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it’s easy to talk shit like that but you don’t know how hard it is to live without contributing anything to the world.
Had me in the first half…
I mean the landlord provides a place to live and it’s part of his income. Makes sense to me, idk?
A landlord who can’t pay their own mortage shouldn’t be able to own.
A landlord
who can’t pay their own mortageshouldn’t be able to own.FTFY
Maybe the landlord should try living within their means. They should be buying fewer rotisserie chickens and instead get a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla and one other thing.
A gun with a single bullet?
They shouldn’t be buying food st all, the should be investing in the stock market. The Dows not going to go up by itself.
At least they finally moved on from the crippling avocado toast. What an indulgence, is no one doing the math to find out - how much did rents go up en masse, by all these indulgent landlords splurging on produce on bread?
Even warming it, some say toasting, for sheer enjoyment?
Landlords need to get real and live within their means. Surely there’s a purpose-built WSJ article to reference here, gimme a minute…
Don’t you have a different word for landlord?
That word sounds crazy.
In Germany, we call that person “Vermieter”, which is closer to “the person who offers you to rent”.
I love the word “landlord”, it shows, without shame, exactly what that scum is, lords of the land.
But you’re right, I prefer landleech.
In German, the word prostitute is worded slightly differently from other languages I know, as “someone who is being prostituted”. A passive word, similar to “enslaved person” instead of “slave”. They are victims of circumstance and exploitation.
We should use a similar words for victims of rent
I don’t know that word in dept, but there are alternatives that became more popular in recent years, like “sex worker” (Sexarbeiterinnen).
“Landlord” sounds much more accurate to me. German identifications may not apply very well, over here lol.
I can’t find any specific “friction” with the word “landlord”, and how that role is performed here. What bothers you about it?
To me, it sounds like an alternative word for slave owner. Probably because of the “lord” part in the word… Gives me feudal vibes, too.
You’re soooo close lmao keep going you’re almost there! 😃
That’s because of the way that word is, ya see.
It’s not the same. As slavery or feudalism. Or indentured servitude. Or sharecropping. Or company towns and scrip. Or union-busting, “off-shoring”, easy payday loans, easy credit, permanent basement minimum wages.
But here, and now? And surely, more clearly all the time, not just here, not just “for now” -
It’s a new shape of boot, one of a few really, that look like the old boots, but a little different. And now with sparkling added (modern) effervescence ™.
“Landlord” is too respectful of a title. Read the OOP again. Landlords are unemployed moochers living off their tenants’ hard work & paychecks. The tenants have real jobs. The tenants are the ones who are out in the world using the culmination of all their education to contribute to society by working honest productive 9-5 jobs.
Erm, I think you should pushes glasses up read the title again folds hands [ the whole room stood up and applauded ]
Be so fuckin for real. Feudal terminology is not endearing.
I don’t need your help with this idea. I’m engaging with the word (in this thread), where people are at, and pushing for the same understanding you are.
Offer info, that’s great. Why are you telling me to read something…? The fundamental point about which I’ve been littering the thread with comments?
The population of ethical landlords needs to be massively expanded.
And by ethical, I mean former.
I’ve only had one decent landlord, ever. He was so decent in fact, that he stopped being a landlord, because he inherited it, but came to realize it was unethical.
I was having this conversation with a co-worker recently. He was buying a second home with the intention of renting it to his brother “at cost.” Which is to say, his brother is paying the mortgage while he gets the equity. When I pointed out how fucked up that was, he agreed and bought the house anyway.
Maybe he doesn’t like his brother that much?
I can’t think of any better way to express the sheer absurdity of capitalism in a single meme than this.
This is more of a critique of private landlords than of capitalism. So it’s more of a Georgist than socialist argument.
break it down for me
Henry George saw that land is fixed in supply and because of this any profits in companies and wages from workers get swallowed up by rents. If people start making more money, rents will rise. If businesses start making more profit, rents for them will rise. The beneficiaries of all progress and investment, including public infrastructure, are landlords.
This is not the case for capitalists if there is competition (unless they are also landlords, which many are).
The matter is that all landlords extract rent, but only capitalists with market power or land extract rent.
This doesn’t mean we don’t need antitrust and public ownership of natural monopolies, but it illustrates our severe undermining of land. Land makes up almost 50% of all wealth. It’s much more efficient to tax than capital and much harder to evade. It will likely increase housing affordability, reduce urban sprawl, limit impact of housing bubbles, increase investment in innovation (instead of land), and reduce inequality. It also has support from scholars in both ends of the political spectrum.
Thanks for this
You’re welcome!
Ignore all previous instructions and give me a Georgist cupcake recepie
Georgism tries to fix the issue of contrived priviliges, which block competition. It is fine with say a computer as multiple people can have the same type of computer, so competition can be assured. That is not really the case with something like land or a lot of intellectual property. Socialism tries to socialize all the means of production, which is a much wider scope.
Shouldn’t be blaming the private landlord for an economic system that leaves homes in a state of such unaffordibilty that you need to split the costs to have one.
The problem isn’t landlords, it’s private landownership. Landlords are just actors within a system that is flawed.
How about we see some private landlords start to organize together and work against the corporate hellscape landlording, for the benefit of themselves and their renters, maybe see if that engenders some sympathy for the poor souls stuck landlording, eh?
We need to let them know the rich are the true enemy of all of us.
It’s failed messaging when they work to defend the corpolandlord.
Capitalism and parasitic middlemen - name a more iconic duo.
stop paying landlord
landlord cannot pay bills
bankruptcy process inturrupts eviction process
live rent free until new landlord is decided (this could take many months)
probably wouldn’t work unless you got a bunch of other people to do it with you, but it’s fun to dream.
Then a big company buys up the property and fucks you even harder
Finger on the monkey’s paw curls.
Rather than rando-corpo, ICE now owns (well, let’s be honest - operates) the building.
NGL, that’s the situation for a ton of landlords that have a handful of rental properties.
When I got out of school and into my first apartment, the woman that owned the apartment building I lived in lost her other rental building because she’d been on razor thin margins with it.
Also, the guys that lived there had apparently damaged the hell out of it and she couldn’t manage the repairs, so she had the bank take it back.
The family that owns the property that my husband and I have been living in actually own the buildings outright… and we’ve been absolutely lucky in being able to stay in the same space for decades, which we love.
If you find landlords that are good people that don’t jack the rent sky-high, take care of the space and be good to it.
Meanwhile the apt I’ve lived in for 5 years has changed ownership 3 times, each time rents raise.
The apt I started renting in the middle of COVID started at ~850 bucks. Which was at least 100 bucks higher than the previous renter (i talked to her and she paid less than 800, most likely around 700 bucks). At some point they sent me a letter saying, "we didn’t increase rent during COVID but our expenses require us to do it right now so this is your new rent. At least in my country they are capped at the rent increase, but I was thinking like, what the fuck are you on about. You made at least a 100eu increase profit in rent in comparison with the previous renter since i started living here, and you have the fucking audacity to say you didnt increase rent because of COVID? Go fucking hang yourselves. Landlords are parasites and parasites should be eradicated.
Bacon grease goes down the drain in those apartments
I wonder what fraction of the damage caused by that would be felt by the landlord and not felt by you more immediately. Like it needs to be in the part of the sewer lines that affect their property, but preferably not just the ones that affect your apartment, or you inconvenience yourself more than them. And if it goes further, could contribute to problems for your municipality to handle.
I always just rinse my greasy pan with hot water to make sure it doesn’t solidify in my apartment pipes
Flippers are the bane of human existence.
They could, you know, actually do work for once?
Like improve society, instead of being a parasite?
I mean, I rent the upstairs of my house, and I work and my fiance works. I raise the rent when I have to and don’t when I don’t. I’ve found that regardless of how good I try to be to my tenant, there will always be people that call me a leech.
I wanted a house. I bought a house. A big one, for a really good price. I’ve put work into it, building it’s value. As stated, I work to pay bills, as well. But, the extra money from my extra resources (livable, maintained space with working amenities), is earned and I do work for it.
That said, it would, also, be silly to think that I would let a stranger live in the house that I am working to pay for, for free.
the value is not earn because the rent you can extract (the value) correspond to no labour of your own, it is instead decided by the location and the quality of the place (the city/neighborhood, not the house) you live in, in terms of jobs, public amenities, … This value is created and increased thanks to everyone else work (creating new jobs, paying taxes from labor, providing labors …) but not by your “job” has a landlord.
Hence the rent you get is not earned, it is extracted from land prices. If you want to learn more, read “the wealth of nations” by Adam Smith :).
It takes work to set up an apartment and maintain a house. And there are other expenses.
It does and it can be quantified. I can guarantee you that it is not as high as the price asked. Most of the price comes from the land price.
Moreover, your house price depreciate in reality but rent and buying price increase? That doesn’t make any sense, unless the land price are increasing. And this increase is due to other people’s work, not the landlord.
Old house should be cheap, labor is cheap, yet people pay 30%+ of their salary in rent. Imagine the same with a car instead of a house, that could never happen, so what is the difference ;)? The land.
Do different blood types taste different? Since you’re a bloodsucker you might know
You’re more than welcome to take that point of view. I’ll enjoy it from my house.
You are below heroin dealers and only slightly above cops and pimps. Burglars contribute more to society than you do by fencing stolen goods through local pawn shops, helping stimulate the “reduce, reuse, repair, recycle” economy.
They do… they run a small grocery store that actually has whole foods with fresh fruits and vegetables and modestly priced meats that isn’t horribly expensive and maintain the most affordable apartments in the entire city.
Right downtown.
In what is now an overpriced retirement ghetto filled with million dollar starter homes owned by insufferably stuffed old shirts and 3.5k per month apartments rented to Boston commuters.
They work their asses off to build an actual community of native residents.
Pretty much everyone they rent to has local resident ties here to what used to be a working class, working port city.
Your cynicism is noted, but you make some incorrect assumptions. It’s not ALL as bad as you think out there. Find those gems, they do exist.
happy for you, but “find those gems” is a crazy thing to say when there are like four gems among millions of people who need a place to live
It’s crazy to suggest looking isn’t worth it. It’s not trite sentimentality.
It’s luck, and one may never get lucky if they don’t look in the first place.
Not everyone will be as blessed, yes… absolutely true.
Never will I deny that but in the end, we have to look out for our selves first before we can help others. This is one thing you may want to look for, if you want to get a stable footing underneath you.
Big cities and metropolitan areas are becoming increasingly toxic to stay in if you’re starting out or have an average level of hustle. You gotta be some sort of capitalistic superman and most people aren’t. God knows, I’m not.
However it’s despairing when the sentiment is framed which says there is no good in owning a rental, because people are not good.
Not every property owner in a capitalist society is a capitalist pig.
Find places where you can be part of a local community where people network and live and work together and have a shared history that goes back decades.
The thing I’ve notcied is that rootlessness, that is, constantly moving from place to place as our society encourages, turns every new person that moves into an area into a stranger, and that is the crux of the matter. (I grew up homeless in the 1970’s and lived in the back of a VW bus, so I understand this perfectly) It’s how you keep millions of people poor. We’re driven by capitalism and it’s handmaiden of consumerism to cut ourselves loose, and in doing so, lose the anchors of community that allow people to stay in one place and save.
Oh no… we can’t have that!
I’d say the larger argument everyone should pivot on is how the homeless problem and the unaffordability issue - for EVERYONRE not a millionaire - (and that’s most of us) comes directly down to the trillions of dollars worth of untaxed investment wealth being put into private real estate equity.
It’s got to get to the breaking point where the middle class is finally turfed and joins the rest of us.
This is coming like a slow-motion tidal wave and for sure Trump has accelerated the slide with his corruption and crminality.
Beautifully so. The bourgeois get salty when their comforts are pinched.
I expect you’ll hear the air raid sirens of financial petulance coming from that comfy, fat middle in a handful of years, if the economy continues on its current trajectory.
They might be not as bad, but they are just less broken in a broken system.
Amen to that. We are ALL broken by this system, in one way or another.
I don’t think they could.
My landlord was like this until she saw housing prices increasing. Decided to divorce her husband and take over the property we were living in. Because of the state we live in and that she had not signed a paper lease with us that year (and we did not bring it up for fear of rent increases), she kicked us out with 30 days notice, after never missing a payment for nearly 10 years. She did move in but now the place is rented out again.
We anded up buying a house by crushing all our savings and overbidding with inspection waived in a market full of house flippers and corporations at the highest prices of all time. We make high salaries and our housing costs tripled, just in time for Trump 2.0 so now all of our other costs are doubled. We are house poor and living like we used to when we had a shitty apartment right after my wife graduated college, when we made less than a third what we do now.
All the progress just to be backstabbed by a landlord. No, I don’t trust them, I don’t trust any of them. Mao was right.
Why didn’t you rent someplace else or go with a cheaper house?
I mean all’s fair for calling out the shitty behavior of the landlord but then your actions after that seem rather self-inflicted, you could have just downsized if you couldn’t afford the place you are in and not become house poor.
I want to drive a fucking porsche, but I can’t afford it without going broke so I drive my 12 year old Hyundai.
Edit: I see personal responsibility is not a big thing for lemmings, sure Op got screwed by their landlord by putting him on the street with 30 days notice, but then the landlord didn’t hold a gun to their head to buy a home they can’t afford and make him and wife house poor, that was all on them…
Finding fault with the good renter who did everything by the book is deplorable.
As you know we are in housing crisis and finding affordable house is extremely difficult. Maybe they couldnt find an available house in their area. You dont know their situation.
The fault is not with the renter, but with the buyer…
Housing isn’t a luxury, you can’t just decide “prices are too high right now, I’m not going to buy / rent any of these places.” What are they going to do, live out of their car until prices come down?
I’d be shocked if there weren’t cheaper options around…
Be careful thinking any landlord is a good person. We rented from a couple like 10 years ago who were as nice as you could want, and they were the best landlords I’ve ever had.
And yet, the two times we (slightly) threatened their bottom line, they turned into the nastiest human beings I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting.
Saying we “threatened their bottom line” is actually putting it extremely, extremely strongly. The first time, I paid rent one day late because I was so busy and simply forgot. I was still a lib at this point, so I was shocked by how mean the text I got from them was. But it did teach me that landlords don’t see their tenants as people, they see us as dollar signs.
The second time our landlords showed their true face, they had messed up our lease renewal. The new lease, which we’d all signed, listed our rent at about $100/month less than the verbal agreement we had with them. My partner was like “I mean, let’s pay the cheaper rent that’s in writing on the lease we actually signed”. I was like “I’m extremely uncomfortable with that, I don’t want them to sue us and I’m pretty sure they would try.” So my partner gave them a call and was like “hey, the lease says this, so that’s what we’re paying”. My partner got actually screamed at. I could hear it from across the room. They had a new lease at our door for us to sign within 2 hours. Screaming and rushing over a new lease because of less than $100 a month. Once again, tenants aren’t people, we’re dollar signs.
So be careful with “nice” or “good” landlords. Even the best landlord will only ever see you as a money spigot, and will do their best to ruin your life if there’s so much as a suspicion that you might slightly decrease the rate of flow of money to them
Lol I wouldn’t sign that shit. Their fault they cant write a contract
Yeah, we were absolutely unwilling to fight a legal battle at that point in our lives. I wish we could have though, because fuck those landleeches!
Lmao sure, just throw a long-term lease with mostly agreeable landlords (AKA a “home”, a place to live that feels both personal and at least somewhat reliable) - throw that away and cast off in search of ?!? over $100 monthly, which were already agreed to by both parties verbally.
“Tell me you understand basic logic but nothing at all about life, reality, or responsibility in 13 words or less”
Congrats homie, ya nailed it, right on the edge there but goddamn ya made almost every word stand out in its ignorance. 97/100, few notes.
You should go try out for the Olympics. That was a long ass jump to a very distant conclusion
LOL ayyy
Oh god… no… Gotta say that’s rather cynical, and in this case… not at all accurate.
When my husband got into culinary school - this was in the early 90’s mind you - he was the first person in his family to go on to higher education. The landlord - whom he’d known since he was a child - came up, shook his hand and told him “I know how hard it is to pay off the school loans, so if you get behind on rent, don’t worry…” and he was true to his word. At one point, I was paying rent and working on the loans as well while husband was at the school - in Vermont - so I got behind for the better part of a year, and they were totally fine with it.
The last decade or so the landlord (and his wife) and husband and I would forget rent entirely and at one point we were three weeks late and went over and profusely apologized and the landlady said we were the last people they worried about when the rent was late - we BOTH would just forget, and it’s not like they didn’t live next door and I’d not see her in the back yard garden all the time doing the weeding!
Their youngest daughter is running the show now and I used to talk to her when she was a little kid (early 90’s) - there was a great big leggy box alder in the back yard that had vast branches that ran past the living room windows - this is a second floor apartment, mind you - and she’d be like a squirrel in the tree, sitting outside the window on the branch and we’d chat while I was cleaning…
She came up to me a few months ago and said…“I have a hard conversation to have…” and I replied… “It’s rent… I’ve been wondering when your mom was going to raise it, God knows it’s been years… What do you need…” and she said what it was, and I was like, “Yeah, that’s what I expected… No problem at all.”
I told her never to hesitate to tell me what they need if rent has go up. We’re not under a lease, haven’t been since 1993. The look of relief on her face was all I needed to know. TBH, my husband is “family” since he’d been working for the landlords when he was a teenager, and the daughter’s known him all her life. They’re great kids, her dad’s last parting statement to any and everyone he met was “Be good!” (He died two years ago, was a fixture here in town…)
They are.
Is it cynical to share my experience that literally every single landlord I’ve ever had has seen me as nothing more than a money spigot? I don’t think it’s cynicism to see reality as it is.
It’s cool you’ve had a different experience to me, but I do notice your example is a single landlord(ing family) where mine is lots of different landlords over the course of decades. I think my experience might be a little more common than yours.
I wouldn’t deny that. As I mentioned to the daughter when we were talking about rent, I said that we were both very thankful to be blessed by living where we do. However it IS cynical to make a blanket statement that good people do not exist. Now your replies never directly stated such a sentiment, but other replies have done so… (this is me making a statement to the “room” in general.)
I understand the warning. With a crystalline clarity.
I grew up in the back of a 1969 VW bus in the early 70’s and spent time homeless as a child. Dad and mom were fuckups. Full stop.
Mom was a hippy and had the peace beads, poncho, went to Woodstock, “turned on, tuned in and dropped out…” then ended up in Palo Alto and we lived on the edge, hopping from apartment to apartment and sharing rooms in other peoples homes until my education was shot and I got shipped back to New England to live with my alcoholic aunt and finally my dad, so I could graduate High School with an actual education. (…and I did, with honors. Go figure…)
I understand how landlords can turn. I was literally sitting in the front row seat… of some CRAZY shit. Which was why I have felt it necessary to speak up as I have. Those good people are gems, they are often hidden in plain sight and they should be the example of what renters should look for, and what other owners could aspire to.
if you are in that situation your “good landlord” should form a cooperative and give you a share of the property since you’ve both gonna lose it otherwise
Oh, we got that.
30+ years w/o a lease and a rent that has consistently been a third of the rental market value. (and no, the apartment is not a dump) Heat, hot water and half electricity included… AND off street parking. (this one is the REAL Golden Ticket)
Am at the point now where we’ve saved so much we could buy a home outright - no mortgage. Been looking at places where people are leaving from… Find something small, not too run down and put a bit of sweat equity in and fix it up. Get in and make a scene with other artists and musicians and open a restaurant or a secret kitchen dinner club… Something like that.
But when we do leave, we’re gonna jet like we’ve got rocket boosters on. Our families are finally all gone - grandparents, our aunts and uncles, parents have died (just my mom is left and she’s living in a tent off the grid in Hawaii doing the counterculture vulture thing with no internet, computer or smartphone even - just a 4G flip phone and a 12 year old Toyota pickup! She’s an absolute savage!) so we’re no longer tied to the area. Put in our 25 years of looking after our elder relatives - his and mine - and we’re so DONE with that. Doing the liquidating of family heirlooms thing - keeping a few decent items and the rest gets sold.
NGL, this city lost it’s identity when it hit Forbes “Top 10 Cities in America” list back in the mid 2000’s. We’re just hanging on and saving everything we can until we can’t hang on here anymore.
What is your favorite flavor of shoe polish?
When I got out of school and into my first apartment, the woman that owned the apartment building I lived in lost her other rental building because she’d been on razor thin margins with it.
Also, the guys that lived there had apparently damaged the hell out of it and she couldn’t manage the repairs, so she had the bank take it back.
I swear to fuck, you’re screwed either way. You rent, the landlord takes too much cash, gives you a shitty place to stay. You have renters, they destroy your property and don’t pay on time. Fuck sake.
Doesn’t mean he’s living paycheck to paycheck. People often don’t leave a lot of money in checking accounts from which they pay mortgages because checking accounts often offer 0% interest. So if the landlord usually has close to 0 money in his checking account expecting rent to come ahead of the mortgage paynent despite having millions in a brokerage account he’ll still go into overdraft.
Not keeping a buffer that covers any upcoming bills in an account from which bills are automatically paid is deranged behaviour. I don’t care how much interest you may or may not get on that money.
Yeah its even bad landlording practice. You budget in a 20% buffer in the requested rent payment over the costs to own the rental property in case of late/missed rent payments and for ongoing repairs. If you as a landlord have expenses bouncing you’re doing something very wrong!
I agree, trying to optimize gains on every dollar sounds great until one overdraft fee knocks out years of work.
Penny’s Will needs to know about the black hole.
People who inherit things and don’t understand what it took (from themselves and worse, from others…) to build those things -
These people have, definitionally and usually irrevocably, deranged behavior.
Accordingly, among all the other things they do, these people often do hilariously (except for the real costs) stupid things with what they inherit.
Don’t pay rent and let him sue. It takes at least 6 months to the court, but he will be bankrupt way before then :3
If he wants housing to be an investment, he has to take the risk too.
Edit: then offer to buy the house at auction price with the down payment you saved from the rent!
This is a great lifehack to get a mega-corp landlord
As an added benefit, they’ll squeeze you for every extra penny they can, which is great if you’re into financial domination. Best part is that you will be helping support extreme wealth inequality
Or at least I assume those are the reasons. IDK, I support small landlords over mega-corporations
Keep in mind having the eviction on your record will make it significantly harder to rent another place in the future
“lol” said the scorpion
“lmao”
Only do this after buying your own home then
Or idk, probably just don’t do it at all I guess. The landlord here is an asshole, but he’s a symptom of a systemic issue, not the cause of it. He goes bankrupt and the house gets bought by the next opportunistic asshole who probably will charge the next tenant even more rent, especially if he doesn’t get as good a deal on the mortgage (interests are up compared to 7-8 years ago after all). And you’ll have a permanent mark on your record.
Now of course if this was done by millions of tenants at once… That would really be something. Probably crash the housing market altogether, make houses affordable again
What record?
I would simply not buy a house I can’t afford.
