I think this narrative is just meant to distract people from questioning the necessity of the landlord class, they want people angry at a faceless corporate boogieman instead of local landlords (for obvious reasons)
[–] dimaggiosghost 1 day ago
[–] ctmlr 1 day ago
[–] AnthonyMouse 1 day ago
What else do you expect "collective bargaining" to do in a market where every tenant has a different landlord? Your landlord isn't going to care if the tenants of 10,000 other landlords threaten to move out. They only care if you threaten to move out, and then to credibly do that what you need is to show them the unit you could move into which is asking for less.
The real problem is that you need the unit you can threaten to move into to first exist, rather than its construction being inhibited by zoning etc.
[–] FroshKiller 21 hours ago
[–] AnthonyMouse 12 hours ago
How is that collective bargaining when your neighbors have different landlords?
All you're suggesting is to stop paying rent, which anybody can do on their own, with the usual consequences of your credit getting ruined and then the landlord serves you an eviction notice and changes the locks.
Consider the economics of what you're suggesting. Your unit costs $800k when it should cost $200k because of artificial scarcity (zoning), so then the landlord has to pay $800k for it and charge rents high enough to pay back that loan. The way you fix that is by getting the cost of the unit back down to where it should be, i.e. building more units to alleviate the scarcity.
Demanding that the landlords charge less without reducing what they have to pay for the building doesn't work, because then who is going to sink $800k to build a new rental unit? Who is going to keep renting out their existing units at a loss instead of turning them into condos or similar? Which then makes the scarcity of rental units worse and causes rents to go up.
You can't solve a supply problem by bargaining with someone the law still effectively prohibits from increasing supply.
[–] 59percentmore 19 hours ago
[–] SoftTalker 16 hours ago
[–] epistasis 6 hours ago
The cost of holding apartments intentionally vacant is large, and has a very tiny effect on pricing unless there's a single player with more market share than exists anywhere I have seen in the US.
In a different arena, parking, it's widely accepted that the best possible way to establish adequate parking is to set prices high enough that there's always a spot available. Anything less results in people not being able to park. Setting apartment prices similarly is beneficial to the public, in that there's always a place to move into.
We need apartment vacancies, they are beneficial to renters, because people need to find housing at all times. Ideally we have a surplus of apartments so that not only do renters have choices but so that prices fall to the cost of providing housing.