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Why U.S. renters are taking corporate landlords to court
(www.cnbc.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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All corporate landlords need to be dissolved. It shouldn't exist. People should not be able to make profit off of housing ever.
Cannot say I agree with that last sentence but unlimited profits from housing should absolutely be illegal. I've been dealing with an absolute shit show of a corporate landlord, one that uses realpage, and it's really been eye opening how fucked these companies are. I 100% knew they were scumbag pieces of shit but I got a full dose of the lengths they'll go to in order to make a buck. Just two of the many cost saving measures: letting me go without heat for 3 weeks and letting our elevators stay broken for 6 weeks. I'm convinced the only reason they fixed our elevators is someone must have finally gotten their lawyer on the phone to them.
Absolutely souless garbage humans work for these companies. They sleep fine at night knowing you're paying a lot of money for an apartment you're freezing your ass off in, have to struggle to get in and out of, whatever. They absolutely give zero fucks about the lives they're fucking with.
having to be responsible for the actual property seems to be a good idea.
idk how it's handled in germany, but i'm not aware of stuff this bad. i have someone in my family who has renters, and they either go fix stuff themselves or pay a professional if the heating's acting up again.
and being a renter of someonecs privately owned apartment in a corporate owned house, i feel like being taken care of adequately.
i hope it gets better for you guys.
Thanks for your response. I think that in the US one of our big issues is inconsistency. What I've described here is unprecedented for me until now but I'm sure many others have had much worse. The basic idea I think is that the bigger a company gets, the more they feel emboldened to get away with shit to save a buck here and there.
It's insanely dehumanizing for someone to lie to your face and tell you their hands are tied and your broken heat will just have to stand for an unknown amount of time. My landlord before this was an amazing man who I will never forget. Many times he showed good will beyond what was required and you can bet your ass he would've had the heat fixed within a week at most even if he had to spend $10,000 to do it. In fact the heat did break once and he had someone there the next morning. Meanwhile the company with hundreds of millions in revenue refuses to spend a buck to expedite the process because they have the cheapest deal possible with some contractor who is slammed
The management in this building treats us like idiots who don't matter. Despite repeated fuckups, everything is always "we're doing the best we can". If they were doing the best they could, none of these issues would've last longer than like a week and a half. The tenants here were damn near mutiny level it was so bad. People were posting notes with numbers to call and an exact count of how many days the elevators were out. It felt good to at least see people doing something to hold the assholes accountable.
There are times that a corporate entity of some description is extremely useful. The issue is for-profit companies.
A simpler solution is to add a tax, based on the property value for for-profit companies. For niche situations, the effect of this will be annoying but not devastating. For companies dedicated to sucking money out of housing, it will hurt them badly. Maybe have it tick up 0.5% of the property a year till it's 5%. Slow enough not to cause a massive shock to the market, but large enough to force a change.
An obvious example of a useful company owned housing situation is a set of apartments. However, here a non profit would work even better.
As for valid for-profit ownership, it does happen. E.g. I know of a veterinary practice that owns several houses. They used them to provide subsided housing to staff, close at hand. They also allow them to house mid to long term locum staff close to the practice. Everyone wins from this arrangement.
I dunno if I want my employer to also be my landlord. It might have worked well for that specific case, but it's easy to see how it could fall apart.
If you're on a 3 month or so contract, it makes sense. It's too long to deal with hotels, but too short for proper rentals.
Basically, there are some legit cases for property ownership. The trick is to kill the leaches, without causing too much damage elsewhere.
This right here.
I live in a very dense city, which means building residential towers is usually the only reasonable way to quickly increase housing density. And we desperately need housing.
Large buildings can cost billions to build. You need a government or corporation to organize around if you’re going to make that happen. And unless you’re China or the USSR in the 70’s, going the government route is going to be damn near impossible right now.
Best option is to regulate private industry.
Let corporations build them, don't let them own them.
If they build a 100 unit apartment building, don't let the corporation just rent them all out themselves.
Force them to be sold to individuals. That keeps the overall condo prices competitive, and then people who buy them can then rent them out on an individual basis for those who prefer not to / can't purchase a condo outright.
Limit how many residential units a corporation can own and incrementally increase taxes for every unit above that limit.
Limit how many corporations one person can own. No more of this bullshit 20 numbered companies in one person's name to get around shitty business practices.
A very easy solution is for the government to build public housing? Isn’t it rather obvious? It completely fix all things you talked about.
Buildings get built, rents are cheaper, and it doesn’t matter if the “returns” are lower than the stock market. The government doesn’t give a fuck about returns, they print the money.
Edit: and I also think it’s pretty fucking obvious why this easy simple and direct solution is not applied. Landowners and capitalists are in complete collusion. The classes are mixing in ways that they are indistinguishable now. And the government is completely controlled by capitalists. They will never cut their profits and means of control. They won’t allow it.
Public housing the US was historically federally funded and was for low income people. It was one of those liberal solutions that tries to solve something, but gets stuck in a system that is already racist, and then the whole thing is made worse by conservatives.
Social housing, where cities build housing themselves, can be a way out. Most cities don't have a lot of experience doing this, so it's going to have to start out with a few small projects. It can be mixed income instead of low income (which tended to support red lining).
Another possibility is for cities to use their leverage with developers to favor unionized shops. This may not be possible under existing state laws, however.
Definitely should be mixed income, and the planning for it is better handled more locally (neighbourhood/borough, city, town etc.). But it should be funded federally, cause cities can’t print money. All development they make has to be funded by taxes. The federal government doesn’t have to earn a dime, they can just print a couple hundred billion and distribute it to all the major population centers to develop public housing and infrastructure however they see best. That would work best imo
Then where does the money go?
If someone rents you a house do they get to charge only the mortgage? What about repairs and other unforeseen expenses to keep it up? And if you pay for repairs that never happen, what then?
If people can only break even on renting, many just. They'll sit in empty houses until market prices increases, exacerbating all of this.
What I'm saying is renting shouldn't exist to begin with. People should not own more than one living place and that place should be the place that they live in.
Housing is a human right.
Article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, created December 10th, 1948:
“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”
Adequate housing is a human right.
Homelessness is a human rights violation.
America needs to understand this.
Humanity collectively decided this shit 76 years ago and America still can't get with the program. Smh.
Sigh ..this feeling of disappointment in my country is unceremoniously familiar.
OK. What does someone do when they move somewhere new and can't afford to purchase a house? Or don't want to purchase a place because they expect to live somewhere 6-12mo for a contract?
The solutions I've seen require a fundamental rethinking of the way housing works in the USA (and most places), where renting just turns into another way to build some amount of equity, and the property managers are under more democratic control. More of the process subsidized by the local government, in the same way that water treatment is.
Arguably it's renting by another name, but the central point is to strip the profit motive out of it (some salaries are needed, but in a system with more regulatory oversight) and to allow the renter to get some financial benefit so they aren't simply pissing money away.
Apologies in advance for that vague response: I'm not an economist or real estate expert, so I can't back up that general idea with any kind of details or evidence it's feasible.
Yeah, I agree totally. That's a great idea. Lease-to-own or something similar. As a renter I'd love to build some form of equity. Because in the US the only real way to build equity or generational wealth is through owning property. Which makes real estate a VERY hot commodity to speculate in. Which is a huge problem for people who just want somewhere to live and built modest equity like everyone else has.
Public housing, rented at cost directly from the government. And you can stay in the house as long as you want, so it eliminates the “risk” of renting. Done. Solved it.
Now just fucking build some public housing please.
I think this is a good idea for public housing. BUT that is not what the vast majority of americans want to live in. Uniform apartments, townhomes or small single-family homes are not the norm and I'd hesitate to make the majority of future developments so homogenous.
And then you have the issue with government-provided housing as we've had in the past: underfunding, under policing, bad locations, NIMBY assholes, etc. We already have subsidized housing/rental assistance: Section 8. So this would be a constant battle to just keep it decent.
Public housing doesn’t need to be uniform or boring… that was mostly a result of the ideology of urban planners of the mid 20th century when most public housing projects happened. The government can contract a private developer to make a nice building, that is well located, and is not just for poor people. That seems so obvious, but it seems people are stuck by their own ideology and can’t even think a bit outside of what is, or has been.
And I’m not talking about subsidised, I mean PUBLIC. Owned by the government or by coops, councils etc. Built using federal money. Just having this around would decrease overall housing costs so much… the market would have to compete with the no-profit, cost only, rents of public housing.
And Amazon has done a lot of research and found you only need to control 8% of a market to control the pricing. The government just has to build enough public housing in major population centers facing rent crisis to own 8% of total housing there. And that’s it. Rent cost crisis averted. And thousands of jobs and GDP generated because of all the construction (add in extra infrastructure for better access to the public housing, and you got a real economic boom cooking — hint hint, it’s literally what China did lmao).
This isn’t realistic. Maybe not owning additional homes for the sole purpose of renting to make a profit would be a better statement to make.
No renting = I hope you like camping in the woods, because that’s going to be your only option when you travel for vacation.
Hotels/motels still exist.
I’m not going to get into the discussion about whether renting should or should not exist but I can get behind the idea that renting for profit shouldn’t be a thing.
Three thoughts.
Sometimes I need / want to rent. Example, I had to repair the foundation of my home and needed a single family home to rent for my family while my home was being repaired for 6mo.
Hotels / motels / inns are a pretty reasonable use case. People need temporary housing for travel.
I don’t want to live in an area for more than 5 or 10 years, I want to rent. Buying a house is a huge fucking pain, and is always full of expensive surprises once you move and have the maintenance on you.
I could go on, but IMHO, there are a LOT more reasons why renting is actually useful, and I might want someone else to be on the hook for the mortgage and maintenance.
There will always be scenarios where renting is necessary but what I was getting at was it's out of control.
What about those who don’t want to own?
Co-ops, or other not for profit rental models. Doesn't have to be a for profit corporation just to manage the building.
"Gosh, I would love to pay the same amount or more to build no equity and have some shit bag landlord paint the walls white and claim he made repairs" said practically no one. Even if they did, there isn't a reason to maintain an insane system for the benefit of very few.
Nah—I’d just assume let everyone choose for themselves whether renting or owning is right for them.
That's working out so well for us.
I've known so many people that think buying would tie them down too much.