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[ChairmanPoo]

I'm honestly losing the grip. A lot

[da_nang]

-snip-
since they're artificially unprofitable.

I urge you to reread what I said. "You already have a tenant; you already profit off him; so why must the rent go up when the demand goes up?"

Let's say the monthly maintenance of an apartment is 200€ and the monthly loan payments including interest is 300€. Total expenses is 500€. Include taxes and risk if you want. At a 10% profit margin, the monthly rent would be 555.56€ regardless of demand. It's a monthly profit of 55.56€ per apartment.

Considering most of the work can be contracted out or done on a server, you can just build 40 apartments and get that 2222.4€ net income for the next 60-100 years. And if all of those have tenants, then more demand doesn't change anything. Your expenses are still the same and you'll have the same profit. Raising rents at this point is just plain greed.

If anything, less demand make them unprofitable, simply because it means less people want to rent an apartment, meaning your units will stay empty, thus you must raise rent to cover expenses or destroy supply by bulldozing buildings. Which is why building luxury apartments is stupid if you're trying to rent them out. There are not that many people out there that can afford to live in them.

[Reelya]

But that's a phony example. When talking about rental accommodation, you're talking as if it's a fixed thing, with a fixed amount of tenants, a fixed amount of landlords, and a stable situation.

By your same argument, no worker should ever charge an employer more in wages than that absolute minimum that worker needs to survive, plus a small percentage, regardless of how in-demand your labor is.

Sure, an existing landlord shouldn't raise the rent on an existing tenant, so that's why San Franscisco has laws preventing that. But the net effect is that the private sector doesn't invest in housing, leading to outright shortages. That's the same thing going on with the toilet paper at the moment. Toilet paper is "cheap" right now, but you just can't get any, and in San Francisco the rent-controlled apartments are cheap, but there are less cheap apartments than ever, so you just can't get one and the people who have one are like the toilet-paper hoarders.

Also, you state that if there's less demand, rents go up. Which is just completely silly. That never happens, which kind of clearly points out that your understanding of how the rental market actually works must be wrong. If there's less demand property prices start falling, and they sell up. They don't raise rents, because that will only cause more people to move out, in a vicious cycle. In low-demand situations, you lower prices/rent until you hit equilibrium. If the equilibrium point is below your costs, then you go out of business, you can't magically "raise prices" to fix it. In housing, that means a sale of the property and it likely getting torn down to build a different type of building or accommodation that's in higher demand.

The point from San Fransicso is that they were using your basic logic when they brought in the rent control laws, and it actually caused about 30% of that type of dwelling to get demolished and turned into luxury condos instead. Overall, the net effect was that there were less rental properties and 7% higher rents city-wide.

Sure, you made the point that someone else could spend their own money to make low-cost housing and rent it out at low-cost, and technically make their money back. But that fails to account for the money they lose by choosing to do that over better-paying investments. If you're saving your money at 10% interest and I tell you to give it to me and I'll pay you only 3% interest, but it'll save me on rent, why should you do that?

[mko]

Official Italy numbers are growing like official USA numbers, with potential for more. It looks bad but may be indicator that testing is growing at similar rate. I hate that 90% of available statistics are at best suspect.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

-----------------

I am really tempted to start gambling on USA stocks, but it would be blatant gambling.
But current sellof is such nice sale and becomes more and more tempting.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/fjvtt5/oc_current_market_sell_off_compared_to_major_ones/

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Your expenses are still the same and you'll have the same profit. Raising rents at this point is just plain greed.

Newsflash, people are greedy. Person may earn 100$ or 10 000$ doing exactly the same thing? Expecting them to decide earning 100$ is not a scalable solution.

"Landlords should decide to charge less and sacrifice their income" (in normal situation, not during current shutdown) is utopia, and treating it as solution is going to fail.

You may as well decide to close police, courts, prison and dissolve laws and declare "Do to others what you want them to do to you.". And then complain when in absence of this tools you will get more thieves.

And if all of those have tenants, then more demand doesn't change anything.

It means that they can charge more and still get clients. You can try denying reality, you can privilege current renters at cost of new ones (rent controls). You can try obligating people to be landlords or force multiple families into one flat. (all was tried)

But only and sole solution to get more/cheaper housing at larger scale is to reduce demand or increase supply. AKA build more housing. In case of San Francisco - stop absurd part of limits on building new housing. Yes, there are indicators that SF needs at this point decades of massive construction to get costs to proper levels, so smarter plan than "drop all rent control and zoning at once" is needed.

You can also deny reality and be confused why it is not working well.

[da_nang]

Supply of apartments is more flexible than supply of labor. I can only work so hard every day, retraining takes years. A landlord can just build more apartments.

Even so, I don't need to maximize my salary. What am I supposed to do with the excess? My time is limited, my consumption is limited. As long as I live comfortably, why would I need more money? It's just going to sit there growing in a pile.

Greedy people are the problem. Demand doesn't suddenly change your expenses.

[delphonso]

Boy this thread gets off topic easy.

[Cyroth]

A local pizza delivery service had the perfect business idea in this time of crysis.
Order food for over 35€ and you get a roll of TP as a present, order for over 50€ and you also get a small spray tube of hand sanitizer.

Genius.

[Max™]

Well, looks like my concern about the 0% rate > futures drop was accurate, guess I should start doing stock things because I'm good at noticing totally unsurprising events slightly before they happen?

On the other hand I honestly didn't expect this administration would literally interfere with testing and flat out fight to the last minute before admitting this is a big fucking problem, and they've made it much worse than it had to be.

Apparently just as they were preparing for the transition the Obama team prepped the incoming Trump team with some rundowns of possible disasters and different ways to deal with them, one of them was exactly what we're facing now.

NoneCorrection: one third of those team members are still in the administration, not that they were bringing it up around the big orange bitchbaby months ago when it could have helped.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/16/trump-inauguration-warning-scenario-pandemic-132797

This was all preventable, but fuckmuppet and his cronies decided to pretend it wasn't real, ignore evidence that it was, deny any attempts to get something done, and stymied efforts by others where they could.

They didn't realize how bad this is going to be, but they wanted this on some level before they realized it was going to poundfuck them just as hard as it would everyone else.

[Frumple]

So hey, looks like Spain's straight up took over any remaining private hospitals, in response to the virus? Neat.

[Iduno]

In a healthy situation landlords with very high profits (or even profits expected to be high) will result in more housing being build, what reduces prices. If you forbid construction, you get higher prices or officially low prices but becoming a new renter is nearly impossible.

Theoretically. Here they refuse to build more housing because it could lower prices, even though most people are paying around 50% of their income for rent, and rent increases ~10% each year (which is obviously more than wages increase). You also need competition to make prices more reasonable. When all rental properties are owned by 2-3 companies, there's more collusion than competition.

People who burn toilet paper rolls tend to soak them in lighter fluid first - do they really burn well on their own?

I wouldn't think so. Anything that tightly packed takes a while to light.

Y'know, something occurred to me. Something that could basically completely eliminate voting as a disease transmission vector, even the potential for transference via mail.

Voting app. Also just calling it in. Can't catch the plague from a voting site or delivered ballot if you don't get either! I think we never thought of the plague-kills-your-gramma angle when discussing issues with electronic vs. physical voting...

Have you heard of a place called Iowa?

[scriver]

Also think of how close your mouth a phone is when calling, prime contagion area. You don't want it travelling over the lines

[MrRoboto75]

Supply of apartments is more flexible than supply of labor.

Supply of labor is based on hire-able people you hire/want and how many hours of work you give them.  If anything, labor is the most flexable part of production.

[Iduno]

Supply of apartments is more flexible than supply of labor.

Supply of labor is based on hire-able people you hire/want and how many hours of work you give them.  If anything, labor is the most flexable part of production.

Yes, but the length of contracts means you're locked in more. You can just order more or less (within reason) resources depending on your production needs. More labor means hiring and training time.

[Jopax]

Oh hey, first confirmed case in my hometown. And surprising absolutely no one it was handled horribly which will lead to a bigger outbreak.

Basically a dude and one family member got back from fucking Italy of all places a week or so ago and didn't think telling anyone was important, cue him getting hospitalized today and some additional fuckery going on without proper quarantine or letting the staff know where he was (all because he has a doctor friend) until it was too late. So now you got a bunch of random people in town that are most certainly infected as well as a number of important hospital staff that may or may not be infected as well.

Just fucking lovely.

[TamerVirus]

It feels as if everyone in the West is dropping the ball hard on this.

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

Lot of weak men in positions of power.

Meanwhile, my governor is getting into twitter fights with Trump, so my state is fucked because Trump's gonna be petty