landlords

If NYC doesn't compensate landlords for repairs, which in turn means they don't want to do them, I agree that is horrible.

You're right, the existing hegemony in SF is an unholy alliance between anti-immigrant liberals and rent-seeking landlords.

How do you operate in the real estate leasing game for years without knowing what landlords want?!

Commercial landlords want long term tenants, not people going out of business in one or two years.

Could it be that some of the landlords successfully made it look like an accident to collect the insurance money?

According to the article, landlords expect economic cycles to last 7-10 years, and the last bust was in late 2008.

That fits your observation that landlords expect the bust to be less than 18 months away.

Something to reduce that 10-year period; something to encourage landlords to install solar; something to encourage first-time-buyers in particular to install.

Make the neighborhood more desirable by whatever means, more middle/upper-class people want to live there, local landlords raise the rent on existing units despite no actual change in their quality?

This is the interesting bit for me: Landlords believe the economic apocalypse is coming.

VCs have longer time-horizons (a typical VC fund will be spent over 5 or so years) and appear more stable to landlords.

Large landlords with experience are probably a better group to bet on (in terms of understanding long term economic trends) than startups.

Landlords just "know it" because they've already gone through it.

Due to the intricacies of the city's zoning laws and unfortunate politics, landlords are at a greater risk of receiving a zoning violation for leasing space to a tech company than they would be if they found a "blue-collar" tenant.

Agreed, many landlords seem to feel like the trouble is a mere few months away, although often any attempt at getting them to discuss how they arrived at that conclusion gets something like "I just know it." So one wonders about the whole "wisdom of the crowds" or "herd" in this case, and whether or not they can sense something that isn't showing up in other indicators.

Landlords have learned the hard lesson over the years.