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.
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
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!