I get that tenant protections can change landlord incentives, but they’re neither the main nor major cause of what we’re seeing. Large-scale speculative buying and consolidation by corporate landlords didn’t suddenly appear because LA updated eviction laws, these trends have been building for decades, pushed by cheap capital, stagnant wages, and an investment culture that treats housing as an asset before it’s treated as shelter.
We are not seeing large scale speculative buying, we are seeing large scale flight from individuals renting out houses because it has become too risky for them. Same market, but the small fish are mostly driven out in favor of those big enough to be able to average out the risks. And those risks as always show up as an increased cost to the consumer.
Small landlords selling out doesn’t automatically lead to a handful of corporations controlling huge swaths of housing, unless you already have a system where Wall Street money can outbid working families every time. That’s not created by tenant protections, that’s a feature of the current market structure.
And once again you have it backwards. If you drive out the small landlords who is left??
And what in the world makes you think that tenant protections do not come with a cost? Just because they don't have a $ hanging from them doesn't mean they don't have a cost.
If anything, those laws are a reaction to decades of imbalance, not the trigger for it. And while regulation can create unintended consequences, the private sector’s track record in keeping housing affordable, even before these protections, wasn’t exactly spotless.
They are both a reaction and a trigger. And what the left fails to understand is that when players leave a market like this that is a major red flag that the regulators are being too aggressive. Yet the left continually demands more regulation to stop the harm of too much regulation. Always fighting fire with gasoline.
1. Savings-and-loan crisis fallout (late 1980s–early 1990s)
- Long before today’s eviction protections, the U.S. housing market saw speculative overbuilding, predatory lending, and reckless investment strategies by private banks and developers.
You realize that overbuilding drives
down prices?
When the S&L bubble burst, it left behind foreclosures, vacant properties, and steep price volatility, none of which made housing more affordable for working-class buyers.
2. The subprime mortgage crisis (2000–2008)
- Predatory lending, inflated appraisals, and securitization by the private mortgage industry created a massive housing bubble.
- Prices skyrocketed beyond reach for millions, then collapsed, wiping out generational wealth in many communities, especially in Black and Latino neighborhoods.
Yeah, but look at the heart of this: Relaxing the standards for writing mortgages in order to "help" those people buy houses in the first place. Define shit as fertilizer and the results are predictable--although the cascade failure due to over-leveraging wasn't so obvious.
This was well before many of the “extreme” tenant protections critics bitch about today.
That wasn't about tenants in the first place.
3. Rent hikes in deregulated markets
- In cities with little to no rent control in the 1990s and 2000s (e.g., Houston, Las Vegas), private landlords regularly raised rents far above inflation simply because the market would bear it, with no regulatory trigger.
Wages didn’t keep pace, pushing working renters into poorer housing or further from job centers.
Can't address Houston, but remember I live in Las Vegas. We have been growing like crazy, it's inevitable that people would be further from job centers. That's an inevitable effect of growth. And would I choose to live (moot, as I'm completely remote) farther from the job centers? Most certainly--because pretty much everything near the job centers is either very expensive or neighborhoods that would make one uneasy at night.
4. Gentrification waves in the 1990s and early 2000s
- Even in places with minimal tenant protections (e.g., parts of Brooklyn before the expansion of rent stabilization), private development aimed at higher-income tenants systematically displaced low-income residents.
And you still do not understand that that is an inevitable part of gentrification. Fix up a place, it becomes more desirable, costs go up.
This wasn’t caused by eviction restrictions, it was developers chasing higher returns.
And where do "developers" even enter the picture in this case?
5. Post-disaster displacement
- After events like Hurricane Katrina (2005), private landlords in New Orleans hiked rents by 40–80% almost overnight, even in damaged or barely repaired units.
Well, duh, what do you expect when supply is cut? If that doesn't happen nobody's going to be interested in creating more supply and you get the standard effect of price controls: cheap products you can't actually get.
1. Massive foreclosure waves (1930–1935)
- In the early years of the Depression, the private mortgage market collapsed.
- By 1933, nearly half of all U.S. home mortgages were in default, and over 1,000 homes a day were being foreclosed.
This wasn’t because of rent control or tenant protections, there basically weren’t any. It was because private banks overextended credit in the 1920s and then called in debts during the crash.
And why do you think it was overextending credit rather than people losing jobs??
2. Predatory “balloon” mortgages
- Before federal intervention, most mortgages were short-term (3–5 years) with a large final “balloon” payment.
Private lenders refinanced these loans regularly during good times , but when the Depression hit, they refused to renew, forcing mass defaults.
Predatory? No, a balloon mortgage
inherently transfers risk from the bank to the owner. That's why they come with lower rates.
3. Absence of safety nets
- There was no FHA, no Fannie Mae, no federal deposit insurance, and no meaningful public housing policy.
Landlords could (and did) evict tenants almost immediately for missed payments. In cities like New York and Chicago, this sparked rent riots and mass protests.
Just because we are saying X (renter protections) causes Y (high prices, lack of supply) does not mean that X is the
only cause of Y. You're citing other causes, you are not refuting the point at all as we never claimed it was exclusive.
4. Rent gouging even during crisis
- Despite mass unemployment, some landlords raised rents to cover their own debts, pushing more tenants into homelessness.
This led to extreme situations like “Hoovervilles”, shantytowns on the edges of major cities, while vacant housing stock still sat in private hands. The only real differences between Slab City and Hoovervilles are that some people move to Slab City by choice, and it wasn’t created by a massive economic crash. Capitalism isn’t one of those differences, though.
Inevitable response. You're asking the landlords to go under to save their tenants.
5. Government intervention out of necessity
- The private sector’s collapse in housing finance is what led to the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (1933), Federal Housing Administration (1934), and later public housing programs.
These programs were direct admissions that the private market alone couldn’t stabilize housing in a crisis.
The government has been playing catch-up for over a century. Almost every major regulation is a reaction to some spectacular failure or abuse by the private sector. Yes, the government often botches the execution, but they’re not the cause.
The government inherently botches it because they are trying to go two directions at once. Getting people into owning houses inherently means increasing the risk they can't pay the mortgage.
