- There's no problem with gay marriage
- CCW (Concealed-Carry Weapons) permits should be issued to anyone who applies and meets the requirements
- Marijuana needs decriminalizing
- As does independent prostitution (i.e. non-pimp non-brothel)
- Illegal immigrants should be deported
- Illegal immigrants' medical bills should be reimbursed by their home countries
- Public school funding should be tripled
- Public school employees should be hired/fired/compensated on professional criteria rather than as though represented by some labor union
- Private school vouchers should be encouraged, based on models where they help the poor
- Rent control should be eliminated
- Capital gains taxes should be eliminated for anyone worth less than say $5M
- Any community can and should define areas where nudity is legal
Friday, March 06, 2009
Wingnut
I just realized that since
10 comments:
"Am I a wacko liberal or a crypto-conservative? "
The word is Libertarian, welcome aboard
I don't want to see ...
So don't look. We've all become too demanding of other people's appearances anyway (and our own).
As for landlords, no, they are only pigs when they don't have to worry about taking care of their renters. No one wants an empty unit and an open housing market takes care of it, supposing you run your business reasonably well. Rent control by and large creates worse conditions for renters. It's one of those anti-intuitive things, like evolution or quantum physics or, obvii, gay marriage.
Well, I was kidding about the flabby peeps, but not the landlords. They're always pigs. No landlord is going to act altruistically. The reason for rent control is because an open housing market didn't take care of things. I don't see the peeps in Santa Monica complaining that they're worse off from rent control. Are they too dumb to see it? I'm not sure you're right about the empty units either: if it were the case that prices always drop to meet demand (or lack thereof), then there wouldn't be so much vacant office space for one thing. There must be a reason why, forex, the company that owns my office building keeps prices up even though there's a bunch of empties and have been for a while now. They probably get to write it off their taxes or something.
Sounds like a libertarian to me, Don.
But I'm with Paula on the rent control issue. I live in a rent-stabilized 1BR and pay $1400 to live in Brooklyn. This year my rent will go up nearly $120 with my lease renewal. Does that sound like rent control to you?
Maybe I'm biased because I live in New York City, but without rent control and rent stabilization (where there are limits in the amount a landlord can increase rent), there would be NO middle class living in New York City. The working class was driven out long ago. Ask any firefighter or policeman where he lives and the answer is inevitably Rockland County.
The last 10 years have seen landlords aggressively de-stabilizing rents in New York, harassing tenants and creating unliveable conditions for their controlled and stabilized tenants to drive them out so they could charge an artificial "market rate" -- I know people who pay $2500 a month for the "privilege" of living in a 12 x 12 studio apartment Manhattan.
As a rent-stabilized tenant, I actually have recourse with the city when the landlord isn't holding up his end of the bargain -- three of the six units in our building are rent-stabilized, and when the landlord decided he wasn't going to heat our building adequately this past winter or provide adequate hot water, we started by calling the landlord again and again, and when the situation wasn't remedied (we're talking no heat on 5-degree nights), we called 311 and complained to the city. Lo and behold, city inspectors came to the building and the heat miraculously came on and the hot water got hot again.
No sympathy for the landlords; they are for the most part thugs and criminals.
I think it shows you're conscious.
And as a landlord, I take issue re: being a pig. We have three great units (two duplexes) in the Arts District in Minneapolis. Our places are great, well-kept/maintained turn of the century places. We love our renters! Sure there are slumlords -- and they give everyone else a bad name.
Somebody's got to own these places, and my husband and I are two of them. It's a long-term investment we see no profit on at the current time. Maybe it's all in where you live, but I can think of only a handful of questionable creeps in Minneapolis that own property, and just by LOOKING at their places you'd have to be nuts to rent from them...
Pearl
p.s. Decriminalization? Absolutely.
I was a landlord once too. Hated it because I'm lazy. But the vast majority are people who've made an investment with which they have some influence stabilizing their own community. I think the worst situations are where the landlords are big property investment types who care nothing about people or neighborhoods, and they do tend to accumulate in big cities. As with immigration and schools funding, the situation is more complex than my simply list can indicate. Cities pricing themselves out of working class residents is a problem, no lie. I'm not convinced however that using regulation to discourage profit and thus discourage investment, upkeep, or tenant loyalty has worked very well.
As a 4th gen. native San Franciscan, I am for and will always be for rent control.
I would be 3rd Gen if me and my mom were born there. She wasn't cuz her preggie mom had to go up to her husband's parents in Chico and I wasn't just cuz.
Anyway, I don't pretend to be an expert on the economics, but it is not considered a coincidence that the two most infamous rent-controlled cities in California -- San Francisco and Santa Monica -- also lead the way in homeless population. The question really isn't about how low landlords are forced to charge but the more consequential one of how much are investors discouraged from building or fixing up rental housing units. Non-rent-controlled cities such as Chicago average a 7 pct vacancy rate whereas SF and SM hover around one or two. You can guess the ironic effect that has on the prices.
Indeed, my dad knew a guy who invested in an apartment house in Berkeley. Big mistake. His inability to manage the input side of the business led to him always losing money and never being able to fix things. It's less clear to me how rent control punishes the lower end of the rental market (this is regularly asserted, I just don't follow it completely), but the local increase in homelessness suggests a connection anyway.
That said, I don't have a dog in that fight, just a set of principles that I try to keep both consistent and informed. I've found that if they don't seem consistent, it's usually because I'm not sufficiently informed.
We have a rental condo (and thus are also landlords) with a nice tenant, but you can be sure that if we could charge $500 more a month we would, and she'd have to pay it or leave. No landlord would do differently, and that's what I mean by "pig."
Without evidence to the contrary, I view the larger homeless pop and rent control in the same areas as a correlation not causation. The same people who are for rent control are also the ones who don't mind funding soup kitchens and other services out of their taxes. They're also the same people who don't want their cops to be harsh to transients, unlike, say, Huntington Beach, where our cops know they can do whatever it takes. And you're not going to see homeless in Chicago because it's too cold! No one could survive a night on the street in winter.
I see what you mean about the homeless thing, though I'm not sure San Francisco really has more soup kitchens than Chicago. Certainly better weather. I don't know. Better minds than mine have looked at this rationally.
When we rented out a house, we charged just enough to break even and were a little below market rate. This was because we liked stability and wanted our tenant to feel at home and take care of the place. If we could have charged $500 more and still filled it, we probably would not have, because that kind of thinking (and here I go all Berkeley on you) balances out with tenants who are more resentful and less motivated. Bad karma, in other words, not that I believe in karma, but I've been told mine is really good, and why risk losing a good thing? We got what we wanted out of the rental: tax deductions (for like our new fridge) and profit upon selling.
You see why I don't run my own business, perhaps.
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