26 ms·

In the United States, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the landlord. Maybe not for things that reach criminal levels of malfeasance but for your ave

In the United States, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the landlord. Maybe not for things that reach criminal levels of malfeasance but for your average renter with a crappy landlord there is zero leverage, it is particularly bad now because housing is so incredibly broken at the moment. For a long time, you have needed references from prior landlords to rent another place. This was especially challenging for mediocre landlords. Where there was nothing worth a court date but they may have ignored real problems and garnished the deposit with no reason. Rental management companies are practically incentivized to deliver the worst service for the highest price. It’s like the taxi industry before ratings from Uber and Lyft came to provide some recourse for riders. Ridesharing’s present outcome isn’t to strive for but neither is the taxi industry of yore. Most folks who talk up the benefits of renting haven’t done it in a very long time.

chii 2y ago
> Ridesharing’s present outcome isn’t to strive for it's much better than the taxi of yore. It's not the perfect outcome, but it's an improvement nevertheless.
- schmidt_fifty 2y ago
  I disagree, i think it's worse in every way except that you can hail one with an app now. It's certainly more expensive and the driver makes less than ever, but now there's a kafkaesque middleman that doesn't appear to provide any value but can fuck with both of you at will with little recourse available for either party. Pricing is only reliable in the sense of feeling gouged by a party that has provided no value. But yea, slick app. I hear the drivers are sometimes less racist, too.
  - jabroni_salad 2y ago
    In midsize cities it's an improvement that you can get a ride at all. Last time I tried to use the legacy service they told me they don't do pickup requests on Friday evenings and to try again tomorrow. Lyft got me to my flight and I never called that dispatcher again.
  - Kalium 2y ago
    San Francisco is an instructive example. Prior to Uber, calling a taxi in SF gave you a 50% chance of one showing up in some functionally unknowable amount of time. 50% is not an exaggeration, it was sometimes below that, and you would have no idea if you should expect your cab in five minutes or fifty. Then you would be charged some amount of money you could in theory anticipate but in practice could not. Should the driver misbehave in some manner, there was theoretical but in practice missing accountability. The drivers were then exploited ruthlessly by medallion-owners. Uber became very popular very quickly because it addressed a number of those consumer pain points up front. You could know for sure if a car was going to come, have a quite good idea of how long it would be, and get a price in advance. Sure, your complaints would likely be ignored, but nothing new there.
    - schmidt_fifty 2y ago
      [dead]
    - kevindamm 2y ago
      Having lived in SF before Uber, I firmly believe their success was accelerated by just how bad taxis in SF were. Sometimes I would call dispatch and hear interminable muzak (really, tens of minutes with nobody picking up). But that was at least better than getting through but then never actually having a cab arrive. Never experienced a worse taxi system. The sus black cars that randomly solicited rides were almost appealing in that environment. I still don't think Uber was a good outcome, even if it was better in many ways.
      - warcher 2y ago
        Not SF but I recall the accepted manner of doing business in my city, should you want a taxi on the big party holidays, was to gather your group and war dial taxi companies until somebody actually arrived. All of them. They would swear they’d show up, and you would swear you’d wait for them to show up, and everybody knew they were lying. Then when you wanted to go home you’d do the same thing except out on the street and you’d steal the first unattended cab, regardless of who’d called them.
- anyfoo 2y ago
  Nobody who ever took a taxi in Germany would say that.
saithound 2y ago
> In the United States, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the landlord. Very much this. The current outcome of any tenant complaint is a private warning not to make a fuss, with an auto-served eviction notice if the tenant makes a fuss anyway. This situation can only be improved by legislating away at-will evictions (no, less demand would not help fix this, see pandemic). No chance of that in most of the U.S., though. Uber/Lyft improved upon taxis because there were a lot of people who wanted to supply the service, but it was illegal for them to do so until Uber/Lyft punched a hole on the legal system. The rental market does not have this problem, in some sense the opposite.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  you can only legislate away at-will evictions if you have rent control and rent control exacerbates the housing crisis
- joe_the_user 2y ago
  Believe it or not, California no longer allows blanket at-will evictions as part of it's recent rent control law. Landlords still have more leverage than tenants but it's a bit better.
  - prox 2y ago
    In an at will eviction, can a landlord just evict anyone when he just feels like it?
    - fires10 2y ago
      Yes, they can decide not to renew or extend a lease often with 30 days or less notice.
      - trogdor 2y ago
        How is ‘not renewing a lease’ an eviction?
User23 2y ago
> In the United States, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the landlord. Maybe not for things that reach criminal levels of malfeasance but for your average renter with a crappy landlord there is zero leverage, it is particularly bad now because housing is so incredibly broken at the moment. In the USA renting is largely a state law matter. Some states are very landlord friendly, but others, such as California, are considerably more tenant friendly. For example late fees are illegal in California and you can basically get a pro se judgment easy peasy if a landlord even attempts to get you to sign a lease with a late fee clause, let alone collect one. You can also withhold rent to pay for services the landlord should have provided, and so on. Anyhow I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, but if you're in California learn your rights.
- favorited 2y ago
  > late fees are illegal in California and you can basically get a pro se judgment easy peasy if a landlord even attempts to get you to sign a lease with a late fee clause That's how laws are supposed to work. If a landlord is foolish enough to put an illegal punitive clause in a lease, they should be punished.
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    thankfully all renters studied law /s
- YokoZar 2y ago
  > For example late fees are illegal in California and you can basically get a pro se judgment easy peasy if a landlord even attempts to get you to sign a lease with a late fee clause, let alone collect one. Having actually gone through this process in small claims court in California, I will say that your miles may vary. I completely won my case except for recovering the fifty dollar late fee (written into the lease) that I paid because rent was once a day late. The judge said it seemed "reasonable" and didn't listen to me talk about California "liquidated damages" language on the subject, which is the supposed law that makes late fees illegal. Fact is, most places I've rented from have had late fees, and recovering them sounds like a huge crapshoot at best.
aurareturn 2y ago
>In the United States, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the landlord. Maybe not for things that reach criminal levels of malfeasance but for your average renter with a crappy landlord there is zero leverage, it is particularly bad now because housing is so incredibly broken at the moment. In California, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the tenant.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  Yep. And in Texas, apartments don't charge much of a deposit because they can bill residents moving out for everything and anything.
  - verall 2y ago
    They typically charge 1-2 full months of rent as a deposit, which is not any less than anywhere else I have been?
    - hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
      In ATX, my rent went down from $16k/month to $9k/month but I think I paid maybe $750 as a deposit. Perhaps: 1. Other locations that aren't ATX use traditional risk management 2. The laws in ATX are different than elsewhere 3. ATX apartments compete for residents by offering low deposits as a loss-leader
goodpoint 2y ago
> housing is so incredibly broken at the moment It's not just "broken". It's designed that way to benefit large financial groups.
- xnx 2y ago
  The largest (collectively) financial group that benefits is current homeowners
  - pydry 2y ago
    The largest aggregate benefits go to large landlords though.
devjab 2y ago
Landlords have a lot of power, even in Scandinavia where we highly regulate the renter-landlord “relationship”. One example of how the regulation isn’t really working as well as intended is in average renting prices. Which despite there being 10.000 empty apartments in my city isn’t coming down. (10.000 is a lot in Denmark). The sister company of my place of work is a landlord, and part of the reason they don’t lower rental prices is because it’s hard to increase it later. So for a period of years it’s better for them to “bet” on the market changing enough to solve our empty apartment challenge. It looked bleak for a couple of years, but thanks to things turning around the strategy has worked out. You can’t protect the rental market from this sort of thing unless you start limiting how many houses private equity are allowed to build and own. Which isn’t something cities are really interested in currently. It used to be such that co-ownership rental-groups or whatever you call “beboerforeninger” in English, if there is even an English term for it. But they are basically non-profit landlords which are owned collectively by every renter. Anyway it used to be that these organisations could compete with private landlords because private landlords were smaller. They have no chance of competing with the kind of deals we can cut a city now, or the speed at which we can buyout and replace old buildings. Simply because we, and companies like us, represent a literal fuckton of money. This is made worse by international investors, but it’s not exclusively caused by them. Our sister company has 0 foreign capital, and we’re still capable of competing with international capital on an equal level. Leaving almost no room for the non-profit organisations and absolutely no room for small investors on any serious level. I don’t know about the US, but here in Denmark there is almost zero chance of it changing. There just won’t be enough political interest in it. In fact there is a huge political interest against it. Both from the cities themselves, but also for basically every home owner in our country. Because our high rental prices keep the housing market high as well, as people give up a lot sooner than we do. As seen with how the housing market is now again increasing here in Denmark after a period of almost dying. It’s not just because no cheap rentals became available, but it’s part of it.
- BazookaMusic 2y ago
  Thanks for sharing this, it's interesting to get an insider look into what's driving the prices here in Denmark.
- 2y ago
dzonga 2y ago
havng lived in both the U.K and the U.S. landlords are much worse in the uk, since they're pretty much the politicians or people setting policy. i'm not making this up, my landlord is a tory politician and him and his friends own a bunch of property. I don't think party affiliatin matters - but point stands. no incentive to improve housing at all. whereas in the U.S, if you stay at a corporate owned apartment -- you're guaranteed things will be functional, repairs done on time etc. In, the U.K the repairs are done wheneveer the landlord feels like it. In london, you see some apartments get on the market without any repairs done to them at all
- monetus 2y ago
  > In, the U.K the repairs are done wheneveer the landlord feels like it. In london, you see some apartments get on the market without any repairs done to them at all Often illegal, but still common here as well.
whiddershins 2y ago
The problem with the landlord tenant power dynamic is that an unscrupulous party on either side can easily do great damage to the other. Look at eviction laws in New York and California. Look at the recent headlines about squatting. The landlord is actually the party with the greater financial risk by far, but the tenant has the emotional and social vulnerability of having no control over their home.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  They have actual physical vulnerability because it's very dangerous to not be living in a home, and there is no guaranteed short-term fallback if you are forced from your home. Speaks VOLUMES that you consider "financial risk" more valid than this, which you choose to downplay as just a sense of vulnerability rather than the actual fact of it.
  - nullc 2y ago
    The tone of "Speaks VOLUMES" doesn't help the discussion. Not all people and and places are equal: It's not a universal truth that someone given 30 days notice will find themselves unhoused and in a dangerous situation. Often it is just a sense. And even where it is true: What then? If landlords are made the social safety-net of last resort, the 'guaranteed fallback', for people who are unable to secure housing then why should anyone be a landlord? It won't be easier to secure housing for people if the conditions are made too unattractive. Some landlords stink, some tenants stink, sometimes the situation stinks without anyone being at fault. Policy ought to try to do the most good for the most people, but part of that is recognizing that an inability to evict people who don't pay (or worse) can mean that even more go unhoused when people choose to not rent out.
    - giraffe_lady 2y ago
      Yeah good Q, why should anyone be a landlord? Given the situation that there is no safety net, and knowing that, why would you choose a relationship that is likely to position your financial interests against the physical safety and wellbeing of someone else, even a whole family? I wouldn't choose it and I don't have respect or sympathy for people who do.
skeeter2020 2y ago
Well from the perspective of a residential landlord all the laws are stacked against us, to the point where I can't risk renting to a very large segment of the population that (especially now) needs rental units desperately. So we shift investment from residential to commercial, or only have very high-priced units for high-income families. The narative is always faceless corporations and rich fat-cats, but that's not always true.
- lkirkwood 2y ago
  Who can you not risk renting to and why?
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    I wonder if they will actually answer this. Incredible "oh you know the ones" energy on it.
  - noduerme 2y ago
    People with a criminal record and/or history of nonpayment of rent (aka squatting) who you're forced to rent to under first come first serve ordinances.
  - mlhpdx 2y ago
    I’ll add folks with a history of causing damage. It seems to be a habit with a few, but it can be impossible (or unclear if possible) to even ask the question under some new regulations.
    - beaeglebeachedd 2y ago
      Some landlords solve this by making the tenant pay the insurance on the rental. That way high risk groups get higher effective rent without the landlord having to look discriminatory.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  We can definitely shift the narrative to it just being a matter of individual malfeasance and exploitation if you'd prefer. In that model the fact that this is so widespread and routine reflects even worse on landlords, and justifies much more extreme action against them.
jjav 2y ago
> In the United States, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the landlord. This is a wild generalization because every state has different rules and cities have their own different rules as well. There are indeed places in the US where the landlord has all the power and the renter has zero rights and it can get ugly. There are also places in the US where renters hold so much power that they can get away with everything and the hands of the landlord are tied and it can get ugly. The best places are those where there is a balance, where the laws acknowledge that both the landlord and the renter need to act reasonably and not try to screw over the other party.
noduerme 2y ago
By your analogy, isn't the abolition of references from prior landlords similar to getting rid of the (uber/lyft) passenger ratings?
- bredren 2y ago
  Do you mean ratings of passengers by drivers?
mlhpdx 2y ago
I’ve been in both sides of the relationship, and I want to start with my observation that bad landlords and bad tenants and rare. Most people aren’t predators, aren’t retaliatory, and generally act in reasonable ways. Some don’t, and the best we can do is not let them spoil it for the rest of us. As a renter, I tried to leave units at least as good as I found them, and as a landlord I find most people do the same. Once out of a dozen places I lived, a landlord acted unscrupulously. And, as a landlord, I’ve had one renter trash a property. That seems like an expected amount of hassle to me. But the risk is very much asymmetric — I lost a week of pay to the landlord, but repairing the damage by the tenant cost me a year of rent. In the US I don’t have a right to shelter, and while that may be awful in some respects it works for the most part. Hundreds of millions of people get shelter. But to be honest, I’m on the edge of getting out of being a residential landlord because of the increased regulation. While I agree with the ethos, the reality is that it increases my chance of being damaged financially regardless of my ethics/behavior. Not sure what my real point is other than “don’t be awful”. On a different note, I find the hypocrisy from some folks in this topic frustrating. They advance exploitative approaches to commercializing SaaS while decrying landlords doing the same. I don’t see a difference. We literally use the term “multi tenant”.
- trogdor 2y ago
  > repairing the damage by the tenant cost me a year of rent Is that not something your homeowners insurance would have covered?
  - mlhpdx 2y ago
    Insurance on rentals is going up way, way faster than rent. This year more than 20%.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  > On a different note, I find the hypocrisy from some folks in this topic frustrating. They advance exploitative approaches to commercializing SaaS while decrying landlords doing the same. I don’t see a difference. You really don't see the difference? I'll help you out: one is a basic (and at the moment, scarce) necessity, the other is a unnecessary luxury.
tdeck 2y ago
This is extremely true. I know a family who recently got out of a terrible situation where their landlord - Regularly stole food from their kitchen - Turned off their hot water for several weeks - Verbally harassed their elementary school aged daughter All of these things are illegal but in the city where they lived there isn't much practical recourse for a poor family. The only option the city lists on their website is to hire a lawyer and take the landlord to court. There's supposed to be a fine for every day the hot water is off, but guess who you can call to enforce that? Nobody. This is true of many laws that supposedly protect ordinary people (e.g. labor laws). Once you go to avail yourself of the protection you find there's actually no functioning mechanism and often that's by design.

chii 2y ago

> Ridesharing’s present outcome isn’t to strive for it's much better than the taxi of yore. It's not the perfect outcome, but it's an improvement nevertheless.

schmidt_fifty 2y ago
I disagree, i think it's worse in every way except that you can hail one with an app now. It's certainly more expensive and the driver makes less than ever, but now there's a kafkaesque middleman that doesn't appear to provide any value but can fuck with both of you at will with little recourse available for either party. Pricing is only reliable in the sense of feeling gouged by a party that has provided no value. But yea, slick app. I hear the drivers are sometimes less racist, too.
- jabroni_salad 2y ago
  In midsize cities it's an improvement that you can get a ride at all. Last time I tried to use the legacy service they told me they don't do pickup requests on Friday evenings and to try again tomorrow. Lyft got me to my flight and I never called that dispatcher again.
- Kalium 2y ago
  San Francisco is an instructive example. Prior to Uber, calling a taxi in SF gave you a 50% chance of one showing up in some functionally unknowable amount of time. 50% is not an exaggeration, it was sometimes below that, and you would have no idea if you should expect your cab in five minutes or fifty. Then you would be charged some amount of money you could in theory anticipate but in practice could not. Should the driver misbehave in some manner, there was theoretical but in practice missing accountability. The drivers were then exploited ruthlessly by medallion-owners. Uber became very popular very quickly because it addressed a number of those consumer pain points up front. You could know for sure if a car was going to come, have a quite good idea of how long it would be, and get a price in advance. Sure, your complaints would likely be ignored, but nothing new there.
  - schmidt_fifty 2y ago
    [dead]
  - kevindamm 2y ago
    Having lived in SF before Uber, I firmly believe their success was accelerated by just how bad taxis in SF were. Sometimes I would call dispatch and hear interminable muzak (really, tens of minutes with nobody picking up). But that was at least better than getting through but then never actually having a cab arrive. Never experienced a worse taxi system. The sus black cars that randomly solicited rides were almost appealing in that environment. I still don't think Uber was a good outcome, even if it was better in many ways.
    - warcher 2y ago
      Not SF but I recall the accepted manner of doing business in my city, should you want a taxi on the big party holidays, was to gather your group and war dial taxi companies until somebody actually arrived. All of them. They would swear they’d show up, and you would swear you’d wait for them to show up, and everybody knew they were lying. Then when you wanted to go home you’d do the same thing except out on the street and you’d steal the first unattended cab, regardless of who’d called them.
anyfoo 2y ago
Nobody who ever took a taxi in Germany would say that.

saithound 2y ago

> In the United States, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the landlord. Very much this. The current outcome of any tenant complaint is a private warning not to make a fuss, with an auto-served eviction notice if the tenant makes a fuss anyway. This situation can only be improved by legislating away at-will evictions (no, less demand would not help fix this, see pandemic). No chance of that in most of the U.S., though. Uber/Lyft improved upon taxis because there were a lot of people who wanted to supply the service, but it was illegal for them to do so until Uber/Lyft punched a hole on the legal system. The rental market does not have this problem, in some sense the opposite.

whimsicalism 2y ago
you can only legislate away at-will evictions if you have rent control and rent control exacerbates the housing crisis
joe_the_user 2y ago
Believe it or not, California no longer allows blanket at-will evictions as part of it's recent rent control law. Landlords still have more leverage than tenants but it's a bit better.
- prox 2y ago
  In an at will eviction, can a landlord just evict anyone when he just feels like it?
  - fires10 2y ago
    Yes, they can decide not to renew or extend a lease often with 30 days or less notice.
    - trogdor 2y ago
      How is ‘not renewing a lease’ an eviction?

User23 2y ago

> In the United States, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the landlord. Maybe not for things that reach criminal levels of malfeasance but for your average renter with a crappy landlord there is zero leverage, it is particularly bad now because housing is so incredibly broken at the moment. In the USA renting is largely a state law matter. Some states are very landlord friendly, but others, such as California, are considerably more tenant friendly. For example late fees are illegal in California and you can basically get a pro se judgment easy peasy if a landlord even attempts to get you to sign a lease with a late fee clause, let alone collect one. You can also withhold rent to pay for services the landlord should have provided, and so on. Anyhow I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, but if you're in California learn your rights.

favorited 2y ago
> late fees are illegal in California and you can basically get a pro se judgment easy peasy if a landlord even attempts to get you to sign a lease with a late fee clause That's how laws are supposed to work. If a landlord is foolish enough to put an illegal punitive clause in a lease, they should be punished.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  thankfully all renters studied law /s
YokoZar 2y ago
> For example late fees are illegal in California and you can basically get a pro se judgment easy peasy if a landlord even attempts to get you to sign a lease with a late fee clause, let alone collect one. Having actually gone through this process in small claims court in California, I will say that your miles may vary. I completely won my case except for recovering the fifty dollar late fee (written into the lease) that I paid because rent was once a day late. The judge said it seemed "reasonable" and didn't listen to me talk about California "liquidated damages" language on the subject, which is the supposed law that makes late fees illegal. Fact is, most places I've rented from have had late fees, and recovering them sounds like a huge crapshoot at best.

aurareturn 2y ago

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
Yep. And in Texas, apartments don't charge much of a deposit because they can bill residents moving out for everything and anything.
- verall 2y ago
  They typically charge 1-2 full months of rent as a deposit, which is not any less than anywhere else I have been?
  - hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
    In ATX, my rent went down from $16k/month to $9k/month but I think I paid maybe $750 as a deposit. Perhaps: 1. Other locations that aren't ATX use traditional risk management 2. The laws in ATX are different than elsewhere 3. ATX apartments compete for residents by offering low deposits as a loss-leader

goodpoint 2y ago

> housing is so incredibly broken at the moment It's not just "broken". It's designed that way to benefit large financial groups.

xnx 2y ago
The largest (collectively) financial group that benefits is current homeowners
- pydry 2y ago
  The largest aggregate benefits go to large landlords though.

devjab 2y ago

Landlords have a lot of power, even in Scandinavia where we highly regulate the renter-landlord “relationship”. One example of how the regulation isn’t really working as well as intended is in average renting prices. Which despite there being 10.000 empty apartments in my city isn’t coming down. (10.000 is a lot in Denmark). The sister company of my place of work is a landlord, and part of the reason they don’t lower rental prices is because it’s hard to increase it later. So for a period of years it’s better for them to “bet” on the market changing enough to solve our empty apartment challenge. It looked bleak for a couple of years, but thanks to things turning around the strategy has worked out. You can’t protect the rental market from this sort of thing unless you start limiting how many houses private equity are allowed to build and own. Which isn’t something cities are really interested in currently. It used to be such that co-ownership rental-groups or whatever you call “beboerforeninger” in English, if there is even an English term for it. But they are basically non-profit landlords which are owned collectively by every renter. Anyway it used to be that these organisations could compete with private landlords because private landlords were smaller. They have no chance of competing with the kind of deals we can cut a city now, or the speed at which we can buyout and replace old buildings. Simply because we, and companies like us, represent a literal fuckton of money. This is made worse by international investors, but it’s not exclusively caused by them. Our sister company has 0 foreign capital, and we’re still capable of competing with international capital on an equal level. Leaving almost no room for the non-profit organisations and absolutely no room for small investors on any serious level. I don’t know about the US, but here in Denmark there is almost zero chance of it changing. There just won’t be enough political interest in it. In fact there is a huge political interest against it. Both from the cities themselves, but also for basically every home owner in our country. Because our high rental prices keep the housing market high as well, as people give up a lot sooner than we do. As seen with how the housing market is now again increasing here in Denmark after a period of almost dying. It’s not just because no cheap rentals became available, but it’s part of it.

BazookaMusic 2y ago
Thanks for sharing this, it's interesting to get an insider look into what's driving the prices here in Denmark.
2y ago

dzonga 2y ago

havng lived in both the U.K and the U.S. landlords are much worse in the uk, since they're pretty much the politicians or people setting policy. i'm not making this up, my landlord is a tory politician and him and his friends own a bunch of property. I don't think party affiliatin matters - but point stands. no incentive to improve housing at all. whereas in the U.S, if you stay at a corporate owned apartment -- you're guaranteed things will be functional, repairs done on time etc. In, the U.K the repairs are done wheneveer the landlord feels like it. In london, you see some apartments get on the market without any repairs done to them at all

monetus 2y ago
> In, the U.K the repairs are done wheneveer the landlord feels like it. In london, you see some apartments get on the market without any repairs done to them at all Often illegal, but still common here as well.

whiddershins 2y ago

The problem with the landlord tenant power dynamic is that an unscrupulous party on either side can easily do great damage to the other. Look at eviction laws in New York and California. Look at the recent headlines about squatting. The landlord is actually the party with the greater financial risk by far, but the tenant has the emotional and social vulnerability of having no control over their home.

giraffe_lady 2y ago
They have actual physical vulnerability because it's very dangerous to not be living in a home, and there is no guaranteed short-term fallback if you are forced from your home. Speaks VOLUMES that you consider "financial risk" more valid than this, which you choose to downplay as just a sense of vulnerability rather than the actual fact of it.
- nullc 2y ago
  The tone of "Speaks VOLUMES" doesn't help the discussion. Not all people and and places are equal: It's not a universal truth that someone given 30 days notice will find themselves unhoused and in a dangerous situation. Often it is just a sense. And even where it is true: What then? If landlords are made the social safety-net of last resort, the 'guaranteed fallback', for people who are unable to secure housing then why should anyone be a landlord? It won't be easier to secure housing for people if the conditions are made too unattractive. Some landlords stink, some tenants stink, sometimes the situation stinks without anyone being at fault. Policy ought to try to do the most good for the most people, but part of that is recognizing that an inability to evict people who don't pay (or worse) can mean that even more go unhoused when people choose to not rent out.
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    Yeah good Q, why should anyone be a landlord? Given the situation that there is no safety net, and knowing that, why would you choose a relationship that is likely to position your financial interests against the physical safety and wellbeing of someone else, even a whole family? I wouldn't choose it and I don't have respect or sympathy for people who do.

skeeter2020 2y ago

Well from the perspective of a residential landlord all the laws are stacked against us, to the point where I can't risk renting to a very large segment of the population that (especially now) needs rental units desperately. So we shift investment from residential to commercial, or only have very high-priced units for high-income families. The narative is always faceless corporations and rich fat-cats, but that's not always true.

lkirkwood 2y ago
Who can you not risk renting to and why?
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  I wonder if they will actually answer this. Incredible "oh you know the ones" energy on it.
- noduerme 2y ago
  People with a criminal record and/or history of nonpayment of rent (aka squatting) who you're forced to rent to under first come first serve ordinances.
- mlhpdx 2y ago
  I’ll add folks with a history of causing damage. It seems to be a habit with a few, but it can be impossible (or unclear if possible) to even ask the question under some new regulations.
  - beaeglebeachedd 2y ago
    Some landlords solve this by making the tenant pay the insurance on the rental. That way high risk groups get higher effective rent without the landlord having to look discriminatory.
giraffe_lady 2y ago
We can definitely shift the narrative to it just being a matter of individual malfeasance and exploitation if you'd prefer. In that model the fact that this is so widespread and routine reflects even worse on landlords, and justifies much more extreme action against them.

jjav 2y ago

> In the United States, the power is almost entirely in the hands of the landlord. This is a wild generalization because every state has different rules and cities have their own different rules as well. There are indeed places in the US where the landlord has all the power and the renter has zero rights and it can get ugly. There are also places in the US where renters hold so much power that they can get away with everything and the hands of the landlord are tied and it can get ugly. The best places are those where there is a balance, where the laws acknowledge that both the landlord and the renter need to act reasonably and not try to screw over the other party.

noduerme 2y ago

By your analogy, isn't the abolition of references from prior landlords similar to getting rid of the (uber/lyft) passenger ratings?

bredren 2y ago
Do you mean ratings of passengers by drivers?

mlhpdx 2y ago

I’ve been in both sides of the relationship, and I want to start with my observation that bad landlords and bad tenants and rare. Most people aren’t predators, aren’t retaliatory, and generally act in reasonable ways. Some don’t, and the best we can do is not let them spoil it for the rest of us. As a renter, I tried to leave units at least as good as I found them, and as a landlord I find most people do the same. Once out of a dozen places I lived, a landlord acted unscrupulously. And, as a landlord, I’ve had one renter trash a property. That seems like an expected amount of hassle to me. But the risk is very much asymmetric — I lost a week of pay to the landlord, but repairing the damage by the tenant cost me a year of rent. In the US I don’t have a right to shelter, and while that may be awful in some respects it works for the most part. Hundreds of millions of people get shelter. But to be honest, I’m on the edge of getting out of being a residential landlord because of the increased regulation. While I agree with the ethos, the reality is that it increases my chance of being damaged financially regardless of my ethics/behavior. Not sure what my real point is other than “don’t be awful”. On a different note, I find the hypocrisy from some folks in this topic frustrating. They advance exploitative approaches to commercializing SaaS while decrying landlords doing the same. I don’t see a difference. We literally use the term “multi tenant”.

trogdor 2y ago
> repairing the damage by the tenant cost me a year of rent Is that not something your homeowners insurance would have covered?
- mlhpdx 2y ago
  Insurance on rentals is going up way, way faster than rent. This year more than 20%.
candiddevmike 2y ago
> On a different note, I find the hypocrisy from some folks in this topic frustrating. They advance exploitative approaches to commercializing SaaS while decrying landlords doing the same. I don’t see a difference. You really don't see the difference? I'll help you out: one is a basic (and at the moment, scarce) necessity, the other is a unnecessary luxury.

tdeck 2y ago

This is extremely true. I know a family who recently got out of a terrible situation where their landlord - Regularly stole food from their kitchen - Turned off their hot water for several weeks - Verbally harassed their elementary school aged daughter All of these things are illegal but in the city where they lived there isn't much practical recourse for a poor family. The only option the city lists on their website is to hire a lawyer and take the landlord to court. There's supposed to be a fine for every day the hot water is off, but guess who you can call to enforce that? Nobody. This is true of many laws that supposedly protect ordinary people (e.g. labor laws). Once you go to avail yourself of the protection you find there's actually no functioning mechanism and often that's by design.