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I can’t help but think from a scientific perspective that when a population is forced to fight for resources, aggression in that population also increases.
In the most basic terms, how would you expect a colony of mice to react in a scenario like this? A dwindling supply of food, along with a shrinking supply of shelter… I’d expect to see a steady increase in violence over time.
I can’t see this ending well, and I certainly have felt a steady degradation of hospitality and compassion in the last decade or so.
Is there even a way to combat this? I feel like the cultural zeitgeist has been so polluted with individualism it’s almost impossible to get the general public to agree to policies that don’t directly benefit themselves.
Just build more houses and more multi-use buildings. Proper planning can solve this.
Of course, that’s one aspect of it, my comment isn’t about policy. I’m sure we both agree on what needs to happen in terms of policy.
I’m just pointing out that there doesn’t really seem to be enough support for such plans or policies.
Wow I’m quite surprised the fires haven’t affected that unit in particular
Sometimes fires like this flare up much later and in the weirdest places. Hopefully when noone is home.
too bad fires spread uncontrollably
It’s Luigi time
Wahoo
How much you bet once those homes are rebuilt, it’ll stay like this?
Hang All the Landlords
Mao, is that you?!
In a capitalist society, raising prices on victims due to supply and demand is rational behavior.
The problem here is less with the landlord and more with the system we live in. It motivates everyone to have antisocial behavior.
Did you really just say don’t hate the player hate the game
We can enjoy hating the player, but hating the game allows for change.
I have room in my heart to hate both
My heart is enlarged as hell
Not a doctor, but you might want to get that checked out
Sartre seems to agree, kind of: “I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.”
Yes, we don’t have enough information to hate the player yet.
It would take exceptional circumstances to excuse this. I would say we don’t have enough information not to hate this player.
I agree that the system we live in is partially responsible, but it has never motivated me to be a piece of shit. People are still responsible for their actions.
We don’t know what situation the landlord is in. Maybe they are also turbo fucked. The human instinct to survive is strong.
If someone pinches me in the face, I guess I can safely assume you will be okay with me punching you.
It’s the same logic, and it’s fucking disgusting.
I think that this bad behavior stems from memories of trauma. Inherited, generational, even genetic.
Imagine surviving a literal famine. Where the only people who didn’t die horribly were those who fucked over their neighbors.
It’s the kind of thing that leaves a mark.
The solution might be therapy. A year shrooming in the woods.
Nah, it’s just greed in this case believe me.
Typically, people owning places like this didn’t get it by starting out in a famine
This is America! It’s not a horrific tragedy with lives lost, many others seriously injured or afflicted with new long-term health problems, their most precious possessions reduced to ash, countless people being made homeless with absolutely no options for places to go… it’s an opportunity!
I don’t mind some landlords. A municipality being a landlord can be good, not everyone wants to buy a home outright. Renting is low commitment, low effort.
Okay except that’s not the situation we find ourselves in. Renting isn’t a problem, and being a landlord is not intrinsically wrong or immoral but the system that governs land ownership has consolidated many properties under a small number of financial portfolios. Such a small number in fact that it makes a collusion of a duopoly extremely easy. These aren’t a single family who subdivides their home to help cover some of the mortgage we’re talking about. These are enormous capital investment firms which view housing as an asset that’s garunteed to appreciate in value and renting as a benefit of the investment. Those capital investment firms don’t see a house as a place for someone to live, it’s an asset they can hold to plump up a spreadsheet. That’s the problem, not landlords be evil but that the system rewards evil landlords.
But there’s a shitload of municipal housing, they’re a (when combined) a huge landlord and use that and land policy to deliver more affordable housing. As a landlord they’re pretty reasonable.
Surely, the difference will be donated to a fire victims fund. In this way, landlord steals from the rich to redistribute to the poor.
I thought for a second this was the price to buy, that’s how fucked the market is.
T=HIS IS RENT!?!?!?!
For a year, right?
… right…?
I live in a high cost of living area and still can’t wrap my head around even the original price. That’s nearly my
yearlyentire salary. What the fuck.Edit: I meant nearly the entirety of my monthly income per month, so a year of rent would cost about everything I make annually. Before tax.
You don’t.
I don’t what?
You don’t live in a high cost of living area when your yearly wage is only 10k.
Unless you’re there living in a car or camping on the sidewalk.
It’s a typo, it was supposed to be "entire salary’, as in my total monthly pay.
Or they don’t live alone.
Supply and demand, unfortunately.
How can people afford this? To meet the 3x gross income requirement you’d need an income of $14,995 * 12 * 3 = $539,820. At that point you might as well just buy a house instead of renting.
Because this isn’t for individuals. Corporations rent houses like this. Movie studios, music labels, executive perks for the c suite, and more recently YouTube streamer companies. When you have clients that need to travel a lot it’s offered as a perk for them to “live” in one of these fancy houses. Executives who only stay with companies for a few years are easier to recruit if they don’t have to hassle with buying or selling a home during a relocation. Or in the modern times YouTubers who need to a fancy house to stream from for content.
Rental costs are expenses, owning is a taxable asset.
The Palisades (where the largest fire is burning right now) house some of the wealthiest people in the country that just lost homes worth over $3 million on average. It’s scummy (maybe illegal?) to jack the prices up and these people are also rich enough to pay it, for the most part.
The other fires going on are a different story, but the address is near the Palisades without being in the danger zone.
Capitalism eating itself, rich people now homeless and can’t afford new homes
- Don’t want too
most of those rich people could afford a house, just not one in as “good” of a neighborhood.
Yet
The winds are over and it’s 5+ miles away, Marina del Rey catching on fire is not what anyone is worrying about right now.
Well you can never rule out arson
I thought all the fires were caused by arson?
That is genuinely don’t know
It has already happened.
I think it’s marketed to people who had a home and lost it.
That assumes someone will give you a mortgage and that you have multiple thousands of dollars saved up for closing costs, which unfortunately is the reason people are forced to look for rentals and are greeted with…that.
That’s true for a lot of folks, but if you can manage 15k/month rent, then you absolutely have financial options and easily get savings.
California is super expensive because everyone makes a lot of money compared to other state medians.
Yeah everyone does. That’s why there are no homeless people in California.
I’ve been looking for a new apartment the last three months. After Jan 1st all of them owned by a rentail company raised thier asking price.
Annual price increase is 35%. Who tf gets a 35% raise every year?
It’s the corpo landlords causing the problem. My private landlord never did any of that.
My private landlord never did any of that.
Mine did. 22% increase in the two years after the pandemic.
But what about the previous years? At one point I happily took a 25% rent increase because there had been no increase for 8 years
Damn, that sucks. Did you move?
We did, yes. We had been trying to buy a house for years, and that pushed us to get serious. It took another year to find something we can afford, and we had to move out of the city, but we bought our own house!
Private landlords are about to get harder and harder to come by…it’s about to be corpos all the way down. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/how-wall-street-bought-single-family-homes-and-put-them-up-for-rent.html
First house I bought was a duplex because it let me afford the mortgage. I bought a 110 year old home in disrepair and spent years of hundreds of hours and tons of my money slowly fixing up the place. I proactively do maintainence, I charge slightly below market rents, and my renters know me on a first name basis and call me for random things unrelated to the house and I’m happy to help. I respond within hours of any request, even if just to let them know when I’m off work to come fix whatever is going on.
Half the homes on my street are now owned by a single person who is trying to buy me out. He’s okay, but the homes aren’t super well maintained and he does his best to juice profits by cutting a few corners. He probably owns a few dozen homes. He’s driving up rents through a mini local monopoly in a niche in demand area.
I compared my return on my investment to what I would have gotten if I just put the money in stocks, and the main reason it looks okay is only because the value of the houses have been driven up by these corporate investments.
I empathize so much with the frustrations with landlords here (and damn do I hate the term), but I don’t see a real bridge to dealing with the problem that doesn’t squeeze out people like me trying to do it right by the renters and force these properties into the hands of the corporations. Not a single person who has lived in my duplex since I bought it can afford to buy me out for what I’ve got in it, let alone what I could get on the open market. They’ve all enjoyed living there and the updates I’ve made, and most of them were in town for only a few years before moving (graduate students/young professionals).
Mostly just a vent. I get why people like me get demonized on here, but it’s pushing out those of us trying to do it better than the rest. I’ve debated selling for awhile, but the next person won’t be as good to the community in all likelihood. And none of the renters have been interested.
Not a single person who has lived in my duplex since I bought it can afford to buy me out for what I’ve got in it, let alone what I could get on the open market.
That’s because of land lords. You are the problem. People could afford to buy a house on a working class income in my parent’s generation. But now you’re using your own price speculation as evidence that we must maintain a class of renters instead of dealing with out of control prices?
Fuck no. The government should eminent domain it all for the original price plus normal inflation and put it on the market at that price. If it’s older than 50 years or has had significant changes made to the original plan then we discount it. Houses are the only product we pay more for as they fall apart and it’s entirely because real estate speculation is a thing.
People rented in your parent’s generation too. My dad was born and raised in London 1931. They rented every house he lived in (good thing too because four of them were destroyed in The Blitz). My Mom was born in 1942 and raised in New York. Do you think most New Yorkers owned their homes even in 1942? And there was a point back then when they couldn’t afford rent and had to live on an actual homeowner’s screened-in porch for a summer.
There will always be a need to rent rather than buy. The price of rents is the issue, not the fact that they are available. And attacking someone who is not part of some corporate rent-raising scheme is unhelpful.
Yeah and tenements were an exploitation too. The problem of housing for sale and housing for rent are inextricably linked. Yeah getting rid of all rental housing is too far.
Totally get how you thought I was using price speculation as justification for landlords, but I was actually trying to make the opposite point. I bought this house because I wanted to own my own home, and I couldn’t afford a single family home, but could half a duplex that was in such a state of disrepair when I bought it that it took me calling 12 insurance companies before one would underwrite it. It’s now one of the nicer houses on the block. The point I’m trying to make is this was a terrible financial decision - I probably earned under minimum wage for the time I put into property maintance and would have earned more on the money in other investments. It’s one of the only homes I could afford on the working class salary I was earning (granted, ~10 years ago).
The eminent domain strategy is an interesting one, but one that has a lot of flaws. For example, under the plan you listed I wouldn’t get enough money back to pay off my mortgage with the bank - expanded economy wide, that would lead to mass lay offs across the banking sector. I could see how you might like that long term (less people working in banking), but we’d need to account for it in the short term or it would spiral the country into a recession like 2008. The house I own in is in an area not many people want to live long term and prefer renting - it’s mainly graduate students and young professionals planning on moving in a few years. And how do you deal with the politics of it - the vast majority of the country, right or wrong, would never support a plan like that. And when I talk about affording it, I’m not just talking about the upfront costs. Most of my renters over the years putting down the first months payment takes some saving. I’ve been pricing out a new furnance and AC, and it’ll run me over $8k. They couldn’t afford that one time cost to keep the house maintained. These are just a couple points that could all be addressed, but mainly sharing because there are dozens more that would also need addressing and to point out that there is no simple solution to this problem.
Yeah maybe that’s a bit extreme. I don’t think the debt bubble would cause a bank collapse, we’ve had people get caught underwater before and a reduced price eminent domain would be similar to TARP in 2008. But we really do need to reign it in. And that’s going to involve some people taking a bath on their loans. It’s the one inescapable problem of solving housing inflation. There’s always going to be X number of people who bought recently and will end up underwater. And the two answers are the government subsidizing their loan and the government forcing a sale where they would recover most of the loan. Legislation that isn’t just another subsidy would likely subsidize the loan on a primary residence and force a sale to the government on other properties that are underwater and unable to be refinanced.
Get a job!
Totally get this response, but even in the large ramble I gave above it’s hard to share all the details. I do have a job and that pays for all my living expenses including my portion of the mortgage. I have a seperate bank account for any money that I’ve ever gotten in rent, and that money only is ever used for property maintenance, improvements, and paying the mortgage. That account is still at the same amount I put in there when I opened it when I bought the house - not a dollar in rent has been spent on myself. I have not paid myself a dime for the hundreds if not thousands of hours of property maintenance work I’ve done over the years.
I’ve discussed with all my renters if they’d be interested in buying the home, but none are. None are at a stage in life where they are committed to living long term in the area.
Only recently have I moved out - I needed a larger place now that I’m married and have a kid. Since none of the renters are interested in buying, if I wanted to sell, the buyers would almost certainly be larger landlords or corporations and I’m not looking to sell to them. So I’m caught in a catch-22 of not loving the system, but playing the game is a net positive specifically for my renters who I have a great relationship with.
You explained everything well, some people just hate landlords no matter what and you can’t reason with them
Property maintenance is a job. Landlord is not.
Some landlords do property maintenance in addition to being a landlord.
So they repair their own dwellings, of which they own more than one, just like a regular homeowner? We don’t call that a job.
Do you ever pay someone to repair your dwelling?
Nah, I got a landlord that sucks so much money from me that he’s nice enough to do it for free!
I think a bigger threat than corporations buying single family houses is that there are certain types of housing that will likely never not be owned by a single entity such as the large apartment buildings with shared entry areas.
I think the YIMBYs need to start adding “ownable units of housing” to their list of things to look for when developing new housing structures. A lot of places in California are starting to build again, but they’re building a lot of corporate-owned apartment buildings with hundreds of units that only help further consolidate the housing market.
My neighborhood did a mixed development model and I think that’s the way it should go: some apartments, some townhouses, some condos. Stop letting a single company own the entirety of the new housing units you’re building.
Same here - yimby me up. I live on the edge of a multi family neighborhood currently being scaled up. It’s objectively good in that we’re building more housing units walkable to the town center and train station. However these are huge apartment blocks that can only ever be corporate owned. They’re replacing smaller multifamily houses much more likely to be owned privately.
So we’re getting more places to live but rent is going up and we’re getting more high end places and fewer places where anyone can live. We’re helping engineers live closer to transit, which is good, but pricing out a lot of regular people
Even worse, my town always had the reputation of the affordable places where anyone to live, in the midst of a cluster of expensive towns. Not anymore. Now we’re grouped as one of the expensive towns
Corps should only be able to own apartment style housing. I’d be fine with more of them being built if we removed single family homes from the rental market.
That varies a lot depending upon where you’re talking about. In my area, the overwhelming majority of people that rent aren’t renting single family houses.
My area of New England, rentals seem to be either big corporate places or a unit in a triple-decker (3-story building with a single unit on each floor, traditionally owned by someone who lives in one of the units).
I live in a condo I own, which seems like an ok balance of privacy, responsibility, and being able to actually afford housing. Mortgage, HOA fee, taxes, etc, is still $800/month cheaper than my old corporate apartment, and I promise you I’m not spending $800/month in maintenance and neither was my landlord.
I think we need to look beyond individual ownership towards collective ownership. Apartment buildings should be a housing cooperative managed collectively by the people who live there.
I’m on board with that too, but I think that’s a tougher sell politically.
That’s reasonable. Given the current climate of apartments, I think the most accessible option for folks would be tenant unions
Get a group of people interested in doing that. And enough money to buy it.
It’s possible, my city passed an ordinance to allow right of first refusal to tenants. 3 immediately formed, and there’s been a few more since.
That’s dope. I like hearing that. Spread that news, it’s good news to spread. Im interested in how that works out.
Agree! With the added note that they shouldn’t do it the way the developers in my area did: they pitched it as affordable, accessible mixed use, and then built luxury homes that normal people couldn’t afford.
Yup. Fucking ridiculous.
I’ve been at the same place for ten years. My rent went up twice. I hate not having a private property owner. Unless I magically come across 150k for a house down payment, it’s looking like corpos from here on out. UghJust twice in 10 years? You’ve got a good place. Every apartment I’ve stayed in (except one privately owned one) jacked the price 11-13% every year. That was a major factor in biting the bullet and getting a house. In 5 years (4 now) the house will be cheaper per month than my last apartment.
Oh yeah I’ve been lucky. Only reason it was raised was because a new guy bought the place.
If I could afford buying a house i would have done it years ago.
I know what you mean. Partner and I are both working professionals with no kids, and it was still a huge financial stretch to get the house. We even had help from family to get the down payment. I honestly don’t know how most people do it.
My best friend and his fiance bought a five bedroom house in a great area. They’ll never have kids. Her family is loaded and helped out, and that’s how they were able to snag it.
Supposedly family used to only really help at the wedding. These days it’s whenever possible, it seems. I feel like this social structure is going to crash hard eventually.
California, where the apt is, limits rent increases to 5% plus the annual increase in the consumer price index (inflation)
*except not if it’s more like a house and if the landlord is renting only a small number of properties (don’t remember exact wording)
5% plus inflation is still triple the typical inflation 😟
If anyone has access to a genie wish, might I suggest:
“I wish any rental that saw the rent on it raised by more than twice the inflation rate, once it is no longer occupied, would instantly burst into flames and burn to ashes in a way that damages no other rental unit.”
Granted, landlords insurance pays for a new building and lost rent. Now renting it for even more money.
Except when it keeps burning down due to the ongoing wish and is no longer insurance.
The fire just never goes out. Engineers eventually harness it for nearly limitless power.
Landlord still profits.
Maybe for the first few, but after awhile it would be common knowledge that raising rents too much magically causes building to burst into flames. Insurance doesn’t cover intentional acts. If you deliberately burn your own house down, insurance isn’t going to cover that. Plus every insurance policy would exclude coverage for this sort of entirely predictable and preventable fire.
