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So if current landlords are so bad, what's to keep anyone from undercutting them? If you're seriously suggesting co-ordination among all the landlords all the way from Blackrock to your middle-class salaryman, I'm not going to believe you.
Well, no, if you're poor enough, the pillaging might well be worse than the raping. Pretty much nobody in modern America is that poor, fortunately.
Idiotic building and planning regulations. At least here in the UK.
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Why do you think Blackrock keeps buying every open lot with somewhat permissive zoning and converting it into apartment buildings. This is them trying to undercut the SFH mafia. However, it is in their interest for zoning laws to not get tooo permissive. Because they would suddenly have to be competitive, instead of just being marginally better than a SFH landlord.
As of now, it is illegal to build in most parts of the US. The US has only 1 dense city and that's Manhattan. Include the 5 boroughs, and NYC is remarkably underbuilt for its demand. Who controls if building is legal ? -> the landlords for that locale. (It is not that simple, but I'm skipping over a lot of nuance to make my tl;dr point). That's why I call it a colonial extraction racket.
Yep.
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You can't just build a house you need approval from the local government to construct housing. Planning departments aren't approving housing construction or density increases that would allow rent to be undercut. There's market power in offering housing for rent, and the planning department enforces it.
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Natural monopoly. If everyone around them lowered their prices, they increase their market share. If you're one landlord out of 100 in the middle of a city and there are 100 families in need of housing, it doesn't matter if 99 of them cut their prices... that 100th family is still going to pay you.
No, the 100th family is just going to move somewhere else.
You are using terms originating from economic theory, but you have an apparent lack of understanding what these terms mean, given that you describe reality which simply does not exist.
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Natural monopoly.... in a market that includes everyone from Blackrock to middle-class salarymen? There's at least hundreds of thousands of landlords in NYC alone. There's no monopoly at all, let alone a natural one.
Sure, I'm off on my terminology. Here's what I mean by the problem, maybe you can help me put it into economic terms:
If you and I share the market of soda evenly, and I price mine too high, you can double your production and take all my business. You can't really do that with land.
ETA: just want to acknowledge that yes, it was dumb to use an obviously technical term in a made-up way. My use of the terms I think is like this: It is a "monopoly" in that others are prevented from entering the market, and it is "natural" in that the barrier to entry is the fixed supply/location of land.
I think your just trying to talk about the idea of land "rent" in the formal theoretical sense of rent. Monopolists also have rents similar theoretically to land rents.
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There's no special economic term for this situation.
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