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Seriously.
I bought my condo in 2023, and by sheer luck, managed to avoid the explosion in housing and rental costs. I hate that we live in a country where banks are being allowed to buy up entire neighborhoods and jack people for an asset that is required to survive.
Pottersville would be nice compared to the Coal Town they’re actually aiming for. You’ll owe your soul to the Company Store.
Everyone with the power to stop it nonviolently: Oh noooo. That’s definitely not what we’ve been trying to do… We’ll get right on that real soon, I’m sure.
I’m hoping prop 37 passes in California. Maybe that will help.
And all this new shit they are building, so much of it is apartments. Those will be owned by some corporation, and they will continually jack up rent so people can just barely get by, and never save or own anything.
They are already owned by the corporations. They’re the ones building them.
A better option is to regulate rental housing, as in Europe: cap the amount and frequency of rent increases, restrict evictions, and give tenants reasonable rights such as decorating and keeping pets. In such an environment, large corporate landlords, who have economies of scale and staff to handle obligations such as maintenance, can work better than many small landlords.
I don’t buy it, corporations are too inherently profit seeking, malevolent, and politically organized for that to not go wrong over time in ways that are resistant to regulation. Measures like use and ownership restriction would be much more effective than rent control because they would actually suppress demand (in monetary terms) by cutting off large pools of capital from accessing the market as an investment or store of wealth. Combine it with measures to directly increase the supply of housing where it’s needed and prices will go down on their own.
For maintenance issues it would be better to give tenants the rights to make minor repairs themselves without the risk of losing their deposit or being sued if it is not otherwise being handled and enable them to deduct any expense from their rent, especially if this is about single family houses rather than apartment buildings.
I’ll probably choose one of Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong burbclaves when the time comes…
Relish in the Feudalism
Something something you will own nothing
I don’t get why people keep saying “own nothing and be happy”
Nobody’s fucking happy
I don’t get why people keep saying “own nothing and be happy”
It’s sarcastic, in a “you will eat what’s on your plate and you will like it, young man,” tone from a boomer parent.
Haven’t been happy since college, what does it feel like?
I imagine it feels like nostalgia if nostalgia didn’t make me sad
Demand the need for laws to be able to unionize against these parasitic landlords, and watch just how much the people claiming to represent you are lying to your fucking face.
I rent an apartment for way too much in a new building built and now rented by the same corp.
Notes:
- we have tenant rights and a “landlord and tenant act” to which we all must adhere, and it affirms rental increases may not exceed inflation % each year.
- it also dictates that all rental terms default to monthly after 1 year
- it mandates adjudication by magistrate on transgressions
- it sets timelines for security deposits, how the landlord must prove a case for withholding, etc
Differences between a corp and a rando landlord:
- Corp has incentive to stick to L&T as its penalties stack up on mass complaints. Randos could cry stupid/poor and skate
- Corp is usually OCD with the 24h entry notice, fire alarm/drill testing reqs in L&T. Randos, not so much.
- this corp will call out dinkweeds who spill in the elevator and don’t clean it up because those bajillion cams all work. Randos have been a little more tolerant of issues that affect renters
- rando landlords can decide to move family in and loophole-evict you. …then decide otherwise abd rent it out for higher. Corps can, must, and will document you being a bad tenant before they boot you.
- building code mandates so many smoke detectors that we have Fucking SIX of them in our place. Because it’s Corp, they’re all linked on the floor and building. So we can’t bobbitt 4 of them to save our sanity without them finding out and caring. It’s a concrete building, people, it’s not gonna burn.
I’m pleased to live under a stricter ruleset than you may, and I do claim it makes a lot of difference. Is a well-regulated property market a potential factor? Is that what you need?
(We pay the highest average rent in North America, and ours is $4/sqft/mo. Glad we are capped at inflation and can’t be reno-victed (and L&T has rules there too I think))
I would NEVER do a small time landlord again, too many risks and bullshit. I hate corpos just as much as the average bear but at least they sort of have to standardize and cant pull the old family switcheroo crap
I don’t know where this paranoia about institutional investors owning housing stock came from, but it’s weird as fuck.
Corporations own less than 9% of all housing tracts in the US. This number has not gone up for a very long time. They’re not scalable investments and come with much more risk than other preferred instruments.
