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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Labor isn’t really cheap. As a home owner, I can tell you that getting a plumber, electrician, sewer guy, appliance repair guy, roof repair guy, squirrel trapper guy, eavestrough guy, etc, etc. are all very expensive and it adds up. Plus property taxes, major stuff like roof replacement every 10 years, grass cutting, painting.
But yes, it’s also property values that go up - and that makes it more expensive to buy land because more people want to use that land. And as a result, the value of renting goes up. You could rent on the outskirts of town for much less; but you want to live in a nice spot just like everyone else. So how else do we proportions out the land except by attributing value to it and doing trades?
when I say labor is cheap I mostly mean the landlord “labor” since this is virtually nothing. It’s not that expensive. It’s never 30%+ of your paycheck, most houses need nothing most of the time. Most of the rent/buying process of housing is land (aka dirt) value.
It’s not so much that you want to live in a nice place, it’s more than one must. We need to bring land prices down it would be better for the economy, for future generations, and for social equality… We can:
tax the hell out of the land value to finance what give land its value (public transport…)
Build publicly owned rent controlled flats
do aggressive rent control on part of the local housing stock.
Look up how Vienna does it, or in the US, the rezoning associated with rent controlled guarantees (without those guarantees rezoning increases land price)
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.
Ad hominem is meh, but does tell me the person is likely deep enough in their emotions that they are beyond discussion.
Regardless, same as I said to the last guy/girl/themself, you have a differing point of view and now you’ve gotten to virtue signal to the world and really put. me. in. my. place. With an extra OOMPH. I’ve enjoyed reading it from my house, and I wish you wealth and happiness.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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…)
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Labor isn’t really cheap. As a home owner, I can tell you that getting a plumber, electrician, sewer guy, appliance repair guy, roof repair guy, squirrel trapper guy, eavestrough guy, etc, etc. are all very expensive and it adds up. Plus property taxes, major stuff like roof replacement every 10 years, grass cutting, painting.
But yes, it’s also property values that go up - and that makes it more expensive to buy land because more people want to use that land. And as a result, the value of renting goes up. You could rent on the outskirts of town for much less; but you want to live in a nice spot just like everyone else. So how else do we proportions out the land except by attributing value to it and doing trades?
when I say labor is cheap I mostly mean the landlord “labor” since this is virtually nothing. It’s not that expensive. It’s never 30%+ of your paycheck, most houses need nothing most of the time. Most of the rent/buying process of housing is land (aka dirt) value.
It’s not so much that you want to live in a nice place, it’s more than one must. We need to bring land prices down it would be better for the economy, for future generations, and for social equality… We can:
Look up how Vienna does it, or in the US, the rezoning associated with rent controlled guarantees (without those guarantees rezoning increases land price)
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.
Ad hominem is meh, but does tell me the person is likely deep enough in their emotions that they are beyond discussion.
Regardless, same as I said to the last guy/girl/themself, you have a differing point of view and now you’ve gotten to virtue signal to the world and really put. me. in. my. place. With an extra OOMPH. I’ve enjoyed reading it from my house, and I wish you wealth and happiness.
lol dork
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…
You haven’t been paying attention
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?
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.