I don't know to what extent there are established precedents for when a topic is worthy of a mega-thread, but this decision seems like a big deal to me with a lot to discuss, so I'm putting this thread here as a place for discussion. If nobody agrees then I guess they just won't comment.
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It only changes the incentive structure up to a point, though. Places where I've rented I haven't hesitated to bitch about every problem because it's the landlord's responsibility to fix and not mine. For example, years ago I rented an apartment that had a powder room downstairs and a full bath upstairs. One day the toilet in the powder room wouldn't stop running, and my cursory examination of the internal mechanism revealed no obvious malfunction that I could easily remedy. So I shut the water off at the valve, called the landlady, and insisted she fix it. She sent her husband over and I showed him the problem, and he had a plumber come out to give an estimate. I have no idea how much the repair cost, but it was evidently enough for the husband to try to talk me out of getting the work done. He didn't see what the problem was since there was a perfectly operational bathroom upstairs. Realistically, he was right — I rarely used the downstairs bathroom to begin with, being forced to go upstairs in times when I otherwise would have used the powder room was only a trifling inconvenience, and I would have paid the same amount for the place if it hadn't come with a powder room to begin with. Nonetheless, I insisted that he get it fixed. He ended up redoing the whole powder room because he had evidently planned on doing that when I moved out but decided that if he was sending a guy in there he might as well get everything done now if I didn't mind. If that had been my house I probably just would have shut the water off and procrastinated fixing it until it was convenient for me.
This is a relatively minor example, but with homeowners these little decisions compound more than you'd think. When I was looking to buy I noticed that there was almost a direct correlation between how long someone had owned a house and how much work needed to be done. For instance, there were several houses I looked at that were built in the '60s and being sold by the original owners or their families after these owners either passed away or went into assisted living. Almost all of them hadn't been updated since the '60s, except for essential stuff like heating and plumbing (and often this was only barely good enough; one house I was told that the only problem with the roof was that there was a leak in '96 but they patched it an it hadn't leaked since. This was in 2016 so even if the roof was relatively new in '96 it would have been due for a replacement soon, and I doubt the roof was new when it started leaking). If a homeowner only plans on leaving in a coffin, it's hard to convince them that they need to spend large sums of their already limited incomes on purely cosmetic upgrades, like new kitchens, bathrooms, flooring, etc. In other words, they're more concerned with keeping the dwelling habitable than in enhancing the value of the property.
I didn't literally mean the apartment you live in. I meant the neighborhood/city/region/state/country (I was purposefully vague about the scope).
You're talking about things that affect you. Of course you care about the condition of your literal apartment when you can force the landlord to fix it free of charge. But people passing through generally aren't lobbying for long-term infrastructure improvements of the town.
I don't know if that's necessarily true, though. Places like New York City have a lot of long-term renters. On the other side of the coin, a lot of the poorest ghettos have long-term renters who won't leave the neighborhood unless rising prices force them out. Conversely, it's trendy on the east coast for outdoorsy types to move out west for a few years just to see what it's like. Sure, some of these people rent, and some of them stay long-term, but a surprisingly large number of them buy houses and sell them a few years later. When interest rates were low anyone with the cash on hand would buy, and a lot of people made out like bandits when they sold a few years later and bought less expensive houses back east with cash.
The other thing is that most people aren't particularly engaged politically, regardless of whether they buy or rent. When was the last time you attended a meeting of your local government? Unlike watching C-Span you can actually address the board, and they might take your opinion into consideration. They also almost always happen in the evening, except maybe in big cities with full-time politicians. I've attended several over the years for various reasons. They're only ever busy if there's some controversial item on the agenda, and even then it's rarely busier than a busy voting precinct. On an average night, there's usually only one or two spectators.
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