this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
1650 points (98.0% liked)
Microblog Memes
5846 readers
2413 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not just another cost of doing business though, it's specifically a cost of not doing business.
So imagine someone has been buying up homes to rent them. Market rate for rent is $1000 and they own 1000 units (just to make the math easy). That means they would profit $1 million every month with every unit filled, and lose $1 million every month for leaving every unit empty.
Now imagine they have half the units filled, so they are getting $0 each month. They could try and raise the rent over market rate to cover the cost, but that would make it harder to fill the empty units and encourage their tenants to leave. If they lower the rent a bit though, they could fill the empty units and erase the cost entirely. Now imagine every landlord is in this dilemma; it puts the pressure onto them to appeal to prospective tenants. They could even increase profit by housing people for free, just filling units with the homeless to reduce costs.
If they don't change behavior and just eat the cost, then that's more money for the state to invest in housing programs.