Posted on 02/05/2020 3:02:46 PM PST by karpov
Los Angeles politicians will make housing affordable, by force if necessary.
On Friday, City Councilmember Gil Cedillo introduced a motion that asks city staff to draft plans for using eminent domain to seize Hillside Villa Apartments, a 124-unit, privately-owned development in the city's Chinatown neighborhood to avoid rent increases at the property.
The property is currently under an affordability covenant that requires its owner to rent out a number of its units at below-market rates. That covenant is set to expire soon, meaning rents on some 59 units will increase to market rates—which means rent hikes of up to $1,000 per unit.
"We think it is important enough that we need to take action to preserve those units. We don't want to generate more homeless people," Conrado Terrazas Cross, Cedillo's communications director, tells Reason, saying that many tenants would not be able to afford the coming rent increases.
"I think it's a brilliant idea but I need to know: Are we in Cuba or Venezuela?" says Tom Botz, the L.A.-area developer who owns the building, about the proposal to seize his property.
Botz tells Reason he purchased the development company that built Hillside Villa roughly 20 years ago. The building's construction had been financed by a number of government grants and loans, including a $5.4 million loan from Los Angeles' since-abolished Community Redevelopment Agency in 1986.
A condition of that loan was that the developer rent out units in the building at below-market rates for 30 years. Other government grants and loans that helped finance the building came with their own specific affordability requirements.
The affordability requirements from the redevelopment loan were supposed to expire in June 2019. Beginning in May 2018, tenants in Hillside Villa started to receive notices that their below-market rents would be increasing
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
The more concentration of apartment units, the less land rights the owner has, really.
1) Homeowners must pay to educate parent’s kids in apartments.
2) Highways are burdened by multi level dense apartments.
The public is unfairly burdened.
You can spout on about private property, but the more dense units, the less property rights exist.
Why do mega landlords have such high rights?
Bigger cities implode on their own dense weight.
Density is inhumane.
Expect nothing else from Communists. The Democrats running our State, and our major cities are nothing less than Communists.
In the 1960s, in order to encourage low-income rental buildings, Congress gave some sorts of incentives to property owners that would expire in ~20 years, after which, the properties would be free to go to market rates.
As the expiration of those incentive agreements was drawing nigh, at the behest of then-congresscritter Joe Kennedy, Congress pulled some similar-but-not-theft stunt.
Plank #1 of the Commmunist Manifesto: Abolition of private property in land and application of all rents of land to public purpose.
http://laissez-fairerepublic.com/TenPlanks.html
It’s simply quite shocking that politicians even talk like this. The arrogance of it is just flabbergasting. Hey, if they really want to keep 52 units $1000 cheaper, write the landlord a check for $52,000 each month. Adjust it for market rates when appropriate.
And I know, that’s also crazy - but they already kicked in $5.4 million or whatever to finance its construction.
Contracts are meant to be broken.
Yeah because you're doing such a GOOD JOB of taking care of the ones you already HAVE!
Agreed.
Some property owners complain because they’re billed for school taxes on their property tax statement, claiming it’s unfair that homeowners must bear the burden of educating the children of renters.
But landlords ARE paying those taxes, and traditionally have divided up & passed those costs on to the renters.
Now the social fascists want us to pay all the schooling with no hope of reimbursement, plus subsidize their rent, then when we’re bankrupt, they’ll generously bail us out— by seizing our property!
So instead of one “greedy” landlord, the poor renters will be overseen by a consortium of bureaucrats.
But what happens when the ‘crats demand a payraise? Lol.
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