Watch “I am a New York City landlord and I'm Homeless.” on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7pbAnaHxXg

by xbmcuser • 5 years ago

39 48 5 years ago

valuearb• 5 years ago

Of course the eviction moratorium is being gamed

ng122• 5 years ago

I feel like when renter friendly laws get passed people think of fat-cat, tophat-wearing Manhattan landlords and don't really consider that the same exploitable laws also apply to an immigrant in Queens who needs rental income from the first floor unit to afford their mortgage.

diebeforei485• 5 years ago

Perhaps the state (or the city) can have some sort of program like tax relief for low-income landlords who were affected by this.

lbotos• 5 years ago

This story seems like someone who is extremely over leveraged:

- two properties (neither owned outright)

- tesla

I'm saying this as someone who is about to be 5x leveraged on a 2 fam property in NYC. What kind of leverage does this guy have 10x? 12x? More?

In NYC, CONED is not shutting off gas for non payment due to covid: https://www.coned.com/en/about-us/media-center/news/coronavi...

If the gas was off prior to covid, I guess you could find yourself in a catch-22, where you'd need to bring the account current before they turned it on, but then they aren't shutting it off at this point. It's unclear if he fought the fine with the city.

If this gets to court, I'm pretty sure he would have a cut and dry case that he as the landlord did not breach habitability (the gas worked) and that it was tenant misconduct (failure to pay the bill) that caused the gas to be shut off (https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/RPP/235-B) Now, I have no clue what kind of ruling the judge would make, but yeah.

Additionally, the covid laws that are protecting from eviction are also enabling mortgage forbearance: https://www.dfs.ny.gov/consumers/coronavirus/mortgage

I haven't had to go through that process, so I'm not sure how many people are denied, but the wording on this page makes it seem like you have a few options (including complaining to the state -- like his tenant did for the gas bill) before you are out of luck.

I feel for this guy, and as someone who intends to rent to a tenant in NYC this is scary, but I feel like my guy got way over leveraged, and because of it, this bad actor has hung him out to dry. There are a few pieces of this story that feel like they are left out to garner sympathy, which may or may not be warranted.

- why is he not getting or eligible for mortgage forbearance?

- why is he so over leveraged?

- why didn't he negotiate with his tenant about the relocation fee? (get the tenant to sign a paper, give the 10k (or less) as a rent credit on back-owed rent, get them out.)

------ Hilariously, I had a similar situation happen to me as a roommate -- One of the roommates I lived with stopped paying rent, wanted to AirBnB their room, and sleep on the couch, while using the AirBnB money to pay rent. They were few months behind on their portion of the rent, we worked with the landord, and the landlord agreed to credit back rent to get them out. Covid makes this more complex, but those with mortgages should be getting some protection based on the way the law is written. If he's not able to I think thats the real story and much more interesting.

CryptoPunk7• 5 years ago

The bigger problem is lack of understanding of basic economics. The investments into real estate made by those fat cat landlords are good for housing affordability, because they increase the stock of livable housing. The motives and stature of the investor are orthogonal to the effects of their investment.

sudosysgen6• 5 years ago

From the point of view of the greater economy it's not helpful to have people buy property (and thus increase property prices by creating demand) to just rent it back out.

It's only helpful if they are helping increase the quantity of housing or somehow providing some other kind of service.

Simply using rent to pay the mortgage is really not something that we as a people benefit from. It would be better for everyone if that immigrant in Queens invested their savings into something else that would provide value.

jshaqaw3• 5 years ago

I’m a renter. I like being a renter. If nobody owned properties to rent who would I rent from?

candybar9• 5 years ago

This doesn't make any sense. A lot of people either don't want to buy due to their own personal circumstances or can't afford to buy. People buying places and renting out increases the supply of rentals, which makes it easier for those folks to rent.

alisonkisk3• 5 years ago

That problem can by solved by selling the equity and charging a fee for property maintenance.

dundercoder• 5 years ago

A moratorium with no accountability was asking for this to happen.

beerbajay• 5 years ago

If what this guy is saying is true, that is clearly terrible. There are however thousands of people who aren't gaming the eviction moratorium and need the protections provided by it.

Also just an aside here to say that both the NY DOB and NY landlords are shockingly terrible in pretty much all possible ways.

tartoran2• 5 years ago

There should be a process to it and the case should be evaluated not granted by default. Renter should be unemployed and not have money in their account or something like that otherwise we end up with people saving on rent just because they’re douches and that at the expense of someone struggling to pay their mortgage. A lot of people don’t afford a whole mortgage and get a 2 unit house and rent one floor. Some cheaters have an income but manage to get the landlord to let them stay in their propery for months to years for free.

So again, this should be evaluated on a case by case basis and people who lie and cheat severely penalized so this behavior is not rewarded. Some people abuse all these laws that are supposed to help people and there is never a consequence for this abuse. Are these laws fair? I think there is room for improvement here

jshaqaw3• 5 years ago

The NY DOB is a textbook case of regulatory capture by the construction and real estate industries. I

rasz5• 5 years ago

You cant evict, but its still your property so you should be able to move in. Cops cant throw you out because you have nowhere else to stay, and there is eviction moratorium. Bonus points for moving in with couple of obnoxious friends.

Btw Sunny is hardly hurting, he has successful renovation business in NY.

CryptoPunk7• 5 years ago

He can't move in because he can't evict the tenant, because of the eviction moratorium.

atat7024• 5 years ago

No, GP means move in adjacent to the squatter.

alisonkisk3• 5 years ago

It's an eviction moratorium not a lease moratorium. The lease contract is still valid.

rasz5• 5 years ago

Lease is already broken due to tenant not paying rent, but that is beside the point. Lease issues would be a separate legal matter if it came to that, but nobody can kick you out of your own property.

achillesheels• 5 years ago

I never understood this line of reasoning. Where do you draw the line between “hurting” and “not hurting”? Surely you must make it quantitative, and if so how do you justify your numbers?

tartoran2• 5 years ago

So this bad tennant wants to sublet and make money from this propery while they are not paying anything in rent. Something’s gone terribly wrong here. Shouldnt the sublet money go directly to the landlord?

alisonkisk3• 5 years ago

Bad tenant is breaking the law. Laws are often difficult to enforce.

ng122• 5 years ago

Well these laws are made difficult to enforce by design. In NYC and SF you can pretty easily squat for 2 years before facing any real penalty for non-payment of rent.

In other countries that'll work for one month before you come home to changed locks.

CryptoPunk7• 5 years ago

This is a massive discouragement to investment in real estate, which means less capital is made available to expand housing stock.

Along the same vein, these are a couple mentions of how rent control constrained New York City housing supply expansion in this article on the effects of rent control:

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html

>New York State legislators defend the War Emergency Tenant Protection Act—also known as rent control—as a way of protecting tenants from war-related housing shortages. The war referred to in the law is not the 2003 war in Iraq, however, or the Vietnam War; it is World War II. That is when rent control started in New York City. Of course, war has very little to do with apartment shortages. On the contrary, the shortage is created by rent control, the supposed solution.

>Also, the decades-long boom in the New York City housing market is not in rent-controlled or rent-stabilized units, but in condominiums and cooperative housing. But these two forms of housing ownership grew important as a way of getting around rent control.

One study estimates that if just three US cities; New York, San Francisco and San Jose, had maintained their land-use rights at the median level for US cities since 1964, US income would have been higher $3,685 by 2009:

https://eml.berkeley.edu/~moretti/growth.pdf

msrenee2• 5 years ago

Can I just reply to your first line? I'm in the middle of the US. We have plenty of jobs here and poverty is less severe than on the coasts.

I would like to purchase a house. 10 years ago, I could have gotten the size of house I want in the area I want for $125k. Now I'm looking at $200k-250k for the exact same house. Wages have not risen proportionally in that time.

You say it's discouraging to investment in real estate, but in my situation, investment in real estate is what has left me in a position where it will cost me $75-125k more to purchase a house compared to 10 years ago. More houses are being built, but that hasn't helped to reduce the average cost of a home.

I guess my question is in what way in this situation is investment in real estate a positive thing for the average person? Yes, more homes are being built, but the 100 year old homes in my area are somehow still all I can afford. To be honest, I'm not sure I can even afford them. We have radon to deal with here on top of all the maintenance and inconveniences that come with a 100 year old house.

CryptoPunk7• 5 years ago

>I guess my question is in what way in this situation is investment in real estate a positive thing for the average person?

A higher volume of investment into real estate will increase the value of land, so land-consuming real estate like Single Family Houses will go up in price.

In contrast, the cost of units in very dense developments, like high rises, will be dominated by building costs, not land prices, so their price would mostly stay constant as real estate investment increases, if all other factors were controlled for, and assuming no major market-freedom-inhibiting distortions of the construction industry via government regulations or organized crime.

Anyway, what goes down in price with rising supply is not the cost of buying real estate. It's the cost of renting it. If a real estate market has regulations that discourage investment, and suddenly those were repealed, and the market saw a flurry of construction, you'd also expect the purchase price of units in dense developments (where land is a minor cost input) to come down, as units available for purchase become less scarce, and that scarcity premium disappears.

jshaqaw3• 5 years ago

As a renter in NYC I expect to pay for this for years to come as landlords have to price in periodic expropriation risk.

Society absolutely had the right (and perhaps moral obligation) to prevent harms like evictions of the vulnerable in a crisis. There is always a tension in law drafting between maximum protection (in which case yes you will have more edge cases abuses by grifters) and maximum targeting which will bury everyone in legal/bureaucratic process and probably harm some of the deserving.

What is almost always bad policy is to place all the expenses of a societal goal randomly on one class like landlords which is the easy way for society to get something without paying for it.

Watch “I am a New York City landlord and I'm Homeless.” on YouTube

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