alt Hacker NewsRent collections are down in New York
Comments
> 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).
> “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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It sounds like an ad-hoc rent strike. Not a great sign for an economy.
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.
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!
When people can simply get away with not paying rent, what sort of sucker would pay rent?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.