alt Hacker NewsThere's entire Reddit communities of these people where they encourage and validate their shitty behavior.
With some of the stories I've read, you'd have to be positively insane to be a small-time landlord these days, especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone.
Go watch Pacific Heights with Michael Keaton for a fictionalized account but this stuff absolutely happens every day.
I saw one recently where the renter has not paid rent for six years and is unable to be evicted. It made national news.
So where does that leave the industry? You eventually push out the mom and pop landlords by making the regulations so insane it only leaves behind the large corporate property management companies and their army of lawyers. Who will collude and drive rents up. It's a vicious cycle and these cities are not helping one bit.
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Tenant "protection" laws are the type of idiocy that economically illiterate progressive politicians always produce. They end up having the opposite effect by making property owners less willing to rent out to anyone. The only effective way to protect tenants is to set public policies that encourage new housing development. When there is a housing surplus, the laws of economics force landlords to treat tenants well. Build more housing!
I have friends and coworkers that want to have rental properties, and I advise them it's not worth it.
I don't want to be in a position where I have to pay more to fix damages than I collectected in rent if I accidentally rent to deadbeats. Or in a position where I have to provide services to someone not paying me.
One of those friends has parents that rented out their old house to deadbeats at the top of the housing market instead of selling it. Those deadbeats have been nothing but trouble and yet my friend still wants to be a landlord.
Somehow the idea of owning rental properties became a pervasive notion in the U.S.
> especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone
The problem is that there will always be more voting renters than voting landlords. So in a purely democratic system, policies which favor renters at the expense of landlords will always be supported.
And that said, some renter protections are definitely needed, because there is a subset of landlords that engage in flat out illegal behavior.
Deposit withholding, making illegal demands, illegal renter selection practices, etc.
Imho, that tends to be concentrated in the "1-5 unit" landlord range, because those landlords are usually (a) not lawyers & (b) treat their properties like pets instead of a business.
The way to handle this, which no one seems to be willing to face, is to make laws that are not wealth-neutral. If you are a mom-and-pop landlord (with a relatively low net worth), your should have more leeway in dealing with tenants. If you are a large landlord, you should have very little. Couple this with ruinous penalties (e.g., full forfeiture) for attempting to hide the true beneficial ownership of the property.
If you think the Reddit communities of tenants are bad, you should try reading the Reddit communities of landlords (at least the UK ones).
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This is a bit of an intentional result, no?
the goal is for peoppe to own the places they live in
Doesn’t help that the landlords want to squeeze the renter for what they are worth. It’s weird to me that shitty landlords are normalized but shitty tenants get a (rightfully) bad rap.
These laws become the way they are because landlords brought it upon themselves for the most part - they’re keeping assets that have massively increased in price and want to extract more and more out of the tenant.
If you have a home that’s paid off your expenses are basically just property taxes, maybe they should do what they can to keep good tenants instead of chasing profits.