Scott,

….Why is this not be obvious to you? If a landlord can take back a property from rental market and sell it after a year to make a profit, then why won’t most landlord simply keep the property and rent it at market price, the reason they cannot is because of eviction and rent control.

You have to ask yourself WHY landlords would prefer to sell their property for a one time payment versus renting it out for residual income? Anyone with some economic brain will prefer to rent out their property and collect rent than to sell it.

The simple existence of rent control and eviction control created this mess. It has created a situation where the landlord themselves have no rights, let alone their own civil rights. Wait, they do have rights. The tenant gets free legal counsel whereas the landlord must pay market rate landlord attorneys that can’t really do much for them because of the tenant favoring ‘ordinance laws’ created by our corrupt local government specifically SF. So if you are a typical landlord and wish to ENFORCE your lease to protect other tenants (why won’t you if they are good tenants and pays rent on time?), guess what? You have to pay an attorney to do so, otherwise it would consider ‘self-help’ or ‘illegal eviction’ or some other technical legal clauses that always favor the tenant and come back to sue you for damages and other lies they can get away with.

Imagine, you have someone constantly suing you or ‘petitioning’ you or your property habitabilities problems (99% are false claims which are really in hopes to sue for large sums of money) and you have to pay your attorney to simply defend yourself. Don’t forget, all this time the tenant gets FREE legal counsel and you as the landlord must PAY every penny to defend yourself. Would you want to be in that situation Scott? Now you see why landlords in SF want to sell their property in such a HOT rental market?

Now I ask you Scott, if there were no rent control and eviction control, WHY would any reasonable landlord wish to sell their property in such a HOT HOT HOT rental market let alone take my rental property OFF the market!!! I’ll tell you, I personally would never sell even if it’s over 10 million dollars if I can charge fair market value rent. That is simple economics.

If the local ordinances are FAIR and JUST, who in their right mind would want to sell? It is never about limited land, wait, there are a lot of lands to develop in California but no, everyone wants to live in San Francisco, thus created a self inflicted problem, not a REAL problem. And local government demands landlords to pay for tenants self inflicted problem, THAT was why Judge Breyer slam down the ordinance and THAT is why I Judge Breyer is such a great man. Does it makes sense to you now Scott?

Nope. They are not over-taxed. If they were even “correctly” taxed, the owner would have to develop the properties or sell them to someone who could develop them. They sit idle and hoarded because there is no penalty to do otherwise. We should not have to subsidize hoarders and speculators, while properties right next door, that have viable 10-20 story buildings, are paying 10X as much (not an exaggeration – my organization has a database based on NYC Dept of Finance figures. It’s all there for anyone to read). See our website:
http://commongroundnyc.org/
or my presentations, including the last one this past July:
http://www.opednews.com/Diary/Case-Studies-in-New-York-C-by-Scott-Baker-Georgism_Henry-George_Land-Value-Taxation-141024-865.html

The ordinary people of NYC are being robbed, and I’m sure the ordinary people of San Francisco are too.

“under-utilized as one story under-taxed buildings”

Who is to say that a building is underutilized? If a building is underutilized then someone would probably buy it and figure out how to make a profit by utilizing it correctly. Also…under taxed? In NYC? They are probably overtaxed which is why people are just sitting on them. To improve them would probably mean having the tax bills go up so high as to be unaffordable.

You sound like an urban planner…or more precisely, an urban “over-planner”.

Everything you write (in this blog) seems to be about how to get more money out of people so government can have more to do whatever it is that they want. Consider the irony here…we are talking about San Francisco, one of the most unaffordable places in the country.

180 degrees out of synch, you and I.

Me. Send me $10.

There is a good lesson in what you say. Don’t ask permission. Just stop renting. It’s nobody’s business but your own and anyone who says otherwise is someone to be watched carefully and stopped at every opportunity.

This is exactly what I was thinking as reading. The owners erred by stating their intentions to house their relatives. They should have kept quiet, just said, “eh, we want a bigger place for ourselves.” Then do as they wish.

PDQ:

Henry George is worth a read. He shows how taking the concept of property rights that was developed for things that you produce from your labour (including intellectual labour) and applying it to real property is itself a market distortion. You might not agree with his solution — I’m not sure I do, either — but it’s worth a read, to understand why a “free” market based on ownership of real property, as it is currently defined, does not produce the same outcomes that free markets produce for other kinds of property.

And what, exactly gives you the right to decide how someone else must “redistribute” the fruits of his hard work?

What you are proposing is theft, plain and simple. Having less is not a justification for taking the property of others. People who are poor generally aren’t poor because others are rich.

In fact…why don’t you go first? Put your money where your mouth is. Give away everything you have to the less fortunate and even then you still have no right to redistribute another man’s property.

But I have no reason to be concerned. In my retirement I am reaping the rewards of my lifetime of hard work and people like you are fringe…generally restricted to college campuses and other artificial environments.

There are no Socialists on CWD. Only greedy doomers whining about their dismal past lives plundering the working poor and middle class. They appear threatened the little guy wants to survive and is stepping up embracing the populist appeal of redistribution.

Just info Scotty…..trying to survive is not Socialist!

Think on it-