Rent collections are down in New York

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/21/rent-collections-are-down-in-new-york-and-no-ones-sure-why-00966982

126 541 1 month ago

alexjplant• 1 month ago

“There is a subset of people, maybe the smallest subset, who are literally making a choice not to pay rent, and we don’t do well with acknowledging that but there is a subset for whom that is the case,” [...] Others bristle at the notion that some tenants are not paying rent just because they may be able to get away with it.

These people absolutely exist. To pretend that they don't is willful ignorance. They are, however, indeed a "small[est] subset" to quote the gentleman in the article. In the era of $4 McDoubles and $6 gallons of gas I have trouble believing that one in four people is my burnout college roommate who spends on Fireball shots and Xbox games instead of paying rent. Life is expensive these days.

naturalmovement2• 1 month ago

There's entire Reddit communities of these people where they encourage and validate their shitty behavior.

With some of the stories I've read, you'd have to be positively insane to be a small-time landlord these days, especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone.

Go watch Pacific Heights with Michael Keaton for a fictionalized account but this stuff absolutely happens every day.

I saw one recently where the renter has not paid rent for six years and is unable to be evicted. It made national news.

So where does that leave the industry? You eventually push out the mom and pop landlords by making the regulations so insane it only leaves behind the large corporate property management companies and their army of lawyers. Who will collude and drive rents up. It's a vicious cycle and these cities are not helping one bit.

rationalist• 1 month ago

I have friends and coworkers that want to have rental properties, and I advise them it's not worth it.

I don't want to be in a position where I have to pay more to fix damages than I collectected in rent if I accidentally rent to deadbeats. Or in a position where I have to provide services to someone not paying me.

One of those friends has parents that rented out their old house to deadbeats at the top of the housing market instead of selling it. Those deadbeats have been nothing but trouble and yet my friend still wants to be a landlord.

Somehow the idea of owning rental properties became a pervasive notion in the U.S.

8note• 1 month ago

This is a bit of an intentional result, no?

the goal is for peoppe to own the places they live in

jen20• 1 month ago

If you think the Reddit communities of tenants are bad, you should try reading the Reddit communities of landlords (at least the UK ones).

nradov7• 1 month ago

Tenant "protection" laws are the type of idiocy that economically illiterate progressive politicians always produce. They end up having the opposite effect by making property owners less willing to rent out to anyone. The only effective way to protect tenants is to set public policies that encourage new housing development. When there is a housing surplus, the laws of economics force landlords to treat tenants well. Build more housing!

ethbr1• 1 month ago

especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone

The problem is that there will always be more voting renters than voting landlords. So in a purely democratic system, policies which favor renters at the expense of landlords will always be supported.

And that said, some renter protections are definitely needed, because there is a subset of landlords that engage in flat out illegal behavior.

Deposit withholding, making illegal demands, illegal renter selection practices, etc.

Imho, that tends to be concentrated in the "1-5 unit" landlord range, because those landlords are usually (a) not lawyers & (b) treat their properties like pets instead of a business.

pixelatedindex15• 1 month ago

Doesn’t help that the landlords want to squeeze the renter for what they are worth. It’s weird to me that shitty landlords are normalized but shitty tenants get a (rightfully) bad rap.

These laws become the way they are because landlords brought it upon themselves for the most part - they’re keeping assets that have massively increased in price and want to extract more and more out of the tenant.

If you have a home that’s paid off your expenses are basically just property taxes, maybe they should do what they can to keep good tenants instead of chasing profits.

BrenBarn• 1 month ago

The way to handle this, which no one seems to be willing to face, is to make laws that are not wealth-neutral. If you are a mom-and-pop landlord (with a relatively low net worth), your should have more leeway in dealing with tenants. If you are a large landlord, you should have very little. Couple this with ruinous penalties (e.g., full forfeiture) for attempting to hide the true beneficial ownership of the property.

morkalork• 1 month ago

In my city, and I assume many others, there's an informal landlord's group that shares lists of problem tenants to avoid renting to. While problematic, I wonder if it's made any impact.

seanmcdirmid• 1 month ago

Usually this is handled with credit reports right? It’s only when the state forbids landlords from demanding credit reports that informal networks are necessary.

In general as a tenant you can only get away with not paying rent once (until eviction happens, no one will ever rent to you again without federal or state assurances), and as a landlord you will only skip the credit report requirement once (because your first tenant is going to be a deadbeat who screw’s you).

jandrewrogers6• 1 month ago

I anecdotally know of a few cases in Seattle where tenants with high incomes that could easily pay just don't. There is a subculture that actively encourages this type of behavior and the laws are setup such that there are almost no consequences for it. I've also met people who bragged about doing it. While rare, it is still common enough that it has become a real problem and has become socially acceptable in some circles.

It is corrosive to the social contract when government policy tacitly encourages this behavior.

CursedSilicon4• 1 month ago

As someone who also lives in Seattle, I'd be curious to see any verifiable citations to such a wild claim

nikkwong12• 1 month ago

It's not rare. I repeat. It's not rare. I am a landlord in Seattle with ~55 active tenants/leases. Let's just say that I know of many landlords in the circles I run in that have absolutely stopped renting to leftie types because they've had so many issues over the last few years with many of them over litigating everything; and deciding not to pay rent over the smallest non-issues, or just not paying rent at all. I could cite case after case; and this topic is especially salient to me in the present moment because I am in fact dealing with one of these tenants right now and its a total nightmare. I will spare you the gruesome details of trying to work with this particular tenant but just trust me—I have an incredibly high tolerance to stress and this individual is doing their best to get as far under my skin as possible.

When the political class or the cultural zeitgeist tells you over and over that landlords are leeches and that "any attempt to profit off of housing is unethical"—people are going to take that to heart and have a hatred for even well-meaning small landlords. If you don't believe this is the attitude, go visit r/Seattle. The inflammatory language of politicians and cultural leaders sets the tone which plays out as legal battles and fights in properties across the city.

This obviously creates an adverse selection problem where small landlords illegally apply their own prejudices and biases in tenant selection. Honestly—could you expect them not to—when the repercussions of picking a bad tenant are so great? And when there are other demographic groups—like immigrants—who are absolutely, verifiably and consistently reliable as tenants. It used to be that it was the section 8 or low income type that were a huge problem but now there's an educated leftish fringe that landlords are also avoiding. Honestly with good reason, IMO.

Some homeowners just decide to not list extra rooms in their house outright. I remember hearing something like that Seattle has the highest number of unrented empty rooms in the country (though someone should fact check that). With the political climate the way it is here, it's obvious as to why this is the case.

pjc504• 1 month ago

corrosive to the social contract

What we see is iterated prisoner's dilemma. Enough people have had their landlords play "defect" against them (rent rises in excess of wage inflation, evictions, failure to do maintenance, intrusion) that the public have started playing "defect" against the landlords.

Same as in a lot of American public life.

rdtsc• 1 month ago

They are, however, indeed a "small[est] subset" to quote the gentleman in the article.

The numbers don't have to stay small because this behavior is not generated independently in a population. Multiple people may become aware of it by talking to each other, social media, forums, some crazy news event that refers to it, etc. All of the sudden a lot more people decide they can do it as well and tell their friends.

I am not defending it or saying one side is right or wrong just that when it comes to things like this there may be a different model at play on how this behavior is generated.

dominicrose• 1 month ago

Someone I know rented a flat in Draguignan to a "friend" of a "friend". After some time he stopped paying the rent and bought alcohol instead. It was a tiny rent but it lasted for a long time. She didn't have a mortgage on it but still I don't think I would be that patient as a landlord.

djeastm• 1 month ago

It sounds like an ad-hoc rent strike. Not a great sign for an economy.

inigyou28• 1 month ago

If history teaches anything, it's that people are so afraid of striking they only ever do it when the alternative is death.

delichon• 1 month ago

We have to consider what the unintended consequences are of public policies or practices where there are no immediate consequences for someone who falls behind on rent
Many [landlords] say they don’t actually intend to evict anyone, but that filing these cases is the most expedient way to get emergency rental aid from the city.

Economics in one easy lesson: incentives matter.

vannevar• 1 month ago

While that is certainly true, it's a very narrow view disconnected from the reasons for the policies. The most likely explanation for more people not paying their rent is that even fixed rents have become increasingly unaffordable because other costs have risen faster than wages. So yes, people are "choosing" not to pay rent because the consequences of not paying the rent lag substantially behind the consequences of not eating or buying gas. But it's an absolutely rational decision. FTA:

...plenty of economic indicators suggest worsening financial duress for people already struggling. Costs are going up faster than wages, and inflation that took hold after the pandemic has proven painfully persistent.

throwawayqqq11• 1 month ago

plenty of economic indicators suggest
— and no one's sure why

Now that i saw the framing, i am looking differently on the discussion here. The smalles troublemakers are more news worthy than broad economic factors behind us all, so you dumb down your headline...

gacgacgac• 1 month ago

People can't afford to live and food comes before paying your landlord? Economy is fucked right now. Income inequality pushes any gains into the hands of the wealthy.

And frankly, more and more people are willing to stuff their landlord if they feel their landlord isn't holding up their end of the deal.

toofy• 1 month ago

i occasionally come across some of the forums and online groups of landlords and the things they have to deal with, particularly in cities with strong protections for the tenants and its interesting to watch the perspectives.

on one hand i feel for some of the landlords who have to deal with some of the very real slacks who go out of their way to be difficult tenants.

on the other we’re talking about homes, by this i mean to stress home over investment. i think we’ve made a terrible mistake in incentivizing people to use homes as an investment. it should be difficult to evict someone from their home, and it should be risky and a pain in the ass to use someone else’s home as an investment.

i feel bad for _some_ of the landlords but from a larger societal perspective we’re going to look back at incentivizing so many people to invest as a landlord as a massive mistake.

dfxm12• 1 month ago

The landlord can divest themselves of the property. It's also ok if people lose money on investments. I don't think you have to feel especially bad for landlords.

halfxing17• 1 month ago

It's also ok if people lose money on investments.

The more likely it is for landlords to lose money on the housing provided, the more rents will go up to account for that risk premium. It's no different than risk-return calculations for any other investments such as stocks.

_DeadFred_4• 1 month ago

All slack has been removed from society. All pricing has been maximized. Every interaction capitalized. Every point of extraction extracted from.

People living in these situations now live from crisis to crisis. Not paying rent/dealing with the consequences is just another on the list. At some point people just become numb. Modern society at the peripherals is not sustainable. There will always be people in the peripherals, but society is now structured to require middle class type stability as the bottom baseline for an individual to survive.

kbar13• 1 month ago

and the middle class is being destroyed

inigyou28• 1 month ago

Has been. You could've said that 10 years ago, but it's completely gone now. People you think are middle class are probably just upper lower class.

FergusArgyll• 1 month ago

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/11/on...

And yes, it's inflation adjusted

BoxFour4• 1 month ago

The uptick in rental delinquency isn’t new. It started six years ago

It has nothing to do with Mamdani, for those of who don't want to bother to read. Most of this occurred under Eric Adams's watch.

Anecdotally, I do think covid made people a lot more aware of how deeply backlogged the housing courts are. It seems like a lot of people (like the anonymous one in the article) realized they could not pay rent and avoid being actually evicted for quite some time.

This is a recurring theme in city problems: Backlogged courts. Sometimes that's to the benefit of the less fortunate (here), but it also often results in terrible outcomes (see: Kalief Browder).

eru10• 1 month ago

I think even the benefit for the less fortunate here is at most a short-term one. In the longer one, you need building and renting out shelter to be reasonably profitable, so that people do it.

It's basically the same argument that says rent caps are bad for the renters in the long run.

tmnvix2• 1 month ago

We don't always have to consider the apparently very fragile and fickle motivations of investors. Social housing can and has worked very well in many cases.

BoxFour4• 1 month ago

Eh, I agree with the general point that rental housing has to be financially viable over the long run. I just don’t think NYC politics lets this particular problem turn quickly into a clean “landlords stop renting/developers stop building” outcome. It’ll look a lot weirder.

Affordable housing is too central to NYC democratic politics for the city/state to simply let a large share of subsidized housing totally collapse. More likely, they keep patching it with public money: arrears assistance, vouchers, preservation funds, regulatory tweaks, etc. That’s already basically the pattern.

The real likely long-term problem is that the city robs Peter to pay Paul: It props up housing operations by reducing funding for other services, creating recurring subsidy obligations, or risking pressure on its fiscal position and bond ratings.

They’re already doing that all the time: Part of how Mamdani plugged the budget gap, for example, was by delaying a classroom size reduction in public schools.

Obviously, I don’t think that’s a great long-term strategy. It turns a blind eye to an enforcement problem in favor of a recurring taxpayer-funded operating subsidy.

manyatoms• 1 month ago

So say they do get evicted eventually, what are their chances of getting the next rental?

N_Lens• 1 month ago

In a Palantir style totalitarian state with panopticon tracking of everyone's every thought, action and history? I'd say pretty good!

laweijfmvo• 1 month ago

i assume they also owe back payments? with interest?

fny• 1 month ago

You can't blame Adams for delinquent payments. He dramatically expanded housing vouchers (the source of the budget crisis) which in theory should have reduced delinquency.

Moreover rents for affordable housing haven't kept up with inflation while benefits have.

Arm chair speculation like what's in the article won't suffice. People need to be surveyed and interviewed to get to the bottom of this.

BoxFour4• 1 month ago

I can and do put some blame on Adams here, but I don’t think the story is ineptitude or corruption, at least on this issue. I think his administration mostly chose to prioritize the long-term housing supply problem, even if that meant more short-term pain for tenants.

He had a pretty good "Abundance-style" agenda IMO: City of Yes didn’t go far enough, but passing it at all was a big deal in NYC land-use politics. Various tax policies like 485-x are at least serious long-term attempts to restart housing production, even if the details are debatable.

He dramatically expanded housing vouchers

This is being extremely charitable to Adams. The big CityFHEPS expansion was vetoed by Adams and the city council overrode him. The Adams administration was clearly skeptical of short-term tenant-side relief.

You can see that in simple things like his rent board appointees: Adams-era boards approved rent increases every single year. I'm not saying that's bad and it's in-line with his general view of housing as a supply-side problem. He inherited a system coming off years of freezes and very low increases under BDB, so some correction was necessary.

But overall when given the choice, he did choose to inflict a bit of short-term pain for a longer-term view.

lyu072822• 1 month ago

Politico is an Axel Springer rag, in case anyone was wondering why they would put a photo of mamdani in the article. It's propaganda.

vachina• 1 month ago

It’s fascinating that America can be the world’s superpower(?) and yet huge swathes of society still live in unstable conditions like this.

cheonic52749• 1 month ago

It’s fascinating that America can be the world’s superpower(?) and yet huge swathes of society still live in unstable conditions like this.

Because huge swathes of society choose to live in these unstable conditions.

They could move to Detroit or even Salt Lake City, but they prefer the lifestyle of New York City.

chadgpt32• 1 month ago

That's what it usually takes. To be a superpower, the government has to extract a lot from the citizens. Russia is an even more extreme case.

anovikov2• 1 month ago

Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working.

Also perhaps there should be a new field for startups (yes i'm aware of 'proptech' but there has to be more than that), that will collect dirt on tenants to threaten them with legal consequences unless they pay.

jquery2• 1 month ago

Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners has an excellent scene where something like this happens to a kid down on his luck.

lyu072822• 1 month ago

and in cyberpunk 2077 there are neon signs above each apartment door indicating rent payment status, gotta bring public shaming into it too. This is the future our loyal soldiers for capitalism fight for on this platform in every thread lol.

inigyou28• 1 month ago

Good idea. Also a robot drone should come and sell your stuff on eBay.

eli_gottlieb5• 1 month ago

Why isn't it automated yet? You delay your rent and your door key stops working.

1) Because screw you, that's horrible and you shouldn't do it.

2) Because all these digital key systems are horrendously insecure and much more open to thieves and crackers than than a plain old door key anyway.

anovikov2• 1 month ago

(1) - what's horrible? renting out flats is a business. not paying the bills shouldn't be tolerated, ideally shouldn't be technically possible.

(2) is negated very simply - have both old door key AND digital security key which auto closes if there are unpaid bills for say more than 5 business days.

ares623• 1 month ago

Every day I doubt why I even bother reading this site. Then anovikov reminds me why. It's so I can keep on top of the creativity/depravity my fellow engineers are capable of.

epsteingpt5• 1 month ago

For those looking for the actual data. It's from 2024 - says nothing about the current situation.

* ~37K affordable housing units (baseline) across ~400 projects * 89% rent collection rate (down from 90.6% in 2023) * That's 600 units that went 'delinquent' in 2024 - assuming a $24K 'base' rent (just a guess) that's $15M in lost rent. * Deeply troubled projects (that can't survive without this rent) are at 11% - seems like the inverse. * Cumulative arrears (unpaid rent) of $500M

Here's the problem: * If no one had to pay, no one would. * We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society. * The projects fall into disrepair, there's no way to bring them back, because they won't be maintained.

Landlords aren't a great solution to the problem to be sure. They can be greedy and heartless.

The bigger problem is the bid up of asset prices - aka private equity and class warfare. As soon as you switch (from renting to owning) your incentives immediately shift.

There doesn't actually seem to be a way around this. Taxing to spend on rent ironically makes the problem worse because you just transfer the money into the cash flows of the owners.

Anyone thinking there's a simple solution to this problem hasn't spent enough time with the problem.

throwaway274483• 1 month ago

I don't understand why we can't just copy another country's housing strategy. There are many countries in the world where housing is affordable, relatively high quality, and the homelessness rate is low. What are we doing that makes this problem so seemingly intractable? Why is our approach to public housing seemingly worse than any other approach in history?

epsteingpt5• 1 month ago

A bit of a misnomer. Housing is, actually, extremely affordable across the US - just not in major cities.

You can plunk $10-$20K and get land and a homestead in dozens of states.

Agree with the other comment that overbuilding is a reasonable strategy, but if you look at Detroit downtown (mid 2010s) having an overbuilt downtown is bad too.

It's a hard problem.

throe939448• 1 month ago

You mean like in Sweeden, where you have to wait 20 years for assigned flat?

Europe has no homelesness, because migrants are housed at hotels at great expense!

raybb2• 1 month ago

What makes the problem intractable is that we have a system where for a huge chuck of the country your retirement is based on housing prices appreciating. It's clear if you directly own a home but even if you don't lots of the places you park your money to watch it grow are ultimately investing/speculating on real estate.

Some might call it housing asset based welfare. Even if you don't like that mouthful another simple example is the University of California putting 4 billion into Blackstone's REIT with "a minimum 11.25% annualized net return through January 2028." That REIT is 90% rentals. So probably at least a few people will feel the squeeze from it.

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/university-californ...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10901-009-9177-6

th0raway2• 1 month ago

Far fewer than you'd think: The vast majority of Europe is in the same boat as the US.

Whenever there's value in agglomeration (ie, all the time), the value of well placed properties just skyrockets, because growth is only going to make that land better. That's why a common recommendation is to up the tax of land as to make speculation with valuable property a bad investment: It's already price like an auction, so higher taxes cannot increase rent prices. The problem is political, as countries with housing problems have a whole lot of individuals have a big percentage of their net worth in housing. Big tax increases would make their property values drop, and they'd be quite upset. So it solves the problem while losing elections.

Instead, governments are happy providing tax advantages to existing residents, in practice making prices go up even faster.

lifestyleguru2• 1 month ago

It's the other way round:) Europe is salivating at the American real estate market. Some European countries don't have capital gains tax on real estate and real estate is the only investment vehicle without this tax. The only country where real estate prices haven't skyrocket looks to be Finland but their general situation is very specific and it's hard to say whether it's by design or by accident.

Social housing in Europe while exists, distribution of it is extremely corrupted process. Applying and waiting will give you something in 5 years or never, you'll know in 5 years. You have to be young couple both employed with perfect portfolio, or whatever the role model in that time and location is. Young couples both employed in desirable city basically don't exist anymore, even if you are after two rounds of waiting suddenly you are not a young couple anymore:) Usually you have to know someone and give a bribe.

digitaltrees25• 1 month ago

The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. America has enough land. We could build new infrastructure, give people lots of land or build houses like we did in the 40s and 50s. Of the price of a house was brought down to 1x the annual salary of the median individual income some of these problems wouldn’t exist. We need to flood the system with investment and inventory.

epsteingpt5• 1 month ago

See Detroit mid-2010s for why massive overbuilding isn't a good strategy here.

oatmeal12• 1 month ago

America doesn't need new cities. There is an unbelievable amount of space wasted within every city and any urban planner can show you. Development policy in the 40s and 50s was backward and we continue to suffer the consequences today.

th0raway2• 1 month ago

America already has plenty of cities that aren't doing very well, and aren't getting migration, so new cities aren't going to help. There's plenty of cheap housing inventory in the US, just not in the places where the jobs are.

maeln• 1 month ago

The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities.

So it is not simple. "Just build more" always comes up in those discussions, and while it does help (and has been proven to help), it is not the definite answer for the housing issues.

Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move. People don't move just because housing is cheap. Actually many people are willing to spend a significant amount of their income to live in specific places. We move to have a job, to build a career, to be close to friends and family, to have better access to entertainment and activities, ...

This is why most developed country experience rural flight. The housing crisis is (mostly) a big city problem. You can usually find extremely cheap housing if you go deep in the countryside. And building is also cheaper (the price of the land is less, there is less permits issues, etc).

And for big cities, "build more" is way more challenging. Ground space is limited, so one solution is to build more vertical, but it is costly and has its own limitation. Spreading may cause issue with water management and require big investment in a public transport infrastructure if you don't want to have a nightmare traffic. Pollution can be a very big issue, etc. And that's for all the non-political issues. The political side of things can get very messy, very quickly.

If there was a simple solution, every big city in the world would have done it by now.

ponector• 1 month ago

Detroit had tons of extra housing. Why have people people fled to other cities?

There is no easy fast solution to this. Just build more housing will not solve complex issues. Not saying there should not be more construction, though.

cucumber3732842• 1 month ago

I'm not sure how you get there without killing or violently subjugating tens of millions of people.

Everything preventing what you want is backed by a law. On the other side of that law is someone making a buck either via business being driven straight to them or business being driven away from someone else and they will fight to preserve it.

Even a simple amendment to the clean water act to exempt residential square footage would have every asshole who makes money off an engineering stamp up in arms. Even some guy who designs bridges would be pissed because he doesn't to compete with all the other labor that would put on the market.

Wash rinse repeat for literally every other issue that's roadblocking the construction of housing.

And this is assuming you want to just develop existing areas further (turn suburbs into cities, exurbs into suburbs, as happened from ~1870 through ~1970). Creating cities from scratch is way harder. Where are those people gonna work?

vjk800• 1 month ago

World is full of empty houses. It's just that people want to live in New York and not in some other place where housing is cheap or, occasionally, even free. And New York is already pretty full.

mullingitover2• 1 month ago

We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society

We tried cramming people from generational poverty into one place and it didn't go super great, therefore public housing as a concept must be the failure, and not our hilariously bad implementation?

Singapore, Austria, Finland, and even a number of mixed income public housing projects in the US have actually done quite well. The narrative that it's all inevitably going to turn into the worst examples is pretty worn out.

The bigger problem is the bid up of asset prices - aka private equity and class warfare.

This is definitely true: housing can either be affordable or it can be a safe investment, never both. Really private equity moving in on the safe investment is a symptom of the problem: regulatory capture by the landed gentry resulting in strangulation of production which benefits a small group at the expense of the greater public.

epsteingpt5• 1 month ago

You're seeing the next version of this - cooked up by the smartest public policy people - fail in real time. That's what this article is about.

89% of these projects are - in fact - doing well. But that number is decreasing. The net result is less supply of public housing in one of the richest states in the entire world.

I'm not sure what your proposal is?

youre-wrong312• 1 month ago

Singapore doesn’t have crime like the U.S. There is also no free public housing. You still must work and the housing is subsidised. But not free.

madaxe_again• 1 month ago

The thing that goes wrong again and again and again with public and low cost housing is that they build housing, and nothing else.

Stick a bunch of people in a tower in a field with no entertainment, no work nearby, building rubble surrounding their environment, no maintenance happening, no follow through on planned facilities, and the consequences are absolutely 100% predictable. Literally last night I watched a pair of bbc documentaries about a new estate, one from when it was new in the mid 60s, one from the late 70s. The residents are there in the 60’s, going “well it’s a pain having to walk all the way up but we trust that the lifts will be installed soon, and we’re looking forwards to the leisure centre” - fast forward 15 years, still no lifts, no leisure centres, and surprise surprise the kids are setting fire to cars to have something to do. If government won’t uphold the social contract, why should citizens?

The implementation is entirely the problem, and unfortunately few seem to realise that it can be done well. You can’t just make containers for humans and expect that to solve everything.

ashdksnndck2• 1 month ago

Public housing isn’t actually free in the countries you listed. It’s subsidized, but the people who live there still have to pay. The affordable housing units in New York are also subsidized. The question is what do we do if people stop paying even the subsidized rent?

euroderf• 1 month ago

We tried cramming people from generational poverty into one place and it didn't go super great, therefore public housing as a concept must be the failure, and not our hilariously bad implementation?

Well-stated! Yes, defective implementations with negative outcomes should not be used to make overly broad or even grossly incorrect assertions about human nature.

PeterStuer2• 1 month ago

Run it down, swoop in low, build it up, sell out high, repeat.

NY is back in the first phase of a realestate cycle. As the wheel turns ...

musha68k• 1 month ago

Cities have to truly compete with private rent-seekers for it to work.

In Vienna they are still building state of the art for that reason:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/10/the-soc...

energy123• 1 month ago

Rents are going down in Austin, Texas despite an increasing population and lots of landlords.

Iulioh• 1 month ago

Is charging just enough rent to reasonably mantain the building such a strange prospect?

mapt4• 1 month ago

Tax property values.

We could talk about the merits of Georgeism but honestly let's set that aside - conventional property taxes are sufficient here. Most of Manhattan apparently has <1% annual property tax, and the eclectic sometimes regressive way it's calculated in NYC is suggestive of corruption. These asset bubbles can only inflate because the owners make nearly as much money sitting on a vacant property as they make with tenants, so they borrow approximately All The Money to dump it into real estate. Property taxes are not just a necessary evil to keep the schools running and the garbage collected (cough), they're a tiny fractional "decommodification" of property as asset, because the money collected from the owners is spent on the residents. Most of this money passes through directly into higher rents, and we shouldn't care about that, because it's spent on the residents (if the residents don't want good public services, literally hand them a check, direct redistribution). This punishes vacant properties appreciably, and pushes them back into the market.

The ecosystem of debt and bank collateral that has grown around near-zero property taxes has strongly encouraged high vacancy rates, because the banks directly demand that what rents be collected, are high enough to justify the collateral valuation, but don't actually demand that rents be collected.

Set property values to the rate of inflation (depending on your preferences, CPI or local COL or local selling prices or S&P), and you have fully "decommodified" housing without lining the landlords up against the wall and shooting them, an option that is increasingly popular.

bell-cot2• 1 month ago

Most of Manhattan apparently has <1% annual property tax, and the eclectic sometimes regressive way it's calculated in NYC is suggestive of corruption.

While NYC has never lacked for rot and corruption, those really aren't needed - or even particularly useful - for something like this.

As soon as you've got any sort of law / regulation / status quo that benefits a class of well-to-do people, there will be intense pressure to maintain that situation. Vs. the opposition - honest reformers, idealists, the poor, whoever - even if they're far more numerous, just never seem to have the zeal / focus / attention span / whatever to correct the problem.

bberenberg2• 1 month ago

Am I understanding your point correctly as you hoping that an increase in tax rates drives property values down enough thay aggregate tax amounts are reduced?

The practical rental math in NYC is simple. Buy a $1M coop in a building with near zero costs. HOA will be at least 2k per month with the majority of that being property taxes. Thats your base rent. If you have a loan, add that to the base. You will not get cheaper rent until you drive aggregate taxes or interests rate down. There isn’t a huge profit margin on rents in NYC. I looked at a unit next door, and if we wanted to have rents break even on mortgage we would need to offer 85% cash up front. Im on the board of our coop, so I see how all of our financials function and same for prior buildings.

polnurfer• 1 month ago

Tax more

mschuster91• 1 month ago

These asset bubbles can only inflate because the owners make nearly as much money sitting on a vacant property as they make with tenants, so they borrow approximately All The Money to dump it into real estate.

The problem is, as long as the stonk based US pension system keeps flooding dozens of billions of dollars a month into the markets, there will always be enough money to flow into REITs and driving up prices, even for vacancies.

Now, introducing (or adequately hiking) property taxes has the problem it may cost the REITs a bit of their profits - but it will be a nasty issue for individual families and small shops, and the large stores will just pass on the cost to customers because even with that, they will still be cheaper than small stores.

Vacancy taxes sound good on paper, because they - if done well - only hit REITs that hope for value gains and other unproductive uses of rare real estate (like Chinese and Russians parking wealth in Western real estate so it can't be seized by the government). The issue with them is a second order effect. If made painful enough to be worth the effort and actually force landlords to either rent out if need be at a lower price or sell, again if need be at a lower price. That however immediately forces REITs to write off significant chunks of the asset value (if rented out) or, even worse, actually realize a loss on the books (if selling).

Unfortunately, the markets really, really do not like either of these two things happening, we've seen that during Covid and the hard pushback against remote working that followed.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: the US pension system being so laser focused on stock and asset markets is going to fry its host society alive, because what needs to be done for society to survive cannot be done because too much pensioner wealth would be wiped out.

jmyeet• 1 month ago

Here's the problem: * If no one had to pay, no one would. * We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons

Here's the actual problem. You've based your argument on a debunked economic theory ie the tragedy of the commons. You may as well argue trickle down economics.

Garrett Hardin wrote an essay called The Tragedy of the Commons in 1968 [1] and it became all the rage in neoliberal circles to justify wealth transfer to private hands (ie privatization) [2]. It never fit experimental data. Ultimately, Elinor Ostrom debunked it entirely using empircal data from the world over, work for which she won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics [3].

Whatever your arguments against free housing might be, the tragedy of the commons ain't it.

[1] https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy...

[2] https://socialistproject.ca/2008/08/b133/

[3] https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...

malfist2• 1 month ago

We've tried free housing before - it suffered tragedy of the commons. Not paying means no ownership means subjugation to the worst actions of the worst members of society.

I tried free housing for the first 18 years of my life and it worked out fine

JackFr• 1 month ago

Why aren’t you still there?

postflopclarity5• 1 month ago

Anyone thinking there's a simple solution to this problem hasn't spent enough time with the problem.

I've spent a lot of time with the problem. and there is a simple solution: relax zoning restrictions and various lot requirements to allow private developers to build more housing. the market incentives are already there, they're just blocked by NIMBY's and stupid city councils, etc.

rayiner2• 1 month ago

I suspect the answer is two-fold:

1) Pass legislation to ban the fed from pulling interest rates below 2%. The unprecedented ZIRP completely fucked up asset values and it will take decades to unwind it.

2) In cities, the government should own all the land and owners of properties should hold only a long-term lease. This will allow the government to control land use and upzone density while ensuring private building owners have skin in the game to actually build and maintain dwellings.

littlexsparkee• 1 month ago

the main reasons for public housing failing (see Cabrini Greene, Pruitt Igoe) in the US are concentrated poverty, rents not covering maintenance/capital expenses, lack of good jobs (too far to access on transit, companies relocated to suburbs), high youth to adult ratios. it's too reductive to say lack of ownership when tenants formed unions to get thing fixed but management didn't have funds, threat to maintenance workers (needing police escort to do work), organizational issues with mgmt (patronage system for jobs in public housing, lack of accountability).

RAGcontent• 1 month ago

the article said asset managers claimed rent collections went from 94% to 89% - wow such a drop! they fail to highlight that these assets are theirs to own indefinitely!

the_doctah2• 1 month ago

Your employer should pay you 5% less then they are legally obligated to. See how flippant you are then.

zkmon• 1 month ago

Social housing in the West is rewarding the bad habits of the people under the pretext that they need help. Every social housing place a like wound in the city and normal residents run away from those areas. People revolt when they hear of any plans to setu0 a social housing building in their locality.

Why this happens? That's because, the housing problem give the opposition a weapon to use against the ruling party, constantly hitting out and winning the sympathy of people. The incumbent administration has no other choice except pouring money into social housing and show that they are doing something to address the issue. No one cares about the actual fall out of this philosophy.

Just one of the evils of vote bank politics.

outime• 1 month ago

There's a limit to every city, and just building new infrastructure won't solve everything. It always lags behind demand and there are space constraints, budget constraints and countless other limitations.

At the same time, expectations keep rising for everyone (myself included): not wanting to spend one or two hours commuting to work, not wanting to live 45 minutes away from a large supermarket and not wanting to spend three hours or more just to meet friends or family among others. The problem is that it simply doesn't scale, and every country/city faces different challenges so there is no single universal solution.

I'm afraid the real discussion can't happen outside of small circles at this time because it'd involve highly controversial topics that much of the population in Western democracies (can only talk about what I know) isn't ready to confront. We have deeply ingrained ideas that are difficult to challenge so instead we'll probably watch cities fully collapse before anything.

wffurr• 1 month ago

What makes you think our current cities are anywhere close to the limit you propose?

nobodyandproud• 1 month ago

Given the absence of other data, I’d say the lack of consequences is the driver.

https://www.macrotrends.net/4694/new-york-city-area-unemploy...

NYC even before covid was renter friendly and difficult to evict, so things must have taken quite the turn.

Which sucks because—and the essay doesn’t specify—rent stabilized apartments remain one of the few ways for lower income to make it into the middle class.

It’s not all pleasant (mice and cockroaches measured in inches) but it’s what allowed me to save, invest, and get out.

snvzz• 1 month ago

When people can simply get away with not paying rent, what sort of sucker would pay rent?

Rent collections are down in New York

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