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I can’t think of any better way to express the sheer absurdity of capitalism in a single meme than this.
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.
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 :).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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!
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.
The banks make money whilst its slaves point fingers amongst themselves.
Yeah, the landlord here is nothing more but another wage slave looking for a way to be less dependent on his wage/salary when the mortgage of his rental property is finally paid off. A symptom of a larger issue, maybe an asshole, but probably just trying to provide for his own family like we all are. Doesn’t sound like a millionaire.
∗ahem∗
I mean yeah exactly, the corporate ones are the bigger problem. This is just one guy. The corporate landlords are pricing even the private landlords out of the market, let alone first-time homebuyers.
Blackstone’s real estate divison in particular should be disbanded and its’ assets sold at auction to private individuals ONLY. Everyone (not here, but in general) talks about Blackrock, a company that mostly focuses on providing ETFs and other financial instruments, while Blackstone is literally out there buying up America’s single family homes and people barely talk about them.
sold at auction to private individuals
Then you’re still not comprehending the problem:
Housing should be FREE.
Privatizing housing is the system that created the problem. Under the current system, housing is a commodity that can be bought and sold. Like any commodity, cornering the market leads to monopoly by which the only supplier is a cartel of a few private entities. Cartel because they work together to fix prices to their benefit.
- What is the primary difference between just one guy and Blackstone?
- Why does just one guy seem legitimate?
- Why should we define property in a way that allows landlords to exist?
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.
“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.
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 ™.
I keep this in mind after selling my home and going back to renting, it was obvious which landlords needed the money. I have no issue telling somebody I’ll move in a month if rent would be changing or any other fuckery.
I may be renting currently, but I am financially stable and have always made above median family income for my areas. I have owned homes, I know what it entails and the finances look like, and I have enough for a down payment on a home as needed, I am evaluating life on more temporary terms currently.
So what do you do for a living that you should be offering to everyone else for free? It might be great if we could find a way to move to a post-capitalist world although I don’t know what that would look like. Landlords aren’t any worse than Chefs who are charging you to eat food, or farmers who won’t allow you to just go take want you want of their crops.
Banks and monetary policy over the last 4 decades are what really drove the prices of housing up. But, as usual, poorer people wanted to keep those ultra low interest rates even though it meant richer people could buy up everything even faster. Same as poorer people wanted Walmart even though it drove out all the smaller businesses that paid living wages and sent manufacturing overseas. I’m not a landlord. But they aren’t the only problem in a capitalist society and many of the individual ones are just people trying to get by same as any other people with a ‘side hustle’.Landlords aren’t any worse than Chefs who are charging you to eat food, or farmers who won’t allow you to just go take want you want of their crops.
Chef provided the labour and knowledge in preparing your meal. Farmer provided labour and knowledge in growing the crops.
Landlord provided buying the property first then charging you for the privilege of living there because a piece of paper says it’s his.The landlord did not build the house, and any maintenance costs come out of your rent to pay for someone else to fix.
Landlords aren’t any worse than Chefs who are charging you to eat food, or farmers who won’t allow you to just go take want you want of their crops
Landlord apologism on a lefty sub… Always good to start the day with a laugh
So what do you do for a living that you should be offering to everyone else for free?
Teaching? Medicine? Those are services provided for free to the public. Why is housing, a literal human right that literally everyone needs, not provided either free or extremely subsidized?
Landlords aren’t any worse than Chefs who are charging you to eat food
You’re thinking of construction workers, the people sweating their asses to build the housing you inhabit, not the leeches between you and the housing that’s already constructed.
It might be great if we could find a way to move to a post-capitalist world although I don’t know what that would look like
How hard is “public rent either for free or for extremely low prices” to imagine?
But they aren’t the only problem in a capitalist society
Agreed, they’re part of capitalism, capitalist business owners are the other part of the problem
many of the individual ones are just people trying to get by
Housing shouldn’t be allocated based on how lucky you are to get a good landlord or not, people shouldn’t be at the mercy of landlords to enjoy decent housing. It should be a guaranteed right.
Really insightful comment, regarding the overall pattern between welcoming Wal-Mart, and welcoming low interest rates for mortgages. And the inevitable outcomes. It’s the very same mechanism of forcing individuals to clamor and claw for what remains within reach, while thereby fueling the exact machine that pulls it all further away.
I’d argue it’s roughly the same class of people, doing the required clawing, though of course many, many people - on both sides of a divider I’d call “clawing for basic stability” vs. “clawing for a supposed retirement” - would completely disagree, about the similarities between the two groups 🙄. It’s the same picture.jpeg.
Aside from “landlords aren’t worse than chefs” (yes, they are, but admittedly depending on both landlord and chef lmao), couldn’t really agree more. Bad systems make for bad incentives make for bad personal decisions. Eventually (fucking eventually…), something gives.
I’d make sure to pay as late as possible every time after that
Yup. That check is sliding under the door at 1159 every month after that. With a video to prove timestamp and date in case he decides to get bitter.
I mean the landlord provides a place to live and it’s part of his income. Makes sense to me, idk?
The landlord doesn’t provide a place to live, they paywall it. The construction of housing provides places to live, landlordism only leeches off the poor classes who can’t afford to buy housing.
The landlord provides a place to live the same way that ticket scalpers provide tickets
Yep, and Minnesota doesn’t seem to get it either.
