The value only exists on paper. He halved it, he can double it. Happens all the time.

But those high rent areas… Okay I don’t know first hand, but in my reading I’ve been led to believe that it’s because companies like Black Rock come in and buy all the available properties, and whenever a property becomes available they buy it. They can then charge whatever they want and nobody has a choice because they bought all the available inventory, and they have deep enough pockets to outbid any competition. They don’t care if a unit goes vacant because they’re making it up on another unit. You can rent two units for $100, for rent one for $100 and leave the other one vacant; the revenue is the same but you’re actually better off leaving one vacant because you don’t have to pay for maintenance on it, and it’s one less property you have to actively manage. They could actually save money by leaving units vacant.

Price controls are really tricky because they vary. They would need to be set at a local level. But they also completely violate supply and demand logistics.

Lately I feel like maybe for-profit landlording shouldn’t be allowed at all, but I’m not sure how that would work.

Some people totally can’t afford to buy, or are only short timers, and need to rent. The people who provide that service including the maintenance are providing useful thing and deserve to get paid a fair wage. You can’t pick on them and punish them.

It’s the people who buy on speculation and then rent it out for more than their mortgage, so they’re getting their investment income and their rent income both. And if you do this with enough houses you end up raking in huge amounts of money. That’s when the giant investment funds get involved.

I think not allowing giant investment funds might be a good start. Maybe limiting the number of units.

Maybe a different tactic would work: for every three units you rent, you have to provide one unit of low income housing at a government set rate (which might be free) and standard of quality. At least that way if they’re going to make a profit they have to give back.

Another option would be: you can charge whatever rent you want, but are only allowed to pay for necessary services such as property management and maintenance. Any excess income automatically goes into a government pool that is used to subsidize rent for those who can’t afford it. It absolutely cannot be siphoned off into investment income. That means if you charge low rents you’re going to rent all your properties and be able to vet the people renting them; if you charge very high rent you’re going to have a lot of unrented properties, and the government will be able to put anyone they want in there–even people who might trash the place or turn it into a meth house. That incentivizes keeping rents as low as reasonably possible, I’m trying to make your tenants happy so that you don’t end up with any vacancies.

Yes…

When you raise wages the market can bear more. Say you’re paying $1,000 a month and have just enough left over for necessities. You get a raise for $200 a month, now the landlady can raise rent $200 and you’re left exactly the way you were before. She won’t figure this out right away of course, she’ll just keep playing with the rent until she hits a point where people are able to pay and she has a unit sitting vacant. Once that unit rents then she can start raising again

And the unit will rent as soon as someone–who previously couldn’t afford rent–gets a raise that makes them able to afford it. Soon the rent for everyone goes up, and now someone’s not able to afford it anymore and has to move out.

The end result is that one homeless person now has a home, one person who previously had a home is now homeless, everyone got shafted with higher rent, and everybody’s available spending money remains the same.

This is why nothing ever changes and the poor will always be poor: the system just designed to suck all excess cash out and put it in the pockets of the investors (landlords, banks, BlackRock, etc). The problem is not wages, because the market will always adjust to eat the wages. The system screws you because it was designed to screw you, and the people who have the ability to fix it don’t want to because they are the ones who benefit from it.

Even so, the problem is not capitalism, it’s our specific form of radically unregulated capitalism, combined with intentional inflation, fiat currency, and laws that favor corporations over people. No doubt that list could be made quite a bit longer!

I’m not willing to abandon capitalism but this version of it has become corrupted.

Another way to look at it is inflation’s too high

Well except if the prices are already going up, why would you want to add stress to the system that encourages them to go up even more? You’re assuming that things are disconnected but that’s in no way proven.

Is that illegal?

Well to be fair it’s not McDonald’s fault that the dollar is practically worthless now

Maybe they’re getting an erection cuz they’re falling asleep of boredom

Even worse, to unleash an untrained surgeon out to the world in exchange for sex.

Interesting. I actually preferred the subreddits that were kind of quiet, where 50 votes was a super popular post and got maybe two dozen responses at most. Any more than that and it starts to become noise. But then I have niche interests and I’m older. Zoomers seem to thrive on the chaos and have no problem with a rapidly scrolling chat window or a 1000+ comments on a post. I prefer a thoughtful audience to a large one, and longer well formed posts. (Not meaning zoomers aren’t thoughtful, they just maybe communicate it differently)

Great point. To see if its worth joining a community I check how many posts it has, and then look at the posts to see if anyone actually reads them (votes). Too little activity its not worth wasting my time. i already have too many communities subscribed as it is.

Minix! I actually went so far as to track down a copy of minix on Usenet and bought it, complete with floppy disks. But before I got around to installing it Linux became available, and I never got around to it. Can’t even imagine trying to install it in a foreign language. (It would be foreign for me anyway)

Yeah I installed 1.0 from floppy disks. I was really glad to get it on CD-ROM a bit later. I probably still have those floppies around here somewhere… I wonder if they still boot? Still have my old 486 around here somewhere too, come to think of it, but I needed a custom kernel to support my SCSI card and I’m definitely not going through that pain again. (Yes I had to boot off floppy drives in order to build a kernel image to be able to install it on my hard drive.)

Probably time to get rid of it.