Another day, another desk. The life of the permanent temporary is to be lamented and, on occasion, pitied. Pity the Mastodon, people. He begs for your contempt, for your sadness. For your thoughts. Do you not have a minute to just sit and contemplate the miserable situation the Mastodon finds himself in? Yes, yes, thank you. That wasn't so hard, now was it?
An observation from the week-end. Rent in Los Angeles is preposterously high for the availability of housing. Looking for a new apartment this weekend, the AM was struck by how consistently expensive apartments were, but also how profuse the vacancies. Understandably, the demand on places in dense, urban areas drives the price of relatively small, shitty apartments higher and higher. But when do renters start noticing that the vacancies are increasing, and decide that prices should start going down, not up? Is there some economical model for this? When the market meets or exceeds 10% vacancy? Does it merely take one management group to decrease their rent for the others to start following suit? Now, don't get the AM wrong - he's not saying that this is going to happen anytime soon in Los Angeles. By lowering the rent of an apartment, one would also, it seems, have to offer current tenants the same reduced rate. Which means that there would have to be quite a few vacancies in your buildings to start dropping prices.
Again, the AM is no economist. Thinking about this sort of thing makes his head hurt and, naturally, he would prefer to use his head for things other than hurting.
Monday, August 02, 2004
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
It's all about priorities. If you're willing to be the one white person in your neighborhood (and here I'm making an assumption based on your being a blogger), you'll probably find some significantly better bargains.
A good rule of thumb is: the more garbage there is on the streets and sidewalks, the lower the rent.
Post a Comment