Apparently DougJ has had the McMegan watch duties, but I’m not sure how he missed this gem:
We’ve been dipping our toes into the DC housing market recently, but after this weekend, I think I’m just about ready to give up. Anything that comes on the market at a decent price is snapped up almost immediately–by my count, mean time from listing to contract is under seven days. The only things that stay on the market long enough to look at fall into one of two categories:
1. The owner bought the house between 2004 and 2007, and wants to get their money back out, hopefully with a little profit . . . and has therefore priced their home at least $100,000 above what the market will bear.
2. The house has been rented, and the tenants, familiar with their copious rights under DC housing law, are essentially refusing to allow the house to be shown.
***There are two components to this, one DC-specific, one not. The specific part is the aforementioned tenant laws, which make New York’s arcane housing court system look like a bastion of pro-landlord sentiment.
By now, you just have to know what is coming next, don’t you? I mean, it is a virtual given. Wait for it, wait for it… THERE:
Not in DC! There’s a whole Office of the Tenant Advocate that will harass your landlord for free if he does you wrong. I resorted to it when a house we were going to rent, that was having some work done when we looked, turned out to have been renovated substantially below both code, and what we were promised.
It’s so unfair when tenant laws work in all tenants’ favor. John Galt would bust in with his unregulated firearms and demand that the free market says those mean tenants show the house against their will!
And I’ll spare you all from linking to the 30 or so posts I’m sure exist on why Megan thinks more people should be renting than owning a home (something with which I generally agree!). You’d think someone who believed that would like strong laws for tenants. But then you wouldn’t have what it takes to write for the Atlantic.
Mnemosyne
It’s the classic McMegan whine: “Why are these peasants not bowing to me?”
Though I especially like the touch of complaining that other people are helped by an office that she herself received help from. Apparently they were supposed to exist only to serve her and shut down the instant her problem was solved.
Short Bus Bully
The cognitive dissonance is DEAFENING.
MikeJ
It is perfectly consistent that she wants more people to rent and fewer protections for them. She just doesn’t want to be one of those unprotected people.
Ash Can
Wouldn’t you think the Atlantic would be getting embarrassed by now? This is why I’m starting to think they have her on staff for comic relief. They’re all laughing at her, not with her.
PeakVT
The fact that the c-word pops into my head every time I see McAddled’s name doesn’t make me a bad person, does it?
Bob L
Help, those other(non-white, non-REAL American) people are using my social safety net!
Well it is good to see McMegan is enjoying the post Obama-recession Bush-Recovery enough to afford a house. But I concede her point; what is the point of being successful in America if you can’t harass minorities and punch hippies? The govermunt is trampling her rights
jl
Excuse me, I don’t think Cole follows the logic of glibertarians. I’ll explain.
See, it was an OK useful thing when she needed it in a just assertion of her rights in a contract dispute and therefore it was OK; it was the night watchman state at work for a member of the productive class whose rights and property were threatened. But she does not need it anymore and it is getting in her way. Hence it is bad, a fit object or ridicule and righteous wrath for subsidizing and protecting parasites living off the productive class.
Glibertarian logic is easy, except for those who hate human happiness and freedom.
Tunch understands this logic; as Cole has repeatedly pointed out to his readers, he is an expert at it. And Tunch is just a cat. A vary large cat, I grant that, but yet, a cat.
No wonder Tunch looks at Cole funny. Cole cannot do elemetary glibetarian logic. It is a scandal.
James in WA
@Ash Can:
The first column of hers that I ever read was so thoroughly Devoid Of Clue™ that I clicked on her bio after only a single paragraph, the better to understand what her expertise was, exactly.
To this day, I continue to be astonished that someone who is essentially a nobody, with no real expertise, has such a distinguished platform from which to babble.
Comic relief is really the only explanation.
beltane
Is this woman capable of objectivity for even a few seconds? My four year old has a more highly developed consciousness than this person. Whine, whine, whine. Me, me, me. It is amazing how all phenomenon are viewed through the lens of McCardle’s person inconvenience, etc. She seriously expects to live in a world where everyone but her must play by the rules.
What an emotionally stunted wreck of a human being she is.
calipygian
This guy has really nailed McMegan:
I think he’s a bit charitable, I think she is the inheritor of the Monty Python “Upper Class Twit of the Year” sketch. But dumber.
mr. whipple
Maybe it’s just the recent focus on her(she’s never been on my radar) but it sure seems like McMegan is a special kind of stupid, even amongst columnists.
jl
The only problem is that the market it perfect. Rational expectations theory shows that a prospective buyer would know what some DC dump looks like inside just from the price and location. This is the only flaw I see in McM’s argument.
MattMinus
Snark fails me…
WereBear
And by that “we” I assume she is married?
What a fun feast that must be.
Zifnab
See, you come to terms on the solution, but I don’t think you really see the problem. McMegan likes renters because they allow her to own property and turn a profit without doing a lick of actual work. I imagine you like renters because they are afforded increased lifestyle flexibility by not being tied up in a mortgage contract for 30 years or required to bare the burden of the thousand problems that come with a decaying house unit.
McMegan isn’t championing rentership, she’s championing feudalism. Renters should be required to pay fealty to their landed betters. The idea that renters have rights which should be protected is absurd! The free market doesn’t allow for rights, only for profit.
Unless they are McMegan’s rights, in which case they are sacred.
James in WA
@WereBear: Not married; engaged to Suderman, who is his own brand of Special.
John Cole
@jl: If you read the whole post, she actually notes an obvious failure of the market without recognizing it is a failure of the free market:
I thought in the free market capital is always allocated correctly! Why is there not enough administrative capacity to make it easy for McMegan to buy a house!
@WereBear: She’s married to former Freedom Works mouthpiece and current Reasonoid, Pete Suderman.
tavella
If the owners want to show the house, they can stop renting it. Instead they don’t want to give up the benefits of the rent while abrogating the tenant’s enjoyment of the property _they are paying for_. And McMegan is upset she can’t exploit them. Libertarianism in a nutshell: the only right they are interested in is their own right to exploit and oppress others.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
You gotta admit it. Glibertarians are natural born spoofs. The more serious, the more spoofier.
Comrade "Tank" Hueco
I’m getting to like John’s increasing use of the phrase “You know what’s coming next, don’t you?” in his posts.
Redshift
@jl: Or alternatively, glibertarianism is “rights” are whatever justification I can think of for doing whatever I want. I pretend that they allow you to do whatever you want because I refuse to acknowledge that your “rights” could ever conflict with mine, so if they do, you’re obviously doing it wrong.
Not hard to understand why cats have an innate understanding of this principle. Though unlike glibertarians, I think they don’t bother fooling themselves with the idea that anyone else has rights.
Polish the Guillotines
@tavella:
Yes.
Libertarian Domestic Policy: Government must ignore me when I screw over the rubes.
Libertarian Foreign Policy: Government must defend me when I screw over the foreign rubes.
WereBear
@James in WA: @John Cole: Thanks, ya’ll. Now I have even more fuel for my imagination.
Tantrums… I sense tantrums.
I don’t doubt the delineations of the Glibbie mindset. When it comes right down it is probably even simpler than that; what’s good for me is… good for me. As a former boss used to say:
What’s this fair shit?
jwb
@jl: Are you sure you don’t moonlight as BOB?
Comrade Kevin
@Zifnab:
I think you’re giving her far too much credit for having thought that through. Everything I have ever seen from her boils down to one thing: “ME ME ME ME”.
Cerberus
I mentioned this in the other thread, but the aggressively privileged which includes both libertarians and teabagging wingnuts, are constantly angry about a world in which everything doesn’t go their way all the time.
They don’t believe in the right to lose, the right to have someone disagree with you, for others to take advantage of the same safety nets “proper people” do, or that some amount of their money goes for programs that won’t benefit them or people they know.
They become offended at the knowledge of other people and having these other people confront them or dare mar their reality by revealing that their prejudices and assumptions aren’t actual reality, is de facto oppression worse than any minority has ever faced.
They so often ride on insular communities where they are prevented from having to know about others except in passing, like little boogie-men in the night and assume that whatever they do or say, the masses will agree with and be pleased to hear for no one could possibly disagree with them without being evil.
So they try and shout down or tune out the people who dare stand up for themselves and become actively scared when the number of those standing up seems to be swamping the ones they assumed were tacitly agreeing with them.
Obviously the solution is to keep smashing their bubbles.
Repeatedly.
I hear sledgehammers work well for this purpose.
Comrade Dread
Let me consult the Galt-vi-tron 2000.
Galt-vi-tron says: “Find a new place to live then, you DFH, and let the landlord lease the place to a new tenant who finds the rat infestation to be a valuable and cheap source of protein.”
Mark S.
What the hell is she talking about? Does she think that if she buys a house that is being rented, she can just kick out the tenants? I would think she’d have to honor whatever the lease said.
Tim I
Has Doug J been court martialed for sleeping on post ?
Polish the Guillotines
@Comrade Kevin:
Can we just refer to her as Veruca Salt?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@John Cole:
Because teh eveeel soshulists have seized the commanding heights of the DC housing market economy, i.e. all the good places between Bethesda and DuPont Circle.
Calouste
@beltane:
That’s all there is to say about glibertarian philosophy.
And even then the last two me’s might be redundant.
Midnight Marauder
The libertarian worldview (especially in the classic form espoused by the McMegans of the world) really is one of the most disgusting, implausible, and obtuse philosophies to ever exist. I always get a laugh when people in an argument with one of the these types come to this realization and comment with something along the lines of “But you don’t actually think any of this stuff would work, do you? You don’t think you could actually run a country like this not named Somalia, do you?”
Yes, kind stranger, they do indeed.
WereBear
Yes, this exactly. Though I always have wondered how these people managed to stay that way. As someone who often works with the public, I have longed to say:
Excuse me, what planet are you from? Because on this planet, our will is often thwarted.
J.W. Hamner
@John Cole:
Obviously, it was government interference in the market in the first place that screwed it all up… as all the cool kids know, the free market can’t fail, it can only be failed.
She’d use a lot more words and anecdotes that seem to contradict her central thesis… but that’s what it would come down to.
cmorenc
Years ago while three of us were renting a house together as genteel-but-impecunious graduate students, the owner decided to put the house on the market in June (while we were still living there over the summer). Understandably, Saturdays were when we wanted to kick back and party, but the real estate agents wanted to show the house to prospective buyers. We gamely went along being good sports about it for awhile, but eventually putting up with several “could we bring someone by to see the house in half an hour” requests scattered across each Saturday wore out our hospitality toward this imposition.
The house was near the end of a cozy dead-end street, across the street from another house occupied by three other grad students we knew from school – these guys were hard-living, hard-partying type of folks somewhat in the mold of Keith Richards, with lots of amusing vices but without the musical talent. Their names were Richard, Tom, and Sam. ANYHOW it was mid-morning the third Saturday in a row the house was being shown, and we were out chatting with our grad-student neighbors across the street about how put out we were getting with the whole process and imposition. Richard (ringleader in the neighboring house) suddenly got an AHA! look on his face and asked: “say, about what time is the next group due to show up at the house?” A: “In about 45 minutes.” Richard responded with a wink: “we’ll have a little performance ready for them.”
As the agent arrived awhile later and got out of the car with a middle-aged couple and walked up toward our front door, suddenly Dave came running shirtless out of the house across the street, and two seconds later a disheveled-looking Richard came running out of the house chasing Dave, an axe-handle in one hand and a half-empty pint of Bourbon in the other, screaming at Dave “I’LL KILL YOU SONOFABITCH!? Sam came out from behind the house and grabbed Richard from behind, trying to restrain him, saying audibly enough that the couple on our doorstep could clearly hear: RICHARD! Calm down, man…you don’t want someone to call the cops again (!)
The couple didn’t stay at our house even five minutes before the agent left with them to look somewhere else. Not long thereafter, the owner took the house back off the market, and didn’t try to sell it again until after we all moved out elsewhere around Christmas break.
Seanly
@WereBear:
She did recently marry some wingnut welfare think-tank jackass. Jokes on him though – I’ve read some of her “recipes” from her old blog. They made Homer’s cloves, Tom Collins mix and frozen pie crust mix seem positive dee-lish.
Cerberus
@WereBear:
It’s probably really easy. If you come from an insular culture that shares a lot of qualities with the dominant culture then everyone you meet, or at least the majority of them will share your values, your heritage, your way of life, etc… and the majority of representations on TV and culture will resemble you enough to be similar as well.
Any deviations can be seen as PC intrusion and “trouble-makers” until critical mass is met.
You can see them really bare their fangs whenever they are confronted for the first time and are really outnumbered by others in any way. This can be seen by troll meltdowns when they try and shut down discussion on an “enemy blog” or attempts to get rid of college disciplines or organizations pretty much for existing and teaching “anti-majority” subjects. Or with enough time and delusion, right-wing teabaggers desperately trying to figure out how the black scary man could have gotten a strong majority of votes when no one they know would ever vote for one of “them”.
The delusion is also key. With some good religious brainwashing or investment in the nastier aspects of the dominant culture, it can be easy to begin deluding yourself about the existence of alternate viewpoints until you are more and more cutting them out and forming more and more excuses of why they can exist until voila, you’re living in an alternate reality scared to death that the rest of the world seems to be moving on from where you shut off and retreated.
jl
@John Cole: What J Hamner said. I did not read that as a criticism. She was explaining the mysterious optimal workings of the market, or took it for granted that meddlesome counterproductive government interference caused the backlog.
B-J should have Tunch write regular posts explaining optimal social decision making procedures (“feed me or I swat you!”). That would straighten the conceptual confusion that abounds here very quickly.
/snark tag here (JICTIAD)
Don
I like the fact that MM doesn’t even bother to get her distances right. She dismisses one neighborhood as being unserved by the metro when the edge of it is 1000 feet away.
DC does have stronger than average tenant protection but it’s most a pain in the ass for sellers looking to convert an apartment building.
The fact that current tenants can be a PITA when you’re trying to show the place is a MacGuffin. It has always been thus everywhere and always will be. Someone in the house can make life difficult. There’s also how long it takes to evict someone in DC, so a renter could make life difficult for a new owner. Again, so what else is new?
The clauses that most stick in a seller’s craw are the rights of first refusal that tenants have and they can delay the process somewhat. 30 days initial notice and 15 days to match a bid. Not great if you’re in a hurry but those are the outside limits and you might be able to get more rapid action.
The really unpleasant timeframes are for multi-unit properties where there’s an option and some time built in for tenants to try to put together a cooperative to buy the joint. It’s a bit of a drag but it doesn’t seem, to me, to be a horribly unreasonable thing to offer to people living in a property. There’s nothing in it forcing a seller to take less for the property than the market will bear.
Will
OT, but over at No Quarter, they are all actively defending the Confederacy today. Every single one of them. The comments are a howl.
http://www.noquarterusa.net/blog/2010/04/12/that-terrorist-in-your-family-tree-southerners/#respond
nate
The brilliant Susan of Texas laid McArdle out perfectly in this post:
“Watching a glibertarian attempt to deal with the real world is always amusing. It’s like putting the world’s laziest rat in a maze, where is stops and complains loudly that it’s not getting its treat every time it hits a dead end. A less entitled rat would turn around and find another way, while the glibertarian rat expects to be rewarded just for showing up.”
Fergus Wooster
@PeakVT:
I sincerely hope not, because you just saved me from making the same confession-by-way-of-question.
trollhattan
If it were not for all that daggon gummint infesting D.C. the Free Market(tm) would reign and the McMegans–herr und frau–would be able to afford a home surrounded by their peers…oh, wait…they wouldn’t any longer be interested in living there would they?
I’m beginning to appreciate how tough it is to go all Galty when one’s income depends on breathing gummint-supplied air and harvesting gummint-spawned capital.
I hear Somalia is nice.
Clark
@calipygian:
I’m pretty sure that Megan McArdle could run over herself with a car.
Warren Terra
How is it possible that the alleged free-marketeer, the Atlantic “Business And Economics Editor” McMegan is complaining that houses priced “at a decent price” are snapped up too quickly?
I mean, it takes about a third-grade-level understanding of Supply And Demand to understand that this result means the houses priced “at a decent price” are in fact priced at least a little bit below what the market will bear – at least, they’re priced lower than the level that the customers will agree to after some hemming and hawing and after a little more time has elapsed, enough time for McMegan to start bidding. I thought the Galtists had a third-grade-level understanding of Supply And Demand (albeit I thought that was about the sum of their understanding of economics).
If anyone were to take that post remotely seriously as being anything more than an existential whine, it would amount to a letter resigning her post due to gross incompetence. One of many, of course.
See also Yglesias’s post, in which he points out that the house sellers are free to buy out the tenants prior to selling the house, at a cost to the seller that’s negligible compared to the selling price of the house.
Warren Terra
@cmorenc:
That story sounds like pure win, and your neighbors sound like good people. At least, I hope their sporting support in your time of predicament made up for the nights their parties kept you up.
Morbo
@Will: No thanks, I’m staying in the boat.
boukman70
Hey, the DC market IS tough. ;)
http://bootynovelbill.blogspot.com/2010/01/housing-crisis-writ-miniscule.html
El Cid
If people didn’t keep forcing me to hear nonsense from McAddled, including NPR / GE’s MarketPlace, then I certainly would never waste a microsecond on this inane, ignorant freak.
SectarianSofa
She’s sticking it to the Man, to Unfair (Anti-McArdle) Society, by producing just what it takes to get by (nothing of any consequence), and possibly slightly less. There is no penalty for lack of journalistic integrity, no shame for thoughts that do not fall into neat lines advancing to a point. She realizes this. Conservolibertarian writers are held to a lower standard than even the hackish knee-height standards that are acceptable for purveyors of regular, reality-based-ish, writings of info-journalo-tainment. This she knows.
Whatever gifts she might have, she’s taking them and going Galt. The effortless crapping on a paper — that stays, doesn’t go Galt. If she were to put her nose to the grindstone to make sense, to have a consistently argued point of view, to defend and/or advance and/or lunch upon ideas which have anything approaching substance — well, she’d be tired out, while America and The World would be unchanged, and the Elites (or Whoever) would have won again. So, instead, she does whatever it is she does to get ready for a column (drinks lighter fluid and India Ink), and then writes away, unconcerned.
That’s my optimistic reading, anyway.
Keith G
How Do You Document Real Life When Real Life Is Getting More Like Fiction Every Day?
Headlines — bread-lines
Blow my mind
And now this deadline
“Eviction — or pay”
Rent!
Well Played sir.
tc125231
@calipygian:
Brian J
@calipygian:
Wow, that guy does have her figured out.
The problem isn’t that she’s a blithering idiot like Sarah Palin. It’s that she knows a little (more than me or you, probably; but then we aren’t the economics and business editors of a major magazine) but acts as if she knows a lot. And when she’s wrong, which appears to be often, she doesn’t acknowledge it, but instead tries to wiggle around it.
Anne Laurie
@Clark:
… and then produce a 10,000 word blogpost explaining that in a perfectly rational marketplace, such self-immolation would be rewarded with large sums of money and a wider media platform, if only it weren’t for all the looosers who whine for ’emergency medical care’ and ‘nanny-state traffic laws’…
Mark S.
Can someone translate?
Who is trying to break the lease, the landlord? You can’t break a lease just because you want to take occupancy.
Jesus, Megan, you can’t just kick out tenants when they have a fucking lease. It’s called a fucking binding contract. Maybe if you weren’t the stupidest, laziest person on earth you would find out how much longer they have on the lease. If you weren’t the cheapest person on earth (going by how she bitched about everything she had to pay for her wedding), you could buy the tenants out. But, no, you’re not allowed to just kick tenants out who still have time on their leases.
John Cole
@Keith G: Glad someone caught that.
gil mann
@cmorenc:
My “faith in humanity” cup was running pretty low, so thanks for the refill.
James in WA
@Brian J:
I doubt that she knows more than any reasonably informed Balloon Juice reader, myself, but that’s actually beside the point: you can know every relevant fact about a particular topic that can be known, and still not add anything to a discussion simply because you don’t have the the mental discipline and training to be able to competently analyze and debate it.
McArdle has a BA in English and an MBA, and she’s worked for a few different “start-ups.” I wish someone could tell me why I (or anyone else) should consider anything that she says about political philosophy to deserve any more consideration than anyone else with similarly irrelevant training and experience.
Yeah, I know, I’m being all elitist and all, but give me someone like, e.g. a Krugman to talk to me about economics, instead of this this know-nothing poseur, any day.
tc125231
@Ash Can:
“Her posts consist of entirely unsubstantiated bullshit and/or whining about how the world does not conform precisely to her ever so specific needs. She makes Marie Antoinette look like a paragon of self-awareness and enlightenment.”
It is no accident that McMegan’s character flaws closely parallel the French Aristocracy’s –a group unparalleled in its fecklessness and stupidity. The US elite is racing towards some sort of apotheosis where its short-sightedness and corruption will be the first in centuries to exceed those of the French aristocrats.
For more information, read Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror.”
Wile E. Quixote
@James in WA:
Because she has tits and is better looking than Andrew Sullivan. Seriously, someone at the Atlantic was seeing starbursts the day she was hired, which is why I’m not renewing my subscription when it’s up. The magazine is shit, McMegan’s last print article was a rehash of the argument over the best way to calculate GDP/GNP and whether or not it was a useful metric. I remember seeing similar articles and hearing similar arguments in the mid 80s when I was in college and studying political science and economics.
asiangrrlMN
@John Cole: I did, too! I love the music from Rent. Megan continues to astonish me that she’s only a few years younger than I am. Her mentality is firmly that of a high school mean girl.
@Wile E. Quixote: Agreed. She’s a cute white girl who some of the progressive white boys like. End of story. And, she does not know more about economics than do I. That’s a pure myth.
Citizen Alan
@tc125231:
If only the French aristocracy had an 18th century answer to Fox News which could devote itself to persuading the masses that they were hard-workin’, salt of the earth, common people you would like to have a beer with, France would still be a monarchy.
James in WA
@Wile E. Quixote:
This pretty much sums up not only McMegan, but also Palin. Bravo, WeQ, bravo.
Nylund
I believe that the only reason she is kept on staff at the Atlantic is due to how low she sets the bar. All the other writers come off looking like geniuses.
That, or when you insist on being “fair and balanced” and your other choices are the likes of Erick Erickson of the Confederate Yankee, then, well, she comes off looking relatively normal.
Francis
well, the points I was going to make have already been made, but they’re worth repeating.
1. Even if she bought the house, the tenants would get to stay for the length of the lease term. She seems completely unaware of basic property law which has been true since about forever.
2. The tenants’ right not to cooperate with the showing of the house is described in the lease. The basic rule is that the tenants get “quiet enjoyment” while the landlord gets “reasonable access”. Some leases limit reasonable access to things like checking up that you’re not destroying the place. If the landlord doesn’t have the contractual right to access for the purpose of showing the place to potential purchasers, the tenants have the contract right to tell the owner and McMegan to go pound sand.
3. She does not describe a hot market. In a hot market, houses go in about a day, and sell for more than the offering price. This is called an “auction”, a word which should be familiar to a MBA.
4. Why the f*ck is she complaining about a hot market even if it existed? It means that housing prices are rising and that she gets to build equity simply by owning the place. Do what everyone else does and get your loan prequalified.
etc.
memory
John, how on Earth did you miss that she used the office and thought it was useful when it benifitted her specifically?
There’s a whole Office of the Tenant Advocate that will harass your landlord for free if he does you wrong. I resorted to it when a house we were going to rent, that was having some work done when we looked, turned out to have been renovated substantially below both code, and what we were promised.
It’s only intrusive government when I’m not using it.