My landlord keeps getting violations from the HOA, and the HOA is straight up making rules up. I can’t sue the HOA for this (which is 100% what needs to happen to get them to stop), because there’s a legal layer between the owner and the tenant…
So yes, shit is broken. He refuses to call them out or take legal action against their harassment of my family. This is really obvious stuff, too. The latest violation involves them accusing me of having open flame torches on my patio. I own solar powered LED lanterns. They want to fine my landlord $100 for this.
I told him I won’t pay it. They are charging HIM, not me, and there’s nothing in my lease or the HOA’s CC&R’s saying I can’t own solar lanterns.
This guy has violated state, federal, and city laws over the last half a decade. He’s also a slumlord that never fixes anything. He once made me wait a year to get my front door handle repaired (sure, I could have fought that, but then he’d have just raised my rent.)
I hope he gets fined, and I hope he fucks around, because I’ve got an attorney ready.
I’m not saying to never take shit from your landlords, everyone… But at some point you have to stand up and tell them to fuck off. Rent is out of control in many cities right now, but that’s not an excuse for the often abusive landlord-tenant systems. Landlords should NOT exist.
I’m sorry you’re having to go through that. I’ve had a nightmare landlord before and it really fucks with your mental wellbeing. Best of luck to you!
Landlords should NOT exist.
There is the Georgism position where rent is discouraged with tax which is set to share out society’s share of the value of limited natural resources
It’s hard to run a civilisation without landlords, since some people are not in a position to buy land and need to borrow it.
since some people are not in a position to buy land and need to borrow it.
Some people have no desire to buy land, and want to borrow it. More than half the people I know (and I’m in my 40s now) have no desire to hold the liability of needing to sell a property to be able to move halfway across the country or world. They don’t “own” their, so they see having to literally own it as a problem. And they are willing to pay more in rent than a mortgage (which happens regularly in some areas around me).
There are shit landlords, and there are decent landlords. I think half the problem is that while some areas have great protection for poor renters, they often don’t have great holistic renter protections. In my state, for example, government-subsidized rentals have the most apartment quality regulations. But after that, you’re expected to leverage your rent to force action… without actually withholding it in any way somehow. And small business rentals? Even worse. I have a buddy who runs a breakfast joint. The heating system in the building died, so the landlord said “well if you want to stay open in the winter you should fix that”. So he installed a minisplit and the other business in the building had to close for the winter. Ultimately, both businesses started withholding rent (against lawyer’s advice) and he finally caved and called his renters “cheap bastards” as he got heating installed (and it was like a comedy that the heating company walked out on him twice for his after-contract renegotiations).
I’m ok with someone owning and renting out a building. But it should be somewhere near the level of quality the renter would maintain the place if they owned it.
If there’s more need to sell land then land prices will inevitably go down. Then everything gets better. At that point, we can afford to have multiple properties while trying to sell.
They should abolish buy to let mortgages. How is it fair that a renter literally pays for the mortgage by proxy but doesn’t have a stake in the home.
That’s interesting. In my state, rental rates are just plain higher than mortgage rates. Maybe that’s why I’ve never heard of buy to let mortgages.
This Was perfect
Yup, same here. System is broken.
The other 1/3rd goes to the feds, so they can pay for
roads,social safety nets, nukes, drones, unconstitutional domestic surveillance programs, and Israeli genocideRemoved by mod
Have you heard of revolution?
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The system is
brokenworking exactly as intended.Is this 2/3s of income plus tip or is the tip included? Because if you want to save money, tip your landlord less!
Yeah, but they really deserve that tip. They work really hard, you see. Just the other year my landlord was hard at work promising to paint over a wall he ruined with repairs.
I bet he’s going to get it done any day now!
Gosh, maybe it’s because my last tip was too low… It’s probably my fault.
As a general rule, it’s always the renter’s fault.
And don’t underestimate the effort and work and emotional energy spent on postponing painting the wall, feeling bad about it, postponing it again, … they spent a lot of time and energy on that!
Give your landlord a negative tip.
Its wild how the entire country is experiencing a housing shortage
Which entire country? This is lemmy.world
Op is even from Lemmy.zip!
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Ditto
I don’t really understand the market failure happening with such a long term housing shortage. By definition there is excess demand for housing right? So it should make economic sense to build more.
When I ask people always say conspiratorial stuff like “they” maximize profit by keeping housing low but even if there was a conspiracy there should be individuals who are not part of the conspiracy who would profit from going against it.
So it has to be either regulatory or funding based, I think. But I don’t know of any recent regulations that would cause this nationwide, “zoning” is probably part of it but there was no one timeline for that, it’s super local. And funding has been free for a decade and a half and homebuilding has still been slow.
I don’t get it.
Where I live, they simply have made it illegal to build any housing since the 60s. It really sucks
Look to other forms of scalping to see how this works at a smaller scale. Scalping isn’t done through conspiracy, but a bunch of small, self-interested actors reducing supply in the market to inflate prices.
On top of that there are actors that are more coordinated and not as small, like corporations that own hundreds of thousands of homes. These corporations can just coordinate internally (not conspiracy, business) and reduce supply to increase their own returns.
This works for smaller actors too though. As long as the number of houses owned is more than a couple, then it’s likely they’d profit from temporarily restricting supply, and locking in renters to leases for more money. They’ll try to slowly sell off their supply without “flooding” the market and hurting the value of their own supply, just like other scalpers.
Scalping isn’t the comparison though because 1, scalpers don’t reduce the total supply. Any scalper who refuses to sell a portion of their tickets, loses all the money they used to buy them, and the opportunity cost of selling them, and there’s no way it’s worth it for any given individual. The supply/demand differential they make money from is that the venues only have a certain number of seats.
Which brings me to 2, theres no equivalent of homebuilders in the scalper world. If some scalpers could generate new seats at the venue for roughly the cost they pay the venue for tickets, supply and demand would figure themselves out pretty quick.
Hard disagree on the last part there. For one, homebuilders again. Their business model is to build the houses and then sell them, if they joined the “sell houses slower” cartel it just means they earn less profit.
But really the whole idea you’re laying out, the math only works if everyone works together, so it becomes a prisoners dilemma. Because say there’s 20 companies slowing down house sales to maximize profit, there can always be a 21st who gets the benefit of the restricted supply from the 20, but they just sell as much as possible and become the most profitable of all. Maybe it’s in everyone’s interest to restrict supply, but it’s in any given company’s interest to sell as much as possible. So it has to be an as of yet unknown cartel of every home seller in the country and there’s just too many of them to have both: Either it includes everyone or it’s secret.
There are absolutely scalpers that reduce total supply. They’ll only list a couple of consoles that they scalp at a time even if they buy in massive bulk, and it’s all done on the pretense of a limited supply from the original seller that they’re artificially limiting past what the market would naturally do (by buying a ton of them up). Given a literally infinite supply, scalpers lack an ability to do anything. Put another way, when they can’t restrict supply, it’s not a viable strategy.
It’s not that they refuse to sell some of their supply, it’s a temporary restriction (all supply restrictions can be viewed as temporary because we don’t have total knowledge of future supply). The temporary restriction benefits them because they can start bidding wars over the reduced supply, and get a higher price per unit at the cost of getting the money over a longer period of time.
The exact same thing works for housing, when you have the same company renting out tons of units but also keeping tons of units in the same area off the market. It means the bidding wars for the smaller supply of units results in more money per unit (lower supply, same demand, means higher costs).
The concept of a prisoners dilemma here only works if houses are fungible, but they’re not. There are sometimes very similar units or even houses in a neighborhood in the same location, and these are almost fungible, but even in these contexts those nearly identical units in nearly identical locations are usually owned by a single entity (corporate or otherwise), so again there’s no prisoner’s dillema, they can restrict supply effectively to increase yield.
The time vs value calculation is different for housing too compared to smaller things like groceries. If you’re a grocery store, and your local distributor of apples lowers the price of apples, some of that will likely go to the customer because of local competition pushing prices down, and you have a constant supply tied to a constant demand of these (from a buyer’s perspective) essentially fungible things.
Houses are different because if you see the price of houses in your neighborhood drop by some significant amount, individual actors who may otherwise want to sell will actively choose to not list their house because they know the value will go back up, and so these actors are all incentivized to vastly limit supply if something in some area cuts the prices of houses (like a huge influx of new homes for example). These individual actors could be literal individuals or corporations.
I have seen the amount paid in property taxes in USA via Zillow and… It is HUGE. No surpries that rents are so high. Rent have to cover minimum taxes, maintenance and part of house value. These expenses set the minimum value of a rent. But why you have so high property taxes? Cause enterprieses and billionaires don’t pay taxes and cause they put their huge capitals also in real estate, raising the prices. The problem is that real estate is a right ( house ), but also an asset.
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People called me crazy when I didn’t like the fact that they wanted free public transit and for all the bus costs to be put into people’s property taxes. My only argument was those that actually need free bus fare, will be unable to continue affording their places they rent because property tax will go up. They will end up paying the same, if not more in the long run…all for free transit. People couldn’t grasp it and resorted to verbally attacking me. Lol I still laugh.
Transit ideally should be partly funded in the reduced road cost. Less so for buses, but imaging you linked exurbs and outer suburbs to the city by rail and a simple one lane each way road, instead of a five lane each way highway
Many states have tax cuts for living in the property you own. The high tax rate is the state saying “if you make money, we want to make money”.
The problems is that if you live in an house you rent, you have to pay indirectly full property tax. Cause you aren’t living in a property you own.
My city* only levies land taxes on investment properties
If you live in your own home, there is no tax
*Canberra, Australia
Taxes do not set the minimum price of rent, supply and demand do that. A real estate investment can still make money even if rental income is less that taxes and maintenance because land appreciates in value over time. This is why the rich invest in it, and why we should tax them where they can’t evade it.
You got a raise? It’s my raise now.
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I think landlords is kind of blanket statement. I think most rational people aren’t blaming the landlords who own a single family home and rent the basement suite. I think it’s more referred to companies gobbling up single family homes and rent gouging their tenants.
This is also Lemmy, so, you know, fuck cars, fuck trucks, fuck landlords, fuck Windows, fuck Google, fuck conservatives, fuck you, fuck me, etc etc
LMAO if you pay 66% of your income on rent then you really need to change something in your life.
While I agree, something needs to change, a lot of people aren’t in that spot. Raising rent got them there, and now they can’t leave because they’ll have to miss rent to have enough to move somewhere else, that’s either way too far or just as expensive.
You’re just out of touch.
Look at almost any major city in North America and then look at the average annual income vs average rent for a one bedroom. Rents have skyrocketed since COVID. Essentially doubled where I’m from. Think wages kept pace?
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You can kindly take your shit opinion elsewhere. Most people who live pay to pay cannot get their life in order because they work 2 jobs.
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Exactly! Flipping burgers is meant for KIDS as a first job! But also if I can’t get a speedy meal during my noon lunch break while the kids are at school I’m going to be PISSED!
If everyone who flips burgers gets a “better job” are you going to stop having burgers?
The issue is that while there is work that needs to be done, then there will be a need to pay people to do it. If you’re a business owner and you have work that needs to be done, and you can’t afford to pay your employees enough for them to pay their bills and lube decent lives, and you can’t personally take the hit to your own income to cover the difference, then your business should fail.
Right now, the arrangement forces people to work more than 40 hours a week – which is illegal, but companies get away with it because they don’t work at the same company for the whole time. In fact, many people with multiple jobs don’t even have full time jobs – they have 3 part time jobs, all working them less than 40 hours a week, so they don’t have to give them the benefits they’re required to provide for full time employees.
(Personally, when I was young I had multiple places scheduling me for 39.5 hours a week. Now I’m a white collar FTE and I work 35 hours a week.)
So, next time you call someone who’s flipping burgers “lazy,” think about how lazy a person must be to work 100 hours a week. Is that what laziness looks like to you? How many hours a week do you have to work too not be considered not lazy?
Because, the thing is, you know they aren’t lacy. They’re working their fingers to the bone, and have much shittier and shorter lives than middle class people. Calling them lazy (or stupid or unlucky or whatever) is how you rationalize the fact that you’re unwilling to accept any inconvenience it might cause you to help them.
In this scenario – aka, the real world, the world we are in right now – they are working harder than the rest of us are, for less money.
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Why can’t they just flip burgers from the age of 16 till 65? What if they don’t mind the work, they have a full and fulfilling life outside of work, and their job is just what they do to make ends meet? Does that mean they deserve to live in debt and working 100 hours a week? Are you so ignorant that you don’t understand that, in any economic system, capitalism or otherwise, not everyone can move up?
It’s literally not possible. There have to be people flipping the burgers. That’s a fact of the system; there’s no way around that. And it’s ok – not perfect, but acceptable – as long as we treat those people with dignity and respect.
And that means paying them enough to survive – and thrive – on 40 hours a week. No one’s saying they should have enough money to buy megayachts – or even regular yachts. But they should be able to buy a shitty canoe – and still be able to pay all their bills, and not have to work more than 40 hours.
If you’re concerned about the possibility that, if they earn more, you’ll earn less, that’s just not true. There’s no scenario in the USA where a company is charging customers any less than the most they possibly can, and paying their workers any more than as little as possible. That’s literally the law. There is plenty of extra money that can be used to cover the needs of our poorest people – and to raise the salaries of more scarce labor who would otherwise turn to flipping burgers if burger-flipping salaries went up.
Literally every business that’s even a little successful has extra money. (“Extra money” is also known as profit.) There is no reason why one person should have to work more than 40 hours a week while another person has more money then they can possibly spend in a lifetime; it’s illogical and irrational, and cruel.
Well obviously because burger flippers are only detrimental to society. These people should be THANKFUL we’re paying them at all to play around behind a stove all day!
In all seriousness, lad has some screws loose, you’re wasting time and effort if you expect to change their opinion. Dudes a slave to the system he’s defending. Sad.
wtf are you talking about? Do you think we don’t need plumbers? Nurses? Get a job loser
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See here the man not only a slave to the system, but placing the shackles on his own arms and legs! Capitalism is wonderful!
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Kinda a chicken and egg thing ain’t it? System sucks, I was born into a shit system, and learned from it, so now I’m a slave to it. What if I told you people are, on average, doing absolutely everything they can to not be paycheck to paycheck? Even the “welfare queens” I’m sure you’ll bring up next are a product of the fucked up system were born into. And also what if I told you people can be working on bettering their own positions while also pointing out that the system they are forced to take part in is absolutely rigged? Get the fuck outta here.
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The system can be abused, sure. I also have a working brain and choose not to, because every person who has abused the system and gotten fat off it has done so off the suffering and legitimate work put in by those who are in less fortunate spots.
The simple reality is that the system only works if you were born in the right spot, or if you’re one of those lucky enough to be pulled up, simply so some dumbass on a forum can go “see? See? It works sometimes! Use it to your advantage instead of complaining!” Fuck capitalism, not because it can’t be used to ones advantage but because it necessarily screws over anyone who isn’t frankly a psychopath, and fuck anyone who thinks it’s a good system.
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That may be the case, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out the flaws of the system and work to make them better. I’d probably be complaining about the aristocracy then, too. Hopefully in the place that fuckin beheaded them.
I also don’t know why you seem to believe that someone can’t be bettering their own life while also complaining about the flaws of the system they’re in. You have problems walking and talking too?
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George Soros
“Soros, who was born into a prosperous Jewish family…”
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Hmmm, which source is more trustworthy? Britannica with their biography, or Business Insider with their click-bait article? Hard to say…
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Did you know that you can be a landlord too, even if you can’t afford a whole house? There’s such a thing as a REIT (real estate investment trust) where you can buy shares in a company that owns and rents out real estate and sends you your share of the profits while you don’t have to do anything except give up the option to invest that money somewhere else, which is actually really important.
I don’t expect everyone here to be able to invest in the stock market; my point is that there are easy ways for even middle-class people to obtain income from rent and yet most of them aren’t doing that because other types of investments are usually better for them. Being a landlord is not some unique source of money for nothing; it’s one of many ways to invest your money in a productive asset and usually not the best one.
“Did you know you can help suck 2/3 of someone’s income too?”
Hey, Exploitation and Colonialism is my cultural heritage
Anti-social Rent-seeking Behavior For Dummies
Did you read the article that you’re linking to? Rent seeking in the economic sense does not mean purchasing property in order to rent it out to tenants.
Rent seeking in the economic sense does not ONLY mean purchasing property in order to rent it out to tenants.
Fixed it for you. Landlording is one of many forms of “growing one’s existing wealth without creating new wealth”
Renting out property does create wealth. Think of a house as a factory that produces shelter. Running the factory, as opposed to leaving it idle, increases the amount of shelter in the world, and shelter is a form of wealth.
Building a house creates wealth. Owning the land underneath it does not, it merely captures a portion of the wealth produced by others.
That’s a well-established economic theory and I’m not contradicting it. What I’m saying is that renting out the house after it’s built continues to create wealth. A world in which I build a nice house but keep it empty is wealthier than a world in which I leave the land unimproved, but a world where I rent that house out (or live in it myself) is wealthier still. The experience of living in that house, as opposed to some inferior option, has value.
Oh ffs, being a private landlord owning a few houses for rent is not a risk-free endeavor and not purely parasitic. You typically have to fix up the properties first (an investment), do work to vet renters, manage the property (maintenance effort/time/cost), and absorb the risk of bad renters destroying the interior. The landlord has to invest their own time and money to provide a livable shelter to others, who exchange money for not having to deal with all the above listed. That livable shelter is a big freaking deal, or why else would someone choose to spend money on it?
Companies developing monopolies on rental markets is a very different scenario, and I don’t think it should be legal. Small private landlords? Yes.
Money for nothing. Read it again yourself genius. What part of purchasing property to rent it out makes you think you’re getting money for creating value?
Those people looking for rent couldn’t possibly be rent seeking!
Lets unwrap this.
First of all you claim that the investment in these funds is not the best option, implying that this reflects on being alandlord directly. Instead you need to consider the costs of running the fund, which is even higher than for actively managed stock funds as you get both active management and physicalassets that are more complex to manage than virtual assets like stocks.
Then you claim that it is not a source of money from nothing. But at the core it is. Why is that? Because space is limited and cannot grow. Companies can grow, ressources can be extracted, work can be put towards something. But the fundamental source of income of a landlord is his control of a limited space ressource. If you claim “but there is a house on that space” then you should compare the rental and also buying prices of the same quality houses depending on location. It is an old wisdomof proerty companies. The first three criteria are location, location and location.
Finally you argue that it is usually not the best asset to invest in. This may be true for many people, but it is irrelevant to the fact that landlords extract money from scarcity and there is no productivity from there part that justifies this extraction, nor does it benefit the overall economy.
All these commenters completely unwilling to consider the details of what you said. Got a slice of REIT in my retirement fund for exactly what you said.
Then don’t rent it an move to a place you can afford to buy the house
So move off of the planet. Got it
Everyone here loves to complain about landlords without realizing that the majority of single family home landlords (not corporate landlords) are barely making it by too.
Banks are really the ones making criminal amounts of money. 1/3 of rent is typically interest payments. 1/3 of rent then goes to taxes.
For instance, I make $2,900/mo. from rent, but pay $2,800/mo. for the mortgage. I’ve spent over $8k this year alone on repairs and maintenance. But please continue to complain how landlords are constantly raking in cash. It’s typical for a homeowner to pay 1% of the cost of the property per year to maintain it. I will never see a positive cash flow until the mortgage is paid off in 25 years. The only benefit I get by continuing to own the property is the appreciation in equity and principle payments to the mortgage. At the end of the year we will have a -$7k cash flow and $5k equity appreciation. In a HCOL area, that $5k on paper is less than 3% of the area’s median yearly salary.
I feel for anyone out there who has a landlord that didn’t consider the hidden costs and the fact they should expect to runa negative cash flow, because it’s those landlords that also can’t afford to fix the house you might be renting.
Dude, someone else is paying your mortgage for you. You know what your tenant get for paying your mortgage? Jackshit.
You are complaining that the home that you rent cost you 7k a year instead of 35k a year. Cry me a river.
Oh yes, it costs me $7k a year for the pleasure of managing a property, responding to all the tenants needs, the risk of paying for major future repairs, trusting the tenant to pay on time and in full (collections is practically impossible to enforce), dealing with vacancies while I still pay the mortgage, paying real estate agent fees which amounts to a month’s rent every time I get a new tenant. And that’s all for a house that I am not able to live in, and that I have locked up 20% of the house’s value for a down payment. It’s much more profitable just to let that money sit in the stock market instead.
But please tell me more about how you know better and that’s it’s all sunshine and rainbows for a non-corporate landlord.
So why don’t you? What motivates you to not take that money to the stock market or start a business, if it’s oh so hard being a landlord?
For us, it’s because work required that we temporarily relocate. But we plan to move back in a couple years and we really like our house.
For others it usually has to do with the fact that selling a home costs 10% of the home’s value after all fees are accounted for.
Then there is the other set of people who genuinely think the equity in a property is more lucrative than money in the stock market (depending on the market and timing, it could be, but it’s ultimately a bet).
But I could ask the same question of every single person bemoaning the existence of landlords. If it’s oh so easy to be a landlord, why don’t they just become a landlord?
Probably because they don’t have the capital necessary to become a landlord in the first place. If you have enough money, being a landlord requires literally no work at all.
“If you’re homeless, just buy yourself a home”
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You get a building that is worth more than you paid for, so that’s your payment.
On 25 years, you pay a fifth of the building price for it. And that is not accounting for the equity that the house gains over the years like we’ve seen during covid.
Here, let me play you the sad song on the smallest violin of the world.
Sounds like you should sell that house, dude…
Lol you have to be trolling
Surely you must ignorant of the economic realities and risk of owning a home and how renting can actually be more lucrative depending on your circumstances.
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You don’t pay $2,800/month for the mortgage. Your tenants do.
If it’s a shit business, they should get out of it, and sell the property
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Poe’s Law?
Don’t think so.
Tbh, it’s always incredible the level of confidence that stupid, hateful people have. I wish we could find a way to use it for something actually productive
Nope.
Dude is either a sincere die-hard Trump supporter or a troll. Check bio.
