Federal Rent Price controls: a vision

This is prompted by the federal lawsuit brought against the maker of the software landlords can use to gauge what rent the market in their locale will bear. (Which, idk, it seems to me, is pretty much what you hafta do if you wanna sell any commodity or service, doncha? But moving on…)
So here’s what I spy with my Third Eye:
Being a landlord, which comes with a lot of expense and responsibility for maintenance, will no longer be profitable. So rental properties will be abandoned by their owner-operators. Squatters will move in and live there free, which will be nice for them!—until the buildings start to deteriorate. As they fall in, and heating /cololing/ plumbing systems fail, the occupants will guy the structures up any way they can, with whatever materials they can scrounge.
Enterprising criminals ( the Venezuelan gangs are a likely candidate) will then take control of these buildings or blocks and begin demanding money to allow people to go on living there (mos’ly) unmolested. I don’t think they’ll consult the federal rent control statute.
Eventually, after quite a few people have poisoned themselves with foul water (or maybe died of a cholera outbreak) and/or asphyxiated themselves with various portable heating devices, the entire shebang(and I use that word literally: it’s what the Andersonville prisoners called the pitiful shelters they rigged up out of overcoats and the like) will burn down, killing all of the less mobile occupants and denuding any survivors of whatever wretched possessions they had managed to keep safe from theft.
Is this what you want, Obamala Hapless?
Oh wait, yes of course it is. Americans in that condition won’t be “arrogant” any more, no siree! Why, we’ll ENVY the slums in Third World countries, at least the ones where the climate never gets cold!

The curtain drops again, as Yeats put it……but—i have seen what I have seen.

Can any of you dear polymaths help me out, share a vision of a less horrible future?

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No polymath-ery needed to see there will be NO less horrible future… It’s the explicit future they have planned for us with the as-yet-to-be fully implemented plan to outlaw single family zoning. They fully intend there to be Cabrini Green clones to replace a couple of McMansions in every suburb of every city. That way, the denizens will no longer be burdened by having to perform flash mob smash & grabs at retail establishments where every good will be locked up. The citizens (and illegal aliens provided with free housing, alike) will be able to simply walk out the (broken, of course) door of the immediately-dilapidating public housing - strategically sited in a formerly pristine suburb like a time bomb - and burglarize any nearby abode, whose owners will have already been disarmed.

That’s the vision of the “re-imagined” “equal opportunity” in tomorrowland of “our democracy.”. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you - with malice aforethought. I imagine that, as in Soylent Green, sumptuous suicide parlors will be adjacent to the abortion clinic.

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“I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.”
— T. S. Eliot

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The vision is accurate but incomplete. Think of the situation when an unfortunate landlord – probably under a federal hate crime charge for trying to evict her non-paying tenants – gets a knock at the door. A well-dressed Venezuelan, with one of those beautiful Venezuelan ladies on his arm, offers to help.

Shortly thereafter, the still well-insured building burns down, and the now-former landlord receives a percentage of the insurance payout. Probably a smaller percentage than she expected, but it can be difficult to understand a Venezuelan accent. Fire insurance premia will go up yet again for people far from the scene. Kamala’s bureaucrats will open a price-gouging investigation into the insurance companies.

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Thanks for rounding out my nightmare. But: No, they won’t go after the insurance companies. They’ll enact even more severe penalties for insurance fraud—and the penalties for that are already draconian.

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Oh! They will probably do that too. All those bureaucrats & lawyers in the Swamp have to do something to pass the time. But – a very big But – against whom will those severe penalties be deployed?

Just as it does not matter who votes, it matters only who counts the votes – it does not matter how severe the penalty, it matters only who the [Democrat/Soros] prosecutor decides to charge. For a demonstration – try to count up the number of times that Hillary! Rodman Clinton has been subject to prosecution.

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“share a vision of a less horrible future?”

As they have sown, so shall they reap, as they have done, so shall be done unto them. The generation of vipers now drowns in their own venom. The prodigal parents find their children have no fatted calves for them, nor even homes to which they may return. Their land which they inherited, they have not kept, nor passed down to their children, but sold to the nations, so that they might live in luxury, nor have they kept the jubilee, nor forgiven the debts owed to them, but enslaved their children to usurers, so now they themselves have nothing but debts and rags. Their wickedness shall be on their heads, and the blood of it.

The future will have fewer Boomers, the generation that inherited late 20th century America from their parents and passed it down to the banks and brokers. It will have fewer feminists, lawyers, schoolmarms, professors, MBAs, bankers, administrators, managers and landlords, and be all the better for it, by and by. Once the corpse of America is no longer full of juice, most of the carrion-feeding invaders will move on.

For some of us, that is a brighter future.

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NABALT (Not All Boomers Are Like That); I’m going relatively easy on the Boomers compared to Rudy Rucker (b. '46). In the first of his 'Ware novels (full text, Rudy kindly open-licensed them in 2010), Software (1982), the Boomers have all been deported to Florida, a.k.a. “The Gimme” (formerly known as the Social Security Administration), or “Pheezerland”

None of them had any money . . . the Gimmie had run out of Social Security back in 2010. There’d been hell to pay. A new kind of senior citizen was out there. Pheezers: freaky geezers.

To stop the rioting, the Gimmie had turned the whole state of Florida over to the pheezers. There was no rent there, and free weekly food drops. The pheezers flocked there in droves, and “did their own thing.” Living in abandoned motels, listening to their crummy old music, and holding dances like it was 1963, for God’s sake.


Castalia House Publishing founder Theodore Beale, of Vaud, Switzerland, better known as blogger Vox Day, has many times been considerably harsher, as well. Here’s one of his Jeremiads most relevant to the topic of driving up housing prices:

Has there ever been a generation more collectively wicked in the recorded history of Man? Has there ever been a generation that cared less about humanity, society, and its own descendants? As Neon Revolt observes, it’s enough to increase one’s desire for the Day of the Pillow a thousandfold.
image

Those who claim that Boomer hate leads to generational division are operating under the false assumption that it is possible to divide that which was previously divided. The Boomers first divided themselves from their parents, then from their children, and then again from their grandchildren. They never, ever, cared about anyone but themselves.

Were the Boomers egged on and tempted by others? Of course they were! And not every individual born during the Boomer years fell for the various temptations on offer. But it’s not as if other generations were never subject to temptation and “the Devil made me do it” has never been accepted as an excuse or obviated an individual’s responsibility for his actions.

Even if it is true that the Devil, or the Jews, or the cultural Marxists, or the communists made you do it, that doesn’t get you off the hook for your generation’s decades-long destruction of one of the greatest societies of all kind, Boomer.

You’re still the one who ate the seed corn. You’re still the one who raised latchkey children. You’re still the one who got divorced. You’re still the one who encouraged your children to take on massive school debt. You’re still the one who ignores your grandchildren in favor of ocean cruises and European vacations and other attempts to fill the void where your soul should be.

You’re still the one who sold the family farm that had been in the family for five generations. You’re still the one who owned four cars and three homes, but will leave nothing to your descendants.

And the conclusive observation, the most damning indictment, is that even now, even in your dotage, even with the grave beckoning and death approaching, you still deny that everything you ever did could ever possibly have been your fault.

UPDATE: Based on the responses from Boomers on Gab, one would have to conclude that Boomers are literally retarded and it was child’s play to manipulate them into destroying their society.

I know I have mentioned it before, but 95% of apartments in the Atlanta area are now over $1100/mo., and that includes studio apartments in the ghetto. The landlord cartel’s standard lease requires proof that that is no more than 30% of income, or $44k/yr. or $22/hr, full-time, 2000hrs./yr…

An average one-bedroom apartment is about $1600/mo., requiring $64k/yr. or $32/hr. to sign the lease.

How did the landlord come to “own” the property? Did he or she or it work for centuries to save up the money? No.
Was it or the money to buy it inherited from some one who was exceptionally productive? Possibly, but rarely.
Did they borrow the money? Yes, nearly always.
Where did the bank get the money? Not from depositors. They created a credit in their own account and a debt in the borrower’s account, creating money from nothing.

The money to buy that property never existed, but it inflated the money supply and drove up the cost of everything for everybody, particularly the people who work rather than borrow.

Another post from Vox:

Don’t blame the younger generations. They weren’t pumping up the money supply with all their home loans, second mortgages, and third car loans. Which, by the way, is the way to pin down those Boomers who try to blame everyone but themselves for their actions.

Because they are responsible for the post-1980 inflation. They borrowed and spent the money. Inflation isn’t printing money, it’s borrowing money. That’s how the money is created. And the private economy is still, to this day, considerably larger than the public one.

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I can’t believe anybody “liked” this. What, are you guys just pretending that highlighted post doesn’t make sense to you? Oh yeah, yeah, I can hear the “OK Boomer” chorale tuning up. But I’m not going to throw my tinder into the self-immolation blaze. Shit this reminds me of the “angry young men” crap that A.S.Byatt took apart so brilliantly.
But I mean, y’know, carry on, have your fun.

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There are some objective trends: The Potpourri - #309 by eggspurt

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I thought your post was grossly insensitive and offensive, given my past comment on this topic. Why do you care about what might happen to some landlords while ignoring what has happened to me? I have been homeless for over three years! It’s no conceit at all for me to say I am better than them and deserve better. Your and your generation’s amour-propre is not something that I and later generations feel obliged to subsidize.

To summarize, despite

brief brag

being one of the most polymathic of the polymaths here, (certainly I know of no one anywhere today with more diverse and potentially valuable inventions), having read the equivalent of over a kilometer of shelf space in a wide range of fields, surpassed most college professors in raw scores on intelligence tests by the age of 9, and coming from an exceptionally distinguished heritage, with extraordinary connections

lengthy oppression

I have been ruthlessly suppressed my whole life. No decent job will reply to an application from me. In the past 20 years, I haven’t made $150,000. In 2020-21, I was disabled for over a year by heatstroke indoors from being worked too hard in an unventilated sweatshop, wasn’t even allowed to see a doctor under worker’s compensation, couldn’t get a lawyer, never was allowed to see or even speak to the opposing attorney or the WC judge, yet still managed to get nearly a year’s pay in settlement within seven months while representing myself.

My landlord then, a New York / Israeli investment company that prefers to rent to illegal immigrants, tried to force me into re-signing a lease on a 3rd-floor, moldy apartment while I was disabled, knowing I couldn’t rent anywhere else, demanded more than rent specified on the lease, would not refund the overpayments, filed for eviction within two weeks, despite the eviction moratorium and despite being unwilling to accept the amount owed, were forced to dismiss their own case, then tried to get me to sign a liability waiver in exchange for nothing.

They promised me a choice of suitable apartments, but reneged. I was forced to live in the unsuitable apartment for another year, paying all rent, but before the end of the year, they filed again for eviction anyway, not because I didn’t pay, but becaused I wouldn’t sign the lease on the unsuitable and defective apartment. To get a hearing, I had to continue to pay all rent. The judge later acknowledged that the property manager perjured herself, acknowledged that I had never received a move-out notice (but said since it had been returned to sender, she said that constituted service), intentionally wasted my time in the hearing until 4:45pm, then refused to admit the emails she’d had for months into evidence.

When I fell out of my chair and started having convulsions she just started ruling on things without a pause, including things that weren’t before her, things over which she had no jurisdiction, and things on which she had no evidence. A year I later had the satisfaction of “eldering” her in Quaker meeting for nearly two hours, but that doesn’t get me an apartment. I can’t afford the rent anywhere, my most recent abusive job would need to pay more than 50% more to afford an apartment.

That’s leaving out lots of malfeasance and fraud and malicious conduct, some of which I covered in the post I linked to above.

But one thing I didn’t mention was my aunt Beth. She lived in the same house in College Park, MD for nearly my first three years, while she was going to law school. I was her paralegal and office manger in the mid-'90s for her family law practice in the early-1800s building at 34 S. Market St. Frederick. Maryland. (I lived on the top floor, the family development / contracting business was on the second floor, and Beth had most of the ground floor.) Beth largely specialized in representing fathers in custody disputes. I won’t try to describe in such a short space what a wonderful, wise and sensible lady she was. In 2007, not much older than I am now, she got cancer and I moved back up to Maryland to help take care of her in her final months. Now she was well liked by all the family, there were many family gatherings, the community loved her, even shut down the courthouse serving a quarter-million people for her funeral.

But one of my aunts felt I had insulted her, really a minor and brief flaring of temper for which she had a good deal of fault. She tried to get me thrown out in the snow shortly after Beth’s death, despite there being ample room in several houses, arranged for my wealthy parents to lock me out of what had been my condo in Atlanta, and caused me to have to sleep in my minivan for a couple of months in early 2008. It seems to me that sort of high-handed viciousness lurks just below the surface of many women, even, maybe especially, the ones for whom social status is most important.

Your generation owes me more than I owe them. My sort of man and your sort of woman are not the same.

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@Enon : So no one can post about a policy of the Democratic candidate for president because it’s “insensitive” to your situation and “offensive”to you personally?

That was my first reaction.

But it sounds like you have a very sad family situation: one aunt got pissed at you and convinced your parents not to let you live in any of the various other buildings your family owns.
I have a nephew whom his father my brother treated like that. I gave him a free place to live for six years, until his financial situation changed.

But I saw his pain and anger close up. And you don’t be around a furnace like that without getting singed yourself.
I alleviated his physical problem, but, as an aunt, I’m not the one who shoulda stepped up for him.

He’ll always be in pain, I’m afraid, and I’m sorry for that—just like I’m sorry for your obvious pain.

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I realize that this was just your initial reaction: “So no one can post about a policy of the Democratic candidate for president because it’s “insensitive” to your situation and “offensive”to you personally?”, and I acknowledge your overture at deescalation, but frankly I am having none of it. My point was not my personal situation, that was just one extreme illustration of a much bigger problem.

Your initial post was about a DOJ lawsuit against a software company enabling landlords to coordinate raising their prices not just to “what the market will bear” but far beyond it. You then continued with imagining the terrible consequences of landlords no longer being able to gouge the citizenry for 20%-40% annual ROI. This imagination was utterly fantastical, completely wrong-headed. There have already been terrible consequences to allowing landlords immense privileges, and I pointed some of those out.

My point was not just my situation, indeed I find the relentlessly self-centered viewpoint of many women and boomers and women boomers, not incomprehensible but reprehensible, particularly those who angle for status and favor of our supposed elites, those parasitical rentiers fronting for bankrupt banks and backed by the members of our corrupt bar and judiciary.

My point was the consequences for millions of actual Americans of allowing such inferior and inimical people to do what you are defending.

If you asked for a solution to the landlord / bank / exploitation problem, which is the direct cause of the homelessness problem, I could tell you about ways to use civil RICO for that, which I have researched extensively for use against not only landlords (did you know that harboring illegal aliens is a RICO predicate offense?), but also for use against employers generally, particularly those who pay less than is needed to afford shelter, against the worker’s compensation boards (whose mission is to enable employers to injure workers as cheaply as possible while providing maximum profit to corporations that have bought up most doctors’ practices in the specialty), against state labor departments (which in many states have no safety enforcement at all, and all of which engage in massive human trafficking for employers), even against the regional Federal Reserve Banks and their owners. But by your initial post, you have positioned yourself as an ally of such interests, thus an enemy, not only of myself, not only of the American people, but of justice.

This invites God’s vengeance: The Sins that Cry to Heaven for Vengeance(Wikipedia)

  1. Murder (as Abel’s blood cried out to God in Genesis)
  2. Sodomy (Ezekiel 16:49–50 : “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy”)
  3. Oppression of the poor, widows, or orphans (cf. plagues of Egypt)
  4. Injustice to the wage earner (“Behold, the wages you withheld from the workers who harvested your fields are crying aloud, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts”(cf. James 5:4)

What you asked was:
“Can any of you dear polymaths help me out, share a vision of a less horrible future?”

What, the complete, workable new economic system I gave you for free wasn’t enough?

Sure, for just three times the going rate for biglaw associates, $1,200/hr., 80 hour minimum retainer. I’ll knock off a thou for cash.

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I ain’t YOUR (mean) aunt, laddie, and I fail to see what my sex has to do with this.
In my experience, people ( regardless of their dates of birth) do not engage in enterprises wherein they can’t make a profit.
S’why I think a federal cap on rents will result in fewer, not more, rental units available, and lead eventually, to the other sequelae I posited.

In case you didn’t get it, I wasn’t advocating this scenario. It was a “vision” as in “nightmare”, not as in “dream”.
Excuse me for reacting sympathetically to the details you shared concerning your personal and family situation. Good luck to you.

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With respect, it would take a lot of very convincing evidence to persuade anyone that landlords are at the root of the homelessness problem.

Much of that serious unfortunate problem is due to the actions of the homeless themselves – drug addiction and other behaviors. And part of it is due to the destructive “environmental” movement and the Political Class’s foolish adherence to “free trade” which have led to the de-industrialization of the US, with the resulting loss of jobs & income leaving good people in a bad place.

There are many people ahead of landlords when it comes to apportioning blame – and for seeking solutions.

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The reason for homelessness is that nine-tenths of the population can’t afford an apartment.

Atlanta–Sandy Springs–Roswell metropolitan statistical area
Metro population: 6,307,261
All Occupations total employment: 2,817,660
75th percentile individual annual pay: $43,500
5th percentile apartment cost: $1100/mo., requiring proof of $44,000 annual income to rent.

Less than 11% of the population can afford to rent even the cheapest 5% of apartments (<700k out of 6.3M, $1100/mo. for a studio apartment, typically in a ghetto).

For all 2.817M employed people in the Atlanta metro area:
281k earn less than $26,800
704k earn less than $33,710
1.4M earn less than $38,440
2.1M earn less than $43,500, fewer than 700k people earn more than $44k
281k earn more than $53,740

Apartments.com:
$1597 avg. rent
$1512 studio
$1597 1BR
$1892 2BR
$2219 3BR

The cheapest apartments cost about 75% as much as average apartments with the same number of bedrooms.

According to the standard landlord cartel (ga-apt.org) lease terms, landlords require proof of 40x the monthly rent in annual gross income in order to be allowed to sign the extremely onerous cartel lease. According to Georgia law, this money is due even if the apartment is uninhabitable or even no longer exists, regardless of any breach of the lease by the landlord. All rent must be paid up to date to even get a hearing in magistrates court, which the tenant will invariably lose. In any evert, magistrates court proceedings are not on the record, and the case will have to be re-litigated de novo on appeal, while continuing to pay all rent on time.

The average household (not individual) income in the Atlanta metro area is less than $51,500, enough to afford a $1287 apartment.
The average household needs a 17.5% raise to afford the average studio apartment
24% for a 1BR
47% for a 2BR
72.4% for a 3BR

Data source, more complicated analysis

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_12060.htm
May 2023 Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Area Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates / Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA

https://www.bls.gov/oes/special-requests/oesm23ma.zip (37MB zip, with MSA_M2023_dl.xlsx, 30MB spreadsheet, see rows 6793-7521, filter by Col. K O_GROUP=“detailed”, and at least one of columns A_PCT10, A_PCT25, A_MEDIAN, A_PCT75 A_PCT90 (Z:AD)<= 44000, replace the 14 entries with TOT_EMP=“" with 100 nominal estimate, count the number of columns Z:AD less than the appropriate annual income cutoff ($44k or $64k for $1100/0.312 or $1600/0.312, respectively), for counts = 1…5, factors at the midpoints of the percentile ranges for cutoffs {0.10,0.25,0.50,0.75,0.90} are: {0.175, 0.375, 0.625,0.825,0.95}, so multiply the appropriate factor from this group times column L, TOT_EMP, giving the approximate number of peole employed in that occupational classification with incomes below the income cutoff, then sum that over the 450 occupational classifications. For either cutoff, the "” estimates were less than 0.1% of the total. There were 1.414M below the $64k cutoff. Using the 10, 25, etc. cutoffs instead of the category midpoints gives a number of 1.282M, a difference of less than 10%.

For the $44k cutoff the number below the cutoff is 908.5k. Using the 10, 25, etc. cutoffs instead of the category midpoints gives a number of 736.7k, 19% less. The 908k estimate is more accurate.

See also:

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Now ask yourself – Why are renters not earning enough to pay the rent? And are the actions of the Political Class making it cheaper or more expensive to build properties to rent?

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BINGO! I bet “regulations” easily double the cost to landlords of offering an apartment for rent.

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This is part of what I’m saying. Regs will keep increasing the costs to owners, while capping or decreasing what they can charge. So they’ll stop doing that business. As criminals take it over, however, there will be neither regulations nor caps on the amount of money they will extort.

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Regulations are a hidden tax on everyone and their main function is to justify the existence of the perpetrating agency; to prove how much they “care” about us and prove they are “protecting” us… Other significant hidden taxes are, of course, inflation and “taxing corporations”. The negative information (these have superseded low information variety) voters just eat this up. They haven’t any idea that every cent of every such tax is a pass through. They are the ones who pay it as higher costs built into everything, in the end.

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