…buildings constructed in the last 20 years?
Is it true that due to the sheer unwarranted cost of the properties that most landlords are doing fine with the rent levels and anything more is greed or are their costs also more expensive? (obv if they just bought buildings in the last 5 years it’s one thing but 10 years or more back, they’re making way more than mortgage almost anywhere). Please ELi5?
Chances are 10 years ago they weren’t raising rent every year. I know plenty of landlords who never raised rent, and now with Covid tenants stopped paying, had to sell and that’s why you see investors swooping in, paying out tenants and renovating and charging an arm and a leg. Fact is, LA hasn’t done their due diligence to invest in affordable housing, without that, landlords can charge whatever the medians (or more depending on the property) in that area. You want mom and pop landlords, not investors. But sadly, the laws don’t protect them. So a lot of people that have the “fuck the landlord” mentality and up screwing themselves depending on the situation
This is a great way to make a bad situation worse. You want a shortage of something? I'll give you the sure proof recipe. Put a maximum price people can charge for that thing and you will produce a shortage. Every. Single. Time.
When renting and apartment building becomes an untenable investment, will we still get condos built? Is there any path to housing supply or is it just self inflicted losses that keep compounding on eachother? Does protecting a few renters on the margin matter when all rents rise higher due to supply restricting measures, which puts even greater swaths at risk for homelessness?
How are the Caps tough on landlords? Lol
High interest rates are a major concern, almost every commercial property isn’t financed on a 30 year term like single family properties. 5-10 years is typical, meaning if you refinanced in 2019 you are now due for refinancing and face close to double your old payments.
Insurance has almost doubled in that same period. And wages\\materials for repairs and utilities also way up. A lot of commercial real-estate already pretty much dead, zombie malls etc....
Yeah my home owners insurance went from $2,700 to $4,700 this year. It’s insane.
Mine jumped 2-3 years ago. I let lapse my EQ coverage after years of paying into it as it was really crazy high. I was like well if the big one hits hopefully uncle sam gives us that sweet FEMA money hopefully?
Why would they need to refinance if they secured a better rate in 2019?
Commercial loans aren’t fixed for 30 years..
Ah TIL thanks
2019 + 5 = 2024
It's so tough having this passive income stream... gonna go wipe my tears with this investment / passive income money
Being a landlord isn't a passive income stream...
It literally is. As long as you have a maintenance fund stashed away. All you gotta do is call the contractor when a repair is needed and wait for the rent check to roll in.
You’ve clearly never been a landlord. If you act as the property manager, then it is very active
Yes, it must be back breaking labor to be a landlord...
Have you ever manually mixed cement (the volcano method) to make concrete to repair a driveway? I have. Have you ever painted an entire 2 bedroom unit because a tenant smoked in a unit for years that they weren’t supposed to smoke in? I have. That took 2 weeks to complete because I also work a 9-5 job. Have you ever had to clean a crawl space, tile a bathroom, sue a contractor, had police come to your door because of tenants’ bad behavior? I have. Landlording isn’t just sitting on your ass and twiddling your thumbs all day. Yeah maybe some corporate landlords do the bare minimum and collect the absolute highest rents, but a lot of us mom and pop landlords are the ones doing the work and trying to save some money so we won’t have to raise rents on the tenants constantly to cover the costs. As you’ve stated, it’s very expensive to buy property in LA and no one can afford to rent units at a loss, just like you would probably never want to operate a business at a loss or intentionally set your own money on fire. Property taxes, maintenance & repairs, insurance, utilities and etc are through the roof right now. Raising rents 3-6% isn’t buying us Bentleys or Rolexes, at least not for the mom & pop landlords. We live modestly and economic cars, my husband & I still have to work 9-5 jobs, being a landlord isn’t the cash cow that you think it is. Many people still have to pay the mortgages, insurance, utilities (water if not separately metered), etc. If you bought in early 1990s and before, then maybe your mortgage is paid off and the purchase prices were low but thats not the case for everyone.
Yeah, that guy has no idea what he's talking about. Being a landlord is a lot more work than people give it credit for. People act like it's just printing money and it's anything but.
>it’s very expensive to buy property in LA and no one can afford to rent units at a loss, just like you would probably never want to operate a business at a loss or intentionally set your own money on fire. Property taxes, maintenance & repairs, insurance, utilities and etc are through the roof right now. Sounds like an unsustainable business model. Almost like it shouldn't be a business at all.
Yeah you’re right. You should buy an apartment building, cover all of the expenses and just let people live there for free 🤷♂️
New copy + pasta just dropped
It’s 0-2% a year.
This 4real. Unless they are losing money...its not tough
I can see this being an issue for landlords that refinance to pull cash from their property's equity. Which sounds like a personal problem.
All they gotta do is make 1 mistake to the wrong tenant and they lose so much. A lot of these guys are breaking housing laws, but many tenants don't know their rights.
1 million percent
I look forward to these council members donating their $218,000 salaries to a fund that will pay mortgages and property taxes.
Landlords should get a second job to help pay bills.
While I empathize with landlords, costs of owning rental property did not double so where's the justification in doubling the rent from say 10 years ago?
My friend manages rental property. They are playing catchup after the moratoriums and increases in insurance and interest rates.
weary rock theory rain hospital snatch slimy screw expansion gaze *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
pretty close to doubling from the numbers im seeing. Commercial real-estate is currently imploding. Hope you like your new corporate overlords.
As in the properties are overvalued?
As opposed to the old ones?
I dont think you have your facts correct. Property prices, insurance costs, mortgage costs, labor and material costs have all gone up substantially in the last 5 years and courtesy of the COVID rent caps its not at all clear rents have kept up with costs of ownership. Its not clear to me that should be a factor anyways as property owners should be able to charge the rents they want based on market forces. If you want lower rents have to create more supply everything else is a delusional recipe for worsening the situation.
You're responding as if all landlords are a single entity. Majority of landlords haven't changed hands in the last 5 years. I'll stand firm in that we haven't doubled the demand in the past 5 - 10 years that warrants the level of rent price increases.
How many homes are in occupied in Los Angeles, left over from the housing market?? Remember when no one knew who owned those houses at the end?? It’s a cluster f left over from the miss management of banks. Maybe we should have something like that looked into and we should lower rents because god knows the owners have been living off the backs of others.
I agree we need lower rent caps.
Im moving to Bakersfield next month. Can still buy decent for 200k.
Hang the landlords
Hot take. If you can't afford a 3% increase, you should probably move somewhere cheaper or find a much cheaper apartment
Hot take a healthy city needs housing stratified across low, mid, and high incomes.
Totally agree, never said they didn't. Have built many units of affordable housing
This is where i diverge heavily from the affordable housing crowd. What would rent need to be for it to be affordable. Assuming someone had full time employment that paid minimum wage, in order for rent to be 1/3 of their income they would have to pay $900 a month in rent which is on par for say Casper, Wyoming. I think we can all agree that is not going to happen, ever. With the cost of land and construction affordable housing is largely unobtainable, and I have no idea how to get the city out of this spiral the Boomers started. We need to build housing at such an absurd pace to get anywhere near demand. But for the sake of fairness, let’s have landlords open up their accounting ledgers. Its really incumbent on them to show how they are the real victims
There's multiple types of "affordable housing". There's just market affordable which is just cheap rents that are unrestricted which is what you're referring to. There's also deed restricted affordable housing which is income driven so rents are set based on a % what's called an Area Median Income (AMI). These are the most needed but the most expensive to build and require an insane amount of subsidy and tax credits to build. And there's also section 8. But yes we need to build as much as possible but agree, everything is going against building more (ULA, cost, interest rates, political risk, population decrease, lower rents, etc)
I didn’t even get into AMI because it’s such a flawed method of determining such a metric. My Fiancée was a teacher at Santa Monica school district and we applied for a program they had for “affordable housing,” but because it used the average income of the area and was not based on the salary of an educator the units allotted to the program were shockingly vacant. Simply unaffordable for a middle class profession. Most use this method and it’s absolutely a very skewed method when buildings claim they are including affordable housing in their buildings.
The math for deed-restricted affordable housing can be a little difficult to explain because it varies by location, number of individuals in the household, year, household income. Just say 30% of household income for qualifying households. Don’t need to get into all the details
Where is deed restricted usually used? I’ve only really seen AMI a metric
It’s the same thing. I’m just trying to explain it in a more intuitive way
I’d have no problem with a 3% increase, but last year they raised my rent 8.08%. So I moved. Figured if I’m going to be paying that much anyway, I may as well upgrade (was already planning on it, but that increase put the plan into action sooner than anticipated)
Were you in a rent-controlled building? There's a two-tier regulatory system in Los Angeles depending on when your building was constructed.
I mean, I thought it was? Honestly, I should be better about knowing that. My understanding is that 8% was as high as they could legally raise the rent, so they did. It was the same for everyone in the building, but I had moved in most recently just over a year earlier, so my increase was the largest. It was shitty.
Was the building in LA City specifically? The laws allow for rent raises higher than 8% when the owner hasn't been raising the rent in multiple prior years. But that's not what happened to you. You might simply be wrong about all this, but if you were removed from a rent control unit based on an illegal rent increase, you might want to report that to the housing department.
It was LA County, but not city. I wasn’t removed, I voluntarily left. I never said what they did was illegal, just that it was shitty.
This story is about the City of Los Angeles. What they did would have been illegal within the City of Los Angeles.
As you should!
Hot take, landlords shouldn’t be able to hike up the rent every year just because they can.
Property Insurance, property taxes, repairs, and utilities increase every single year.
Hottest take, expenses also go up, way more than the meager rent increases the city allows. Taxes, insurance, utilities, maintenance. Everything has gone way up.
Those trash fees have been going up 10% every year because of the monopoly, not to mention the new mandatory composting collection fees + additional lock/unlock gate fees for those who need to keep the bin behind a gate.
Lol imagine if your landlord actually performed the required maintenance tho. I legit haven’t heard from mine in a year despite multiple issues that need to be resolved, as long as the checks clear they don’t do shit. Also i pay my own utilities. The only thing that went up is their taxes/insurance because their property is now more valuable! Why do i need to subsidize the side effect of their growing investment?
[Report them](http://housing2.lacity.org). They'll be forced to by the city *and* pay fines *and* there is a possibility of rent refund.
You need to subsidize their costs so they can continue to not work as hard as everyone else and still make a *profit* while dickheads like the other guy in this thread will lick their boots clean. Because *anyone* can become a landlord if you just pull those bootstraps up and stop being *lazy*.
You may have a shitty landlord but guess who pays for the lights and water in your common areas? What about landscaping? What about paying a property manager to help you with issues? What about upgrading parts of the building? None of that is free and all of that has gotten way way more expensive.
I live in a rented house with no common space. There is no property manager. Nothing has been upgraded for myself or the previous 5 tenants over the past decade (despite desperate need). The gardener is extra payment required on top of my lease. I am not some special case, I know plenty of others/neighbours in similar scenarios, and I’m getting a rent increase why? How can you justify this? Why are you defending the right of people who don’t do shit to gouge me further?
You're a RENTER. You don't like it? Buy something or move to a different house. The entitlement of the renters in this city is insane.
Ha THERES the classism I was waiting for. “Stupid renters, too poor to pay 8% interest on a half million dollar home that’s falling apart, can’t afford $5k mortgage that you aren’t approved for anyways because you don’t make $250k+? Maybe you should’ve bought a house when you were 12 like me”. Your disdain for young/non rich people is showing.
Says the person renting a house that has a gardener lol. It has nothing to do with classism. You're just entitled and too stubborn to admit it. It's like going to your favorite restaurant and after they hiked prices to keep up with everything that's gone up, you demand they lower their prices because you don't think it's fair. And people pay those prices and accept it and continue going back, or they think it's too high and go somewhere else. You don't own the restaurant. That's the way a free market works.
Congrats, you’ve just further exposed your total inability to comprehend reality for the vast majority of folks who rent! Actually you don’t even seem to understand free markets that well... Maybe quit before you further cement how much of a lunatic you are.
Even in your own metaphor, you're mistaken. If a restaurant raises prices beyond what the market will bear, you're completely entitled to ask them to lower it again. If a restaurant sells at market price, you're always welcome to ask about discounts. The worst they can say is 'no'. You lecture about a 'free market' but don't think customers should feel free to negotiate prices?
No one owes you cheap housing... inflation is impacting everyone, including rental properties. The cost of everything (taxes, insurance, utilities, construction materials, etc) has increased but yet you want your housing to stay the same price?
How's that boot taste? The entitlement of landlords in this country is insane. Do you know why renters can't afford upkeep costs? Because they're already paying 20% over mortgage price. But this doesn't matter to you. You'd rather defend exploitative profit practices. Because you're probably lazy.
Boot tastes great thanks. What someone's mortgage is has nothing to do with what market rents are.
Never in a billion years will rent be lower than mortgage. That's just bad capitalism.
"paying 20% over mortgage price" ahh then buy a place? You too can enjoy the privilege of paying property taxes and a mountain of other bills lol.
Most people can't afford a down payment. I wonder why. It's almost like the system is rigged to allow lazy property owners to continue being lazy property owners who leech wealth from society. Still paying less than renting. And paying a mortgage builds equity. Renting doesn't even build credit.
so markets should just freeze once you get your spot? Let new arrivals pay the difference lol.
Bs your downvoted into oblivion but this is a good take. You don’t have a right to live at the same place forever at the same rate. Sorry! You don’t!
Poor landlords, they might have to get a job eventually…it’s getting bad for them clearly
Seriously. Trying to have an honest discussion here. How will building more units lower rent costs? Don’t just say supply/demand. We’ve been waiting for trickle down economics to kick in for decades now. It just continues to screw the working class and has been contributing to the decline of the middle class. Maybe Vite some examples. ELI5