This could be prevented by action at the state or national level, but "lets not hand out huge unearned tax breaks to business" isn't an idea that goes over well with certain legislators.

Yep. It would do a lot for the economy if the federal government banned this zero-to-negative-sum competition. Or even some big states.

Another consideration - even when they do pay off on paper over a generation or so, such as because the federal government pays for a lot of the initial costs, car-centric development projects tend to create more asphalt than their taxes can replenish long-term.

Once you realize that as a class business owners are shitheads, it's easier to say no. I think the schools should teach that more.

I don't dislike the concept but in practice it seems like the results are always corrupt and bad.

I agree it makes sense to ban these competitions between localities at the federal level.

I agree it makes sense to ban these competitions between localities at the federal level.

Is West Virginia still trying to get remote workers to come for the scenery and cheap houses?

Ohio recently "won" one of these races for the bottom and was chosen as the location for the 20 billion$ Intel chip plant. Hurray!

If the chip costs that much, they probably won't sell many.

The series that Minivet linked in 2 is now kind of blowing my mind if I were to think about what it would actually take to implement his recommendation in Heebieville.

ie, asking this:

Will this public project generate enough tax revenue to sustain its maintenance over multiple life cycles?

before you build a road or highway or whatever.

He presents it as though local governments have two options:
1. ask that question and only lay out money for projects that will pay for themselves to be maintained over the long haul,

or

2. keep growing so that your new businesses and residents can pay for all the stuff you built for your old businesses and residents.

Is it really that stark that those are your only two options?

There's always failure and municipal bankruptcy.

Is it really that stark that those are your only two options?

No, but the third option is to accept that your current taxpayers are going to be on the hook for maintenance costs for the new infrastructure indefinitely, and that's always a hard sell politically.

Competition between places for businesses can be good when there are real policy differences, e.g. Europe is becoming a tech backwater because of GDPR and it's Good that their companies have the option of moving here. But when it's just "who will give me the most tax breaks" it devolves into zero-sum nonsense and that seems to be the most common case or at least a lot of high-profile cases are like that.

I have no idea what GDPR is, but I kind of doubt it's a bigger problem than having to make voting decisions on the basis of "what is most likely to keep us a democracy over the next 20 years?"

I didn't click through, but what's the source of the federal government's power to tell a municipality that it may not give tax credits to specific businesses engaged in some particular activity?

Equal protection, sure, but what if there's a rational basis?

Should we take back all that land that was given to railroads, and turn it over to the Indigenous nations from which is was expropriated at gunpoint?

My beans.

GDPR is an EU data privacy law, the main practical impact of which is all the annoying popups making you Accept that they're using cookies or whatever.

I didn't click through, but what's the source of the federal government's power to tell a municipality that it may not give tax credits to specific businesses engaged in some particular activity?

You don't have to click, but you should definitely share the link that you didn't click on.

If it makes life even slightly harder for Facebook, I'm going to write my representatives to support it.

Unlike random startups, Facebook has the $ to pay a bunch of dedicated compliance personnel, so GDPR actually benefits them relative to the competition, which is why you see Zuck calling for more social media regulation lately when Congress hauls his ass in front of them.

O.K. I'll think of a different way.

Here's an interesting local version:
- In ~2010, company with recent success and projected growth is offered tax breaks to move to neighboring city as anchor business in a new development area. They promise to add 500 jobs, which is tied to $12M of the total incentive
- Success is short lived and they only add ~375 jobs
- City claws back 25% of the jobs portion of the incentive ($3M)
- Meanwhile the area development succeeds beyond anyone's wildest dreams, making it one of the most dense and walkable parts of the city with tens of thousands of jobs and thousands of new apartments. Of course this results is exorbitant rents and complaints of gentrification. Someone recently posted a before/after picture of dozens of high rises compared to dozens of parking lots, and one response was that they preferred the before because at least you could park for $4 for the whole day.
- The city the company departed from has no trouble filling the vacancy because the market is so hot
- Company has later success and adds several thousand jobs, including building yet another facility at the far end of the neighborhood that is still underdeveloped

Arguably the whole incentive was a wash- probably the neighborhood grows anyway, as shown by the city being able to claw back the jobs incentive because it's not like the company was going to leave, and they probably made up the balance in taxes paid. The lesson seems to be that the incentive was unnecessary if neighborhood growth was going to happen anyway, but there are some who still argue that it played a role in making development happen faster.

22: Is that Watertown?

No

23: Got it. I also thought there were some life science company tax breaks for Watertown.

I hate how that area of the city developed. I disagree that it's really walkable. Boston is a pedestrian-friendly city for the most part, and that area just isn't. I followed my hair stylist there for a while (he moved back to Newbury St.) and getting there was so unpleasant. Public transit went there, but as a pedestrian I felt like I was an inconvenience.

Also the convention center there is overwhelming, but now nobody uses Hynes. A friend of Tim' was there for ACS, and she was trying to find a Drug store. Google gave wildly optimistic times for walking to the nearest CVS.

I heard google maps now assumes you've got heelies.

Speaking of that, I think all of the map apps should be prevented from making travel time estimates that assume you speed.

They've just figured out how you, specifically, drive.

I also hate how they decide to do a faster route and say that they will change the route unless you select no. I can't tap my phone, because I'm driving!

I hate that too. My neighbors hated that they kept sending people down our residential street to save 30 seconds. They got the city to make it illegal to turn left during rush hour.

Within a five minute walk radius you've got 20 restaurants, 10 coffee shops, 3 hotels, a brewery, a supermarket, a pharmacy, assorted other shops, probably 1000 apartments, and a couple million square feet of office space. It's a little longer walk to initially get there from a major transit hub but I'm not sure how much more walkable it could have been.
The area around the convention center sucks because it's a bunch more hotels and everyone wants to be able to drive there so it's car-centric. I wouldn't consider that the core of the neighborhood.

I'd prefer to have one brewery I go to and one I tell people I wouldn't be caught dead in.

I thought embattled popup Europe pre-dated GDPR, and that GDPR added some real data protection (in terms of storage and users' ability to request access to what data is stored about them) without solving the more essential problem of making popups less annoying or pointless.

33- there is a second brewery for that purpose (the touristy one not the fancy one) but it's more like a 15 minute walk.

That's okay then.

Will this public project generate enough tax revenue to sustain its maintenance over multiple life cycles?

We are stuck with spending one million dollars to shore up the steepest street in the city, laid out in 1836, which is falling down a slope. There are 8 parcels on that street, and three are conservation land. The payback period on this project is approximately never.

Can you buy out the other five?

I thought embattled popup Europe pre-dated GDPR, and that GDPR added some real data protection

The special sauce I use for not having to put popups on the websites I build is that I don't collect personally identifiable data on my users. It seems to me that a lot more websites could do that. There are plenty of institutional websites out there that don't actually need to keep close tabs on every user as a means to achieve their organizational goals.

Unfogged should probably get some popups, though. We may be illegal in Europe.

Can you buy out the other five?

Not for one million dollars.

Put in a nuisance to lower the property values?

Maybe they will be cheaper once the road falls into the ravine.

32: The roads are really wide. To me walkable is the Back Bay, Beacon Hill, the North End, and the financial district. The streets in the Seaport are too big - at least along Silver Line way, near the ICA.

It's the walk from the transit that bugs me. Contrast that with the Back Bay or Beacon Hill.

I went to check out the Seaport once but we decided not to take out a mortgage to go to the aquarium.

41: I think they prefer to be called "Karens" now.

The hidden secret of aquariums is that they kind of suck. Same with zoos.

Except zoos don't hide it very well.

Is it really that stark that those are your only two options?

Option 3 is make better use of your existing infrastructure - with infill density. Then you [have the potential to] get a city tax base that actually sustains itself rather than acts as a drain.

Props to you Spike for sticking to to your principles. Personally I'm very happy to give my data away in exchange for getting better-targeted ads. Seems to me we have a tyranny of the minority going where a handful of dedicated paranoiacs have willed a policy into existence that makes life worse for just about everyone.

Poor communities pay more per job than rich communities (which is completely unsurprising)

It is completely unsurprising, I would think. If there's something about community A that makes investments there more productive than in B- like, say, A is near a sea port and B is up in the mountains, or the population in A is better educated - then investors are going to choose to invest in A rather than B, and so A is going to become rich. So if you chuck the same amount of inward investment at each community in the form of tax breaks, community A will produce higher returns and therefore more jobs.

13 Europe is becoming a tech backwater because of GDPR

"Would like to see the thinking behind this assertion," he said from his desk at a software company.

39 The special sauce I use for not having to put popups on the websites I build is that I don't collect personally identifiable data on my users.

Very much this. A site also does not need to partner with 300-500 (I've counted sometimes) other sites to get its job done. That number of other sites do not have legitimate interests in the information collected by the first one.

47: The Boston Aquarium sure does if you're older than 6. I've always wanted to go to The Monterey Bay Aquarium.

52.1: presumably that one study that said European app developers weren't producing as many apps as they should be?

Saiselgy has been saying that the important thing privacy advocates are breaking is the census. He says the government is intentionally adding noise to the data and using estimates of eg household size to make it impossible to identify individuals but also making it less accurate. I haven't seen much analysis beyond these claims though so I don't know about how much it's messed things up.

Do you mean Seaport Blvd? Silver line way isn't near the ICA. Seaport Blvd is the widest road in the area but I think it's comparable to Boylston.

50: I'm more than a little creeped out by the ads I used to get before I took Facebook off my phone.

Saiselgy has been saying that the important thing privacy advocates are breaking is the census. He says the government is intentionally adding noise to the data and using estimates of eg household size to make it impossible to identify individuals but also making it less accurate.

I once peer reviewed a paper about how to do this, and it all seemed very reasonable, with different layers of data distortion calibrated to the actual use of the data and the amount of security in place required to provide reasonable expectations of data privacy. Handing out raw census data for anyone to play with is bad.

Its also a global practice and not just something Americans have cooked up.

That's not new, is it? I recall learning that in research methods class and that was close to 30 years ago.

I always learned you should never click unsubscribe in emails because it just confirms that they have a real address, and while I'm sure that still applies to obvious spam, I unsubscribed from a bunch of car dealers, charities*, event venues, etc. and it worked. That plus gmail filtering of blatant spam has cleaned things up pretty well. I don't know if that's a GPDR outcome but something seems to have improved.

*Goddamn Dem fundraising emails and sharing of lists is the worst**, but they do take you off the list when you ask. I'm guessing the "55x DONOR MATCH *****NOW*****!!!" Trump emails don't work the same way.

** Somehow I end up on lists of congresspeople in random districts. Grijalva?

***** Those were emphasis stars not footnotes.

The Seaport's a bit different just because there are so many skyscrapers, but what strikes me about the recently-developed neighborhoods as experienced from street level is how alike everything looks. The new Harrison Street development in the South End (Ink Block and the rest), the Assembly Row area in Somerville--they're all sort of identical, bland, boxy buildings. Lots of shopping and restaurants, fairly dense and walkable, just... lacking the sort of variety that makes walking in older neighborhoods pleasant.

I think there's a difference between statistical sampling for projections and what he's describing. Sampling was an issue in 2010 because it would pick up traditionally underreported groups that favor Dems and Republicans argued the Constitution forbid this because it says actual enumeration, but is totally scientifically sound. This sounds like intentionally making estimates less precise, sort of the opposite so that the data can't be disaggregated with extreme precision.

61.2 is the most right thing ever.

62- How much of that is cost (5-over-1 cheap wood frame) and how much is permitting? If every single design variation has to be approved, like the horror story from the west coast about the wrong brick pattern delaying construction by a year, then obviously developers aren't going to risk anything that could be called "out of character" or need separate approval. Which shouldn't even be a valid argument in former industrial areas- yes, my new building is not a trash-strewn empty lot.

They replaced a perfectly good abandoned steel mill with a big box development here. On the one hand, it's a horrible visual spectacle. On the other hand, it turns out having Target and Lowe's nearby is nice.

It's been years since I went there. I went to a couple of events at the Convention Center foe Tim's work.
and I went to my hair stylist (who recently moved to CA), but he moved back to Newbury, maybe 8 or 9 years ago, but it was close to the ICA. It could be the bus I was thinking of.

65: I don't know! I'm curious about that. I would have thought that a lot of these were large enough projects that they needed some kind of approval anyway, but I don't really know.

Now I'm thinking we need a Seaport meetup.

We have a nice new building in town with our delicious bakery that just directly stole the look of its facade from a specific old building in Chicago. It's pretty great, and much more appealing than any of the other new construction.

62 et al: It's not really the permitting*. I spent ~15 years on a neighborhood design review committee (comprised mostly of design professionals), and believe me, we weren't dumbing down anything that was brought in. What corporate architects mostly bring to the table is already incredibly dumbed down, and when they vary from the repetitive norm, design reviewers are mostly ecstatic. A few blocks from me there's an apartment building that doesn't look like all the rest, but also doesn't look especially beautiful or interesting IMO (or the O of anybody I know), but people at the city raved about it.

We've basically spiraled up our own buttholes as an industry. The code writers funnel buildings into a limited number of economical forms. Builders are mostly bad, and are only competent at the few things that are so common that they get lots of practice. Developers care a lot more about cost certainty than anything else. There are only so many ways to clad a 5+1, and they've already all been done a thousand times. Oh, and the public can't imagine an urban landscape that doesn't look like car-filled streets lined with buildings for the 19th century.

Things are completely different in enlightened topless Europe, by which I mean: every single aspect of what I said above is completely different. Building codes are more permissive about life safety stuff but way more restrictive about energy usage. Builders never lost the craft tradition and never tried to turn everything into Levittowns. Legal structures and finance are in place for different development models. All of the above empowers architects to get creative, and the frequent use of design competitions pushes innovative design. And the public would burn shit down if they had to live in the cities and suburbs Americans demand.

I truly don't know how to fix any of this.

*the permitting process isn't great, and in some places it's awful, but it's mostly a symptom of a systemic problem, not a particular cause. Especially wrt aesthetics--you see pretty much the same stuff in places with overbearing design review that you do in places with little or none.

If every single design variation has to be approved, like the horror story from the west coast about the wrong brick pattern delaying construction by a year

I get that this is frustrating but I think a huge reason people think 5 over 1-type buildings are ugly is the shitty-ass siding they inevitably use. We have a great building here in town that went up recently and houses a lot of people, but they picked terrible looking fake brick siding that looks like terrible fake brick siding, and that's one reason people don't want these things in their neighborhood.

72 before seeing 71.2, but I think brick siding that looks like actual brick would be a good step forward, if not so good as actual brick.

Honestly, my house is a little ugly from the outside. In its defense, lots of people did much worse in the 70s.

In Baltimore they use a lot of formstone. Its tacky in its own way, but way less ugly than pressed fake-brick panels with their repeating patterns and obvious seams.

Insulbrick is the local abomination. I think it was made with asbestos on presses lubricated with oil from baby seals. I gather that removing it is an issue.

Yeah, that stuff is so hideous, its amazing.

I'm pretty sure I spent a couple days chipping a bunch of it off a shed my brother owned, one time. That was before people cared about asbestos.

In Baltimore they use a lot of formstone.

This is amusing:

There is debate over the historical significance of Formstone. Because it was usually applied to buildings long after their initial construction, Formstone is viewed by some as an inauthentic addition that detracts from the historical significance of the building. But some historic preservationists, architects, and citizens, particularly in the city of Baltimore, argue that Formstone has acquired its own historical significance as it has become a part of the Baltimore landscape and is representative of the history and evolution of the city's working-class neighborhoods.

Of course the problem is, "historical significance for whom?" If you grew up with it, I'm sure it would feel like an important part of your sense of the city.

When I lived in Baltimore there was a guy who had formstoned his Cadillac. Formstone is a part of the cultural heritage.

I have a question. Our city council is considering an ordinance to help with derelict landlords and unsafe rentals, where the city would do inspections of rental properties and require landlords to fix anything unsafe. It's in the very early workshopping stage still.

The big concern is how to keep the landlords from passing costs on to their tenants, especially since this will be the most shitty rentals by the most vulnerable people. They're talking about a 1 year moratorium on raising rents, and rehab assistance to the landlord if they can show hardship. What else can be done? How do you mitigate against a landlord saying "fuck it, I'll just bulldoze the old house and sell the property" and evicting someone who definitely won't be able to find another place that charges $550/month?

(The conservative members of the council seemed especially convinced that the whole program might be a bad idea because of this problem, so I am very interested to know how best it could be solved.)

Do you have a sense of how many of the landlords in question have multiple properties? It might be a different solution if you're thinking about the person who owns a 4-plex and lives off the rental income; vs the person (or company ) that owns several buildings which will be inspected on a schedule and upgrades will get spread out over time.

80: That's a tough one. I take it the city doesn't have the fiscal capacity/political interest to pay for the upgrades itself, which would be one approach.

What are the major costs?

Things like lead abatement and asbestos removal could maybe be funded through a different channel. If you can removed some of the high-ticket items like that, maybe it would be easier to focus on "fix these rotten stairs before someone falls through them" without the threat of massive costs.

Otherwise, an across-the-board rent increase moratorium might be the best approach. It's a crude instrument, but I'm sure the city doesn't have the administrative capacity to oversee a more granular approach of monitoring individual landlords and policing their spending and rent decisions.

There are grant programs that could theoretically fund this kind of thing, but you're not an entitlement city so you'd have to apply to the state and it doesn't look like they have any programs that would fit.

There could be programs at the federal level that you could apply for directly, especially for specialized things like lead abatement (as Spike noted).

I was just listening to the volts podcasts about companies who (essentially) finance energy improvements and are paid back out of the energy savings. Would it be possible to look for an additional partner so that the total package would be [funding from city] + [energy efficiency funding] + [out of pocket cost to building owner] for [repairs] + [heat pump] (or whatever). Would it look more attractive as a package?

For example (but I don't think this specific company operates in TX): https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-andy-frank-on-how-to?s=r

Would it be possible to look for an additional partner so that the total package would be [funding from city] + [energy efficiency funding] + [out of pocket cost to building owner] for [repairs] + [heat pump] (or whatever).

It's definitely possible to structure a program this way, but it's hard to do something that complicated at this small a scale.

I think we're an entitlement city. At least we get a lot of CBDG money. They were talking about using that money to help low income landlords, like those renting out an old house they inherited.

What about making part of a finding of violation a rule that a landlord can't raise rent while subject to an unremediated violation or within some period of time (a year?) after the violation is remediated? And accompany it with some financial assistance to landlords in remediating violations on the landlord making a showing of hardship.

There's probably a million reasons that wouldn't work well, but it was the first thing I thought of.

81/83: It's super preliminary - just a workshop by a guy on city staff to city council. He was very upfront that a lot of these details aren't known and he doesn't yet have solutions to a lot of the problems. I think next it goes to the public for vetting and feedback.

91 is what the presenter was circling around.

Maybe low-interest financing from the city to those who don't qualify for a grant? and then extended rent control time span?

Re-housing assistance if the landlord shuts down the property altogether?

whoops. Nobody pay any attention.

Come to think of it, I did just repeat exactly what you said in 80 -- I think I didn't quite understand it until I repeated it. But it shouldn't be too much of an administrative burden, I don't think: if the city has the capacity to issue the violation, it should have the capacity to administer a rent freeze for the property in relation to the violation.

I think a key thing would be a reg requiring notice to the tenants of the rent freeze -- maybe at two points, when the violation is issued and when it is determined to be remediated, so the tenants would know when their rent was going to come unfrozen.

Looks like you are an entitlement city for CDBG but not for some of the other programs that might fit. There are limits on what you can do relating to housing with CDBG, but I think you could find a way to make this fit. LB's idea in 91 sounds like a good approach.

But it shouldn't be too much of an administrative burden, I don't think: if the city has the capacity to issue the violation, it should have the capacity to administer a rent freeze for the property in relation to the violation.

Yeah, I raised the issue of administrative burden and I do think it's something to think through carefully, but this is probably right. What may be tricky is keeping them from just waiting until the end of the freeze then jacking up the rent as much as they would have anyway, but at least the freeze with adequate notice gives tenants some time to prepare for that possibility.

I think that may be either not a problem or an insoluble problem depending on how you look at it. That is, in the absence of a general rent control ordinance, the rent for any apartment is going to be (roughly) what the market will bear -- if landlords can get tenants at a higher rent, they'll raise rents. You don't want there to be a class of apartments that are cheap because the apartments are unsafe, you want (or at least expect) everything to rent for the price of a safe apartment, because you want everything to be a safe apartment.

Giving tenants warning and time to prepare is a good thing, but I don't think you should be thinking about holding rents down long term for specifically the apartments with safety violations. Affordable housing should be addressed separately.

We have this thing where we are rehabbing a bunch of old housing using energy efficiency funds from the utility, but also by selling tax credits, which is a scammy thing I don't understand but which seems to be a viable means of funding stuff, if you don't mind holding your nose.

I used to love holding my nose, but now everyone in the grocery store looks at me funny.

100: Yeah, big picture what seems to be going on here is that these landlords are cutting corners on maintenance and passing the savings along to the tenants, who get low rents but poor living conditions, and can't just leave because the housing in good shape is more expensive for that reason. So really, the rents should be higher, because they should be set to cover reasonable maintenance costs and they aren't. Some sort of tenant-based rental assistance might be the solution to at least ease the transition for tenants. I wonder if you could make landlords accept that as a condition of fixing a violation.

Curious where Unfogged is at on rent control generally. Guessing mostly pro-.

I've never thought much about it. I have a general negative affect toward people who rent out properties, but only because of a lifetime of bad experiences with people who rent out properties. My main political belief is that income and wealth need to be distributed exactly as they were in 1980.

Yeah, rent control is not really a live issue in my life so I don't have a strong opinion on it. If it did come up as a serious proposal I think it would depend a lot on the details.

Fucking shitheads from other states who buy houses for speculation and then abandon them in such a state that local taxpayers have to fund their demolition can fuck right off.

You can use CDBG for that kind of demolition.

My main political belief is that income and wealth need to be distributed exactly as they were in 1980

I just sent HG a guest post for which that comment would be precisely on topic.

Gen X in the house.

Personally I would prefer to have more income and wealth than I did in 1980.

Rent control may be useful in some limited situations but it doesn't get you more housing, which is what is needed to actually get prices down.

In 1980 I was pooping in my pants and it was somebody else's problem. That's a kind of wealth that money can't buy.

I am sort of 'depends on the details' on rent control -- I can imagine regulations that might protect vulnerable tenants without screwing things up too much -- but mostly I'm with Spike. To make prices affordable you need abundant housing in desirable locations.

Doesn't LBJ's state put pretty harsh restrictions on how localities may regulate rents?

I agree with Spike in the grand picture but I think rent control is still good for other reasons. First, economic externalities: rent increases/evictions are a big source of dislocation, and unemployment that should be avoided a priori, and where tenants are fundamentally in too weak a bargaining position compared to landlords for us to get the optimal outcome. Second, moral insult: it's blatantly and palpably unjust when a landlord demands 10% more than what was sufficient for them last year, and the government can and should do something about that. We're talking about people's homes.

(If on a continuum, 1 is where all all economic relationships are founded on equity with the richer deferring to the poorer, and 10 is where every contract is as mercenary/Ferengi/cutthroat as possible, rentals are currently about an 8 or 9 in most of the county and we need to move at least one notch to the left. Landlords can bear some minor portion of their tenants' economic risk.)

But yes, you need a lot more supply (public and private) to really get rents down/stable. When you rely on rent control alone, which usually expires or at least is greatly weakened for a vacated unit, you end up with a tiny aristocracy of people paying 1995 rents and focusing on retaining that, while ignoring the many more people who need to move periodically for a range of reasons and can't benefit.

I think people with commercial property should be required to replace toilet seats if there is an indelible stain that is yellow or brown.

Also, the toilet paper roll holder should actually spin.

And the one urinal that sometimes is a waterfall when you flush it should have an actual plumber look at it.

My views on rent control are shaped by a particular part of enlightened topless Europe and by about a decade of dealing with a large corporate landlord, whom I generally affectionately refer to as The Fuckers. Generally, I am for it.

My views got sharpened when Berlin passed a rent-reduction law (which should have brought me a lot more relief (boosting my disposable income by 66% in my initial calculations (I pay way too much in rent because when we moved in we were a two-income semi-diplomatic family and are not anymore (see 116 above about externalities (which Germany is actually pretty good about; when we were near crisis I learned there is a thing called Umzugsvermeidungsunterstützung, support to prevent forced moves))) that underestimated the fuckery that The Fuckers were casually engaging in) than it did) and the top national court said lol, no, that's a federal responsibility good luck getting rural-ish states to care.

I'm looking for a Bundestag rep to sponsor my Act on Improving the Efficiency of Rental Relationships, because who in Germany would really be against more efficiency, right? Anyway, the gist is that the more properties an entity, or any linked collection of entitites, owns, the less they are permitted to collect rents above the locally prevailing rent. (This measurement, Mietspiegel, is a thing that already exists.) Beyond a certain point, the deviation would turn negative, such that the more properties owned, the further below the prevailing rates have to be. This should be measured locally, regionally, and nationally.

Big corporate landlords are always banging on about how efficient they are. Time to put up or divest.

And tbh I'd like to see that curve be very punitively negative so that divestment is by far the better option for the companies. Several in Germany have gotten so big that their corporate performance is utterly divorced from anything to do with owning properties. They are financial managers pure and simple; their portfolio just happens to be people's homes.

In my case, there were rats in the attic (the city pest control person said he'd never seen evidence of so many in a dwelling) because The Fuckers hadn't bothered to install the simple devices that prevent rats crawling up pipes. When we moved in water pressure was a dribble. Three years ago the pipe carrying water to building (vintage 1940) collapsed entirely. The Fuckers did nothing until city health authorities got involved. (Thank goodness The Fuckers haven't figured out how to get the city not to care about such things. I guess that's the only good aspect about a company too big to tend to any details.) Now the building gets its water from a side pipe that diverts from a row house.

Anyway.

Doug, that sounds like a nightmare. Sympathies.

BG, thanks!

There's lots to like about the location, and it's been a good place for the Kinder to grow up, but when the city of Berlin talks about expropriating certain corporate landlords (technically re-socializing what was originally built as public housing), I'm like "With a large side order of tumbrils, please."

More generally, I wonder what the Unfoggedtariat thinks about the aphorism, "Mortgages are rent control for middle-class people."

Houses are great, until the basement stream returns.

After Trump's tax thing, there's no more real tax saving with it and I'm paying less to live in a house than the newer one bedroom apartments go for. But every few years, something really expensive has to be done.

126: I wish I'd bought into my current neighborhood in 2015 or 2016, and refinanced in 2021 but I wasn't in a position to do that. My rent wasn't going up that much, but our place was cramped and when people moved out they did cheap renovations, and raised the rent a lot.

There were a couple of years with no rent increases. I had some significantly better jobs, but the rent was going up faster than our salary increases - especially if you included the fact that health insurance goes up, so after-tax wasn't really going up.

Tim moved in at a slightly below market rate wage, and it was tight. When the site closed and he got a better job, it was comfortable. By the time we left, though, if he'd been there by himself, it would have been tight.

Even with a fixed rate mortgage, my property taxes are going to go up. Some protection from rising rental rates, but valuations go up and so do taxes.

MA has a renter's deduction for state income taxes but I don't think you can deduct property taxes as a homeowner. I never cashed in on the unjust middle class homeowner subsidy.

We were thinking of it as starter house, but then 2008 happened and trying to get a bigger house seemed risky.

And, let's be honest, it had become a starter home.

I got a market adjustment last year, but they took away the money for going on a spouse's health plan, so my after tax income dropped. Tim got a promotion, so we're not in a terrible place but not really moving forward.

I sold out to big pharma. It's great.

The kind of rent control I want to play around with is requiring landlords to offer really long leases (that the tenant can terminate early without penalty). Ten years with rent increasing no faster than inflation? Like that. But it's the sort of thing where the details matter a lot.

123. That's interesting, it's what the communists tried doing in central Prague to be able to bulldoze the decayed remains later. Who owns the land the building is on? I've heard that housing:population unusually high compared to the rest of Europe in Berlin, built up around the turn of the century and then depopulated during the cold war years when the rest of Europe grew and improved, thoughts?

With a mortgage, owner decides about improvements, rebuilding, relocating. The US subsidizes homeownership with favorable tax treatment, 30-year mortgages with no prepayment penalty exist only in the US as far as I know.

Beyond a certain point, the deviation would turn negative, such that the more properties owned, the further below the prevailing rates have to be. This should be measured locally, regionally, and nationally.

This doesn't seem bad per se, but it seems mostly like a much less efficient implementation of a wealth tax.

I would agree with 116. I think rent control is a poor way to set the average market price (and I think the average market price is important to track), but I also support tenant protections.

Yeah, I agree with 116 too. Renters should have enough rights that renting is a legitimate option for people who want a place to live for a decade, and that means some kind of rent stabilization. (I mean it's not like 30-year fixed rate mortgages would exist in an unstructured market...) It was a big shock moving to a town where renters have no rights at all, and you have to decide each year in like December whether you're signing for a whole year starting the next August. I basically felt like I had no choice but to buy a house, just to actually have some rights.

132: My MIL has that. She sold her house in the sticks 2 hours from Toronto for a godawful lot of money and moved to Ottawa, thinking she could buy, but the market there has gone crazy - especially crazy given that the 30 year fixed doesn't exist there.

In Ontario buildings rented out before a certain date have controlled rent increases. Her building is a newish complex, but the Liberals had moved forward the date that qualified, so she's covered. I believe it can only increase at the rate of economic growth. I'm not sure how they measure that though.

136: California was like that for me, b/c the rental market was dominated by managed complexes with leasing offices and leases for an entire year w/ no right to sublease. Tricky if summer job was elsewhere.

My old place was owned by a guy w/ a few buildings, and we started out on a lease but switched to month to month before house hunting. Andy you could live without a car. Where I was in California, your options were basically limited to the actual college town if you did not want to own a car.

112 is correct.

As is 113.

134: This doesn't seem bad per se, but it seems mostly like a much less efficient implementation of a wealth tax.

I'm not sure that a wealth tax would do anything to a corporation that's managing upward of 100,000 units. The idea is to align the incentives enough that landlords have to care about upkeep on their properties, or at least that they're screwing the tenants on a retail basis and not at industrial scale. They're also apparently terrible to the craftspeople who come out for maintenance or repairs. Sometimes they go for the daily double, as when they lied about whether they were sending someone immediately when the neighborhood heating went out on a sub-freezing night.

133: That's interesting, it's what the communists tried doing in central Prague to be able to bulldoze the decayed remains later.

Berlin built a lot of public housing in the Weimar years, and afterward too, I think. You can look and see competing styles. I'm less sure about public housing during Imperial times, but for a conservative Bismarck was surprisingly ok about some measures to improve public welfare. Which is to say that there's a longish history of publicly owned and administrated housing in Berlin.

I've just read the wiki page about the referendum to socialize more housing in Berlin, and it aims at companies that own more than 3000 units in the city. One of the companies in question owns more than 100,000 just in Berlin. Altogether, about 250,000 of 1.5 million units in the city would be taken into the public sector.

I do know that a lot of public housing was privatized in the 1990s; I don't know how many of those that were privatized in that wave would be re-socialized if the initiative is ever implemented.

Who owns the land the building is on?

In my very particular case, the German federal government owns the land. The development was built for naval officers around 1939-49 (I know), then housed US military lawyers in the early part of the occupation, then went to Berlin city employees. Willy Brandt lived across the street from my place for a while before he was mayor. Now it theoretically rents on the open market but because of its history a vacancy is open first to city/federal employees for a limited period before it goes to the general market. When we got in, demand was much lower (our apartment had stood vacant for probably two years, judging by some of the mail I found) but now places basically never get to the market. Mine is a corner case, but given the number of units potentially covered by socialization, every kind of land ownership is probably involved.

I've heard that housing:population unusually high compared to the rest of Europe in Berlin, built up around the turn of the century and then depopulated during the cold war years when the rest of Europe grew and improved, thoughts?

That was truer closer to the turn of the century than it is now. Berlin had relatively cheap housing for a European capital for exactly those reasons, and because a lot of the housing stock in the East was in bad shape and/or had legal uncertainties hanging over it. That's been changing, and the initiative is part of the efforts of renters (who are a larger share of the population in Germany than (I think) anywhere else in Europe) to be able to afford living in the city.

OT: So despite not masking or making any attempt to avoid each other, it's been a week since my son's covid symptoms appeared and no one else in the house has covid symptoms. Unless I'm wrong and my allergies are covid. But I'm pretty sure my allergies aren't covid because if I don't go outside, they go away.