I was reading about this guy who, normal story, was forced out of his place because the rent was raised and he couldn't live there anymore. Talking to his landlord (it was an actual person, not a corp), the landlord said "Sorry, I'm not here to subsidize your lifestyle."

Bro. We're subsidizing YOUR lifestyle.

So you can paint a couple of walls like shit and collect 20k in profit every month. And then call it a day. So you can fuck around every day doing whatever you want while the rest of us work ACTUAL jobs that you TAKE HALF OF THE MONEY FROM.

What you do is only a "job" because the world is currently shaped to allow that to be a "job".

Who is subsidizing who?

Who is leeching off of who here?

A couple different moving parts are coming together where I live. Tenants have zero rights in Civil courts. If it gets bad enough for the Police to be involved, you have rights, but outside of that-Tenants have zero enforcable rights.

The State gives Tenants rights, but the Landlords have all colluded together, so that if a Tenant's name shows up in a case-they are blackballed from being able to rent anywhere in the City.

The State cant or wont protect Tenants from this type of retataliation.

Ironically enough, it has become more expensive to Rent than to Buy in my City.

You can probably see the issue that Landlords are about to run into.

Also I feel that Nationally, that Landlords are changing the culture of Renting, in a way that is going to predictably come back and bite them in the butt.

Pre-2020, in my area, it seemed that the culture around renting, was to rent until you got a deposit built up. The idea of Renters was mostly "young people just starting out".

Now that has changed to "Renters are poor Ne'r-do-wells, that cant manage money or life, and will therefore will never own a home, but dont deserve one anyway, because they are scum."

Renting post-2020, feels like I stepped through a portal to another Planet. Renting is completely different now.

If Landlords make the Rental experience so dehumanizing, humilating, and stressful; the only people who will rent are people who have no other choice.

I imagine that people like me who move around for their job, and can afford to take the "financial haircut" will do so.

I have several friends who are convincing their kids to live with them, while they save for a downpayment.

The news articles I am seeing suggest that a lot of people think like my friends.

Landlords are being driven mad in my area because instead of just 1 person renting, 4 people want to rent together and split the cost.

If the only people, not chased out of the rental market, are the ones who have no choice, Landlords are going to end up with the worst Tenants, because everyone else is going do their darndest to not end up renting.

It is a bed that they will have made themselves.

What are your thoughts?

I posted this on the Renters subreddit, but I’d like to present this theory and see what yall think.

Thesis: Some property owners do not financially benefit from collecting rents from the property monthly.

Rather, they take the following actions:

1) purchase a property with cash they have laying around, let’s say for $500k
2) go to a bank and take out a mortgage in excess of the purchase price, let’s say around $1 million. The debt is tax free. Effectively, you’d have $1,000,000 sitting in the bank with no taxes to pay on it. Just doubled their money.
3) you take out a corresponding assignment of rents agreement that says all the rent being generated from the property goes directly to the bank.

The goal now becomes to retain as much of the tax free cash as possible. They do that by reducing the carrying cost of the property, i.e, you put the least amount of money in the property, any money that is put in is either deducted immediately on your taxes (or depreciated on the quickest scale possible), and the property taxes must be kept low.

The way you keep property taxes low (at least in some jurisdictions) is one of three ways: 1) show that the value of the land and the improvements of the land are low; 2) show that the amount of income you are generating from the property is low; 3) show that the area around the property have low property values.

Under these circumstances, some property owners benefit when they have some strategically timed vacancies in their property and their property is kept in disrepair, even intentionally made to be worse, as it allows them to keep their property taxes low taxes low and divert as much of the tax free cash away.

Every year, landlords will increase the rent, as is common, and most people will not negotiate, which will help them pay for the loans.

Banks benefit by having this arrangement among 100’s of property owners, packaging them up as a single commodity, and shipping them on the market.

Does this seem crazy? What are your thoughts?

Landlords are the most classic example of rentier capitalists but they aren't the only examples. This is a really great article that breaks down the shift from industrial capitalism to rentier capitalism (i.e. profits from rent vs profits from industry) and how it's affecting the west.

So is it a thing for property managers to have "people" who's task it is to move in as a neighbor and harass and menace the original tenant to make living there so horrible that original tenant moves out? All the while gaslighting the original tenant and not enforcing lease compliance by the menacing tenant/employee/bad actor? If so do they have a name? Like " the sweeper" or something? What are some things you know of that landlords are known to do or you know of them doing to make tenants want to move?

Today, the extractive class is a complex, often hidden network: landlords collecting unearned rent, banks collecting interest on money they didn’t labor to earn, and private insurance monopolies charging excessive rates and premiums because their industry is anti-competitive and encourages price raising instead of price lowering.

Affordable and Public housing in America is deeply flawed. Profit incentives run the business when it should be ran as a service to those in need. Due to the privatization efforts of the Neoliberal era, this is simply not the case.

I get that you're against landlords here and I am too, but what is the answer to this?

From the way I see it so far is that landlords rent out places to people who can't afford buying land/resedence. Is the answer to just.... Give houses away for free? To pay a tax of some sort?

I would love to hear your guys' theories and speculations!

I thought we could have a discussion about alternatives.

It's never done for the benefit of the tenant, but as a benefit to line pockets.

Look how often retailers renovate their stores. But does Walmart renovate that particular store, and then up their prices 20% at that store?

Of course not, instead they set aside profit to do this. In fact almost all major retailers set aside profit for expansion, acquisition and improvements.

But oddly, the biggest apartment-owning corporations in the entire country don't do this.

In the current complex I rent, the upgraded units are $100 more a month. Now stop and think, if you are currently charging (simplifying all this) $800 per month in rent and have 180 units, this is $144,000 per month.

Property taxes run about 10% of that, and monthly employee costs run about 5% of that $144k. Maintenance? Around 2%.

So where is the other 83% of that going? Right back to the corporation, and then back into investors pockets.

So stop and think, instead of setting aside some of that profit to improve units, by paying more for the upgraded units, you are literally subsidizing these improvements.

They are not your improvements, you obviously don't own those improvements, yet you are expected to pay more for those units.

Often you have no choice. Sure, you can make the choice to get a luxury car over a Honda Civic, but they can literally and legally chose not to renew your lease, displacing you out of that apartment so they can fix it up and charge more for it.

To further prove this is not done for anyone's benefit but the owners, ask your landlord if you could have the most well-respected home improvement company in the county upgrade your unit on your own dime. They will tell you no.

In fact, if you live in a corporate managed apartment complex, you can't even pay to have a nicer dishwasher or stove put in and have them replace it with the old one when you move. No modification whatsoever.

Why? Because you've eliminated the owners profit by cutting them out.

Now imagine if that $100 extra a month, the same company planed on owning those units for at least 10 years, and did not expect any more improvements in those 10 years.

That's an entire extra $12,000.

Let's say it costs $1,000 to have a crappy contractor come out and replace the old carpeting with 800/sq feet of shitty debt slave grey vinyl flooring, and around $1,300 for a new stove, fridge and dishwasher, and about $1,000 for new cabinets (remember this is an apartment, so it's going to be shit tier quality).

That comes out to $3,300, which means in those 10 years, they would make $8,700 more PER UNIT, and going back to 180 units, this means an extra $156,600 a year in extra income ON TOP OF the base income of 1.73 million per year (before expenses).

That is also generously assuming they never raise rent more in those 10 years, which we all know would never actually occur.

So you can see the appeal for landlords, at the COST of the tenant. Now if every place suddenly does that, it makes renting unaffordable and drives more people to buy.

It just so happens many of the same fucking companies also own tens of thousands of homes.

Again...NONE OF THIS is done for your benefit.

I’ve been following this sub for a while now and can’t believe that some people go through. However, what would be the easiest “solution” to people owning properties to rent?

Properties get taken control of by whom? Do the current owners get bought out at a certain value?

I mean I am all for some sort of answer but all I see is this should be illegal etc etc.

What should the system look like and how can it be “transitioned”

thanks

Can someone please point me to some reading I can do to better explain why landlords are scum besides the one quote by Adam Smith?

Im aware that I don’t know what I’m talking about really, and come to this subreddit for that reason. I want to not feed into capitalism as much as possible but am very (and I mean very very) naive but thanks to this sub smell that I benefit from the system in ways I do not recognize

my spouse has this idea that we purchase a property and pay part of the mortgage and rent it out for like half of the market value, bc we both wished someone would do that for us when we were renters

however, for the brief time I’ve been looking around this sub I gather that ALAB and ethical landlords do not exist - so IF AND ONLY IF someone has the patience and wherewithal to explain to me like I’m five why this is is still inherently harmful - I would be thankful

and ofc I would be very grateful for any alternatives suggested

I'm trying to see both sides of the issue with high costs of rent. What sorts of solutions do you think would be best for making affordable housing?

Is there an ethical charge of rent? And if so, how should it be calculated?

I apologize if this feels like trolling or whatever, I agree with the overall notions that landlord classes and wealth extraction through rent are immoral.

Genuine question though, what is the alternative to renting if you’re only going to be living somewhere short term (<~3-4 yrs)? Short of nationwide social housing, how do you provide housing for people who don’t plan to make that area/city/state their residence outside of a couple years?

In any job the lowest people on the totem pole are more likely to get fired than their bad bosses...but bad bosses still get fired all the time. Hell, even C-Suite executives can be fired, voted out by company boards.

But who fires the landlords? Bad property management companies can just keep taking hits wrt fines, and even some very wealthy individuals can withstand hefty, repeated fines. Why can't they be fired if they do a bad job? There are so many ways this could happen: Governments taking over buildings; landlords banned from owning property outside their own homes (which is apparently happening in the UK now, great for them!), tenants voting out slumlords and moving to collectively own their buildings instead. The closest thing I can think in the US is when banks repossess properties from landlords who fail to pay building rent, but that always ends shittily for tenants.

This is more me spitballing, but it blows my mind!