People Who Live In Suburbs: Classy, Icky, or Dudes?

no my source is 'please find a place w/ 75% of the population as renters that also has below average tenant rights'

the market, like all markets, doesn't just appear out of nowhere, it's something that was on a certain level created by certain policies and laws. just as big banks might 'hate the SEC' but wall st couldn't exist if the SEC didn't exist, the contract law that and 'standards' we use are what creates 'the renter housing market'. if we had different rules, we would have a different market, but if we had no rules, we would have no market. in that sense the right to repairs does not 'create a less efficient market' because it's a basic aspect of the market. it's a net positive because people don't have a lot of information about the building they're going to be renting and if they were responsible for the repairs, wouldn't be able to price that into their decision making + wouldn't be as interested in renting places that might require extensive repairs if they weren't staying for long. we can imagine a market without this rule, it just seems like a worse one for both parties. the same is not true for every single law.

― iatee, Thursday, April 5, 2012 5:49 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This sounds like free-marketeer sophistry to me, but I was kind of baiting you for it

even that wouldn't 'prove anything', maybe there is some republican town w/ self-hating renters, but it's a trend that's by defintion of 'political interests' going to be true. if those interests aren't expressed it's a political failure not an economic one.

xp

you must have been an infuriating undergrad

like supporting your assumptions with "well prove me wrong then" is kinda hilarious

yeah hurting idk how you're reading 'markets only exist because of the government' as 'free marketeer sophistry'

dude you are one of the less interesting people to argue w/ here but your 'counterexamples' that you jumped in w/ were places that do not have renter majorities, so at least do some research before you jump in to the mix

but if we had no rules, we would have no market

First we wouldn't have no rules and secondly, huh?

what's huh about that? there is no 'free market' without contracts and rule of law.

"just as big banks might 'hate the SEC' but wall st couldn't exist if the SEC didn't exist"

wait waht -- this is basically the opposite of history.

Iatee, there's no question that stuff like NYC housing code and tenant protection law (1) constrains supply/increases landlord costs, (2) does more than just "create a market" and (3) in some ways benefits tenants more than landlords. For example evicting a tenant in NYC is really, really difficult. It could be easier without "not having a market", and making it easier would reduce landlord costs and probably contribute to increased housing supply. And having the law it is makes a renter a little closer to an owner. I'm not saying I'd want to change the law, but that's the effect. And I'm talking about things beyond just the existence of contracts and rule of law.

FWIW the federal government and state and local governments intervene more directly in the rental markets as well through all kinds of tax credits and incentive programs for rental housing, through section 8, etc. I have no idea whether the overall economic intervention is greater in the rental or mortgage markets, although I guess an analysis must be out there.

modern finance could not exist if inside trading weren't policed on some level sterling

dude you are one of the less interesting people to argue w/ here but your 'counterexamples' that you jumped in w/ were places that do not have renter majorities, so at least do some research before you jump in to the mix

― iatee, Thursday, April 5, 2012 10:30 PM (10 minutes ago)

uh that was my point. thats why they are counterexamples to the idea that places without renter majorities have weaker tenant laws so at least do some research read your own argument before you jump in to the mix

hurting, again, I said "that's not true for all laws" I was responding to the more extreme examples that you brought up, such as the ability to kick someone out on a whim or not have to do repairs. there are also laws that benefit *some* tenants more than landlords, but if you're suggesting they're strong enough to constrain supply then they do not benefit tenants across the board, they benefit *some* tenants, namely people who already have apartments. this is more explicitly the case w/ rent control, which might help poor people w/ apartments but can hurt poor people w/o apartments if it constrains supply.

Anyway I think to get back to the original point, it's a little bit flip to just throw up one's hands and give up on homeownership, because there's like hundreds' of years of history behind why being a renter can suck and why a society of mass rentership rather than ownership is mostly good for the capitalist class (which is not to say that the same class hasn't figured out how to benefit from mass ownership, because they clearly have).

arguably, the illusion that the house might not always win means that more ppl put more money in the market than otherwise, but yeah... i hardly think that the policing of insider trading has been effective or meaningful on anything but the symbolic level for a very long time, if ever. anyway the story of the markets is basically ppl start trading stuff, and then eventually form their own associations and exchanges with rules to regularize the way they trade stuff, and eventually it gets big and messy and dangerous enough that you get some form of state regulation on top of that -- and that usually happens after something spectacular happens to freak people out, and the state action is more symbolic than real. so yes, markets arise in the context of policies and laws, simply as a historical fact, but its much more the case that the market comes first, and the laws regarding it come second.

FWIW the federal government and state and local governments intervene more directly in the rental markets as well through all kinds of tax credits and incentive programs for rental housing, through section 8, etc. I have no idea whether the overall economic intervention is greater in the rental or mortgage markets, although I guess an analysis must be out there.

section 8 is for very poor people. there is no rental market subsidy that comes anywhere close to the home mortgage interest deduction, so there's no need for an analysis, it's pretty open/shut?

sterling read some polanyi

Anyway I think to get back to the original point, it's a little bit flip to just throw up one's hands and give up on homeownership, because there's like hundreds' of years of history behind why being a renter can suck and why a society of mass rentership rather than ownership is mostly good for the capitalist class (which is not to say that the same class hasn't figured out how to benefit from mass ownership, because they clearly have).

I never said 'give up on homeownership', it has its advantages for some people, it's just not something that needs to be promoted above renting via policy. and being that any policy that promotes homeownerrship makes it a better deal than renting, you can't say 'but we can do both'.

xp to sterling

like, the idea that the history of capitalism is just a long string of events that started w/ 'people just trading w/ each other' is not only ahistorical it's also a fairly right-wing narrative. it 'makes a lot of sense'...it's just not a narrative based on actual history.

iatee I'm not talking about the history of capitalism. I'm talking about the history of modern financial markets going back less than 200 yrs.

but again if you want to talk not about markets from the beginning of time or all trading ever but markets as institutions developing in the interstices of medeval societies across feudal europe, you can also tell a story that has the laws coming second.

this is getting kinda off subject but my point was and only was that

a. capitalism and individual markets are ultimately social constructs that require certain social behavior, laws, institutions

b. that being the case it's better to think about sets of laws as things that create theoretical markets and to compare the markets they create and not assume the idea of a perfect and eternal 'market' that is then damaged by laws.

c. laws that benefit everybody in a market are probably 'good'. individuals and institions all want to inside trade, and it's something that's impossible to police 100%. but you will never ever hear anybody say "there should be no laws against insider trading" on CNBC. wall st does promote laws that benefit the finance industry and harm the rest of us, but having a lower bar of regulation and a certain 'fairness' to the game is the only reason why millions of americans allow strangers to put their money to be put in equities etc. that they know nothing about.

I compared this to the rental market. landlords might want to individually not repair buildings. individually they might want to spend as little money as possible on it and would love to have the ability to kick somebody out on a whim. but there will never be a movement by landlords against the law that they have to do repairs, because as a whole, they benefit from a world where people can feel secure knowing that they won't have to pay for a new sink in the place they just moved into - it gives people reason to choose renting.

fwiw, lots of ppl argue all the time that laws against insider trading are typically capricious and generally unenforceable, and actually stand in the way of market efficiency and price discovery.

yr broader argument (which doesn't require any which-came-firsting about markets/laws, i'll grant) is also false in that if landlords got their way they would get rid of laws that said they had to do repairs or couldn't kick tenants out and they have tried to get together and lobby for that sort of stuff. some, more cynically, would argue that they can either "self-regulate" (just like wall streeters argue) or that the market would take care of it (again, just like wall streeters argue), but others basically have the mindset that "it's my property, i should be able to do what i want, and in the end it lets me charge less rent and people can fix their own damn sinks or whatever and if they don't like it they can go somewhere else."

look, in an otherwise 'normal' market, if landlords didn't have to repair your building you would

a. be less likely to rent an apartment without extensively checking every single hole and vent and plug and would be overall less likely to rent (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
b. would invest v. v. minimally in any repair you did yourself and would thus leave the place in terrible shape when the next person came
c. the price of the apt would have to be, overall, lower, considering that 'the burden of repair' was not priced into your rent.

it 'makes more sense' for the burden of replacing that sink to be put on the landlord when the state of that sink in 5 years from now affects them but does not affect you. it's not something that's being done because america loves renters, it's done because it's really just more logical for the person who owns the building to be doing the long-term investments in the building and for the cost to be indirectly incorporated in your rent.

and again, that does not mean that *individual* landlords don't want to screw you

once you are already paying rent of course they'll try to get you to pay for anything you're willing to pay for. but as an overarching system it would make very little sense for renters to be paying for repairs, and even building owners know that - thus this system is in place across the country -. not because tenants have particularly strong political rights everywhere, because, on the macro-level it doesn't make sense for tenants to pay for repairs.

I’ve been reading up a lot of this subject cause I find it v. inneresting.

when I say laws ‘create the market’, I meant that our current conception of ‘the rental market’ is dependent on common law, all of which itself is historically/culturally dependent. ‘caveat leesee’ has a long and glorious common law history and it made a lot of sense…in a specific period in history, for a rural society:

“It is reasonable that the common law of leases suffered the same development. Leases, at least long term, were largely agricultural. The parties were on an equal bargaining level and conditions were visible. Actual tillers of the soil were either on a sharecropper basis of little political force or were agricultural laborers whose deplorable economic conditions were notorious but accepted. The dissatisfied leesee could always default. Thus the law saw no necessity of placing a protective cloak around the lessee either for economic or social reasons”

(http://scholar.valpo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2060&context=vulr"> http://scholar.valpo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2060&context=vulr)

there was nothing ‘more natural’ or ‘more market’ about the extended ‘caveat leesee’ era. it was a fundamental piece of how the rental market operated, but it was ultimately a historical and cultural artifact. ‘the free market’ does not favor the landlord – the set of rules and laws that had been passed down through common law (and came from historical and political contexts) created a market that favored (certain) landlords. again it’s important to highlight the difference between ‘urban tenants have been historically underserved by the market’ and ‘tenants were historically underserved by a rental market that was created by laws that were not in their favor.’

the tenant revolution of the 60s/70s is framed in terms of a welfare transfer from rich landlords to poor tenants – now they have to pay the entire cost of our sink repairs, before they didn’t - and in isolated very poor markets that can be the case (in short - they can’t transfer any of the cost to people who can’t/won’t pay more.) 48 out of 50 states in the country have passed ‘warranty of habitability’ rulings/laws – (colorado has other regulations, arkansas is really the odd man out: http://lawreview.law.uark.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/15-Norman.pdf) often originally with an intent on some level to help the poor. but even outside of that intent, these laws aren’t going anywhere anytime soon because the market they create is a *better market* and one with rules that reflect the information asymmetries and need for complex and long-term repairs that exist w/ contemporary urban housing.

moreover, ensuring that everyone keeps ‘minimum standards’ can keep a neighborhood from descending into a slum – there is, on some level, a prisoner’s dilemma game - landlords all want to spend the minimum they can possibly spend on repairs and are even more likely to do this is a neighborhood w/ little legal power – but if everyone does this, the entire neighborhood loses value. this article is dated but sorta fleshes that out:
http://duncankennedy.net/documents/Photo%20articles/The%20Effect%20of%20the%20Warranty%20of%20Habitability%20on%20Low%20Income%20Housing_Milking%20and%20Class%20Violence.pdf

there is also that same game except on a macro scale – in an era where everyone but the poor has a choice between renting and buying, having a reliable lower bar of standards and decreasing the system-wide information asymmetry about the need for repairs is going to make renting a comparatively less-risky decision.

in both cases landlords are always going to want to ‘cheat’ at the prisoner’s dilemma game and force you to pay for your own repairs, and scummy landlords do their best. stronger tenant legal protection in this situation only harms *bad* landlords who would otherwise be taking advantage of power disparities and not following the law. within this context strong tenant legal protection can be *good* for good landlords, who are otherwise forced to deal w/ the consequences of people not trusting the rental market.

in an era where most middle class americans have a choice between renting and buying, + when housing supply is so fundamentally constrained by zoning policies, I don’t think the overall effect of the warranty of habitability on supply is negative. it should be seen as anything more than a long overdue attempt by the legal system to set rules based on the realities of contemporary urban economies and not...rural england.

anyway 'lol' mostly just wanted to organize my thoughts

er that first link is "Caveat Lessee" by JS Grimes

"Federal housing policies changed the whole landscape of America, creating the sprawlscapes that we now call home"

^^ that's a pretty straightforward, descriptive sentence. you're reading more into it, because of how you feel about the word "sprawl" and what it connotes to you in the context of your understanding of the suburbs and housing issues. i'm not even trying to argue you're right or wrong, or what sugrue "really" thinks or whatever. just, you know, that we should be able to tell the difference between advocacy and historical description.

― s.clover, Thursday, April 5, 2012 4:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is kind of disingenuous, i agree that its straightforward and descriptive but dont see how you can read this and say that theres no 'tude there, as though "sprawlscapes that we now call home" is a loaded phrase only to iatee and urban planning nerds, or generally as though surgrue is not smart enough to understand what message is sent by writing a lil historical account about federal housing policies in the wall street journal

Just doing a little blogging about my neighborhood here but:
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120410/NEWS/304100022/Commute-boost-Des-Moines-wants-rapid-transit-buses

yessss

cool that looks promising

The commenters on newspaper websites are the worst, worst thugs in our society, btw

how many people do you think would be served by that route?

idk, 15-20k at least? It has the benefit of going past two grocery stores while downtown has no real grocery stores, so I could see people downtown using it for that, or for a bunch of people along the route going downtown

my county has a brt system and it is super awesome. cut that particular trip in half at least! they just need to expand it beyond one route (which i know they are looking to do when they have the $$$, but that may be a ways off).

I just had a thought that college is like how we should live all the time. dense with our friends around us.

you mean like people all up in your shit all the time and someone setting a fire on the floor above you by using a space heater to dry out a towel that had been used to soak up spilled everclear? yeah, fuck living like college.

j/k I like your thought, dayo.

yeah yeah suburban loneliness such a cliche but it really is a thing that america is content with, striving to be like daniel boone with a coonskin cap and settling for having the wild unexplored frontier of 5000 sq ft houses that nobody else but your family lives in

my senior year dorm room had a 20 foot vaulted ceiling with skylights over a 475 square foot living room; the guys who lived in it the year before hung a basketball hoop on a wall and used to play horse

so yeah, I advocate living like I did in college

cool, moving to your place asap and setting up a basketball hoop in your living room

(I still miss that room, even though the bedrooms were tiny)

good series of articles:
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/walking/2012/04/why_don_t_americans_walk_more_the_crisis_of_pedestrianism_.html

college dorm rooms are on the way out, all the newer buildings are apartment-style

thx for the articles iatee. they make for a great read and make me miss walking even more. i hate that i moved from basically one of the most walkable cities in the world to one where you can't do anything without a car.

where do you live now jibe? you used to live in paris, right?

yup. went from paris to kuala lumpur. where everyone uses a car and jokes that if you see someone walking, it has to be a tourist.

ah yeah that place is supposed to be a nightmare