Gabe Lehman In a move that critics are calling “one of the most tasteless events I’ve ever heard of,” Berkeley landlords are celebrating the end of eviction protections in the East Bay city with a...
Gabe Lehman
In a move that critics are calling “one of the most tasteless events I’ve ever heard of,” Berkeley landlords are celebrating the end of eviction protections in the East Bay city with a cocktail party.
Berkeley, like many other Bay Area municipalities, began a moratorium on most evictions at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. The moratorium lasted over three years but expired on Sept. 1, 2023.
“We will celebrate the end of the Eviction Moratorium and talk about what’s upcoming through the end of the year,” reads the event notice on BPOA’s website.
The Berkeley Property Owners Association, a trade group for rental property owners in Berkeley, apparently believes regaining the right to throw people out of their homes is cause for celebration — or at least a networking event.
BPOA doesn't represent majority of Berkeley landlords
Simon-Weisberg said that while the event was “completely in character” for the BPOA, it does not represent the views of the majority of Berkeley landlords. She said most landlords were “very generous and patient and really worked to help tenants” during the worst of the pandemic.
BPOA claims renters abused moratorium
BPOA claims renters abused the moratorium to weasel out of paying rent. “We make no qualms about celebrating the end of the eviction moratorium. We are celebrating the end of the tenants who could have paid rent, and chose not to,” BPOA President Krista Gulbransen told Berkeleyside.
Others disagree. Leah Simon-Weisberg, chair of Berkeley’s Rent Stabilization Board, denies the charge that many tenants could have paid rent and chose not to, calling it “nonsense” and saying BPOA has not provided any evidence of fraud when it came to the eviction moratorium.
Rising Covid-19 rates
Simon-Weisberg found it particularly troubling that BPOA decided to celebrate evicting tenants at a time when COVID-19 rates are starting to pick back up. “While the moratorium is over, COVID-19 continues to spread in our community. Hospitalizations and deaths are on the rise. It seems very insensitive to those who might be rendered homeless to ever celebrate eviction,” Simon-Weisberg told SFGATE.
Problem for UC students
Controversy around housing issues is nothing new for the Bay Area. The high cost of housing has been a long time problem in the region, especially for UC Berkeley students.
I was a UC Berkeley undergrad, so I was a tenant of Berkeley landlords for ~3 years, since UC Berkeley dumps you to the street after freshman year due to not having dorm space for anyone other...
I was a UC Berkeley undergrad, so I was a tenant of Berkeley landlords for ~3 years, since UC Berkeley dumps you to the street after freshman year due to not having dorm space for anyone other than freshmen. They were fairly notorious as a group - one of the major landlords was a convicted rapist and sex trafficker, for instance.
Maybe ironically, or unintuitively, the big corporate apartments were considered to be the "best", landlord-quality wise, like firestone. They mostly did things by the book. They were expensive, and limited to downtown because of zoning. Most people rented from tiny landlords who owned one or two properties, and these were just a mixed bag. Some absolutely tried to scam you, some were nice as a person but very slow to fix properties, some were good landlords.
Either way, the best way to take power away from them is to allow more upzoning - remember, as a student, if you could get university apartments or "big corporate apartment building" apartments, that was the gold standard. The university is constantly getting blue balled by the city and NIMBYs - People's Park, an area that all students knew to avoid at all costs, is supposed to turn into student housing, but is constantly being thwarted.
That's the thing I noticed as well about landlords: The megacorps were almost always the least-bad because they had the most to lose from breaking the law. Having such a large number of properties...
That's the thing I noticed as well about landlords: The megacorps were almost always the least-bad because they had the most to lose from breaking the law. Having such a large number of properties exposes them to class actions.
Wheras with small-time landlords, the best-case was they were as good as the megacorp and worst-case they were abysmal slumlords extracting as much value out of their tenants while doing the bare minimum to keep the building from being condemned. And since the number of tenants is low, its far less likely for them to hit on a savvy one that will take them to court.
I mean anecdotal evidence doesn't cover edge cases. You don't see the entire bell curve as an individual tenant. I know a (now deceased) landlord who owned one building. It wasn't his primary...
I mean anecdotal evidence doesn't cover edge cases. You don't see the entire bell curve as an individual tenant. I know a (now deceased) landlord who owned one building. It wasn't his primary income. He did not maximize profit when setting his rents and he was open to delays for hardship situations. I don't think he ever evicted anyone. I'm reacting to your statement of best case, not your general observation of the trend.
But yes, having lawyers on staff means you avoid the most blatantly illegal abuses.
I had a great landlord once. She was an elderly lady, whom let me just fix or find someone to fix any issues, and I sent her the receipt and she deducted it from my rent. It was at that moment I...
I had a great landlord once. She was an elderly lady, whom let me just fix or find someone to fix any issues, and I sent her the receipt and she deducted it from my rent.
It was at that moment I realized that landlording should be severely limited, pretty much isolated to large multi tenant buildings. Because the best landlord I had let me act like a homeowner.
The only reason we "need" the ability to rent places is that the transfer home ownership has become exceedingly complicated. Simplifying that process would eliminate the vast majority of renting use-cases. It does require rethinking the commodification of housing (and tying it to the majority of people's wealth), because I think that's one of the biggest things holding back the ability to simplify.
I suspect taking full financial responsibility for a house that’s new to you is never going to be quick and easy, given the amount of hidden variation and things that could go wrong. Doing a few...
I suspect taking full financial responsibility for a house that’s new to you is never going to be quick and easy, given the amount of hidden variation and things that could go wrong. Doing a few repairs doesn’t seem quite the same?
Easy purchases might be doable for very standardized apartment units, though. This would be more commodification. Commodities are easily bought and sold because they’re standardized.
Simple thought: Nobody owns any homes. You pay taxes to a local NGO housing authority. They assist with repairs, maintainence, and upgrades. You want to move to a new home? You find a vacant one...
Simple thought: Nobody owns any homes. You pay taxes to a local NGO housing authority. They assist with repairs, maintainence, and upgrades. You want to move to a new home? You find a vacant one and you move. The housing authority verifies the home is good for the next person, and they move in.
Kind of like renting, but without onerous restrictions preventing you from doing what you like with the place. And with the key distinction that nobody is building wealth from this. It's a public service like a water utility.
While this is far from a perfect plan (I can think a dozen loopholes and problems as I write it out), what it does is provide a clear separation from living spaces and financials. It means that there is no 'market' for housing, merely availability (or lack thereof).
One problem is one of demand based on location. I envision an national housing site, ala zillow or redfin, which lists all currently available homes. Any new home on the market has say a 7 day window for applications that go into a lottery drawing. Perhaps people whom work or attend school within walking distance get higher priority.
People want to own their homes for more reasons than purely financial gain. Your home is yours when you own it. You can do with it as you like (within reason), and it naturally becomes an...
People want to own their homes for more reasons than purely financial gain. Your home is yours when you own it. You can do with it as you like (within reason), and it naturally becomes an extension of you and your family over time.
What you just described sounds like a complete nightmare that would be ripe for widespread abuse.
Standardized and uniform homes owned by some monolithic organization that we all shuffle between is a hellish beige dystopia that completely disregards the human element of housing - which is more than just shelter.
If the housing stock isn't uniform, who decides the allocations of the properties with better amenities? Ultimately someone has to in your system, and that position(s) is going to be inherantly incredibly powerful and inevitably corrupt.
What happens when someone wants or needs to move to an area but there isn't enough housing? Or when someone wants to add something to their home like a gym, garage, office, etc.
Would they have to move to a new home with that feature (if it even exists)? Would they be told they don't need it/can't have it according to some corporate/government rubric or metric? After all, the person doesn't own the property and wouldn't be entitled to make that change without the property owner's sign off.
This concept would only maybe work if implemented in a very watered down way for something like city apartments. Even better, we already have systems to help people get free or heavily subsidized housing that need it. Perhaps a better solution would be simply investing in improving those systems and the quality of that housing, instead of destroying the individual right to own property.
I feel like you latched on to my first sentance while ignoring the rest. I laid it out as such because most systems like this already exist in some way or another, they're just disjointed and...
I feel like you latched on to my first sentance while ignoring the rest. I laid it out as such because most systems like this already exist in some way or another, they're just disjointed and don't solve the problem because of it.
Demand would be handled via lottery. Nice homes in good locations you might only get 1/1000 to get. But a nice home in a moderate demand you might get 1/4 chance or even just your pick of the litter. In places with not enough housing? Luck of the lottery. Rather than yet another 'wealth makes right' system.
People want to own their homes for more reasons than purely financial gain. Your home is yours when you own it.
I know. I was banking on this. Much how it already is, you own your home as long as you live in it and pay your taxes.
You make it yours, the main restriction being not making it a hazard. You might have to get permits and inspections done to do major work, just like you really should/have to now. You know, to avoid accidental fire/structural problems. So build that garage, revamp to add a third bathroom, go nuts. You might even be able to get the housing authority to do some of these things for you. The key distinguishing thing is that you don't get to leverage the home itself as an asset, so if you want to do these things you save the money to do so.
But if you want to move? Well then you move. You pick a home from the available ones, or wait to try your hand at some lotteries. You move out, housing authority fixes any major problems with your home (the way inspections and owners/sellers negotiate now). No money changes hands between new owners and old owners. You just pay the new taxes for the new home.
Having a simple authority you're paying for helps insure maintenance gets done on time. How many homes were ruined because a family couldn't afford to replace the roof? Baking "we insure structural integrity" to the housing transfer process means people won't need a financial burden to keep on top of a house, merely to improve upon it with the intention of settling down in it.
destroying the individual right to own property.
The only way you own property is if you'll kill anyone who takes it from you. Otherwise, you are relying on the collective will of society to do that removal for you. It's part of the reason the state will strip you of your home if you never pay your taxes on it.
The main thing I did with my proposal, the thing that is different than the existing system, is that I removed the mass financialization which acts as a useless middleman. The system as it exists is just a revolving door of debt letting bankers extract money as it goes round and round in circles while people move around.
And the NGO wouldn't need to be federal. Could have multiple levels all the way down to the local town government. Just like now. I don't call the state to get a building inspection done...I call my local town inspectors.
In my experience of US apartment renting, the biggest issue with big corporate complexes are "papercut" issues. The units themselves will be decent since they're newish construction, but you may...
In my experience of US apartment renting, the biggest issue with big corporate complexes are "papercut" issues. The units themselves will be decent since they're newish construction, but you may face things like the various building amenities not being maintained particularly well (despite being heavily featured in advertising), unwillingness to deal with the neighbor occasionally looping game intro screen music with his subwoofer all night, etc. Better than the unit being in disrepair or something like that, but enough to make you question why you're paying as much as you are.
There is recent good news about People's Park. https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/09/08/peoples-park-supreme-court-case-opposition-ab-1307-student-housing I agree. Generally speaking the SF Bay...
I agree. Generally speaking the SF Bay Area should look to Japan as a model for a system that provides comparatively low cost housing. I also think capsule hotels could help workers who live with their families in the Central Valley or north of San Rafael.
In any group of people who are given an opportunity for a financial benefit there will be hardship cases that the program was meant to help and who truly need it and their will be opportunists. Banking rent for two plus years instead of paying it would be a smart financial choice.
This is pretty typical. The corporations and big time landlords don’t care to engage in insane squabbles or violate laws they are likely to be caught out on. As long as you pay on time and don’t...
This is pretty typical. The corporations and big time landlords don’t care to engage in insane squabbles or violate laws they are likely to be caught out on. As long as you pay on time and don’t trash the place, they stay out of your way and everything is good.
Every time I’ve heard a story about crazy landlords, it’s always someone who’s renting the granny flat of some boomer who listed it on Facebook marketplace.
I’m curious what form of evidence would be acceptable or practical in obtaining. Bottom line, people weren’t paying rent, in some cases probably for the full term of the moratorium — that’s not...
Others disagree. Leah Simon-Weisberg, chair of Berkeley’s Rent Stabilization Board, denies the charge that many tenants could have paid rent and chose not to, calling it “nonsense” and saying BPOA has not provided any evidence of fraud when it came to the eviction moratorium.
I’m curious what form of evidence would be acceptable or practical in obtaining. Bottom line, people weren’t paying rent, in some cases probably for the full term of the moratorium — that’s not acceptable in my eyes. Why should the government be offloading social housing costs on private landlords? If the government thinks people should have a roof over their head, the government should be paying for it.
I'm a landlord, this behavior is disgusting, but I understand where they're coming from because of all the vitriol you read online. I almost don't even want to participate in this discussion...
I'm a landlord, this behavior is disgusting, but I understand where they're coming from because of all the vitriol you read online. I almost don't even want to participate in this discussion because I'm probably going to be attacked by most of you.
Eviction moratoriums hurt because there are definitely bad tenants out there. It's compounded by the fact we didn't put a moratorium on mortgage payments.
I'm also a young guy too (just turned 30) I saved every dime I had when I graduated college to buy and work on houses while I tried to find a job in my field (chemistry at the time).
I think most people won't be happy until I sell everything I have and my wife, my newborn, and myself live on the street. I can't help but feel personally attacked when I see comments like eat the rich.
No, but there was a federal foreclosure moratorium, and federally backed and federally sponsored mortgage servicers offered COVID hardship forbearance. Do you expect people to feel sympathy for...
It's compounded by the fact we didn't put a moratorium on mortgage payments.
I think most people won't be happy until I sell everything I have and my wife, my newborn, and myself live on the street. I can't help but feel personally attacked when I see comments like eat the rich.
Do you expect people to feel sympathy for you with statements like this? No matter how many dimes they save, the vast majority of Americans will never be in the position you are in of owning multiple homes.
Yeah, as someone that will never probably own a single house, I definitely have an extremely difficult time finding any sympathy for middlemen that own multiple. I don't want landlords on the...
Yeah, as someone that will never probably own a single house, I definitely have an extremely difficult time finding any sympathy for middlemen that own multiple.
I don't want landlords on the street, I just don't want them to be landlords. Would rather them live reasonably and be part of our class rather than another layer of extraction of our income.
Both where I live and in other completely separate locations where parts of my family live, every landlord we encounter is some measure of awful. They are still human beings with a life story and may be nice to your face- but I feel like just the entire concept of landlording corrupts anyone that touches it or attracts bad people. I get it, landlords are people, but until they remove themselves from that position it will taint my view of them as people. They represent a class that will garner no love from me.
Whether it's an individual person or a management team that got bought out by private equity- in both cases they take in thousands of dollars on things they own and don't even have to constantly pay for themselves, invest none of it in the property, basically keeping it all as profit, keep raising the cost every year, and then ask the renter to pay for and do things that are the landlord's responsibility in the first place and get mad when it isn't done.
"I am the main breadwinner in my landlord's family"
I don't mind the concept of landlords. Semi-permanent housing for people who need it is a vital service for society. But I hate seeing rental property being treating as some kind of passive...
I don't mind the concept of landlords. Semi-permanent housing for people who need it is a vital service for society.
But I hate seeing rental property being treating as some kind of passive income, as if they were remote feudal lords. I think if you are going to enter the business of renting out property, it needs to actually be your business. It needs to be the thing you spend your working hours on: doing basic handyman repairs, chasing up contractors, being on call to answer tenants' questions, showing homes to prospective tenants, etc.
Maybe it can be a part-time occupation (for example, if you are only maintaining and renting out one or two modest homes, you may need a second job to supplement your income), but you should nevertheless take an active role in managing and maintaining your properties. You should not just let the home gradually deteriorate, and nor should you hire some for-profit third party where the tenant's rent must cover the expenses and the management company's profit and your profit/mortgage. If that is the situation, you should cut out the middle man (yourself) and sell to the property manager.
Tenants should never, ever be asked to fund a landlord's lifestyle when the landlord does not equally benefit the tenant's lifestyle. This is supposed to be a fair trade (payment for service), not feudalism.
I don't see how this is beneficial. I rent an apartment myself and also own one in another city which is rented out via an agency. I will not apply for a rental that isn't managed by a 3rd party...
I don't see how this is beneficial.
I rent an apartment myself and also own one in another city which is rented out via an agency. I will not apply for a rental that isn't managed by a 3rd party agency. The agencies are well versed in the law, have good tech to make payments and stuff seamless, and have no emotion, they just follow the rule book, take payments, and stay out of your way. Meanwhile privately managed rentals are a source of endless drama, idiot owners who don't know the local laws, etc.
I will also not directly rent my place out as I'm not an expert in the local laws, am not in the city to do inspections, etc, and have a full time job. My apartment is cashflow negative so I must work a job.
The reason you should not want an absent landlord is because you are paying the landlord's bills and the management company's bills. In this scenario, you would rather pay only the management...
The reason you should not want an absent landlord is because you are paying the landlord's bills and the management company's bills. In this scenario, you would rather pay only the management company (because they provide services that you benefit from) but not the landlord (because do not offer value).
An absent landlord's profit is effectively an additional property tax, except that (unlike a real tax) it does not get meaningfully reinvested in a way that benefits you. The fees you pay to the management company, however, do benefit you because they pay for the management of the property. As such, you want the property owner and the manager to be the same entity — or, barring that, for the landlord to not skim any personal profit off of your rent.
I am cool with the latter (I think it's a good option for landlords who feel emotionally attached to a specific property, such as their childhood home or whatever, or who have plans to live in the property at some stage in the future) but it's pretty rare. In my experience, you usually only see it in landlords who have inherited a property or have had reason to move away from their main home for a period of time. You don't see it in landlords who purchase properties with the goal of renting them out.
From a less individualistic standpoint, I think it is better for society as a whole if we strongly resist letting passive income making up a meaningful proportion of the economy, outside of scenarios where it is needed for charitable reasons (namely people who cannot work, such as the elderly and those with disabilities). Passive income tends to stratify societies into classes: those who work for the whole of their income, and those who leech off of them.
You aren't paying anyone's bills. You are paying rent loosely set by the market. If the landlord has a very expensive management company, they can't just increase the rent to cover it, since every...
you are paying the landlord's bills and the management company's bills.
You aren't paying anyone's bills. You are paying rent loosely set by the market. If the landlord has a very expensive management company, they can't just increase the rent to cover it, since every other property will have lower rents. Conversely, if you self manage and save on costs, you aren't going to drop the rent bellow market rate, you'll just pocket that savings as payment for the work you've done.
If anything, self management would increase the cost of providing a rental since the landlords hourly rate is presumably much higher than the real estate agent managing 50 properties at once.
Of course you are paying their bills. Management companies will go out of business if rent cannot cover their bills. Individuals will stop investing in rental properties if they do not make money...
Of course you are paying their bills. Management companies will go out of business if rent cannot cover their bills. Individuals will stop investing in rental properties if they do not make money from the rent.
Your rent is based on the local market, but the local market is based on the costs and profits of property managers and property owners. Rents will be lower if their costs and profits are lower. The fewer middle men there are (all else kept equal), the lower the market rate will go. This is why people who are opposed to absent landlords oppose them in general, not just their own absent landlord; if there were fewer absent landlords across the board, then rents would fall across the board (forcing the few remaining absent landlords to reduce their own profit or sell).
If anything, self management would increase the cost of providing a rental since the landlords hourly rate is presumably much higher than the real estate agent managing 50 properties at once.
In a free market, the landlord in this scenario would make adjustments to remain competitive (reduce their hourly rate or purchase more properties to manage collectively) or they would leave the business and sell their property (presumably to a different property manager who can keep costs down more effectively). Both of these scenarios are desirable to tenants.
Society basically requires you to be a property investor these days. Even if you don’t directly own a property to rent out, basically all retirement funds are partially invested in property. If...
Society basically requires you to be a property investor these days. Even if you don’t directly own a property to rent out, basically all retirement funds are partially invested in property. If you want to have a secure retirement, you need to put your savings in some kind of investment since cash in the bank will be devalued to nothing by the time you retire.
In this situation, if you don’t want to be dumped on the street to die when you get old, you are very much incentivised to get an investment property.
I can't speak for everyone but I make a firm distinction between prosperous hard working people and the mega wealthy who vaccuum up assets and own massive shares of the economy. Edit, the...
I can't speak for everyone but I make a firm distinction between prosperous hard working people and the mega wealthy who vaccuum up assets and own massive shares of the economy.
Edit, the resentment about the party comes in part from the underlying fact that too many people have been gentrified out of the region and we lack affordable housing. The system is unjust and grinds people down. But individuals within the system might or might not be personally sympathetic. I have seen abusive tenants. I have also seen poor hard working people who can't catch a break.
I'm sorry that you have to face the negative sentiment/backlash caused by other people. Every person deserves to be treated fairly, and judged upon their actions, not the worst actions of the...
I'm sorry that you have to face the negative sentiment/backlash caused by other people. Every person deserves to be treated fairly, and judged upon their actions, not the worst actions of the collective group.
I find myself feeling the "eat the rich" attitude when I read about things like this. But one of the things that I believe are holding us back from progress is that we have the wrong idea of "rich".
Landlords who are unethical and predatory are definitely a problem, but the biggest
problem is the rich people that you don't see. Humans aren't good at comprehending the scale of increasing orders of magnitude, and as a result people get lumped into categories (like "rich") that don't fit. The people we encounter first hand or see in news articles like this one are easy targets, but it's ridiculous to say that the systemic issues and inequalities can be solved by going after local landlords.
Ultimately, going after the wrong targets just fractures us at a time when we need to unify, and it's exactly what the real "rich" people want to see.
Side Note:
When I was a kid my father who was in the Army got deployed to the middle east. If I remember correctly, our landlord (who was retired and lived across the street) offered to waive our rent while he was overseas. My parents ended up opting to move in with my grandparents (for the extra support for my mom), but that kind of offer only comes from someone with genuine compassion.
We don't want you to have zero homes, we want you to have exactly one home, so that others can also have exactly one home. The difference between one home and zero homes is pretty massive.
We don't want you to have zero homes, we want you to have exactly one home, so that others can also have exactly one home. The difference between one home and zero homes is pretty massive.
Its anonomous here, please share. Perhaps being more transparent about the financials will help garner sympathy from non-landlords. This isn't intended as an inquisition, but rather the questions...
Its anonomous here, please share. Perhaps being more transparent about the financials will help garner sympathy from non-landlords. This isn't intended as an inquisition, but rather the questions that need answered to justify landlording.
How many properties do you own?
What is the total worth of those properties, and the debt you owe on them?
How much net income (less mortgage and maintainence) do you recieve from renters?
How many hours a week do you spend doing your landlord duties?
Assuming a single-family home, what do you provide that a renter could not?
That last question in particular is the big one. Because for a very, very, very large number of people, the only thing holding them back from home ownership is the lack of funds to make a down payment on a mortgage. Or other arbitrary bullshit like creditworthiness, which is a load of bunk for loan backed by a relatively non-depreciating asset.
I know that personally, as a non-landlord, if I landed in dire financial straights, I could sell my home and net $150,000 from principle payments and appreciation. I could then move into a smaller home, using the minimum down payment, and live for another 4 months at my current quality of life while hunting for another job.
Its this kind of financial stability that landlords build off the paychecks of their tennats. The tennants of course, upon hitting dire financial situations, don't have an asset they've been putting equity into.
We don't literally want to eat the rich. We want them to divest of their ill-gotten assets, and work a full-time job like the rest of us. Its just that many would rather die than having that happen, or at least thats how it seems. Landlords don't even have the justification that a business owner or CEO does...they're literally making money almost purely out of ownership.
I think this is where a lot of the disconnect lies between the landlord crowd and the anti-landlord crowd. From the perspective of a tenant, how hard you worked to buy the property they rent is...
I saved every dime I had when I graduated college to buy and work on houses...
I think this is where a lot of the disconnect lies between the landlord crowd and the anti-landlord crowd.
From the perspective of a tenant, how hard you worked to buy the property they rent is immaterial to them. They just want to know whether you are a good landlord or a bad landlord. And people who are struggling to buy a home to live in are, equally, not interested in how hard you worked when you took multiple properties off the market.
Think of it like this: Someone who runs a profitable criminal enterprise probably had to work very hard and take many personal risks to get there, but this is not going to sway victims or jurors to empathy. If anything, it will make the crime lord look even more guilty in their minds because it implies that they easily could have chosen a more ethical career.
Just to be clear, I am not comparing being a landlord to being a crime lord. I am just using this as a metaphor to try to illustrate how people who feel victimized by people who do X are not moved by stories about all the hard work and sacrifice that went into doing X. These stories often actually further damage relations because they highlight the difference in people's moral systems.
Yeah we all get together in secret meetings. There's a secret hand shake and everything. We collude with bankers to prevent you from securing mortgages too. /s
Yeah we all get together in secret meetings.
There's a secret hand shake and everything. We collude with bankers to prevent you from securing mortgages too.
It’s not straightforward because it’s Marxist jargon. I sort of know what it means, but not in practice. What do you expect class solidarity to consist of?
It’s not straightforward because it’s Marxist jargon. I sort of know what it means, but not in practice. What do you expect class solidarity to consist of?
I'm going to go ahead and agree with the poster below me that this is Marxist jargon, and here's why: I find fault with my sole identity being related to a single class, in this case landlord. I'm...
It's actually a straight forward question and one I think it'd be worth it (for yourself) to think about and seriously answer
I'm going to go ahead and agree with the poster below me that this is Marxist jargon, and here's why:
I find fault with my sole identity being related to a single class, in this case landlord. I'm a lot of things, healthcare provider, patient advocate, charity worker, 3rd generation immigrant, Mexican, and US Citizen (removed some of my other identifiers so you can't find me on the street). These are other classes that I belong too, but they don't solely define who I am, and that's my biggest problem with people like you. We aren't some monolithic block, we're people just like you, and a lot of us are people of color or your neighbor and you seek to divide us.
I mean this with all due respect despite the snark implying that this would be a question worth thinking about for myself, but are you involved in your local politics? I think you'd be surprised what you can get accomplished if you do something like call your representative. For instance, my state congressional representative lives in my neighborhood, and my city council representative lives in the neighborhood adjacent. Change starts by speaking up at a local level with community organizers.
My guy, absolutely none of the things you mentioned are classes. Your failure to meaningfully engage with my honest (and extremely simple) question is pretty telling!
My guy, absolutely none of the things you mentioned are classes. Your failure to meaningfully engage with my honest (and extremely simple) question is pretty telling!
Having class solidarity does not require colluding or conspiring with anyone. It does not require speaking to them or meeting them. Do your material interests align with the material interests of...
Having class solidarity does not require colluding or conspiring with anyone. It does not require speaking to them or meeting them. Do your material interests align with the material interests of landlords as a class? Do you act to the benefit of that class including when it is to the detriment of other classes, i.e. the working class?
Unless you charge the absolute minimum rent possible and only raise it to cover your own ownership expenses and never because it's commensurate with market forces, you do have class solidarity with landlords.
Eat the rich, there's no other solution. These people have a legitimate mental disorder that causes them to lack empathy or they would not have been so fucking stupid to pull this kind of stunt.
Eat the rich, there's no other solution. These people have a legitimate mental disorder that causes them to lack empathy or they would not have been so fucking stupid to pull this kind of stunt.
Gabe Lehman
In a move that critics are calling “one of the most tasteless events I’ve ever heard of,” Berkeley landlords are celebrating the end of eviction protections in the East Bay city with a cocktail party.
BPOA doesn't represent majority of Berkeley landlords
BPOA claims renters abused moratorium
Rising Covid-19 rates
Problem for UC students
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/berkeley-property-owner-party-fight-protest-18365042.php
I feel like this was a predictable outcome.
I was a UC Berkeley undergrad, so I was a tenant of Berkeley landlords for ~3 years, since UC Berkeley dumps you to the street after freshman year due to not having dorm space for anyone other than freshmen. They were fairly notorious as a group - one of the major landlords was a convicted rapist and sex trafficker, for instance.
Maybe ironically, or unintuitively, the big corporate apartments were considered to be the "best", landlord-quality wise, like firestone. They mostly did things by the book. They were expensive, and limited to downtown because of zoning. Most people rented from tiny landlords who owned one or two properties, and these were just a mixed bag. Some absolutely tried to scam you, some were nice as a person but very slow to fix properties, some were good landlords.
Either way, the best way to take power away from them is to allow more upzoning - remember, as a student, if you could get university apartments or "big corporate apartment building" apartments, that was the gold standard. The university is constantly getting blue balled by the city and NIMBYs - People's Park, an area that all students knew to avoid at all costs, is supposed to turn into student housing, but is constantly being thwarted.
That's the thing I noticed as well about landlords: The megacorps were almost always the least-bad because they had the most to lose from breaking the law. Having such a large number of properties exposes them to class actions.
Wheras with small-time landlords, the best-case was they were as good as the megacorp and worst-case they were abysmal slumlords extracting as much value out of their tenants while doing the bare minimum to keep the building from being condemned. And since the number of tenants is low, its far less likely for them to hit on a savvy one that will take them to court.
I mean anecdotal evidence doesn't cover edge cases. You don't see the entire bell curve as an individual tenant. I know a (now deceased) landlord who owned one building. It wasn't his primary income. He did not maximize profit when setting his rents and he was open to delays for hardship situations. I don't think he ever evicted anyone. I'm reacting to your statement of best case, not your general observation of the trend.
But yes, having lawyers on staff means you avoid the most blatantly illegal abuses.
I had a great landlord once. She was an elderly lady, whom let me just fix or find someone to fix any issues, and I sent her the receipt and she deducted it from my rent.
It was at that moment I realized that landlording should be severely limited, pretty much isolated to large multi tenant buildings. Because the best landlord I had let me act like a homeowner.
The only reason we "need" the ability to rent places is that the transfer home ownership has become exceedingly complicated. Simplifying that process would eliminate the vast majority of renting use-cases. It does require rethinking the commodification of housing (and tying it to the majority of people's wealth), because I think that's one of the biggest things holding back the ability to simplify.
I suspect taking full financial responsibility for a house that’s new to you is never going to be quick and easy, given the amount of hidden variation and things that could go wrong. Doing a few repairs doesn’t seem quite the same?
Easy purchases might be doable for very standardized apartment units, though. This would be more commodification. Commodities are easily bought and sold because they’re standardized.
Simple thought: Nobody owns any homes. You pay taxes to a local NGO housing authority. They assist with repairs, maintainence, and upgrades. You want to move to a new home? You find a vacant one and you move. The housing authority verifies the home is good for the next person, and they move in.
Kind of like renting, but without onerous restrictions preventing you from doing what you like with the place. And with the key distinction that nobody is building wealth from this. It's a public service like a water utility.
While this is far from a perfect plan (I can think a dozen loopholes and problems as I write it out), what it does is provide a clear separation from living spaces and financials. It means that there is no 'market' for housing, merely availability (or lack thereof).
One problem is one of demand based on location. I envision an national housing site, ala zillow or redfin, which lists all currently available homes. Any new home on the market has say a 7 day window for applications that go into a lottery drawing. Perhaps people whom work or attend school within walking distance get higher priority.
People want to own their homes for more reasons than purely financial gain. Your home is yours when you own it. You can do with it as you like (within reason), and it naturally becomes an extension of you and your family over time.
What you just described sounds like a complete nightmare that would be ripe for widespread abuse.
Standardized and uniform homes owned by some monolithic organization that we all shuffle between is a hellish beige dystopia that completely disregards the human element of housing - which is more than just shelter.
If the housing stock isn't uniform, who decides the allocations of the properties with better amenities? Ultimately someone has to in your system, and that position(s) is going to be inherantly incredibly powerful and inevitably corrupt.
What happens when someone wants or needs to move to an area but there isn't enough housing? Or when someone wants to add something to their home like a gym, garage, office, etc.
Would they have to move to a new home with that feature (if it even exists)? Would they be told they don't need it/can't have it according to some corporate/government rubric or metric? After all, the person doesn't own the property and wouldn't be entitled to make that change without the property owner's sign off.
This concept would only maybe work if implemented in a very watered down way for something like city apartments. Even better, we already have systems to help people get free or heavily subsidized housing that need it. Perhaps a better solution would be simply investing in improving those systems and the quality of that housing, instead of destroying the individual right to own property.
I feel like you latched on to my first sentance while ignoring the rest. I laid it out as such because most systems like this already exist in some way or another, they're just disjointed and don't solve the problem because of it.
Demand would be handled via lottery. Nice homes in good locations you might only get 1/1000 to get. But a nice home in a moderate demand you might get 1/4 chance or even just your pick of the litter. In places with not enough housing? Luck of the lottery. Rather than yet another 'wealth makes right' system.
I know. I was banking on this. Much how it already is, you own your home as long as you live in it and pay your taxes.
You make it yours, the main restriction being not making it a hazard. You might have to get permits and inspections done to do major work, just like you really should/have to now. You know, to avoid accidental fire/structural problems. So build that garage, revamp to add a third bathroom, go nuts. You might even be able to get the housing authority to do some of these things for you. The key distinguishing thing is that you don't get to leverage the home itself as an asset, so if you want to do these things you save the money to do so.
But if you want to move? Well then you move. You pick a home from the available ones, or wait to try your hand at some lotteries. You move out, housing authority fixes any major problems with your home (the way inspections and owners/sellers negotiate now). No money changes hands between new owners and old owners. You just pay the new taxes for the new home.
Having a simple authority you're paying for helps insure maintenance gets done on time. How many homes were ruined because a family couldn't afford to replace the roof? Baking "we insure structural integrity" to the housing transfer process means people won't need a financial burden to keep on top of a house, merely to improve upon it with the intention of settling down in it.
The only way you own property is if you'll kill anyone who takes it from you. Otherwise, you are relying on the collective will of society to do that removal for you. It's part of the reason the state will strip you of your home if you never pay your taxes on it.
The main thing I did with my proposal, the thing that is different than the existing system, is that I removed the mass financialization which acts as a useless middleman. The system as it exists is just a revolving door of debt letting bankers extract money as it goes round and round in circles while people move around.
And the NGO wouldn't need to be federal. Could have multiple levels all the way down to the local town government. Just like now. I don't call the state to get a building inspection done...I call my local town inspectors.
In my experience of US apartment renting, the biggest issue with big corporate complexes are "papercut" issues. The units themselves will be decent since they're newish construction, but you may face things like the various building amenities not being maintained particularly well (despite being heavily featured in advertising), unwillingness to deal with the neighbor occasionally looping game intro screen music with his subwoofer all night, etc. Better than the unit being in disrepair or something like that, but enough to make you question why you're paying as much as you are.
There is recent good news about People's Park. https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/09/08/peoples-park-supreme-court-case-opposition-ab-1307-student-housing
I agree. Generally speaking the SF Bay Area should look to Japan as a model for a system that provides comparatively low cost housing. I also think capsule hotels could help workers who live with their families in the Central Valley or north of San Rafael.
In any group of people who are given an opportunity for a financial benefit there will be hardship cases that the program was meant to help and who truly need it and their will be opportunists. Banking rent for two plus years instead of paying it would be a smart financial choice.
Have you been to downtown Berkeley recently? I saw a lot of new buildings and construction there.
This is pretty typical. The corporations and big time landlords don’t care to engage in insane squabbles or violate laws they are likely to be caught out on. As long as you pay on time and don’t trash the place, they stay out of your way and everything is good.
Every time I’ve heard a story about crazy landlords, it’s always someone who’s renting the granny flat of some boomer who listed it on Facebook marketplace.
I’m curious what form of evidence would be acceptable or practical in obtaining. Bottom line, people weren’t paying rent, in some cases probably for the full term of the moratorium — that’s not acceptable in my eyes. Why should the government be offloading social housing costs on private landlords? If the government thinks people should have a roof over their head, the government should be paying for it.
I'm a landlord, this behavior is disgusting, but I understand where they're coming from because of all the vitriol you read online. I almost don't even want to participate in this discussion because I'm probably going to be attacked by most of you.
Eviction moratoriums hurt because there are definitely bad tenants out there. It's compounded by the fact we didn't put a moratorium on mortgage payments.
I'm also a young guy too (just turned 30) I saved every dime I had when I graduated college to buy and work on houses while I tried to find a job in my field (chemistry at the time).
I think most people won't be happy until I sell everything I have and my wife, my newborn, and myself live on the street. I can't help but feel personally attacked when I see comments like eat the rich.
No, but there was a federal foreclosure moratorium, and federally backed and federally sponsored mortgage servicers offered COVID hardship forbearance.
Do you expect people to feel sympathy for you with statements like this? No matter how many dimes they save, the vast majority of Americans will never be in the position you are in of owning multiple homes.
Yeah, as someone that will never probably own a single house, I definitely have an extremely difficult time finding any sympathy for middlemen that own multiple.
I don't want landlords on the street, I just don't want them to be landlords. Would rather them live reasonably and be part of our class rather than another layer of extraction of our income.
Both where I live and in other completely separate locations where parts of my family live, every landlord we encounter is some measure of awful. They are still human beings with a life story and may be nice to your face- but I feel like just the entire concept of landlording corrupts anyone that touches it or attracts bad people. I get it, landlords are people, but until they remove themselves from that position it will taint my view of them as people. They represent a class that will garner no love from me.
Whether it's an individual person or a management team that got bought out by private equity- in both cases they take in thousands of dollars on things they own and don't even have to constantly pay for themselves, invest none of it in the property, basically keeping it all as profit, keep raising the cost every year, and then ask the renter to pay for and do things that are the landlord's responsibility in the first place and get mad when it isn't done.
"I am the main breadwinner in my landlord's family"
I don't mind the concept of landlords. Semi-permanent housing for people who need it is a vital service for society.
But I hate seeing rental property being treating as some kind of passive income, as if they were remote feudal lords. I think if you are going to enter the business of renting out property, it needs to actually be your business. It needs to be the thing you spend your working hours on: doing basic handyman repairs, chasing up contractors, being on call to answer tenants' questions, showing homes to prospective tenants, etc.
Maybe it can be a part-time occupation (for example, if you are only maintaining and renting out one or two modest homes, you may need a second job to supplement your income), but you should nevertheless take an active role in managing and maintaining your properties. You should not just let the home gradually deteriorate, and nor should you hire some for-profit third party where the tenant's rent must cover the expenses and the management company's profit and your profit/mortgage. If that is the situation, you should cut out the middle man (yourself) and sell to the property manager.
Tenants should never, ever be asked to fund a landlord's lifestyle when the landlord does not equally benefit the tenant's lifestyle. This is supposed to be a fair trade (payment for service), not feudalism.
I don't see how this is beneficial.
I rent an apartment myself and also own one in another city which is rented out via an agency. I will not apply for a rental that isn't managed by a 3rd party agency. The agencies are well versed in the law, have good tech to make payments and stuff seamless, and have no emotion, they just follow the rule book, take payments, and stay out of your way. Meanwhile privately managed rentals are a source of endless drama, idiot owners who don't know the local laws, etc.
I will also not directly rent my place out as I'm not an expert in the local laws, am not in the city to do inspections, etc, and have a full time job. My apartment is cashflow negative so I must work a job.
The reason you should not want an absent landlord is because you are paying the landlord's bills and the management company's bills. In this scenario, you would rather pay only the management company (because they provide services that you benefit from) but not the landlord (because do not offer value).
An absent landlord's profit is effectively an additional property tax, except that (unlike a real tax) it does not get meaningfully reinvested in a way that benefits you. The fees you pay to the management company, however, do benefit you because they pay for the management of the property. As such, you want the property owner and the manager to be the same entity — or, barring that, for the landlord to not skim any personal profit off of your rent.
I am cool with the latter (I think it's a good option for landlords who feel emotionally attached to a specific property, such as their childhood home or whatever, or who have plans to live in the property at some stage in the future) but it's pretty rare. In my experience, you usually only see it in landlords who have inherited a property or have had reason to move away from their main home for a period of time. You don't see it in landlords who purchase properties with the goal of renting them out.
From a less individualistic standpoint, I think it is better for society as a whole if we strongly resist letting passive income making up a meaningful proportion of the economy, outside of scenarios where it is needed for charitable reasons (namely people who cannot work, such as the elderly and those with disabilities). Passive income tends to stratify societies into classes: those who work for the whole of their income, and those who leech off of them.
You aren't paying anyone's bills. You are paying rent loosely set by the market. If the landlord has a very expensive management company, they can't just increase the rent to cover it, since every other property will have lower rents. Conversely, if you self manage and save on costs, you aren't going to drop the rent bellow market rate, you'll just pocket that savings as payment for the work you've done.
If anything, self management would increase the cost of providing a rental since the landlords hourly rate is presumably much higher than the real estate agent managing 50 properties at once.
Of course you are paying their bills. Management companies will go out of business if rent cannot cover their bills. Individuals will stop investing in rental properties if they do not make money from the rent.
Your rent is based on the local market, but the local market is based on the costs and profits of property managers and property owners. Rents will be lower if their costs and profits are lower. The fewer middle men there are (all else kept equal), the lower the market rate will go. This is why people who are opposed to absent landlords oppose them in general, not just their own absent landlord; if there were fewer absent landlords across the board, then rents would fall across the board (forcing the few remaining absent landlords to reduce their own profit or sell).
In a free market, the landlord in this scenario would make adjustments to remain competitive (reduce their hourly rate or purchase more properties to manage collectively) or they would leave the business and sell their property (presumably to a different property manager who can keep costs down more effectively). Both of these scenarios are desirable to tenants.
Society basically requires you to be a property investor these days. Even if you don’t directly own a property to rent out, basically all retirement funds are partially invested in property. If you want to have a secure retirement, you need to put your savings in some kind of investment since cash in the bank will be devalued to nothing by the time you retire.
In this situation, if you don’t want to be dumped on the street to die when you get old, you are very much incentivised to get an investment property.
I can't speak for everyone but I make a firm distinction between prosperous hard working people and the mega wealthy who vaccuum up assets and own massive shares of the economy.
Edit, the resentment about the party comes in part from the underlying fact that too many people have been gentrified out of the region and we lack affordable housing. The system is unjust and grinds people down. But individuals within the system might or might not be personally sympathetic. I have seen abusive tenants. I have also seen poor hard working people who can't catch a break.
I'm sorry that you have to face the negative sentiment/backlash caused by other people. Every person deserves to be treated fairly, and judged upon their actions, not the worst actions of the collective group.
I find myself feeling the "eat the rich" attitude when I read about things like this. But one of the things that I believe are holding us back from progress is that we have the wrong idea of "rich".
Landlords who are unethical and predatory are definitely a problem, but the biggest
problem is the rich people that you don't see. Humans aren't good at comprehending the scale of increasing orders of magnitude, and as a result people get lumped into categories (like "rich") that don't fit. The people we encounter first hand or see in news articles like this one are easy targets, but it's ridiculous to say that the systemic issues and inequalities can be solved by going after local landlords.
Ultimately, going after the wrong targets just fractures us at a time when we need to unify, and it's exactly what the real "rich" people want to see.
Side Note:
When I was a kid my father who was in the Army got deployed to the middle east. If I remember correctly, our landlord (who was retired and lived across the street) offered to waive our rent while he was overseas. My parents ended up opting to move in with my grandparents (for the extra support for my mom), but that kind of offer only comes from someone with genuine compassion.
We don't want you to have zero homes, we want you to have exactly one home, so that others can also have exactly one home. The difference between one home and zero homes is pretty massive.
Its anonomous here, please share. Perhaps being more transparent about the financials will help garner sympathy from non-landlords. This isn't intended as an inquisition, but rather the questions that need answered to justify landlording.
That last question in particular is the big one. Because for a very, very, very large number of people, the only thing holding them back from home ownership is the lack of funds to make a down payment on a mortgage. Or other arbitrary bullshit like creditworthiness, which is a load of bunk for loan backed by a relatively non-depreciating asset.
I know that personally, as a non-landlord, if I landed in dire financial straights, I could sell my home and net $150,000 from principle payments and appreciation. I could then move into a smaller home, using the minimum down payment, and live for another 4 months at my current quality of life while hunting for another job.
Its this kind of financial stability that landlords build off the paychecks of their tennats. The tennants of course, upon hitting dire financial situations, don't have an asset they've been putting equity into.
We don't literally want to eat the rich. We want them to divest of their ill-gotten assets, and work a full-time job like the rest of us. Its just that many would rather die than having that happen, or at least thats how it seems. Landlords don't even have the justification that a business owner or CEO does...they're literally making money almost purely out of ownership.
I think this is where a lot of the disconnect lies between the landlord crowd and the anti-landlord crowd.
From the perspective of a tenant, how hard you worked to buy the property they rent is immaterial to them. They just want to know whether you are a good landlord or a bad landlord. And people who are struggling to buy a home to live in are, equally, not interested in how hard you worked when you took multiple properties off the market.
Think of it like this: Someone who runs a profitable criminal enterprise probably had to work very hard and take many personal risks to get there, but this is not going to sway victims or jurors to empathy. If anything, it will make the crime lord look even more guilty in their minds because it implies that they easily could have chosen a more ethical career.
Just to be clear, I am not comparing being a landlord to being a crime lord. I am just using this as a metaphor to try to illustrate how people who feel victimized by people who do X are not moved by stories about all the hard work and sacrifice that went into doing X. These stories often actually further damage relations because they highlight the difference in people's moral systems.
Do you have class solidarity with landlords?
Yeah we all get together in secret meetings.
There's a secret hand shake and everything. We collude with bankers to prevent you from securing mortgages too.
/s
It’s not straightforward because it’s Marxist jargon. I sort of know what it means, but not in practice. What do you expect class solidarity to consist of?
Do your material interests align with theirs? Do you act to the benefit of those interests, including when they are to the detriment of other classes?
I'm going to go ahead and agree with the poster below me that this is Marxist jargon, and here's why:
I find fault with my sole identity being related to a single class, in this case landlord. I'm a lot of things, healthcare provider, patient advocate, charity worker, 3rd generation immigrant, Mexican, and US Citizen (removed some of my other identifiers so you can't find me on the street). These are other classes that I belong too, but they don't solely define who I am, and that's my biggest problem with people like you. We aren't some monolithic block, we're people just like you, and a lot of us are people of color or your neighbor and you seek to divide us.
I mean this with all due respect despite the snark implying that this would be a question worth thinking about for myself, but are you involved in your local politics? I think you'd be surprised what you can get accomplished if you do something like call your representative. For instance, my state congressional representative lives in my neighborhood, and my city council representative lives in the neighborhood adjacent. Change starts by speaking up at a local level with community organizers.
My guy, absolutely none of the things you mentioned are classes. Your failure to meaningfully engage with my honest (and extremely simple) question is pretty telling!
That's fine if you feel that way, I disagree with the premise.
I disagree with the premise of your question. I'm starting to realize I might not be left enough for you to answer this question.
Having class solidarity does not require colluding or conspiring with anyone. It does not require speaking to them or meeting them. Do your material interests align with the material interests of landlords as a class? Do you act to the benefit of that class including when it is to the detriment of other classes, i.e. the working class?
Unless you charge the absolute minimum rent possible and only raise it to cover your own ownership expenses and never because it's commensurate with market forces, you do have class solidarity with landlords.
Eat the rich, there's no other solution. These people have a legitimate mental disorder that causes them to lack empathy or they would not have been so fucking stupid to pull this kind of stunt.
Disgusting