Specifically regarding apartment buildings: what can be done in a future libertarian Russia with lunatics who keep rabid dogs in their apartments, bring trash from the landfill, drill every day, etc.?

анонимный вопрос

I have already answered a practically identical question, but since we have returned to this topic, I will now approach it from a slightly different angle.

In a recent post on monopolies, I mentioned that in a free market there are both factors contributing to the growth of companies and factors contributing to their fragmentation. The inconveniences that individual apartment owners face when attempting to jointly manage an apartment building clearly tell us that in this area, the tendency toward the growth of companies will be stronger in a free market. And indeed, it is more convenient for one developer to build an apartment building, for one legal entity to manage it, and so on. So, as the initial non-market Russian distribution of property (where every apartment has its own owner) is smoothed out, we will more and more often arrive at a situation where apartments are owned by a landlord and rented out by them.

Thus, the boundaries of acceptable behavior when using the apartments will be determined primarily by the owner, not the tenant, and for a quiet, decent resident, this is certainly convenient: you inform the owner that the neighbor is going crazy and has filled the apartment with some stinking junk, and the owner will set things right.

Now, in the event that the neighbor bothering you is actually the owner of their apartment, we fall within the framework of the usual problem of negative externalities: filing a claim, negotiations, threats, court, compensation. Moreover, again, if you are not the owner but a tenant, the problem is solved more easily, since it is easier to determine the amount of damage. You declare your willingness to move out if your landlord does not resolve the problem with the neighbor, and the landlord then presents claims to the neighbor, based on the amount of rent they risk losing, and this is a much more reliable basis for legal proceedings than other methods of assessing damage.

The moral. Housing maintenance is also a business, and no one promised that doing business is easy. But there are ways to make your life easier; after all, it’s the market.