Washington 2020: The Calm Before the Drizzle (user search)

Sawant has successfully driven a lot of small landlords out of D3 and now all the local apartment buildings are owned by big corporations who can afford to legally defend themselves against her, and that just makes things more expensive and impersonal for renters.

I am not a communist and I have no particular issue with the rest of what you posted, but is this really true? When it comes to renting, as with most economic transactions in my life, I'd rather deal with a large corporation that has established legal policies than with a small proprietor for whom things are personal.

I'm well-off and when I rented I always went with a large corporation because they knew what they were doing and had a solid reputation. Basically, I knew what I was getting, and knew there would be a pretty high floor for the experience, and I was willing to pay a premium for that.

But Sawant isn't representing me, supposedly. She claims to be representing the poor people (the "working class" -- not including people who make a lot of money working, like me) who are stuck renting more run-down places with fewer amenities and and less-experienced or less-professional management. Obviously almost all those places are run by local landlords who are going out on their own rather than teaming up with some big megacorporation that will run their property for them.

In practice, here in D3, what this looks like is corporations handling the management of all the fancy new six-story glass "luxury apartments", which are around $2,000 a month for a 1BR. But there are also still plenty of ancient three-story buildings, built pre-WW2 (and likely pre-WW1). They're drafty, made of thin wood and plaster, you can hear everything everyone else is doing, the appliances are all decades out of date and break down all the time, and there's certainly no amenities. No firepit on the roof. But you can live in one of those for more like $1,300 a month. So your Amazon employees live in the "luxury" apartments with the rooftop firepits, and your Starbucks baristas and artists live in the 19th-century apartments with matchlight ovens, and that's the way things are.

But when Sawant keeps making things worse and worse for the small landlords who manage those WW1-era buildings, they eventually decide, screw this, I don't have to deal with this. They sell their WW1-era building to a developer, the developer tears it down and builds a new six-story glass luxury apartment building on the parcel. Now there's more housing for Amazon employees and less housing for Starbucks baristas. And with less supply of the WW1-era buildings, but the same demand, prices go up. So those Starbucks baristas get angry at landlords for raising prices, and vote for Sawant, who promises to fight for them by antagonizing those landlords, thus driving more of them out and further shrinking the supply of housing for her constituency.

It's a vicious cycle, and one that's completely unnecessary. A competent city councilmember could solve this problem, maybe by creating grants to restore some old properties or make improvements so they're more livable and the landlords don't have to keep raising rent to pay for new boilers and repairs to the centuries-old architecture. But the only language Sawant understands is animosity, so she just attacks and demonizes them and introduces policies to make their lives harder. And of course it's only the small landlords she goes after, since she can bully Grandpa Tom renting his old building out to six artists, she can't bully the big corporations with their professional legal outfits.

So how do you solve this problem? Sawant's solution is rent control. Just make it impossible for landlords to raise rents. Of course this will never actually pass (there's a statewide prohibition on rent control ffs) but if it did, supply would immediately shrink to 0 because nobody would want to become a small-time landlord in Seattle anymore, and landlords would immediately search for any loophole available to evict their tenants and bail on their properties. But the reality of this doesn't matter because Sawant has no intention of actually passing rent control -- it's just a wedge issue she can use to get re-elected again and again, which is her sole motivation.

You can just write "I do not understand housing"

Socialists and those on the left also don't seem to understand housing. If you have a city there are X amount of apartments and Y amount of people who wants to stay in the city where Y>X then there's going to have to be some method of filtering out people unless you increase the amount of apartments which a lot of left-wing groups resist.

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