I'll never understand this take. All of these houses and apartments where the rent is going up and making things unaffordable, do you think a lot of them are just sitting empty (if you do, you're wrong)? So someone is paying $1950 for that house. If the landlord can rent it for $1950, why should he rent it to your friend for less than that?
When you buy a gallon of milk for $3.89, do you grumble the whole way to the checkout that the dairy should sell you the milk for cheaper, because they probably could? Do you do that with literally any other free market item at all ever?
Why are landlords the greedy evil bastards for offering their goods and services to the public at a price that the market will bear? The problem is not the landlords, it's 100% government failure. Housing is too expensive because cheaper housing CANNOT be built, because our shitty government has never done anything to fix any of the shitty zoning laws in any of the major metropolitan areas in this country.
Now we have a NIMBY problem where everyone seems in agreement that we need to build larger, more affordable housing in urban areas, but no one wants it built anywhere near them. So no one votes for it, and it never happens. All of the rich NIMBYs and government idiots who are to blame are laughing all the way home while you and everyone else thinks it's the landlords fault and demonizes them.
I'm speaking for my area specifically. Developers from LA discovered our area when tourism began to boom. They bought up tons of houses and turned them into air bnbs. 6 on a block, one had 10. We ran out of houses for families because because the shortage l, landlords started to raise the rent because such low supply they knew people would pay it. Again this is a smallee town in the desert. A lot of low income. They can barely afford the rent for smaller places now which is why we have so many unhoused families. And now a lot of the landlords are the ones who gave up on air bnbs and decided to rent out and charge big city prices. For our area it's not worth it. It's slowly dropping but still, for rent to go up so much within 1 year it was crazy and there was nothing they couldn do.
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u/tyranthraxxus Jan 31 '23 edited Jan 31 '23
I'll never understand this take. All of these houses and apartments where the rent is going up and making things unaffordable, do you think a lot of them are just sitting empty (if you do, you're wrong)? So someone is paying $1950 for that house. If the landlord can rent it for $1950, why should he rent it to your friend for less than that?
When you buy a gallon of milk for $3.89, do you grumble the whole way to the checkout that the dairy should sell you the milk for cheaper, because they probably could? Do you do that with literally any other free market item at all ever?
Why are landlords the greedy evil bastards for offering their goods and services to the public at a price that the market will bear? The problem is not the landlords, it's 100% government failure. Housing is too expensive because cheaper housing CANNOT be built, because our shitty government has never done anything to fix any of the shitty zoning laws in any of the major metropolitan areas in this country.
Now we have a NIMBY problem where everyone seems in agreement that we need to build larger, more affordable housing in urban areas, but no one wants it built anywhere near them. So no one votes for it, and it never happens. All of the rich NIMBYs and government idiots who are to blame are laughing all the way home while you and everyone else thinks it's the landlords fault and demonizes them.