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I’ve been looking for a new apartment the last three months. After Jan 1st all of them owned by a rentail company raised thier asking price.
Annual price increase is 35%. Who tf gets a 35% raise every year?
It’s the corpo landlords causing the problem. My private landlord never did any of that.
Private landlords are about to get harder and harder to come by…it’s about to be corpos all the way down. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/how-wall-street-bought-single-family-homes-and-put-them-up-for-rent.html
First house I bought was a duplex because it let me afford the mortgage. I bought a 110 year old home in disrepair and spent years of hundreds of hours and tons of my money slowly fixing up the place. I proactively do maintainence, I charge slightly below market rents, and my renters know me on a first name basis and call me for random things unrelated to the house and I’m happy to help. I respond within hours of any request, even if just to let them know when I’m off work to come fix whatever is going on.
Half the homes on my street are now owned by a single person who is trying to buy me out. He’s okay, but the homes aren’t super well maintained and he does his best to juice profits by cutting a few corners. He probably owns a few dozen homes. He’s driving up rents through a mini local monopoly in a niche in demand area.
I compared my return on my investment to what I would have gotten if I just put the money in stocks, and the main reason it looks okay is only because the value of the houses have been driven up by these corporate investments.
I empathize so much with the frustrations with landlords here (and damn do I hate the term), but I don’t see a real bridge to dealing with the problem that doesn’t squeeze out people like me trying to do it right by the renters and force these properties into the hands of the corporations. Not a single person who has lived in my duplex since I bought it can afford to buy me out for what I’ve got in it, let alone what I could get on the open market. They’ve all enjoyed living there and the updates I’ve made, and most of them were in town for only a few years before moving (graduate students/young professionals).
Mostly just a vent. I get why people like me get demonized on here, but it’s pushing out those of us trying to do it better than the rest. I’ve debated selling for awhile, but the next person won’t be as good to the community in all likelihood. And none of the renters have been interested.
Not a single person who has lived in my duplex since I bought it can afford to buy me out for what I’ve got in it, let alone what I could get on the open market.
That’s because of land lords. You are the problem. People could afford to buy a house on a working class income in my parent’s generation. But now you’re using your own price speculation as evidence that we must maintain a class of renters instead of dealing with out of control prices?
Fuck no. The government should eminent domain it all for the original price plus normal inflation and put it on the market at that price. If it’s older than 50 years or has had significant changes made to the original plan then we discount it. Houses are the only product we pay more for as they fall apart and it’s entirely because real estate speculation is a thing.
People rented in your parent’s generation too. My dad was born and raised in London 1931. They rented every house he lived in (good thing too because four of them were destroyed in The Blitz). My Mom was born in 1942 and raised in New York. Do you think most New Yorkers owned their homes even in 1942? And there was a point back then when they couldn’t afford rent and had to live on an actual homeowner’s screened-in porch for a summer.
There will always be a need to rent rather than buy. The price of rents is the issue, not the fact that they are available. And attacking someone who is not part of some corporate rent-raising scheme is unhelpful.
Yeah and tenements were an exploitation too. The problem of housing for sale and housing for rent are inextricably linked. Yeah getting rid of all rental housing is too far.
What is your proposed solution then?
The federal and state governments get into building housing again. Except this time they don’t fuck them over with no jobs and services. Drop multi-unit housing buildings into the highest cost areas first. Rent is the cost to build, maintain, and remodel spread out over the next 50 years. The rent only goes up with actual inflation, but can be frozen for seniors or others on a fixed income. HUD can then take that asset and finance more projects. The more seed money they get, the faster it snowballs.
Basically drop some anchors in the market.
Then ban short term rentals. If that’s not enough then tax vacancy.
I can’t help but think from a scientific perspective that when a population is forced to fight for resources, aggression in that population also increases.
In the most basic terms, how would you expect a colony of mice to react in a scenario like this? A dwindling supply of food, along with a shrinking supply of shelter… I’d expect to see a steady increase in violence over time.
I can’t see this ending well, and I certainly have felt a steady degradation of hospitality and compassion in the last decade or so.
Is there even a way to combat this? I feel like the cultural zeitgeist has been so polluted with individualism it’s almost impossible to get the general public to agree to policies that don’t directly benefit themselves.
Just build more houses and more multi-use buildings. Proper planning can solve this.
Building denser to limit sprawl also greatly helps fire resiliency in fire prone areas. Sprawl greatly increases the perimeter that must be defended
Same with maintaining a healthy ecology!
To be fair this isn’t specifically a landlord thing. This is a capitalism thing. And it’s happening everywhere and every day. From your grocery store to your pharmacy to your university. The essence of capitalism is to exploit all opportunity for as much value as possible.
This is the system humans have chosen to live under. And zeroing in on the landlord isn’t productive.
Humans didn’t choose it just like humans didn’t choose feudalism. They formed over time as production and technology got more complex, meaning society is bound to change again and again in the future as well.
Humans have chosen other systems, such as communism. Although that required action and effort, and those systems are arguably worse than capitalism.
Either way, doing nothing other than bitching on line makes it a choice
They are not arguably worse than capitalism when it comes to economic systems capitalism is at the bottom of the barrel.
Well, I remember Russians standing in bread lines. You’re probably just finishing puberty.
It is better to feed the poor than to not do so. Insulting the level of cognitive development of someone for pushing back against your statement is, ironically, childish behavior.
Liberals love infantilizing people they disagree with
It’s Luigi time
