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We don't need landlords to be better people. We need functioning institutions and laws to protect both parties in the lease. More importantly we need a massive

• bbstats 2y ago
  The only thing that anything needs, everywhere, is for people to be better people.
• kube-system 2y ago
  Yes, we do. The legal system always has friction, and I wouldn't want to rent from someone who I know is an asshole and expect to lean on the legal system, even if I had all of the protections in the world. The best scenario is always people behaving well.
  • chongli 2y ago
    The issue right now is that the housing crisis has progressed to the point where the legal system is breaking down. At least where I live, the landlord and tenant board (which adjudicates claims between landlords and tenants) is backlogged 18-24 months or more. Many tenants realize this and have started taking advantage by refusing to pay rent altogether, knowing they’re protected from eviction by law (until their day comes to be brought before the board). For their part, landlords have completely lost trust in the system and demand excruciating levels of background checks and references and personal information to try and avoid these bad tenants. All the while raising the rent to exorbitant levels (due to hot real estate market and low vacancies). It’s become an incredibly vicious situation!
    • bluefirebrand 2y ago
      Hey if the landlords are tired of renting out property because it's too hard they could sell instead! No sympathy for rent seekers that would rather let their buildings sit empty than rent below the absolute maximum they can get
      • RHSeeger 2y ago
        If all the landlords sold, there would be no place for the people that want to rent. Sure, some landlords will sit on a property rather than rent it for less than max. And some landlords will rent for the absolute minimum that pays the bills (and doesn't account for risk, load, etc). But lots of landlords are in the middle, renting for a fair price, treating their renters reasonably, etc. And forcing them out of the market isn't going to help the overall health of the system.
        • lotsofpulp 2y ago
          Maybe the price drops enough so that the renters can afford to buy.
          • RHSeeger 2y ago
            Not everyone _wants_ to buy. Why is that so hard for people to understand? I have rented at times in my life and owned at other times. Sometimes owning is not the right choice.
            • bombcar 2y ago
              We need supply to expand to where there's ready housing available and then people will realize that landlords do exist for a reason; if they didn't commercial landlords wouldn't exist at all. Some major chains like Walmart own the stores they operate in, but others operate on various leases.
    • kube-system 2y ago
      Yeah, being a good person plays both ways. It is a shame when tenants squat, and it's a shame when landlords avoid their legal obligations when they know their tenants can't effectively do anything about it. My point is that sitting in court won't turn a bad experience into a good one.
    • asdefghyk 2y ago
      RE ".... landlords have completely lost trust in the system and demand excruciating levels of background checks and references and personal information to try and avoid these bad tenants......" It appears OVER THE TOP However Im about to hand over an asset valued at a large amount so it is entirely reasonable. I've had applications where person has edited PDF documents to fake them. Ie bank statements. Revealed with forensic analysis. Applications with fake references are not unusual. Its like a bank application. The data is needed to catch these bad people out. Insurance normally does not cover these situations.
      • foldr 2y ago
        IMO what's really needed is for most of these 'checks' to be made illegal. Then those who are willing and prepared to take on the risks associated with being a landlord can do it. Many other industries have regulations preventing all sorts of background checks that companies might otherwise want to do (e.g. insurance).
        • asdefghyk 2y ago
          The side effect of your proposal would be rent increases and a decrease in supply in dwellings, as less people would be prepared to accept the risk, That's my prediction after almost 40 years supplying several rental properties. You should tell banks and other lenders the same thing, do not ask so many questions.
          • foldr 2y ago
            That is a generic argument that can be used against any form of regulation on the rental market. As the proportion of people who rent increases, I suspect that there will be growing political pressure to ban these intrusions and humiliations. (I wonder if you share your own bank statements with your tenants?)
            • bombcar 2y ago
              Amusingly enough that's becoming an issue in some places; people "rent" properties they don't own and then skip town with the deposits and leave the owner with an unexpected tenant to evict.
    • forgetfreeman 2y ago
      It fascinates me how pervasive the housing crisis narrative has become when in point of fact the real issue is economic opportunity has been stolen from rural and small communities. It fascinates me even further when the housing crisis narrative is used to justify municipalities greenlighting (and in some cases subsidizing) wildly profitable real estate development projects that generally make all of the issues collectively referred to as the housing crisis objectively worse in the communities these projects were intended to serve.
• NewJazz 2y ago
  Or for more collective ownership of property, and cheaper transfers of ownership. Moving is already hard. Then we tack on loan origination fees, title insurance, broker fees. That's before anything is spent on actually inspecting the property.
• bugglebeetle 2y ago
  > We don't need landlords Fixed that for you. As the radical leftist Adam Smith himself pointed out: "[Landlords] are the only one of the three orders whose revenue costs them neither labour nor care, but comes to them, as it were, of its own accord, and independent of any plan or project of their own. That indolence, which is the natural effect of the ease and security of their situation, renders them too often, not only ignorant, but incapable of that application of mind"
  • gigatree 2y ago
    Sounds like Mr. Smith never owned a house
  • aidenn0 2y ago
    That's bullshit; being a landlord is a lot of labor. Buildings don't magically maintain themselves. It is true that there is a disconnect between the labor and the income; being a landlord in a desirable area isn't more labor than being a landlord in a less desirable area (in fact it can be less!).
    • swatcoder 2y ago
      Smith is speaking about the core business of owning and letting use of land (or some other finite resource) itself. The improvements that one might speculatively build on the land and then need to maintain or alter over time is actually a different, secondary business which can be seen as more labor-based, as you note.
    • michaelmrose 2y ago
      Flipping burgers and making french fries is a lot of labor. When you aren't up to your elbows in grease you are up to your elbows in some cleaning up between rushes and the pay is low so if you want to live you better have a second gig. Your check between your 2 jobs only says 55 hours a week but in reality between community and preparing for work and lunch breaks you are out of the house at least 65 hours a week or about 3400 hours. It eats your entire life! Conversely being a landlord isn't even really a job. Once every 3 years you spend a few hours overseeing the skilled labor needed to do any repairs and updates and a few more hours interviewing 2-4 tenants and in between you mostly cash checks or fire off a few angry letters if the tenant gets behind. Spending less than 20 hours per year per unit. An average mom and pop owns 1-3 units and works less in a year what a low wage worker works in a week.
• smgit 2y ago
  Plus manipulation works the other way too. Not hard to manipulate everyone to jack up rent. And there are thousand ways to do it.
• mlyle 2y ago
  Better laws and institutions for when parties aren't decent people would be good. But, decency is always going to be better than good adjudication when people aren't decent. Of course, systems that make it easier and safer for people to be decent would be good, towards that end.
  • michaelmrose 2y ago
    Not only are there always going to be indecent folks it is the factor that is least amenable to any sort of meaningful change. You can't make people be good people but you can via law make them stop doing particular kinds of wrong.
    • mlyle 2y ago
      > it is the factor that is least amenable to any sort of meaningful change. I disagree. You can create systems and cultures that encourage most people to be decent or most people to be indecent. There will always be some indecent folks and you always need to be able to deal with that, of course. The question is-- will that be the exception or the usual course of business?
      • michaelmrose 2y ago
        People have been landlords and tenants long enough for every facet to have been explored. The whole surface area of the problem is composed of a multitude of aspects that pretty much only work consistently when rules are externally imposed upon actors. Wherein such restrictions are pervasive and enforced they become internalized by all actors and normalized. If you want to fix a current issue in your state for instance if a substantial portion of your state's tenants are getting their deposits stolen. Say 10% of 200,000 landlords are doing wrong by their tenants. You can either convince 100 or so lawmakers who have no stake in it and a handful of judges to enforce treble damages against a relative handful until flying straight becomes culturally normalized OR you you try to somehow have a discussion with hundreds of thousands of people with their flag firmly planted on one side and see if you can convince the worst 10% of them not to fuck people over. Discussion is like the living coral on the outside of the reef its built on the bones of rules and enforcement. People are on average not very good, very motivated, or very intelligent. You don't rely on their goodwill for much beyond navigating and following existing rules and building on on them and you normally build on them by creating new rules not hoping people on the ground spontaneously come up with useful improvements against their own interests. It's weird to suppose that something nebulous like overall good will and functionality is anything but a conglomeration of all the tiny little aspects which individually provably only work with adult supervision. Hell pick an aspect and compare a US state that regulates some aspect of the landlord tenant relationship with one that doesn't regulate it and not shockingly that its not JUST the state in question that is better or worse it will be better or worse in respect to the matter so regulated. You can't manage relationships with that much obvious power imbalance via negotiation.
• quartesixte 2y ago
  We need landlords to be people, period. Local people, who gained the property through other business means and have decided to make a little bit of extra profit while providing a necessary service to the community. Ideally, they would live in one of the units with the tenants. My landlord lives in the “best” unit of the apartment. It makes the experience so much better, and a kind of mini-community develops. Faceless corps becoming landlords and using professional management companies is part of the problem.
  • onionisafruit 2y ago
    Adam Smith, is that you?
    • bugglebeetle 2y ago
      Nah, Adam Smith hated landlords and almost exclusively referred to them as parasites incapable of productive work.
  • imgabe 2y ago
    The professional companies at least usually know and abide by the relevant laws. They have lawyers and risk management teams that make them. It’s usually the small time landlords who end up deciding they can keep your security deposit because you didn’t renovate the kitchen, or if they want to let their brother in law stay there they can kick you out with no notice or whatnot.
    • autoexecbat 2y ago
      > abide by the relevant laws This can unfortunately mean maximal increases in rent each year, rather than someone who is just happy to have a good tenant who causes no trouble
  • _JoRo 2y ago
    I have had the exact opposite experience. Lived with a landlord for a year (he inherited the property as part of a trust), and he was the nicest guy whenever it came time to sign a lease or extension, but as soon as the paperwork was signed he was a jackass to most tenants. It also didn't help that he didn't have a job, and was attempting to pay for all of his living expenses using money from the rent (which led to him trying to nickel and dime the tenants for everything). My experience with professional companies has been very good. The managers aren't trying to micromanage the tenants, and as long as you're not causing problems they are usually quite reasonable if anythings comes up.
• kerkeslager 2y ago
  I'm actually not seeing the reason landlords need to exist. Owning things is not a provision of value to society.
  • catlikesshrimp 2y ago
    Landlords don't "need" to exist. They simply exist because for everything someone has to own something. Communism doesnt work, I hope that knowledge doesn't have to be relearnt
    • kerkeslager 2y ago
      > They simply exist because for everything someone has to own something. And for things like housing, that should be the person who lives in the house. > Communism doesnt work, I hope that knowledge doesn't have to be relearnt What part of our massive homelessness problem do you see as the current system working? I'm not even proposing communism as a solution, but this absurd pretense that we have a working system needs to be crushed, and trotting out scare words like "communism" when you don't even know what they mean whenever someone criticizes the existing system is a big part of why our system is so broken.
      • s1artibartfast 2y ago
        It depends on what the hypothetical alternative is. If the solution is ban renting, then we would substantially increase the number of homeless. Prices would absolutely go down, but anyone unable to buy would have no option.
        • kerkeslager 2y ago
          > Prices would absolutely go down, but anyone unable to buy would have no option. Without numbers, which you don't have because no one does, that's total nonsense. Price determines options, not buy/rent. If the price of buying were lower than current rent, more people would have options, not fewer. There are a lot of ways to make that happen. Government could build housing which would both provide jobs and housing, and act as a means of controlling prices (if prices get too high, the government undercuts them). This was done in the 50s and while the results in cities were bad (i.e. "projects", which were largely a result of racism), suburban and rural houses built in that time are pretty good--I grew up in one--and we can learn from the mistakes of that time. Government lending which is currently extended to banks could be extended directly to homebuyers--there's no reason for the middle man here. Home ownership is part of the American dream and without it, the American dream is dying.
• jszymborski 2y ago
  Totally agree on needing better laws. In the absence of such laws, it helps for landlords to just be decent folk for the sake of being decent folk.
• gigatree 2y ago
  As foolish as it is to think that bad people would create good laws, or that good laws don’t get used towards bad ends, it’s even more foolish to think that laws could ever be a replacement for good people. If everyone was good to each other, we wouldn’t need laws. If everyone was bad to each other, we’d probably be better off without them.
• bjackman 2y ago
  I agree but funnily enough I think this kind of operation is probably one of the most effective things we could do to establish those institutions. I have always suspected that one of the most effective things you can do to make a lasting and significant impact on problems like this is to infiltrate hostile communities and influence them in favour of the _ideas_ that are needed to create a more reasonable political landscape. So, like what OP did, but instead of "cashing in" on a single tenuously pro-tenant action, I would "cash in" on an argument in favour of, for example, fair and neutral government mediation services for tenant disputes. Or something of that nature.
  • bombcar 2y ago
    The problem is that the number of tenants always outnumbers the landlords, and so it's very hard to convince everyone that the government mediation service is fair and neutral.
• iancmceachern 2y ago
  They're not mutually exclusive, at need both