She could get a job (as a physiotherapist) if she wanted to work. She is in her 30s and undoubtedly has psychological problems. We can’t do anything about it because she is on the other side of the world. She isn’t going to die without welfare, but fewer handouts may force her to take responsibility for herself.
There are plenty of people out there who do need help. I agree with that.
Wow, glad to see one of the big American exports is ‘conservative, self-righteous prick’
Being a landlord means you make money doing nothing. It is the closest thing there is to being a feudal lord in the modern world, receiving a portion of the labor of others simply by dint of being their ruler.
Wow, what an ignorant statement of entitlement. There’s the whole issue of capitol costs, opportunity costs, and all sorts of economics that I can only begin to discuss. I’ve got plenty of personal experience with rental property maintenance, screening tenants and showing units, collecting rent from tenants, and rehabbing units between tenants, and dealing with deadbeats. I didn’t own the properties but I certainly earned a wage for my part in the process and charged expenses to the landlord or their agent. I’m pretty sure that they employed accountants, paid mortgages on the properties, paid business loans, paid property taxes to the local government, paid personal or corporate taxes on income, paid for insurance, and either personally supervised the enterprise or employed someone to do so on their behalf. However you want to look at the situation the rent checks weren’t immediately deposited in their personal accounts and even the slum lords had expenses that ensured that rents paid were never pure profits.
I don’t know about these days, but back when I was a Dole Scrounger, the DSS paid my rent directly to my landlord, so I guess there name would have been on the transfer.
I think this bloke should be this year’s recipient of the Nicholas van Hoogstraten Award.
But is it even legal to evict existing tenants on the grounds that they receive benefits? And how can it be?
Where I live (Denmark) you can’t evict tenants unless they misbehave or don’t pay the rent. (If you fail to pay the rent, you can be evicted with 5 days’ notice, though.)
But I suppose rental in the UK is also covered by a contract. How can it be legal to evict people on the basis that “we don’t feel like renting to you any more”? Next in line: Evicting black people for being black.
One month contracts are not entirely unusual on this island. It autorenews unless one side or the other decides so. I avoid those contracts like the plague, but I am on my 2nd one year contract for this flat, and have signed for the 3rd year.
The next in line would be “evicting people for being people”
One of the key lines from that Guardian article for me is this:
Ashford, Kent, is in the south east of England - I live not too far away in the currently rainy county of Hampshire. Now I don’t know how high housing benefit goes, but I know that rents are consistently getting higher. The average rent where we live at the moment is between £800-£1000 per month for a very small house, you’d struggle to have a family in here, seriously. The worst part is that these are only getting higher and higher - we’ve been in our current place 2 years and we’ve seen our rent increase by around 10%.
We’re landlords ourselves, we own a house in another part of the country where average rents are much lower, and you get more for your money to boot ~£400-£500 for a place bigger than what we have in the south east.
What I’m trying to say here, is that in the south east, it makes much more economic sense for private landlords to kick out benefit claimants where if they hike the rent, they’re more likely to end up with a default. This as opposed to private tenant who would no doubt struggle but, grudgingly be able to swallow the increase.
This is all linked to the housing bubble - the house prices in the south east go up astronomically, so when you do a buy to let you need a higher rental income. It has other knock on effects too - private landlords will only accept the cream of the crop when it comes to renters. A common denominator when we moved down here was no DSS, no Pets, and in some places even no children!
Christ, what an asshole.
If that’s the way it works now–landlords are paid directly-- then this just sounds like his way of trying to prevent the Universal Credit change, or at least make it fail and be retracted, rather than a decision based on actual data. Otherwise, yeah, he’d base evictions on actual defaults, not imagined ones.
Smacks very much of shit companies in the states firing, or cutting employee hours, right after Obama was reelected because they claimed they wouldn’t be able to afford the Affordable Care Act changes. Those playing politics with people’s lives.
Surprised this is legal–not sure what would happen here in the US if you decided to evict all welfare recipients.
[mod edit: removed ableist slur]
This is a direct result of the conservative policy to cap housing benefit at 80% of a nominal average market value. Of course those on benefits are going to get into arrears with any housing that’s not totally substandard, where’s the other 20% meant to come from? Whilst I think this guy is a slimy good for nothing toad I also acknowledge that he is put in this position because housing benefit has not kept up with rent increases. What is needed is either a return to housing benefit paying full whack for private rented accommodation, rent caps and enforced renting to housing benefit claimants or a massive new programme of council house building. Without any of these this situation is just going to get worse and worse.
Then there is the small detail that much of the housing bubble in the South East and especially in London has been funded by the very same Housing Benefit i.e. financed by the tax payer. To put it simply in their infinite wisdom recent UK governments rather than subsidising / supporting ownership for lower and middle income households have both a) artificially inflated house prices by subsidising the buy-to-let market and b) ensured that young families are entirely dependent on the very same inflated private housing provision.
The alternative could have been to use those billions in Housing Benefit to actually build houses for families (even single parent ones) but that of course would have been the doing of a nanny state.
Boy I’d really like to say this landlord is doing something wrong but did you read the article? First: All of his tenants in arrears are on housing assistance and MORE THAN HALF of those are in Arrears. Second, the insurance companies have made the same decision-- no landlord rent-insurance if you rent to people on housing assistance.
So what the hell is is supposed to do? He has to have cash flow to pay his mortgages. Where does this come from is over half your tenants don’t pay?
Would you be happier if he doubled everyones rent so he could afford to have half the people not paying?
His criteria for discrimination is income which is pretty much universally accepted as a legitimate basis. It’s not ethnicity. it’s ability to pay.
Don’t make social justice movements into a mockery by trying to shame every landlord.
Too late. Most popular comment in thread about boycotting this individual.
Anyone else get the feeling that we’re barrelling straight ahead toward dystopia?
What I thought was interesting in the article was the reference to “rent guarantee insurance.” I don’t believe that is at all common in the US. Rather screening tenants to figure out who would be willing and able to pay is one of the core competencies for landlords, and the risk of a non-paying tenant is assumed by the landlord. Of course that’s one of the reasons that housing discrimination is so high. But I’m surprised that someone who owned so many units would purchase such insurance even if it was available. I would have thought that with so many homes “self-insuring” by figuring in a vacancy rate into your accounting would make more sense, and that way you wouldn’t be paying insurance company overhead.
This seems right on - I’m not sure why folks expect a landlord to accept tenants who are unlikely to pay on time? I’m sure its a very complicated problem, but just from the facts laid out in the article, its really hard to say that the landlord is in the wrong. Shouldn’t the focus be on enabling these people to pay their rent, not punishing the landlord because they can’t or won’t?
And I it sounds like this is an attempt by this landlord (and others?) to put pressure on the government to raise the housing benefit. The question is, if this landlord evicts everybody on public assistance will he be able to fill his units with tenants? Or will he have to lower his rents to do so?
Or you, a good paid up renter, get forcibly evicted by the bank because she defaulted and didn’t tell her tenants about it. So much for your lease or the planning and savings it usually requires to find a new place. Same stories in the U.S.
