At my apartment complex, I made friends with the supervisor. He was asked to recalculate the rent, and because we were buds, was able to not raise rent on me. But he HAD to raise rent for new renters by 25%.
I asked if he gets anything out of it, like a raise… And he said no.
I moved out for other reasons. But it was kinda fucked up.
There are two kinds of landlords I’ve encountered over the years.
The first knew my name and would only raise my rent when their insurance and or property tax would increase, and would show me the bills as evidence. There was even a year when my rent got lowered because that year’s assessment went down.
The second referred to my living space as a unit and spoke of my rent as below market that needed to catch up.
If you’re renting, find the first landlord whenever possible, though it seems to get harder and harder to do so.
This is ridiculous that you’re getting downvoted for this statement. This all-or-nothing rejection to landlords is unreasonable. I rent a house to my buddy for $300/month. I could be renting it more than that, but I just want to make sure that he and his family are okay. I CAN NOT AFFORD to let him live there for free. The rent I charge is beyond reasonable. The people rejecting the idea that you should be able to at least collect the property taxes for something you own have never lived in the real world.
Hot take: you need to collect property taxes plus some reasonable amount of money to be able to afford repairs. Houses break. Five digits worth of repairs are common nowadays.
Yes, there are dicks who are landlords (especially corporations) but letting people rent your stuff for a reasonable amount of money is not ethically questionable. The fact that housing shouldn’t be something you speculate with to generate income doesn’t mean you can’t let people use your things.
It’s the general consensus across lemmy that rental prices once rented should never change.
No one wants to have to pay more and I understand that, but it’s the banks that set everything.
We could live in a world were rents didn’t go up, the only problem is everyone would set their rent super high to ensure cover of future mortgage cost increases etc.
I suspect that if the government were to implement UBI, this would be a concern they thought of and would have things within the same breath as the UBI itself to address it. It only comes up every single time UBI is mentioned.
It is easy to implement, it’s hard to enforce because not everyone is going to be forthcoming. My city is rent controlled, passed by a healthy margin, but not all landlords are self reporting. The protections still stand, renters needing to present to the renters department at city hall.
But your point stands in more conservative areas which would be inundated with campaign donations, ads, and just overall lack of faith in functioning government.
A huge majority of politicians are landlords. They’re more represented than mining, tech, forestry, oil, agriculture, or any other big industry lobby group.
This doesn’t happen where UBI has been put into practice, and only happens in theory if you assume housing demand is perfectly inelastic. That’s why it’s a common suspicion.
Reminder that jobs and houses exist outside of major cities. If you have an immediate set of dependants then well fuck, but if you’re early in career I recommend getting the fuck out of your competitive shit hole of a city.
*Downvotes from people who are thoroughly unimpressed with your narrow viewpoint and seeming inability to empathize with other people who have very different life realities than you do.
The only other viewpoint I’ve seen from anyone countering is a hot take. So I wouldn’t be so sure
Those other people with a “very different life” haven’t explained why they can’t do 30min drive to/from work? If they don’t want to do that I understand, but that’s a completely different conversation.
Anyone who already drives 30mins to work is likely not renting in the centre of a major city (original comment point). Before you say because kids/family, re-read my original comment.
My god, your comments are written with such a lack of empathy and your opinion is so underdeveloped that that is why you earned my downvote.
Rent is increasing everywhere because inflation is increasing everywhere, including outside of major cities.
More importantly, the solution to "housing is increasingly controlled by those who own a lot of housing and they are using that control to extract more wealth from those who own less than them. " is not simply “move somewhere less densely populated, the housing there is cheaper”. Why? Because of course it’s fucking not.
Housing is cheaper there because less people live there. What does that mean? Less people want to live there, for a myriad of reasons. Maybe I have multiple family members within a city? Hell, I have friends certainly and they’re not moving with me - decade long friendships that won’t go away but I’ll certainly see far far less.
Maybe I have kids and I don’t want to move them to a new school? Maybe the schools in my neighboring small towns aren’t properly funded or have a conservative board so their education is skewed.
Maybe I like going to IMAX theaters as a treat and my neighboring towns don’t have one. Or ice skating or to an arcade or to top golf or to a Thai boxing club or to a pottery class. Cities have these experiences in spades, and maybe my neighboring towns dont.
Maybe I hate driving and commuting would not only cost more of my most valuable resource but it would cause things I’m opposed to like increased pollution while costing me more money and increasing my risk of accidental harm. Maybe the city I would have to commute in our through has such a reliance on car infrastructure that everywhere is clogged up with traffic most hours of the day making any sort of timely transit impossible.
Maybe I just like good food, smaller towns have less variety, less options, and fewer hours. Maybe I like well sourced meats like fish, which my small towns struggle to source.
Maybe my neighboring towns don’t speak my language as well as cities, they can’t accommodate me while I learn the native language. Maybe I like a racially diverse populace with high education and who have a multitude of life experiences. Maybe I’m LGBTQ and my neighboring towns are too conservative to treat me well. Maybe violent crime is higher in the suburbs and neighboring towns and that worries me.
I mean, you’ve clearly thought about all of this and found it inconsequential when compared to hundreds of dollars in rent. But I’d be willing to pay more money to stay in a public transit heavy city, with my friends, so I can get good sushi and Turkish food when I want, and see movies on the big screen.
That doesnt mean I want to pay some guy’s 4th mortgage at a rate that costs me my ability to ever own an apartment. Housing is a right, we have the capacity to make it affordable everywhere, we should be doing things that improve everyone’s lives not pretending that it’s acceptable to tell everyone to uproot their entire life in exchange for €X00 a month back.
Not everyone can drive. Many households only have one car between multiple adults. Some can’t afford childcare and rely on nearby relatives to help out, and would have to start paying for childcare if they moved. Some people don’t have the education or job training that would allow them to get a job worth commuting to. Some people are reliant on social services or medical care that is not available otherwise. Many of the suburbs around American cities are just as expensive as the cities themselves but without walkable areas, nearby shops, or any public transportation.
This is just a handful of examples and it barely scratches the surface of the more complicated issues at hand here
Just because you managed to type out an opinion on the internet doesn’t mean you are entitled to other people’s time and effort.
Not every random hot take in the comment section of The Onion community is going to be worth engaging. Particularly when the point is “cities are all shitholes so you should just leave!”
That's because -- wait for it -- the cost of living is lower in small towns. Not just rent, but everything, is cheaper. And there are far fewer job opportunities in small towns, especially if you're in a specialized or highly trained field.
You know what else is real easy to find in small towns in the country? Corruption, nepotism, racism, wage theft. Pretty much any way for the big fish in the little pond to keep their thumbs on the scale is easy, because there's so few people to call attention to it, and no real incentive for the state to get involved to clean things up.
Transportation costs are inconsequential when compared to the outrageous rent costs in the inner city. Were talking about a factor of 10+ here for a 30-40min drive/train.
I did that drive for 8 years so I could afford a 4 bed house, it was fine. The same money, a stones throw from work couldn’t buy me a cardboard box
If you think your time is worth the extra rent costs then don’t complain about the rent costs?
Redneckistan doesn’t exist in my country so it’s a non factor. I had no idea that concept encapsulated 100% of the area outside cities.
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