I recently learned that my dad used to be a landlord. Problem was, he has a sense of morals, ethics, and empathy. Tennants would be unable to pay rent for one reason or another, but he wouldn’t evict them because he understood that sometimes shits hard. Eventually, he had to sell all his properties to a less scrupulous landlord.
I feel conflicted with the knowledge that I could have had a better childhood if my dad was a worse person.
He could have been the type of parent to charge their children rent once they turn 16.
my father is an engineer, government contractor, and Zionist. I wonder sometimes if the Palestinians are paying for my nursing degree right now.
Y’all need Georgism.
My landlord is the only homeowner that I can safely look down upon and tell to “get a job”.
Every time I see these posts: The happiest countries in the world are consistently: The Nordic countries are often considered happy due to high levels of social trust, strong welfare systems, and low income inequality, which contribute to a sense of security and well-being among their citizens. Additionally, their effective governance and access to quality public services play a significant role in enhancing overall life satisfaction. These governments are working for the people, not oligarchs.
Hella expensive property though. For my Baltic ass anyway
International investment firms and boomers have been hoarding apartments. Some smaller cities and their ourskirts can be surprisingly cheap.
Also, they have excellent music.
Apart from Denmark. I know only one band from there.
Killer pastry though.
Remember to tip your landlord (down a staircase)
LMFAO this is so real lol, landlords have their own circlejerk claiming that market prices increased lmfao
(also if someone could help me out, when I upvote a post on Lemmy, it doesn’t show my upvote or downvote or anything even after trying and reloading several times. I’m writing that on this post because it’s happening on this one as well)
No idea, we see your post so I’d assume the API is working for you in general. Check your VPN, do a test downvote on an old post in an obscure place and wait 24h to see if it’s just a delay, or else submit a ticket. Feel free to downvote this and comment back and I can tell you if I see it 🙂
Yes it seems to be working fine now, thank you for the comment!
My mother was deserted by our father in the 60s. She had 4 children. She found a rental house. Our landlords became like family. She struggled, but always paid the rent, and our house was always well looked after. As an adult, I suspect the couple that owned the property never raised the rent. I don’t know that for sure as I didn’t have the opportunity to ask my Mom before she died. I will say that all 4 children were educated and are leading productive lives. Thank you to the kindness and humanity of that couple that were our landlords ❤️. You made such a difference in my Mother’s, and her 4 children’s lives.
Is landlord a “job” where you live?
I think every single person I know who owns a house/flat and rents to someone has of course a regular job where he works at. Wouldn’t be financially viable in any form otherwise (and it shouldn’t be).
There are some people who own a bunch of properties and their job is maintaining them and dealing with the paperwork. And then there are some people who passively collect income and have a management company do that with no real connection to the place…
They are basically investors in the housing market when their money makes its own money without their direct involvement.
One landlord: “How will I pay my bills?”
Their multitude of tenants and their families: “How will WE pay our bills?!”
Landlord: “(dead serious) That’s not my problem!”
Always remember that “the market” is just a signal to the landlord that they could get more if the property were on the market today. It’s still their choice to squeeze you to take advantage of that. “It’s the market” is code for “because I can”.
Also they know that people don’t want to move every year or two, so they can absolutely raise the rent above market level without you wanting to leave yet. This has the effect of pushing the market higher. The switching cost is very high, so it’s in their favour that way too.
A landlord I knew about through a friend said they never raised the rent as long as their property is being paid off, because they would rather have it occupied and being paid than the tenants leave and the place sit empty.
Not to say that’s a good landlord by any means, but there is a choice. The market isn’t a mandate.
they would rather have it occupied and being paid than the tenants leave and the place sit empty.|
Small-time landlords (maybe what’s going on here) are also more sensitive to disruptions in cash-flow. That is, a tenant that can’t pay rent or is just tearing up the place. So it’s more desirable to retain a tenant that can keep paying, even if they’re not worth top-dollar to you.
I also just threw up in my mouth a bit while typing that out.
Once you get up to corporate scale however, I’m guessing that you just have a certain percentage of bad tenants no matter what you do. So part of your overhead is processing evictions and refurbishing units for new renters. As a result, it is less risky to squeeze everyone a little harder.
Sure but they still don’t have to raise the rent at every opportunity, that’s still a choice.
Also though the largest landlords are in a position to create artificial scarcity by buying up properties just to keep them empty, so people don’t have other options.
Peter Parker: “you’ll get your rent when you fix the damn DOOR!”
“How will I pay my bills”
(Democratic) Socialism, UBI, and fair wages.
I mean, you can go one further and establish public utilities that ration resources per capita instead of charging a vig on top of the production cost.
Why do I need UBI and wages if I can just claim a vacant apartment and be guaranteed power/telecom, of which their are millions nationally?
We could divert the tens of billions (converted to energy/man hours) we’re throwing away on AI subsidies and everyone can live a comfortable middle class life free of charge.
Why do I need UBI and wages if I can just claim a vacant apartment and be guaranteed power/telecom, of which their are millions nationally?
Because almost all of those homes are vacant for a reason. They are in disrepair, or under renovations, or actively looking for someone to occupy them, etc. Of course, there are some places in rural Kansas which are just vacant - but then, these are already dirt cheap. Iirc, there are some towns which will give you the house for free if you live there for X number of years.
So let’s say anyone can request a residence for free from the government if they would like. What happens? Well, first of all, all vacant housing stock immediately disappears in almost all places because - all things being equal - most people would prefer to live alone, rather than living with their family (when they are an adult) or with roommates. And the government can’t force people to live with someone they don’t like - that’s a political non-starter - so if someone ends up residing in a 5 bedroom house, they can just keep rejecting potential roommates the government sends their way. If your goal was to end homelessness, this market trend will immediately stymie your goal - you will still need to build more housing, which will take more time, and people will still be homeless.
Meanwhile, it becomes agonizingly difficult to move anywhere. Want to move to a new city? Well, you’ll be on a years-long waiting list to find a place to live. If it is a city that a lot of people want to live in, then the waiting list will just perpetually keep getting longer. Want to move out of your parents house? You’ll need to find a friend who already has a place, or get on a years-long waiting list.
What if you have special needs, like you are wheelchair bound? Now you need to wait even longer for a place which is wheelchair accessible. Sure, the government might prioritize such cases - but what about cases that don’t neatly fit in a box? Suppose you have a best friend who needs help looking after their child. You want to help out, but you live on the other side of the city, an hour away. So you can never help your friend as much as you want because of the commute, and their child will be grown by the time you could get a place closer to them.
Markets are good because they force people to make choices that balance their desires against everyone elses, which creates a highly efficient mechanism for rationing scarce resources like housing. So people can live alone if they want, or find roommates to save money if they want. They can spend more to live in a hip neighborhood if they want, or spend less to live in a cheaper neighborhood. They can decide how much they value not walking up stairs every day, and choose to pay more for an apartment with an elevator or on the ground floor.
Really, you pull a “what about wheelchairs” then turn around and talk about how people should pay more if they value not taking the stairs?
Exactly. Markets solve all sorts of problems, big and small.
AI subsidies?
But think of the market!
Landlords are parasites.
They’re the foundation of society, I say!
We had 7 units in a strata. All we wanted was to cover the mortgage, taxes and insurance. We kept the rents purposefully low, hoping to attract long term tenants. Quite frankly - tenants move when tenants move regardless of leases (you can’t get blood from a stone in small claims.) They aren’t rich like we aren’t and what little rent we got didn’t pay for the cleaning, painting and repairs that we had to do when they moved out. If it wasn’t acceptable to me - it wasn’t acceptable for my tennant. We scraped along for 7 years and finally had enough. We sold for what we bought them for. Landlord tenant laws are different everywhere - lots of people seem to think you are rolling in money if you are a landlord. Bottomline - We were too soft and feel we got taken advantage of - never will we do this again. If you can’t afford your rent, don’t be fooled you can’t afford home ownership either -
They aren’t rich like we aren’t.
We had 7 units in a strata.
Fucking what.
If you can’t afford your rent, don’t be fooled you can’t afford home ownership either
Said the person with 7 rental properties, talk about out of touch.
I don’t get why u just blame landlords.
You know what other countries are doing? Building multilevel longterm concrete compact apartment complexes.What does US do? Nothing.
I’m telling you, those places are full of depression, conflict, traffic, ample(read: no) parking and those with all kinds of life struggles. People (the ones I know) need some space to maintain a healthy style of living. I can hear the lady yawning through the walls at my place. I yearn for a home with no shared walls sooooooo badly lol.
We dont need compact apartment complexes, we have plenty of houses being hoarded by companies and landlords so they arent on the market and the few that are can have artificially high prices. There are “Cash for your house now!” signs everywhere where I live plus they keep mailing us too, and those are usually either landlords or house-flippers.
I haven’t seen any hoarded houses in my area. I think someone is doing disingenuous propaganda.
Sometimes houses are empty for couple of years because foreclosure and bank has to wait for liens to clear. My neighbor’s place was held for 2 years, due to stupid system.
It’s easy to not see something you don’t look for.
No but seriously. Houses foreclose all the time, they go back to the banks. So bank then has to wait legally required time. And then the bank has to do all the repairs and resell shit.
While all that happens - yeah it’s on the books as owned by a corporation, but it probably doesn’t warrant loosing your mind about it.
So I dunno which stats people are talking about when they refer to companies holding houses? I think it’s a lot of boloney.
U know what the issue is - government is not building cheap affordable long term housing. Like apartment complexes. There are no programs in place.
The issue is the government letting the cheap affordable single family homes (not apartments or condos) go extinct.
It’s a multi faceted problem. There needs to be gov program to start building apt complexes . This will reduce demand on houses and drive prices down simultaneously
