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~90% of single family home rental properties in the US are owned by ‘mom and pop’ landlords.
A ‘mom and pop’ landlord being defined as owning 1 to 5 properties.
Most often that number is 2, they own their home and then a single other home they rent out.
The corpos are a big problem, but the bulk of the problem are the modern American kulaks, and anyone who isn’t telling you this fact is lying to you by omission and unserious about solving the problem.
The Russian and Chinese communist revolutions redistributed/reconstituted land and property ownership, away from the ‘mom and pop’ landlords of their times.
I am not saying they did so perfectly justly.
I am saying that very similar intial conditions are now recurring.
Yes, if you weren’t aware, communist revolutions are usually, very significantly, rebellions against landlords, all landlords.
Fortunately, we have a government that uses regulations to…Oh…
Seriously.
I bought my condo in 2023, and by sheer luck, managed to avoid the explosion in housing and rental costs. I hate that we live in a country where banks are being allowed to buy up entire neighborhoods and jack people for an asset that is required to survive.
Living in the U.S. has one cardinal rule. Profit above all else no matter what.
🙏
Relish in the Feudalism
Something something you will own nothing
I don’t get why people keep saying “own nothing and be happy”
Nobody’s fucking happy
I don’t get why people keep saying “own nothing and be happy”
It’s sarcastic, in a “you will eat what’s on your plate and you will like it, young man,” tone from a boomer parent.
Haven’t been happy since college, what does it feel like?
I imagine it feels like nostalgia if nostalgia didn’t make me sad
I’m hoping prop 37 passes in California. Maybe that will help.
And all this new shit they are building, so much of it is apartments. Those will be owned by some corporation, and they will continually jack up rent so people can just barely get by, and never save or own anything.
And yet, building housing units is the only way to lower housing costs. Every time a state proposes restricting housing construction limitations, some NIMBYs and those myopically focused on brow-beating corporations say, “rents will always rise, corporations will always jack up the prices! There’s no point!” And those voices are proven wrong again and again.
It turns out, companies can’t just arbitrarily raise the rent however much they want whenever they want. Corporations aren’t magical evil genies. They can only raise the price to what the market will bear. And that rate is entirely dependent on the ratio of housing units to households.
Corporate landlords got caught using an app on people’s phone to collude to price fix rent. They have settled, but there is very little incentive created, because nothing made it to a court decision, to stop this behavior. So yes, they do raise the rents whever they want, because they have coordinated with every other in the region to have similarly over blown pricing.
Then why don’t they all charge $10k/month in rent? Or $100k? Or a million?
No amount of collusion can magic away basic market limits.
Just because they aren’t inflated to fit and absurdum argument doesn’t mean they aren’t able to charge way over the actual market value of the rent via market control, and collusive monopoly. This is a well known consequence of a captured market, and why we have the concept of anti-trust at all.
So yes, the corporate landlords are be able to raise the cost of housing to evil levels of extortion without being genies, or magical, or any other thing no one is arguing they are. Especially when so many properties are purchased simply to sit on the property and have no real concern for using it to house anyone, as there are largely empty apartment buildings, even whole neighborhoods, in the most desirable places, when we can’t seem to even have enough housing around to bring the costs down marginal amounts.
If it passes in California; it’s not something that will help. If it doesn’t; or is vetoed, it probably actually had some good policy behind it.
I swear deep blue states are the worst neoliberal shitholes. Zero worry for the Dems in losing their seats. So the elections becomes “who can suck the cock of big tech, Hollywood, and mortgage investment companies the best”
They are already owned by the corporations. They’re the ones building them.
Pottersville would be nice compared to the Coal Town they’re actually aiming for. You’ll owe your soul to the Company Store.
I’ll probably choose one of Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong burbclaves when the time comes…
Everyone with the power to stop it nonviolently: Oh noooo. That’s definitely not what we’ve been trying to do… We’ll get right on that real soon, I’m sure.
Demand the need for laws to be able to unionize against these parasitic landlords, and watch just how much the people claiming to represent you are lying to your fucking face.
I rent an apartment for way too much in a new building built and now rented by the same corp.
Notes:
- we have tenant rights and a “landlord and tenant act” to which we all must adhere, and it affirms rental increases may not exceed inflation % each year.
- it also dictates that all rental terms default to monthly after 1 year
- it mandates adjudication by magistrate on transgressions
- it sets timelines for security deposits, how the landlord must prove a case for withholding, etc
Differences between a corp and a rando landlord:
- Corp has incentive to stick to L&T as its penalties stack up on mass complaints. Randos could cry stupid/poor and skate
- Corp is usually OCD with the 24h entry notice, fire alarm/drill testing reqs in L&T. Randos, not so much.
- this corp will call out dinkweeds who spill in the elevator and don’t clean it up because those bajillion cams all work. Randos have been a little more tolerant of issues that affect renters
- rando landlords can decide to move family in and loophole-evict you. …then decide otherwise abd rent it out for higher. Corps can, must, and will document you being a bad tenant before they boot you.
- building code mandates so many smoke detectors that we have Fucking SIX of them in our place. Because it’s Corp, they’re all linked on the floor and building. So we can’t bobbitt 4 of them to save our sanity without them finding out and caring. It’s a concrete building, people, it’s not gonna burn.
I’m pleased to live under a stricter ruleset than you may, and I do claim it makes a lot of difference. Is a well-regulated property market a potential factor? Is that what you need?
(We pay the highest average rent in North America, and ours is $4/sqft/mo. Glad we are capped at inflation and can’t be reno-victed (and L&T has rules there too I think))
I would NEVER do a small time landlord again, too many risks and bullshit. I hate corpos just as much as the average bear but at least they sort of have to standardize and cant pull the old family switcheroo crap
A better option is to regulate rental housing, as in Europe: cap the amount and frequency of rent increases, restrict evictions, and give tenants reasonable rights such as decorating and keeping pets. In such an environment, large corporate landlords, who have economies of scale and staff to handle obligations such as maintenance, can work better than many small landlords.
As fucked as it is in the US, it’s not all rosy and great here in Europe either. We too have greedy landlords and corruption and way too lenient roles for the owner class…
Or tax the ever living hell out of rental income, and use it to fund community outreach programs.
Especially AirBnB’s.
Taxing rental income alone will have the opposite effect because landlords just pass on the cost to the tenants.
A CEO will NEVER voluntarily give themself a pay cut to give you a pay raise, even when ordered to give you a raise by law.
frustrate the bullshit:
1: NO subdividing homes. you want a multi unit, BUILD ONE. I don’t give one turd out of a rats ASS if that house used to be owned by the wealthy businessman, and his 6 kids and army of servants back in the 1920’s That’s a single family home and a single family home IT SHALL STAY. (and that’s the ones that make sense: I’ve seen 3 bed 2 baths turned into efficiencies. which brings us to…)
2: Cap subletting by dictating the minimum amount of square footage an apartment MUST occupy. Set that number OVER 1,400 sq ft, and dictate it must have attached, discrete, private bathroom and kitchen facilities. (open floor plans are fine but apartments can’t share.)
3: National Rent Control Act. You cannot set rent any higher than 10% of the monthly earnings from Minimum Wage in your area. Want to raise rent? Petition for increases in the minimum wage.
4: Tell the auto industry to suck it, and bring back light rail and other forms of community owned public transit. If Mamdani can get it done in NYC, your local Board of selectmen sure as hell can once they get their corrupt heads out of their ass and grow a pair to confront the zoning board. Savings on gas ease burdens of Rent, and walkable cities are happy cities.
5: Ban “Landlord Specials.” Audit the move out process and ensure that proper abatement is enacted. White paint won’t cut it any more. This also ensures that the Securtity deposit scam is snuffed out.
6: Regulate Property owners such that before they can rent to tenants there is sufficient parking and/or access to outdoor spaces per tennant (this may need to be grandfathered exempt in some cases, but it should be a step in the right direction going forward).
7: Get a national/federal Tenants Bill of Rights passed. There will be some compromises, but at least there will be a clearly laid out social contract.
8: Clean up/expunge “squatters rights.” (which shouldn’t be a problem if you do everything else on this list)
9: Actually give a damn about Section 8 housing by giving cities and communities incentives (like grants/endowments) for WELL MAINTAINED and modern properties. Revoke the same for laziness and mismanagement. INSPECT, INSPECT, INSPECT, AUDIT, AUDIT, AUDIT.
10: Elevate the Head of the Department of Housing to a Cabinet level post and make damn sure there’s a congressional committee providing oversight. The answer is MORE government not less, you mafiistic dopes! Gravy train stops HERE.
11: (this is also a jumping off point for Most public construction and infrastructure projects, BTW) Get the Army Corps of Engineers to build homes. Force (order) the Military to piss money on this. Besides, it’d be much more well spent than ANOTHER god forsaken wild goose chase bombing a place halfway around the world, because one Billionaire or another has a Senator by the cajhones and the buttpains that the locals of said location decided to fight back, after he pissed them off for the millionth time. (That’s for damn sure) If it worked for FDR, it can work for US, TODAY.
I don’t mean like a 10% increase, I mean “the landlord gets a maximum of $100 per month plus qualified expenses no matter what you charge”
Basically, make it undesirable to be a landlord unless you are just holding a house as a land investment and need to have someone in it to cover the costs.
I don’t buy it, corporations are too inherently profit seeking, malevolent, and politically organized for that to not go wrong over time in ways that are resistant to regulation. Measures like use and ownership restriction would be much more effective than rent control because they would actually suppress demand (in monetary terms) by cutting off large pools of capital from accessing the market as an investment or store of wealth. Combine it with measures to directly increase the supply of housing where it’s needed and prices will go down on their own.
For maintenance issues it would be better to give tenants the rights to make minor repairs themselves without the risk of losing their deposit or being sued if it is not otherwise being handled and enable them to deduct any expense from their rent, especially if this is about single family houses rather than apartment buildings.
I don’t know where this paranoia about institutional investors owning housing stock came from, but it’s weird as fuck.
Corporations own less than 9% of all housing tracts in the US. This number has not gone up for a very long time. They’re not scalable investments and come with much more risk than other preferred instruments.
Because people like to blame big corporations and pretend that “mom and pop” landlords aren’t also raising the rent and donating and lobbying politicians to keep housing as scarce as possible.
People are more sympathetic to small capital even though it operates on the same incentives as large corporate capital. IMO it’s because people moralize this stuff and it’s easier to say the rich guy on Wall Street is evil for raising your rent as opposed to Mabel who lives in the unit below you.
