Every landlord I’ve had has been “nice” and “friendly.” Unless you need something or they’re not happy with something you did.
Because they don’t see you as a person … they see you as either a benefit or detriment to their wealth. You are an extension of their wealth and their only interest is in watching to see if that wealth increases or decreases.
I think my landlord sees us as people, he’s just fundamentally incapable of understanding what it means to live in a lower income bracket. He’s selling the house we live in and seemed genuinely confused why we, as a single earner household paying significantly below market rent, would be worried because “there’s only a few situations where they can kick you out”. Yes and if they invoke one, which they will because we’re a bad investment, we’re SCREWED.
Meanwhile he thinks he’s being generous by listing for below appraisal when it’s still at least double what he paid a couple years ago. Just living on a totally different planet.
All of this is starting to remind of Charles Dickens from 150 years ago.
He probably thought we’d be way past his generation by now … we are in many ways but in some ways we are no different than our ancestors 10,000 years ago … this may be the 21st century but human greed and the ignorance of man never changes
I mean yeah if they’re assholes sure. And many (most?) are no doubt. Yet I have friends who are landlords and they’re not fucking monsters or I wouldn’t be friends with them.
I think this reductive take of yours feels good to type but if we want to address the problems of housing, I think a more nuanced understanding is needed.
If you’re like a friend of mine, it’s just a family that owns a couple extra houses (withholding judgment on that) and let’s say the husband is out of work the wife makes like $50k/yr, and you’re on the hook for two mortgages (say $5000) and now the sewer pipe to the sewer main needs replacing at a cost of $15,000, your car breaks and needs $1000 of repairs.
If it comes to it and you don’t have the cash or credit to deal with it, nobody is going to prioritize the tenant’s sewer over their kids having a house to live in and food to eat. When times are so desperate you have to choose, you’re choosing your own family. (The assholes always choose themselves under all circumstances of course)
Idk wtf the answer is but housing is a human right and the idea that anyone should be unsheltered is fucked.
Both friends bought another house and rented their original. Some inherit a house. Because putting your money in savings like we used to in the 70s and 80s when you got rock solid perfectly safe 2-5% return hasn’t been a thing for 20+ years.
Then you have corporations with the capital to be able to snap up houses after the 2008 predatory lending fiasco (thanks to unregulated capitalism). With low interest rates that ended up being the best play and then that ended up pricing out regular people.
Yeah we need more supply but the equation there doesn’t really favor building affordable housing because reasons I don’t understand well enough to try to talk to. Some claim too much regulation but that claim is usually the kind of bullshit that corpos/rich and their shills spout to be able to deregulate and better screw us peons. So I’m skeptical.
Idk what the solution is because I don’t understand the very complex problem well enough. But I know that “landlords eat babies” isn’t that helpful because the whole housing thing (rental, ownership) is a train wreck systemically.
If you can’t afford to maintain a house you are renting out then you shouldn’t be a landlord. Your friends could just as easily sell the house to a family and invest in a way that doesn’t require them to maintain an asset they cannot afford, but instead they choose to keep it and profit as much as they can. Landlords are assholes.
This view kinda confuses me, I’m not a landlord don’t worry! If people can’t afford a house then what are they expected to do? It’s all well and good saying if you can’t afford the repairs then you shouldn’t be a landlord but if you can’t afford a house, what then, does the same sentiment apply?
It seems to me it’s very much a problem with the ‘system’ . Aiming your hate at landlords in general makes no sense when they aren’t the reason you don’t own a house in the first place. Obviously some people do take advantage of others, that’s not what I mean.
What is the solution here?
If I could wave a magic wand, I’d limit the number of houses people could own and how much wealth any 1 person could have…
But the problem still stands, people need enough money to get a house in the first place… So how does that work?
If that’s what you think, your life must suck ass. Landlord wants to pay their expense and that’s it. If a tenants destroys the place or ask stupid shit all the time, that sucks. That’s just being normal human being. Stop dehumanizing people.
You needing something is fair as it “should” be part of the agreement you have with the landlord. Even if unspecified, the landlord agreed to provide a place that is fully functioning and comfortable livable. So they can’t removed if you need something.
On the other hand, you are renting their property and you agreed, even if unspecified, to care for their property during your stay and return it in the same state as you received it. You fucking up their shit in any way gives them the right to removed. Both scenarios are a breach of agreement, written or not.
PS: Landlords require tenants to get credit checks etc. in order to ensure that the tenant can pay. Tenants should have the right to require landlords to hold adequate insurance that would protect and accommodate the tenant.
That sounds good in theory, but in practice, I’ve had to ask multiple times and then just begrudgingly get the plumber called in or whatever. Landlords hold all the power.
Took the best part of a year to convince our landlord to replace the ancient, breaking fridge. Still also in a pitched battle with him to get the boiler fixed properly or replaced rather the sending his mate around. Landlords are bastards.
Landlords should be required to hold certain types of insurance before they can rent. This includes home warranties. If your fridge and boiler were dying, the landlord might be less of a shit if all it took was a call to a toll-free number.
I agree and fear that I didn’t make my point well. The reasons tenants get screwed all the time is because all of the requirements and restrictions are on the tenant side. If people were required to hold insurance that protects the tenant, and certain regulations existed and were enforced, before said people could be allowed to rent a property, then maybe the power dynamic could be brought closer to equilibrium.
I get it now. And yes, I agree.
My landlord lives in the same house as me. Things get fixed very quickly, especially when it comes to anything leaky. Might also be especially connected to their mother living one flat below mine.
That’s not landlord/tenant that’s just people/people.
People/people made worse by the system. The system that created the landlord/tenant roles.
Yeah that’s what I was thinking. You could swap in most relationships and it’d still be as reasonable.
“Not saying your tutor is a bad person, but they have interests that oppose your own”
“Not saying your doctor is a bad person, but they have interests that oppose your own”
Etc
Different is not necessarily oppositional.
My doctor does not benefit from me being sick. My tutor does not benefit from me flanking.
My landlord does benefit from me living paycheck to paycheck because they have extracted the maximum possible cash from me.
Doctors do benefit from you being sick, I’d imagine that funds a large majority of the industry.
Guess I don’t know the tutor business well, but if they are paid, they don’t benefit from you not needing them
Look at Kaiser; they run a vertically integrated shop. They’re fanatical about
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not paying for any elective treatments even if it would improve quality of
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preventive care to cover all the diseases they’re legally required to cover
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minimizing org-to-org friction
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using the cheapest means of communication whenever possible (text > video >> in-person)
I never had my blood pressure and lab work more scrutinized, never had more help offered to lose weight, etc, than when I was a KP patient.
Turns out I have special medical needs and there is a specialist clinic near me, so I switched insurance. But I always felt that my doctor wanted to keep my ass out of the hospital because that is where his bonus came from.
Now SURGEONS, that’s a different story.
So, some doctors suck, some don’t?
Bet you can apply that logic across the board to all walks of life tbh. Some landlords are dickheads, some are just other people trying to get by.
and I say that with a dickhead landlord
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Wait, what? How does it benefit your landlord if you live paycheck to paycheck?
They want the most they can get, of course. I just don’t quite understand what you mean?
You living paycheck to paycheck doesn’t affect your landlord unless you miss a payment. And in those instances landlords don’t have any kind of human empathy for the situation their tenant is in.
It does affect your landlord. Lower income means higher risk of non-payment.
That’s why some places require credit checks. The ideal tenant is rich and willing to pay whatever.
More descriptive title next time please :)
I love lemmy, but these titles make it feel like everything is posted by bots
Yup
Didn’t see anything in the about section requiring a descriptive title, mighy want to put something there if a descriptive title is required for posting on this instance…
Firstly, even without rules ‘yup’ is a terrible post title.
Also if you look at every other post in this community, just try and do something similar. Even a single relevant word is fine.
It helps to know youre human and worth my time reading… but ehhh… whatever
My landlords wife yelled at the plumber for sealing our bathroom wall back up when the shower spigot was still leaking, and then her husband comes in and says “honey stop we don’t need to pay to fix the valve if we don’t have to”. So my shower still leaks and they really fixed nothing because they didn’t want to spend $1000 (less than half our rent) to redo the shower.
Wouldn’t the leak cause more damage to their property over time?
Yes, but here you are expecting a landlord to actually think about the future.
A passive income earner is definitely going to think about the future, and realize that tens of thousands of dollars in damage is likely going to cost more than the income from renting.
No matter how much you disagree with a demographic, they are still human. Maybe we’d have better chances at improving things if we started seeing each other as human again.
I don’t see it happening though after these last few decades of internet caused radicalization
Right. The entire reason they purchased an investment property is because they’re thinking about the future. But there are slum lords that’ll invest the least possible money and milk it for everything they can, then just condemn the place and move on.
Hey, that is my landlord. He spun a story to my wife when we rented about having caught illegal subletting in the house we rent and that is why he padlocked the finished basement and attic, but the longer we have been here the more we are pretty sure there is a serious mold infestation in both that should make the house unlivable and he just wants to charge us a grand a month until we die.
The house needs serious work, the floors are deforming, there is cracks along door frames and buckles in the plaster from where the structure is slowly collapsing. Unfortunately, the rent is so high that we cannot afford to escape. I am wholeheartedly planning on leaving him with code enforcement coming in and dropping a bunch of fines on him when we go to leave.
FYI, pad locks are seriously easy to defeat without breaking the lock. A few minutes of YouTube videos, an aluminum can, and scissors are all you need to get in. If you’re worried about mold, I’d strongly advise that, or an official inspection.
Yeah shims are great for cheap locks. I learned how to pick a 5 pin lock in a few hours, so you can always do that too if the shim won’t fit.
My old landlord ignored a water mark hole in the ceiling below the bathroom until the leak got to the point they had to tear out all the drywall in the bathroom, and probably should have replaced all the framing too.
(It was there when we moved in, and we mentioned when we noticed it getting bigger)
So no. Unless they are a “professional” landlord they tend to not act on issues until it costs them more than early action would have. All while making life a pain in the ass for the tenant.
It’s hard to know what terms OP used correctly, but sounds like maybe the bath spigot is leaking a bit while the shower is on. If that’s the case, it wouldn’t cause damage to not fix, the shower water pressure would just suffer. And AFAIK, you wouldn’t typically need access to inside the wall, unless they did something stupid and tiled in a way that you can’t access the diverter stem nut to replace it.
IANAP, just DIY and have had to replace shower stems due to failing gaskets
Almost all people will put their own well-being above yours. This isn’t a trait exclusive to the upper-class.
Yeah if we’re both in the same situation maybe but my income Vs your well-being is a different thing isn’t it?
I can accept to be a bit less comfortable to help you live in less horrible conditions.
In an ideal world we’d all treat each other how we wish to be treated. I try to do that in every interaction, not always successfully. But we saw during covid that there are hundreds of millions of selfish-ass people. People that wouldn’t even temporarily give up haircuts or Starbucks to potentially save someone’s life. Hell man, they wouldn’t even wear a thin piece of cloth across their mouth and nose to potentially save people’s lives.
I guess I’m saying that I agree with you, but many people don’t… at least not in practice.
Who wouldn’t put their income before your wellbeing when push came to shove?
In any of the systems we’ve tried since the species got agrarian—especially Capitalism whenever it’s Fascism Hammer Time—not the average person that’s for a certainty.
They’re too busy surviving.
In a proper society where we (the collective We, but really ~2k dragons) used the same tools we used to separate us to instead expand the sense of the tribal umbrella so that the species innate selfish altruism could shine?
A whole lot more folks whose part would be exactly like in the fabric of society, comfortable and without a thought of want for they know We got their backs too.
Context matters. Would you choose to go make a little bit of money or help someone who was about to be killed?
I realize that I may be in the minority here, but I used to be a landlord. I never charged full market rate, and I always took care of my tenants. I never kept any security deposit money. One tenant had a breakup, and I showed up that evening with a locksmith to change her locks so he wouldn’t be a problem. That cost me some money but it didn’t cost her anything. I mean, they’re paying for service you need to provide service.
I remember people like you. It’s always appreciated but eventually a corporation gets every building.
True story.
For those interested I recommend Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. An amazing breakdown of the history and why. Eye opener at the very least.
Edit: Curious: Why the down votes?
history of what
Class and caste systems.
A reasonable opinion on twitter? Is this from 10 years ago?
Even the best monarchs do not justify monarchy; it is a position inherently created for abuse. You may have a good king, or two, or ten - even kings who WILL put your wellbeing before their own interests - but invariably they will always be outnumbered by those who seek the position for the sake of abuse, or who succumb to the structure of the position which encourages abuse. Likewise with landlording. The problem isn’t with individuals, the problem is with the system.
The point of individualistic free market deal making is that it forces two people to find an overlap in their interests, then hold each other to operating within that overlap.
According to the theory of class interests, deals only happen when someone is being bamboozled. According to the theory of individual interests, deals happen when two people find an overlap in their interests.
There shouldn’t be a conflict. We should want new landlords to enter the system and provide cheaper housing.
Cheaper housing aligns with renters interests.
There is no limit on the amount of housing that can be built.
