• HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    You run into a problem that you need to mitigate for this to work: qualifying for a mortgage.

    A landlord can rent to you for a year–or less–and they assume the risk of you not paying and needing to evict you. Their income verification can be a lot more loose as a result. A bank is going to be in a relationship with you for 15-30 years; they want to be pretty sure that you’re going to be able to meet your financial obligations for that whole time period. As a result, they’re going to be quite a bit more strict about proof of income, etc.

    Renting can be cheaper, too; a tenant isn’t on the hook for repairs to a unit, but when I need a new roof in my house, or the water heater goes out, I get to pay every penny of that myself. Yeah, the mortgage is cheaper, but just because you can afford the mortgage doesn’t mean that you can afford everything else that goes into owning a home.

    You also get into weird and perverse tax and zoning incentives that can make it difficult to build any kind of affordable housing; Dems say they want affordable housing, right up until someone wants to put it in their neighborhood, then they start acting like Republicans.

    Yes, the lack of affordable housing is a huge problem. But it’s not quite as black and white as it often seems.

    • smolyeet@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      They don’t assume the risk? The moment I don’t pay by the third they are threatening to evict me. They charge rent that covers their monthly mortgage payment and then some. It’s the same shit. The place I rent now is owned by progress and it’s 50/50 it seems what they cover. On top of that I have to clean it all (professionally now , that’s new) when I move out. When I moved in the place was 1700 and now it’s 2400. There’s so much risk they’re taking in renting me a place , charging rent , but not getting anything back for it.

    • explodicle@local106.com
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      8 months ago

      One factor that might be interesting is if renting was banned, then property values would plummet – making mortgages more affordable. But I don’t know if this would fully offset mortgage risk premiums and water heater (etc) insurance.

    • Slithers@reddthat.com
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      8 months ago

      Renting can be cheaper, too; a tenant isn’t on the hook for repairs to a unit, but when I need a new roof in my house, or the water heater goes out, I get to pay every penny of that myself. Yeah, the mortgage is cheaper, but just because you can afford the mortgage doesn’t mean that you can afford everything else that goes into owning a home.

      Don’t worry about that, landlords have figured that out. There’s a new 500 unit apartment complex that is currently being built in the Philadelphia suburbs that is taking applicants for units at the affordable price of $3500 per month.

    • Gabu@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Landlord apologists can freely choose between sucking my cock or eating shit.

    • abraxas@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      Dems say they want affordable housing, right up until someone wants to put it in their neighborhood, then they start acting like Republicans

      In my experience, this isn’t the case unless someone (sometimes Republicans, sometimes just politicians) try to put ALL the affordable housing into specific neighborhoods for selfish reasons, or the place the affordable housing is going doesn’t have jobs because someone actively avoid putting them in the places with jobs because “them poor people are criminals and will hurt business”.

      New Bedford, MA was a great example. It was an open secret that MA acted to ship a high percentage of projects and Section 8 to New Bedford. It’s also an open secret that budgeted commuter rail plans to New Bedford kept getting cut despite the rail running to the rural ass-crack of Western Mass, creating a job-starved desert of one of the otherwise most established economies in the state. Solely because somebody didn’t want people in affordable housing to have mass-transit access to most of the state.

      I don’t blame “The Dems” for that. Neither should anyone. This isn’t NIMBY, this is “Let’s put them all in your back yard. Then put more in your back yard. Then keep it coming. Then burn the bridge. Aren’t I doing good?”