Originally published at: Evictions soar as landlords hike rents | Boing Boing
…
7 Likes
Inflation, they say. But aren’t most homes in the U.S. bought with fixed-rate mortgages taken out before rates went up?
Variable rate mortgages are unreasonably popular.
Even with a fixed rate mortgage some costs are subject to inflation: maintenance (assuming the landlord does any), property tax (excluding CA I guess), and, um, er, yeah that’s about it.
Oh, plus the cost of the Landlord’s brand new car keeps going up, and eating out three meals a day keeps going up, and…
12 Likes
I just bought my first house, in Austin no less. And while there’s a lot i could say about the journey i am glad i lucked out, i wasnt expecting to find a house i could afford and it came right on time too because the apt complex i was at wanted to jack up the rent after the pleasure of flooding my apartment 3 different times in one year. I’m also offering a spare room to a friend that has fallen on hard times.
Landlords suck and cost for housing is hurting folks
29 Likes
You know, housing projects probably wouldn’t be quite so bad anymore now that the crime rate is down and brutalist architecture isn’t in vogue anymore. (Still most likely wouldn’t be great, but at least stable.) We don’t actually have to route everything through the private market.
10 Likes
The problem with Projects was never the idea, it was the implementation. Warehousing people in grim towers in bad neighbourhoods, then abandoning them with no services or support was never going to work.
There are plenty of public housing models around the world that do work though.
https://www.bchousing.org/projects-partners/development-projects
It’s not enough to simply build them. People have to be supported with medical care for addiction, job training, daycare, healthcare, etc. The physical structure is one piece of a web of support. A very important piece, but only one piece.
27 Likes
Does the apartment include heat and hot water? My apartments do and town water and sewer and taxes have increased. Oil prices have risen. And materials (and labor—if you can find a carpenter, electrician, or plumber) cost for any repairs are higher. I try to keep costs down, but have raised rents. It’s not the landlords, but Capitalism that sucks!
2 Likes
I can tell you as a small time landlord, management costs can increase dramatically if one isn’t the owner of the building(s)
I own a single unit in a condo complex. The condo association is increasingly hostile to rentals (a high % of renters affects the ability of others to obtain a mortgage or refinance). So they charge me a yearly rental fee equal to two months of usual monthly maintenance charges. They also tacked on move in/move out fees for tenants. I pass that along as rent increases.
But in all fairness, it never increases rent more than 2-3% a year. The property is a tax shelter and I am getting enough of a benefit from its property value increase over time.
Frankly I find it is more cost effective and less irritating, not to act like a greedy asshole. Too bad plenty of other landlords do not.
10 Likes
It depends on the area as well. Thanks to remote work and an increasingly aging populations, a good number of people are moving out of expensive places, in or close to major cities.
When they do, they create sales/rental booms where they move to. Landlords and property sellers jack up prices to capitalize on it.
3 Likes
Yep capitalism sucks, and landlords raising rents to profit off others’ desires not to sleep outside are part of that suck
11 Likes
Root cause is too many people but nobody wants to talk about that.
1 Like
Look at the stats for the major metropolitan areas claiming a housing crunch, and in most of them you’ll find more vacant housing units than they had in the ‘90s.
The problem is greed and treating shelter like an investment commodity instead of a basic human right that should be available at a reasonable cost, based on the actual cost of providing a service instead of, “how much we can possibly squeeze out of someone for it, if they’re desperate enough.”
31 Likes
That’s because it’s factually wrong and borderline evil. Thank fuck you’re not in charge of housing.
19 Likes
Why does no one ever lead by example?
16 Likes
Plenty of people talk about that… far too many jackasses love to pontificate about how “those” people “breed” too much and should be “controlled” by their “betters” probably by forms of forced sterilization… that “science” of “eugenics” with a Malthusian bent has been disproven over and over again, however and shown to be the backwards, bigoted bullshit that it is… Now pretty much the only people who spout that nonsense are people that we don’t wish to listen to for good reasons - they are just wrong and they are generally speaking racist assholes.
So feel free to go looking for that discourse online, if you don’t mind visiting nests of vileness and racism.
The problem here is treating housing like a commodity rather than a human right.
26 Likes
What is the correct number of people?
22 Likes
No, the root cause is fucking not too many people.
And the reason nobody wants to talk about that is it’s bullshit. I’d suggest thoroughly rinsing it out of your head.
The Overpopulation Myth and its Dangerous Connotations | Sierra Club.
“Overpopulation is really not overpopulation. It’s a question about poverty,” says Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington DC. Yet instead of examining why poverty exists and how to sustainably support a growing population, he says, social scientists and biologists talk past each other, debating definitions and causes of overpopulation.
Cohen adds that “even people who know the facts use it as an excuse not to pay attention to the problems we have right now”, pointing to the example of economic systems that favour the wealthy.
SOURCE:The science myths that will not die | Nature
(Emphisis is mine, because it’s a conservative Think Tank saying the wealth inequality is the real problem, and those guys usually bend-over backwards to blame anything except that - so you’d expect them to blame overpopulation for capitalism’s problems if there was any real evidence to make that arguement.)
@ClutchLinkey already pointed out signs it ain’t the root cause of high rents and housing “shortages” while I was checking links. And it ain’t the root cause of poverty either,
23 Likes
There isn’t one. This is just more warmed over eugenics horseshit. Because it’s apparently better to advocate for mass murder than it is to contemplate criticism of and changes to the capitalist system that treats everything like a commodity…
22 Likes
Nah, the “correct” number of people is just slightly higher than the number where the person arguing there’s too many people would have to get sterilized or jump in the ovens themselves.
And waaay too often around the number the population would be if certain groups they hate anyway were gone.
3 Likes
Yeah, kind of my point… It’s all just racist bullshit (or anti-semetic bullshit, etc).
9 Likes
For some reason this topic always gets responded to with hatred and ad-hominem attacks. We’re running out of air, land, water, temperate climates, and natural habitats. We are past the carrying capacity of the planet. There are basically three dials that can be turned. a. Remove waste and corruption. Everyone’s for that. b. Downsize lifestyle. c. Stop replicating ourseves so much.
