Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

Welcome to America. The president is a landlord. Other options for renters will rely soley on the kindness of their own landlord. The government will most definitely come down on the side of evictions.

i have never had a landlord do any repairs to any place i ever rented.

on the other hand, i have definitely had landlords immediately renovate a place i'd just vacated and start charging double the rent to the next people.

i have never had a landlord do any repairs to any place i ever rented.

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, July 28, 2020 3:30 PM (five minutes ago)

where have you lived that this is legal

As if landlords adhere to the law...

Landlord can't pay mortgage/taxes --> landlord gets foreclosed on --> property may not be available for rent anymore (banks don't want to be landlords, and even if they sell it to another would-be landlord this takes a lot of time) --> multiply this enough times and you get reduced housing availability for renters.

Aren't those houses either going to be purchased and put back on the rental market or purchased by people who otherwise couldn't buy/drive down house prices overall opening the market to people who were renting, which then frees up rental stock?

i have never had a landlord do any repairs to any place i ever rented.

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand),

heh, i think about 1/2 of mine have pretended to care. usually it's some version of "....uh yeah that just doesn't work."

My landlord replaced my water heater himself and did such an unsafe job (no way to let an overheating heater vent rather than explode) I paid someone to come out and redo it.

I've gotten so used to being able to make noise I'm terrified of going back to a 1-bedroom apartment.

milo wtf kinds of noise are you making

Guitar, mostly.

Sometimes just atonal wailing at life in general.

Time to buy a cheap house in the boonies and telecommute forever

I saw a sweet 1930s Crafstman in a town in Illinois 90 minutes from Madison for $60k...

yeah I dunno, I can't really come up with a good defense for bailing out landlords I guess.

lovin how they keep bringing up these poor widdle old ladies losing income from their rental property

As if landlords adhere to the law...

I have lived at my current location years longer than I probably would have otherwise cause the landlords are actually cool/nice/reasonable/responsible and this is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to find.

I couldn't give a fuck about any landlords. I just want renters to keep roofs over their head. however we can best achieve taht, to which I have no answer.

otherwise "relief" will be known as "350 million gofundmes"

Landlords often adhere to the law....IF you are cognizant of the law, your rights, and have the time, energy, and money to enforce it.

If you're a struggling mother of 4 living in a cramped home that works long hours and can barely scrape by on rent every month, you're hardly going to have the energy to fight a landlord at the end of the day, the money to take them to small claims court, or the time to become an expert on your rights.

my last commercial landlord that wasn't just a person who had a room for rent tried to fuck me on carpet repair charges after I moved out, and were clearly trying to charge me for normal wear and tear. I wrote a dispute as allowed by law, which they summarily ignored, and then sent the amount they charged me to collections. An angry call and an email later, they were like "ohhhh just kidding holmes, here's the REAL charge", like "lol, ok, you got me". that's how they always are.

I got treated with more respect and adherence to the law by the lady with two dogs that I lived with last year. it helps when they actually live with you, because they have to live with the same bullshit you do.

the whole reason most states have to write that "self-help" evictions (ie, changing the locks on the 3rd of the month, deliberately shutting power off to a delinquent renter's house) are illegal in their statutes is because of the sheer volume of landlords doing illegal shit like that.

Landlords are 99% total shit.

Last place I lived had black mold, ancient baseboard heating that drove electric costs up to $350/month for a 1/br if we wanted to keep it relatively warm in winter, and leaks that ruined part of my record collection. None of this was visible on tour of the apartment.

We raised the issues with documentation numerous times. No response, or "Yeah, we'll get that fixed," and then nothing.

Eventually, we just said fuck it, put a down payment on a place, and told that landlord to keep the security deposit, but we were not paying three months worth of rent because of his negligence. Included pictures, documentation of our documentation, etc. Got an email back saying, "okay!" and never heard from them again...

Turns out (surprise!) they're total slumlords and have been renting out nearly uninhabitable properties for years and years. One of the other properties they rent had an *entire bathroom* fall through a rotting ceiling.

But this is all to say: I have had one kind landlord in my entire life. The crisis of evictions that this country is going to see in the coming months is desperate and despicable and could easily be mitigated by rent cancellation.

I had one fantastic landlord and the reason I left is because a) the traffic in that area was bad, b) I wanted my own place

I miss that landlord so much, because as stated above, that's an anomaly.

The crisis of evictions that this country is going to see in the coming months is desperate and despicable and could easily be mitigated by rent cancellation.

agreed! I think that is why we, er, at least I, am thinking about this "landlord bailout" idea ... not as a "oh poor landlords" but as a "what can we do realistically to keep landlords from evicting tenants" ... the key word here is "realistically".

forbid them from evicting their tenants

Aren't those houses either going to be purchased and put back on the rental market or purchased by people who otherwise couldn't buy/drive down house prices overall opening the market to people who were renting, which then frees up rental stock?

hahah ... ok i will stop laughing ... it probably is different in parts of the country that aren't NYC or the SF Bay Area or similarly expensive areas with an already existing lack of affordable housing (and some would argue housing in general) --

besides the delays that man alive mentions (where the property is vacant for a significant period of time), oftentimes these houses end up purchased by investment companies and remain vacant for even longer because the companies don't see the house as a "house" they see it as an asset in their portfolio, much like shares of stock, they can hold or sell or use whenever, they don't have the same economic incentive to rent it or sell it the way a small investor would ... this was the whole set up for the Oakland "Moms 4 Housing" incident (I think there was a version in LA too) where homeless families commandeered a vacant house.

Yeah, if we didn't have corruption and manipulation of the housing market, prices would've gone down... but of course not. I read a report that said it actually took 18 months for the 2008 crash to actually see prices lower.

lovin how they keep bringing up these poor widdle old ladies losing income from their rental property

They are the real estate equivalent of the "family farm"--a dwindling and economically endangered species, but so politically useful to distract from the national and multinational corporations that control these sectors and play legislators like sock puppets.

My landlord replaced my water heater himself and did such an unsafe job (no way to let an overheating heater vent rather than explode) I paid someone to come out and redo it.

good lord! ... I have seen these ... it's one of those things where, once you explain how it works and what can happen if you don't do it properly ... the person who did it wrong tends to be like ... oh shit, uh ... yeah, fix that.

Fewer than 50% of landlords are mom’n’pop landlords*... and waaaaay fewer than 50% or units are administered by them, even before you consider the fact that a lot of the mom and pops* employ for-profit commercial management companies.

so we're all on board with guillotining the landlords, great

yeah, I tried to devil's advocate some kind of way it would be bad for the larger housing or financial system, but I don't really see it.

so we're all on board with guillotining the landlords, great

oh fuck off

no!

it probably is different in parts of the country that aren't NYC or the SF Bay Area

...yes

which is also why we have the horrible government we do rn ...

I live in a 100 year old fourplex. My landlord makes $70k per year in rent off my building and pays $5500/yr in taxes.

— Scott Frazier (@safrazie) July 29, 2020

My landlord is literally who city council is talking about when they talk "Mom and Pop" landlords except it's bullshit. She owns property all over LA and even internationally.

— Scott Frazier (@safrazie) July 29, 2020

She is receiving huge amounts of passive income on investments she has basically no expenses for, and California's Reaganite tax system lets her keep huge profits while starving the state of the ability to fund services for everyone else.

— Scott Frazier (@safrazie) July 29, 2020

Then City Council cries about the crisis Covid is imposing on landlords. It's outrageous.

— Scott Frazier (@safrazie) July 29, 2020

are we pasting an entire thread's worth of tweets into ilx now

It’s fine there’s room

Seems to me if you cancel rents for people, you should also freeze mortgage payments for the landlords. Seems simpler than trying to determine who is worthy of the relief.

or maybe we could freeze landlords...cryogenically

the fourplex in that tweet is either not representative if the landlord owns it outright or else he's leaving out the mortgage his landlord pays, which I'm sure is a lot more than $5500/year. Depending on when he bought it, how much he paid and the terms of his mortgage, the landlord could be breaking even, could be clearing $10k a year, or could be clearing $40k a year, or really almost any other possibility. If landlords could make that kind of profit on investments ($5500/year outlay and $64,000/year in profit) you'd see a lot more people becoming landlords.

You... do, though? Problem is having the capital to purchase. There are rentseekers a'plenty in the USA.

If she’s paying $5500 in property tax, it was frozen decades ago so I think it’s safe to assume that it’s owned outright.

Or if she’s borrowed against it, she turned the equity into more properties for the same result.

I guess that's possible. IDK how it works in LA -- there are places that reassess the second a property changes hands and places that don't.

You... do, though? Problem is having the capital to purchase. There are rentseekers a'plenty in the USA.

― Nhex, Wednesday, July 29, 2020 4:13 PM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Typical ROI is nothing like what is described in that scenario.

if she paid any interest in the mortgage and the $5500 is property tax, could be that she has something like $700,000 in this investment property. So the return is like 10%. But then she can probably make hundreds of thousands more when she sells the property later. There's really so much unknown here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEnmjDD_fTE

Maybe not typical but I don't think it's uncommon either. I spent years doing maintenance and handyman shit for people who owned du/tri/quadplexes - the only way they didn't own outright was if they'd taken equity to buy more property.

Any way you cut it, she's a leech on society of course.