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Reading the article, the owners aren't exactly rolling in it and are also depicted as mostly working class. If it wasn't for a global pandemic, most would have
by bigmattystyles 6y ago
Reading the article, the owners aren't exactly rolling in it and are also depicted as mostly working class. If it wasn't for a global pandemic, most would have been fine and they would have thought to have invested very conservatively. In my mind, it's just that it's convenient/expedient to make them eat the cost of unpaid rent -
- buescher 6y agoThere are plenty of investments that are much more conservative than taking out a loan to buy real estate. Most of them don't even come with mortgage payments.
- door100 6y ago> depicted as mostly working class. What "working class" person owns investment property in NYC? They amount of capital required to do that is so enormous that the article calling them "working class" is deeply misleading. They certainly aren't working class in the way that most NYC tenants are.
- refurb 6y agoI love it. Too poor to invest in property? Working class. Have enough money to invest in property? No longer working class. It’s attitudes like this that prevent the working class from participating in the generation of wealth through capital. As soon as they dip their toe in, they’re now “rich” and get the rug pulled from under them.
- yellowapple 6y agoI mean, the ownership of property - particularly land - and the use of that property to derive one's income is exactly what differentiates the working class from the ownership class. Landlords are pretty unambiguously in the latter; rent-seeking is not work.
- bigmattystyles 6y agoHaving known someone who owned and personally maintained a small apartment complex, you are wrong. My FIL is the hardest working person I know.
- door100 6y agoProperty management is work. Owning property is not. For small scale landlords, this is often the same person, and they may do a lot of property management.
- yellowapple 6y ago> My FIL is the hardest working person I know. A landlord's wealth derives from being a middleman between the tenants and the property, not from the landlord's own labor. That wealth is quite literally the whole point of being a landlord in the first place; if the income from rent didn't significantly exceed the value of the labor your FIL performs as "maintenance", then why would he bother with dealing with all the headaches of property ownership if he could instead just be an employee of the tenants themselves (said tenants forming e.g. a housing cooperative)? That is: there's nothing a landlord does that the tenants couldn't do themselves (whether directly or by hiring someone to do it on their behalf). It is therefore not labor alone that defines the relationship between a landlord and one's tenants. Your FIL may be "the hardest working person [you] know", but he's still a middleman in the ownership class.
- refurb 6y agoSure the landlord is doing something I can’t, as a tenant, can’t do myself - if all I have is an income of a few thousand a month and I need housing, the landlord is providing me housing I couldn’t otherwise afford.
- door100 6y agoWhat kind of housing someone can afford is a political question. Our current answer to it is that this should be resolved through market mechanisms, which creates high prices alongside scarcity