MK

Business and Real Estate Lawyering. U Montana Law, UCSB History. DMs are open but notifications are off. “In no time at all this’ll be the distant past.” -FJM

[MK @Kocmur]

@EllliotttB

[MK @Kocmur]

@moseskagan As a matter of fact yes, so this is an appreciation reply. I read East of Eden (excellent, esp for fans of California) and Dunnett’s King Hereafter (very good) this year. Based on the overlap, I’m looking forward to these suggestions!

[MK @Kocmur]

@bradford_hardin @StudentRentPro

[MK @Kocmur]

@iononrecourse Not the same without Piano Pat, I’m told. I always figured it was the nearby AFB that made the slightly South Pacific theme “work” in Great Falls.

[Moses Kagan @moseskagan]

What every voter should know about housing policy

1. Rents reflect the balance of supply of apartments and demand for those apartments in a given area. That’s it; there’s no magic. If you want lower rents, you can hope for a recession that destroys jobs and, therefore, demand. Or you can add supply.

2. There is no amount of money that any big city government could feasibly spend that would add materially to supply. This is because, depending on the location, new apartments cost $250,000-1,000,000 to develop… building even a few hundred of those starts to stress any city budget, and many big cities need tens or hundreds of thousands.

3. On the other hand, investors (including pension funds and endowments, insurance companies, rich families, etc.) can collectively **easily** provide enough capital to build as much housing as we need **so long as they are confident they can get a reasonable return**.

To get those investors to fund the creation of the housing our society so desperately needs, we must do two things:

1. Dramatically reduce the time & complexity associated with securing governmental permission to develop housing.

This means reviewing and simplifying the overlapping regulations that constrain housing production: zoning codes, building codes, parking, ADA, etc. But it also means changing the cultures within the relevant governmental agencies from “default no” to “how can we help you?”.

2. Provide certainty around on-going regulation of apartment operations.

The way investors get a return from building rentals is as follows: They hire managers to lease the apartments, collect the rents, pay operating expenses and any mortgage payments, and then send the investors the cashflow that remains.

But governments all over the country have been restricting the manner in which apartment buildings can be operated in all kinds of ways.

For example: Cities have been making it harder to screen tenants, while also making it much harder to evict tenants who don’t pay. You can see why both of those measures are politically popular. After all, who doesn’t want people to get second chances? And who wants anyone to get evicted? But, as a manager, the combination of those two regulations makes it much harder to predict, with any certainty, that the rent will get paid… and that makes it very difficult to get investors to provide capital to create more housing.

Another example: Rent control. Again, I understand why renters love rent control and why politicians want to give it to them. But, if, as has been the case in NY, LA and San Francisco, city governments hold annual rent increases below the rate of growth in the operating expenses of the buildings, the cashflow payable to the investors shrinks… making them much less likely to invest capital in building more apartments.

In conclusion: For ~every other good or service in the economy, we allow the market to function, and the result is that we have a surplus of choice at all price points (think of food or clothes or cars), which is spectacular for the consumer. If we want a surplus of choice at all price points in housing, we need to get comfortable with the idea of allowing the market to provide it.

And that means allowing investors to build rental apartments *and* allowing them to operate those apartments in a manner consistent with making a reasonable profit.

[MK @Kocmur]

@SeanODowd15 @bobbyfijan I think you were supposed to say "excel"...

[MK @Kocmur]

@JohnPalminteri Saw them on a flight tracker app Wednesday night, inbound from Hawaii

[MK @Kocmur]

@moseskagan where one parent "mediates" the relationship between the child and the other, which IMHO isn't ideal. If you know how to avoid that I think it's worth sharing too! 2/2

[MK @Kocmur]

@moseskagan You wrote "each" rather than "both"... We're just strangers on the internet so I don't know your parents' circumstances but if they are still together that's an interesting distinction and perhaps worth expansion. I think it's easy to fall into a pattern 1/

[MK @Kocmur]

@ADeermount “I don’t usually sue people, but…”

[MK @Kocmur]

@bonanos @JasonIsbell 👍I’m curious about this too

[MK @Kocmur]

@rohindhar @girdley

[MK @Kocmur]

@SopanDeb Are we Soman or are we Dancer?

[MK @Kocmur]

@nycsouthpaw @Megatronic13 https://t.co/GBETmOGPpu

[News Channel 3-12 @NewsChannel312]

The U. S. Coast Guard (USCG) is currently searching for a person that fell overboard from a bulk carrier vessel, the African Cardinal, about 14 miles off the coast of Point Conception. https://t.co/76c49wMcP7

[MK @Kocmur]

@Wildlaw406

[Colin McCarthy @US_Stormwatch]

Taking into account the intensity, duration, and extent of the ongoing heatwave, as well as the exceptionally warm overnight lows and the added humidity (especially in SoCal), we are looking at one of the worst heatwaves in modern history for California.

[MK @Kocmur]

@moseskagan @girdley Love these! I chewed through them in law school, especially during a summer clerkship and they really messed with my writing voice. Legal writing is anachronistic enough without 19th C. naval dialogue leaking in (“look sharply now”)!

[MK @Kocmur]

@moseskagan @fortworthchris Something I think about, can’t remember where I read it- Cost of fire codes (these are good!) increase housing costs but nobody’s ever reduced the fire dept budget because we don’t need same back-end protection anymore.

[MK @Kocmur]

@EllliotttB

[MK @Kocmur]

@moseskagan As a buyer the lender will then want another doc, a UCA or similar, spelling out why you are authorized signer. But they’re going to want a UCA for other stuff anyway, so NBD