We don’t have an instance stance on landlord apologia, but maybe we should make one, based on the number of people from other instances defending these mooching rent-seeking parasites.
i hope you do; seeing it is a depressing reminder of how much americans think that exploitation like this is okay and even more depressing to see people exploited like this want to perpetuate it.
/me sorts by controversial
You know what’s the fastest way to make landlords disappear? Ask about some broken shit around the house that they are required by law to fix. Radio silence for months guaranteed. Until the next rent increase of course.
For a lot of them, they don’t even care if there’s tenant turnover, especially if its a high-demand area. There’s no incentive to fix a broken AC; the tenants already signed the year lease. They can get to it next year when its time to clean up the place for the re-listing.
If it’s a longer term tenant, the landlord is actually disincentivized from fixing the AC, because they can fix the AC and jack the rent way up as soon as the old, abuse tenant inevitably leaves.
One of my friends suffered through this during the recent heat wave. They’ve been told there’s no budget for AC despite a recent $50 rent hike.
Their landlord is an independently wealthy multimillionaire — they don’t even need the money!
Landlord said to me “property tax has gone up. This is my only form of income. Will need to increase rent”
Told him “yeah, everything has gone up and my paycheck is still the same”.
Like, these types of relationships are so parasitic. This is the “nice” mom and pop style landlord too that every liberal seems to want to give a pass too.
Sure, are they less bad than the big corporate faceless landlords? Yes. But the entire relationship is the problem.
They get to justify forcing me out of my home because the value of the house that they own WENT UP.
That’s why their property tax is more. They literally own something that is more valuable and making it further impossible for me to ever buy a place of my own.
If they offered to let you buy it for the fair market value of the home, would you? That’s the only viable way for them to extract that house value without evicting you. A fair answer could be absolutely, and perhaps that should be something renters are given some rights to do, but just pointing out that a tax assessment doesn’t mean they have usable money unless they can do something to cash in.
I literally asked. He said he’s not selling.
That is unfortunate.
Old guy or younger guy? If this is their retirement income, they would probably be better off selling it and putting the proceeds into a nice account.
Of course those accounts also profit off of the inconvenience of others, but with social security all messed up, some form of screwing with the active working generation is needed to model retirement of the older generation, and a financial account is less egregious than sitting on potentially available housing stock.
I think I can answer most of your questions by saying he comes over to discuss the lease in a Mercedes Maybach. An SUV that starts at $178,000.
I don’t think age or other things really matter at that point.
He owns multiple properties and houses.
But, still, my entire point is that this relationship in itself is what needs to die. It’s not this individual dudes fault. It’s a system that allows people like this to exist that produce nothing.
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If that’s their whole retirement investment (as they said it’s their only income, no idea about us retirement details) if they don’t increase your rent, their net income will GO DOWN. Prices of everything also went up for them, if you think it’s hard with constant income, imagine with declining income.
The value of their house going up is useless to pay for bread.
You should get a bigger paycheck, average wage growth is around 5% in the US, higher than inflation even.
Sounds like they should get an actual job, rather than expecting someone else to pay for their retirement; someone who probably won’t get to retire themselves
If it’s their only income source I assume they are retired. If they aren’t, you are absolutely right.
Why do we have to sacrifice our future ability to retire and own a house because they bought all the houses and retired first?
How are the two related? It’s not a zero sum game, there’s new houses being built all the time.
There are studies recently released that show that the people who are buying houses 20 years ago are the same people buying houses today. It is a zero-sum game because nobody else is able to buy a house, especially not if they’re younger.
If that’s their whole retirement investment maybe they should get a job
They probably had a job for many decades, it’s how they bought and paid the house.
Sorry why should you pay NOW for a guy that workED many decades? Can you pay me for the work I did yesterday?
And now they are taking away the next generations ability to buy and pay for a house by making them fund their retirement.
People Mike that are not tge reason housepricees increase so mich that is 99% big speculators owning thousands oft units and hiking prices and rents.
How are they taking it away? There have always been people who rent and people who buy. Someone renting doesn’t prevent you from buying.
If i had Jeff Bozos money, I’d buy a bunch of houses and offer them to the homeless to get the back into society. Fucking bozo Bozos is. And that’s why I’ll never have Jeff Bozos money.
Capitalism rewards the worst most selfish hoarders of wealth. How can we build a system like this and expect this type of altruism? Makes no sense. The system was always broken.
Oh, I know. I was just explaining why I’ll never be a billionaire. I care about people. Sad that that’s a fact of life
“understood, create a factory town and offer housing in exchange for employment.” ~ Bezos
is that not the only way to do it?
Please use gender neutral inclusive language, instead of landlord, use the gender neutral term, landleech.
I was ready to hate on this post… but you right.
Seconding this motion
How do people still argue that landlords are useful and necessary?
By being landlords or personally knowing landlords.
The people saying that are usually hoping to become landlords themselves.
My parents own multiple rental properties and completely straight face told me it’s a charity cause they rent to people who can’t afford homes.
Meanwhile I’m engaging with my mutual aid group every week handing out about 400 meals, and survival gear for people who can’t afford anything.
Glad their fucking charity has turned enough profit to pay off the rentals, their main home, and their vacation spot though. /s
If they’re making profit, how in the world can they possibly think it’s charity?
People not understanding the actual cost of owning and maintaining a house is my only argument for landlords. Or if you maintain it yourself it’s a knowledge and time requirement.
Not saying landlords did a great job maintaining the rentals I’ve lived in. But there was definitely a point in my life where renting made more sense than owning a house.
We really need more control on rent prices so only high density housing is rentable. Or something, I don’t have answers for why my shitty house is worth 70% more than it was 5 years ago.
You don’t need a Lord to maintain a property though. That is the function of a superintendent, which is a role small landlords sometimes assume, and yes that is a job that should be compensated.
But it has nothing to do with owning and rentseeking.
My housing coop charges 38% market rate rent, maintains the common area, has a property manager, and provides units fridge/stove/furnace/AC, on 46 three bedroom townhouses.
So either landlords are wildly inefficient with their expenses, or they are taking a crazy margin over their operating expenses.
Right, I’m not arguing that landlords are good. They seem to be a symptom of a system set up to encourage their shitty behavior.
I do wonder if a housing co-op is protected by law in some way. Or more likely it relies on a few people having good intentions who are running it. A housing co-op with no intent of profiting, ever, would be a good system imo.
Well yeah that’s where I live.
There are regional housing federations that deal with helping the governance of these organizations https://www.housinginternational.coop/members/co-operative-housing-federation-of-canada/
These are all non-profits, that have bylaws governing them. If there’s a weird situation the coop can go into receivership and a new legal board established to resolve those problems.
There are companies that would do the maintenance for you, so I think if that was your concern, you could roll the dice with those while still actually owning the house.
But I will say if you aren’t going to be somewhere more than 2 years anyway (university or a work assignment), renting could make sense.
They kinda are necessary, given how they’re the byproduct of capitalism’s private property model and its commodification.
You could technically remove them by having the state manage all the housing, but that’s overly idealistic given how that’d go against the ruling class interests which would cause heavy lobbying by big landowners. It would also make the state a monopoly landowner which would have its own implications.
In other words, they’re necessary not because they’re useful, but because of how dogshit the system is.
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I just found an article (from 1955) by my grandma where she argued that she prefers renting over building a house because she has more freedom that way. She can move more easily because she doesn’t have to find a buyer for her house, she doesn’t have to worry about something breaking because that’s on the landlord to fix and she doesn’t have to go into debt to live somewhere.
As far as I know she never owned a home, always rented. But all her kids bought houses.
Sure, but it sounds like she’s never been evicted for no reason.
And her rent probably didn’t take 100 hours of labor a month.
That does sound like a regulation problem in the capitalist hellacape that is the USA more than anything. I live in The Netherlands and evicting someone here is very difficult. A landlord needs to make his case in front of a judge and everything. There’s one reason with which they can evict a tenant with a bit more ease and that’s to use the property themselves, but they need to prove why they need it all of a sudden. And even then they need to pay the tenant roundabouts €7000 to help with the move.
I had a coworker liked that. He enjoyed renting because it meant having fewer responsibilities.
I disagreed, and countered that renting means being more dependent on somebody else. Some landlords are excellent at responding to repair calls, but there are so many more that will leave you hanging for an indetermined amount of time, while leaks continue or appliances break. Personally, I’d rather not have the quality of life in my own home be dependent on someone who doesn’t really care about me.
Sadly, I don’t have much of a choice. I would prefer being able to pick my own repair people or just fix simple things myself. Alas, like so many others, I work full time but remain stuck in the rent trap. So much for freedom.
One of my coworkers said the same thing. After the third time they were forced to move they caved and bought a condo.
One of my big concerns is that access to psychological benefits of keeping a pet gets to be gatekept by the whims of someone else.
I’m also that coworker. Bought a 1995 build house in 2013, and sold it last year. Holy cost of maintenance. Roof, foundation, HVAC, plumbing, gutters, siding. We upgraded the windows too, so that was a choice, but nothing else was. Didn’t have money for professional interior upgrades because we were maintaining the structure itself instead.
If I ever buy a house ever again, it will be a condo so I’m only responsible for the INSIDE. As of right now, after all that, I’m happy renting. I’m so disinterested with painting and whatnot, that it doesn’t bug me to have white walls.
I do agree that the pet situation sucks though. We have 2 “aggressive breeds” that were strays we picked up off the street years ago (2016 and 2020), a Pit mix and a Dobie mix. Finding someone to rent to us with those was a chore. And for the few years we rented out our home (military. Lived in it while we were stationed there, rented it out for a few years, moved back in when we returned to the same duty station), we didn’t have a breed restriction.
We’re about to move across the country again, and I’m STOKED to be moving into an apartment. Rn we’re renting a SFH and it has been so nice knowing that money we had saved up isnt about to disappear because the water heater broke or whatever.
FYI: You might “only” be responsible for what is inside your condo but you are 100% on the hook for the costs external to your unit.
Surfside in Miami has forced all of the Condos to re-imagine their finances. Some units are being hit with $100,000 Special Assessments to repair the foundation, or facade, or just keep sufficient balance. There is no way out of this except to sell. They can charge you whatever they want, whenever they want.
Also “external” problems are also yours. One of the 5 units above yours flood into yours? That’s a civil problem between you and the whichever unit it is. Good luck finding them, and getting your money. Even if you get it. You still have to deal with the trouble.
Had condo suffer water damage 11 times in 8 years due to various reasons caused by units above. Basically on your own. Condo board is not getting involved. You get all the problems of someone else’s lack of maintenance, and none of the benefits of your own maintenance.
Condo Fees went from $110/month to $930/month because ‘fuck me’ I guess. No control over that either. You can petition the board but it’s full of old nosy fucks.
Oof, glad I read this so we know what questions to ask/red flags to look out for if we ever do pull the trigger on purchasing a condo!
COA fees going from $110 to $930 is fucking wildly crazy work. Did they at least tell you WHY it shot up like that?
And its also crazy that special assessments cab be billed for that high per unit. We’d be fucked! I thought the point of paying COA fees each month was supposed to spread the cost of maintenance around/ensure there are savings in the bank to cover major repairs!
Either the fees didn’t jump straight to $930 from $110 or the person didn’t do due diligence in reviewing the condo’s budget before they bought.
People? Like IRL? I’ve only ever seen it happen online.
And then they raise rent. For what? They haven’t upgraded anything. They haven’t added any of that value to the property. Every year the house gets older. Cars lose value every year even if you maintain it perfectly.
I’m not a landlord but the taxes go up every single year. Home insurance goes up every single year. Both often by a lot. Compared to 2019 my taxes are up 45% and my home insurance is up 500%.
The land value is up purely because they ain’t making any more of it.
The cost to repair everything goes up every year. A part of my washing machine broke again. Part was $20 in 2017. Part was $60 4 months ago. Post Tarifs it will probably be closer to $100. Nevermind the labor if I can’t DIY.
Plenty of reasons for costs to go up each year.
Real question is :
Why the fuck aren’t the wages going up?
If that too kept up with inflation since the 1970s then we’d all be happier then pigs in shit.
The land is what’s gaining value, not the structure on it
friend bought a house and was super excited about it. it cost her a pretty penny.
It had black mold and almost killed her children. The landlord claimed they had no idea (they did)
they left (sold the house) for more than what she paid for. This was in California, the housing market is completely and utterly f****
Bought a house, but there was a landlord?
They probably bought it from someone who previously had rented it out.
That is just patently untrue.
And then they try to fuck you over when you leave the place by pinning all the costs of normal dilapidation on you. Fortunately where I live the law forbids it but it doesn’t stop them from trying every time.
Good tenants make the neighborhood more desirable. So the rent being raised is a way to punish good Tennant, and steal their hard earn benefit from their existential labour.
If there were only a set number of cars available and creating more was prohibitively expensive, cars would appreciate in value as well.
And to be clear, I’m not talking about the house; building more of those is expensive, but doable. It’s building more land that’s the tricky part
When I did a vacation in Sri Lanka our guide told us some cars appreciated in price because the government increased (I believe it was that) import taxes.
Edit: Appreciation due to car scarcity
Same happened everywhere during covid.
It’s mind-bending that a car now cost what a new house cost, when I was a kid.
The cost of goods should go up. It is a healthy sign of the economy. The fact that wages don’t is the problem.
(This was way after covid).
If I remember it correctly, the government is heavily restricting import of foreign brands.
Our guide drove an imported japanese EV.
Hey, those buildings and apartments aren’t gonna rent themselves! /s
*2/3 of the tiny portion of the value someone creates that their boss actually lets them keep
Its not the first time I’ve heard this, but I’m not sure I agree with this sentiment. The product I produce only has the value it has, because a lot of people work to make it so. And a huge part of that is managing costumers, understanding them prioritizing they requests and managing a team. If my workgets sold for 100 I would only be able to sell it at 50 because I do not have the costumer relationship
managing costumers, understanding them prioritizing they requests and managing a team.
All of which is also being done by employees who are being paid less than they produce.
What do you think a boss does? They are also employees.
Not at the top.
The labour theory of value is completely compatible with everything you just said.
10 workers do 1 value worth of work on product, whether that be manufacturing, shipping, logistics, marketing, so on
boss pays them 0.5 value each
boss sells for 10
boss lives off the stolen 5 value
I am posing this in the most abstract simple way possible. Obviously in an actual supply chain, many bosses would be stealing different amounts of value all throughout the process, as each worker added value to the final product over time.
You are assuming that bosses do nothing. They add value. Not all of them, but in general they do. At my work place we pretty much begged my boss to please hire someone between him and us to manage tasks. Because my boss adds value Ina bunch of ways but he was so busy he could spare the time for the things we needed him so year long projects failed.
Management is labor, sure. It all adds to the collective labor expended necessary for producing a widget, say, 1 hour of cumulative labor expended through dead labor (the percentage of tools used up) and living labor. Let’s put constant capital at .5 hours, and variable at .5 hours. The value of the widget is 1 hour of socially necessary labor time, and it is sold for this price on the commodity market when supply meets demand.
Where do profits come from, then? From living labor. The price of the commodity labor-power is regulated around the average cost of subsistence. A worker may only need to truly work for 3 hours in a day to produce their social consumption, but they are paid for those 3 hours as spread out over 8, 9, 10, etc. hours. The difference between paid hours and the unpaid hours forms the surplus value extracted, which is the chief component in profit (though not the same).
That’s an oversimplification, but the point is that ownership adds no value. Management and administration can, but not ownership alone. It is only ownership of the constant capital that the owner entitles themselves to the profits, participating in a Money -> Commodities(means of production + labor power) -> Production(combination of MoP and Lp) -> Commodities’ (greater value than original commodities) -> Money’ (greater sum of money than originally fronted, fresh for the surplus to contribute to subsistence of the capitalist as well as expanded production). This is just a Money -> Greater Money circuit, which exponentially grows, the only action being buying and selling from the owners perspective (and this is often automated by having others do it).
I didn’t read it all. But I think we agree. The problem is owners. Not bosses. People who get to do nothing and still get paid
Then I think you should reread @glimmer_twin@hexbear.net’s comments with that understanding. We all agree that management is a necessary part of the social production process, but that it is ownership that entitles people to stealing from the working class.
I now understand what they mean, but I stand by my coment because it does seem to blame bosses. It’s just a matter of wording
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Landlord = banned. Your kids will get back at you some day, no doubt about that.
When I married my wife and she moved in we tried renting out her house with a property management company. She got one tenant and had that tenant for over 2 years with no complaints and we never raised the rent, just enough to cover taxes going up too.
But when we wanted to move to a larger house we gave her an 8 month notice we couldn’t renew since the market is so bad and we needed to sell. And my wife wasn’t profiting at all, she was still in the red from the repairs and setting up the house to rent out. We offered her like $10k off the price.
Anyway long story short, the tenant gave us hell for those 8 months, and when she moved out we found she never complained about anything because she ignored all the problems which made things worse and the house needed thousands of more dollars to prepare and sell.
She’ll never try being a landlord again, she hated it and the tenant shit talked her “landlord” on Facebook all the time like she was some evil monster.
I don’t know how anyone else does the landlord thing, this must be all the ones run by evil corporations.
This was a house my wife bought for like $150-180k originally.
Yeah being a landlord makes you into the bad guy despite intentions. You’ll always make back whatever “losses” you incurred in equity, because we have a crazy for profit housing market.
Landlord/renter is an abominable financial relationship.
Tough shit. Must be so inconvenient for you to not keep up on repairs to your own building. That’s on you.
Cry us a river
Standard rent is at least 1-1.5% of current not original value per month and taxes are about that per year.
you probably bought for 150 you earned 100,000 when it ballooned up to 250k rented it for at least 2500 a month x24 months or 60,000 paid 6000 each to taxes and management pocketed another 48,000
When you sold realizing that cool 100k you naturally had to do all the repairs and upkeep you had been putting off so you ended up coming out of pocket for “thousands”
In the end you netted 140k for doing 10 hours work once whereas the median worker earns 200-250
You probably charged here so much to ensure you made the “market rate” eg people like you that she had no funds saved to actually move and you probably nickel and dimed her deposit away for stuff that was actually on you.
Where am I wrong?
Wow lots of assumptions here. My wife only rented it out enough to cover her expenses (mortgage, insurance, property management, etc). She only netted $100 a month as “profit” but that doesn’t include taxes at the end of the year, and she was paying towards $6000 she owed to house repairs. It doesn’t include repairs needed from normal wear and tear and tenant damage.
A lot of your assumptions are based on profit towards selling the house, which in this situation means its not sustainable on its own without you covering everything out of pocket.
The real kicker here is that her tenant made more money than my wife. The tenant was making at least $10,000/month per bank statements.
Your other comments are false also. State laws here are very clear on what can be charged as a deposit.
None of that was my point though, and I realize sharing that here on a meme was dumb on my part. I’m not looking for sympathy, I was just feeling a rare moment of sharing an experience often overlooked: two hard working people who independently buy a starter home, meet later, and one moves in with the other and tries to rent out their house. Landlords aren’t always evil but your reply demonstrated all the immediate assumptions and biases. After all, why should anyone be allowed to own more than one home, right? Especially if they try to rent it out? I guess Air BNB is better.
A lot of us lived in rentals and heard talk about the dream of rental supplemental income, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be and not really feasible without an insane rate or having enough cash to not pay a mortgage. It’s probably why more companies are trying to buy up houses.
Wow what a messed up situation. Surprising to hear the tenant was wealthy. I still maintain that the only winning move is not to play.
Have you tried getting a job?
No sympathy for landlords.
No sympathy lmao, you dont get to cry
I have managed a building with 8 units before. Never again.
I once had a lady’s ceiling collapse. I then come to learn she’s been putting a bucket out to catch water for months, never told anyone about it. What should have been a quick 15 minute fix ended up being a total nightmare.
Had one dude who was a heroin addict. Kept flushing needles. The plumbing had to be taken apart multiple times to get his needles out.
Had a lady who kept adopting cats, wouldn’t get them fixed. She would then let them out into the hall to spray the walls with what was basically straight ammonia, except grosser.
I could go on all day, trash fires, fucking litter, a phycological inability to break down cardboard. I think my blood pressure just spiked writing this.
You couldn’t pay me to be a landlord. People are awful.
If it’s any consolation, I’m in an 8-unit owner-occupied condo rn and my kitchen ceiling collapsed last week because the HOA refused to fix a roof leak for almost two years. So now what should have been a couple hundred dollar roof patch is thousands of dollars coming out of my HOA payments.
Bullshit you just didn’t do any maintenance
people will ignore problems if they think someone else will deal with them
Yeah we know you did
Mod removed my post without reason. Maybe cussing offended them.
The market seems to self select for bad landlords. All the well intentioned ones I know got burned and stopped renting.
‘well intentioned’ and landlord dont go togther
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based tenant fuck your eldery leechlords
Very similar situation.
lazy moocher doesnt even begin to describe what this class of parasitic pieces of dog shit are. there are no words to even describe them. they’re a cancer, a plague, they need to be eradicated.
i can not imagine thinking in my brain that i should just get a free house that someone else has to pay for by getting a real job just because i was able to secure a loan and they werent
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so if nobody will rent to you because renting is evil and you STILL can’t get a loan, where do you live? I think you kind of glossed straight over the unable to get a loan part which is going to poke them either way. Free house doesn’t exist.
jesse what the fuck are you talking about
If you can’t get a loan to buy a house, what makes you think that will change if there are no rooms for rent?
For real though not understanding how loans work at all is on brand for you guys, If you want to go back to the days when everyone could own a house why don’t you go attack the zoning laws that make houses so expensive and survivable, then we can go back to shanty towns that burn thousands and crawl with disease but hey everyone can own their own no loan hovel right?
dude you are literally arguing against a point nobody made because you’re too stupid to follow anything and now you’re crashing out to defend landlords
lmfaoo. rofl.
I’m literally arguing a point that someone made, then the comment was deleted. I think you’re projecting an inability to follow things onto me when really it’s a struggle that you’re coping with yourself.
Reflexively hating all landlords is a symptom of not understanding how things work and, probably more importantly, a burning desire not to understand a goddamn thing.
cringe
Rent is due in 5 days.
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