LogFAQs > #957536618

Smarkil posted...

Well turns out that does count for something then doesn't it?

Eh, yes and no. Like I said, it often doesn't take long for the difference between owning a property and renting it to add up to enough capital to form a decent safety net (if it didn't, landlords just plain couldn't make money), so that's really only a valuable service for people looking for shorter-term accommodations. On a long-term basis, it just slows down amassing enough capital to be able to own your own property, purely for the sake of providing that capital to somebody who had the good fortune to buy it before you were ready to (which, in many areas, was vastly easier 5 years ago than it would be today, even without the added challenge of doing so while paying higher rents) and is looking to supplement their income with that good fortune.

Long-term renting is a symptom of a broken system where many properties are owned by relatively few people that have hoarded them, making it harder for renters to ever graduate to ownership because there are so few viable opportunities. That's one of the major routes by which wealth inequality forms and worsens, especially when you start getting into properties being inherited or sold off in large chunks to developers that permanently turn the land into properties no non-corporation will ever be able to own.

Smarkil posted...

Are banks also middlemen because they're only taking on the risk of taking money from savings and lending them to borrowers?

In some sense, perhaps, but they also provide the very helpful service of storing and transporting money, and the middleman services they provide are something that the vast majority of people will never be able to provide for themselves because they don't operate on a sufficient scale.

Smarkil posted...

Long term real estate is literally not a high risk investment.

Whether you're looking long-term or short-term, any real estate investment is always going to be beholden to the market, which is quite volatile. At any time, a significant drop in local property values can more or less completely eliminate your ability to turn a profit on your investment because you'll need to drop rent to unprofitable levels to stay competitive. That's even without considering the unpredictability of tenants on top of that (even in a perfect system that does allow immediate removal of and compensation from problem tenants, you're never going to escape the risk of missing a couple months' rent because a tenant had to leave unexpectedly), nor the fact that landlords are taking on the risks of property ownership in lieu of their tenants and therefore stand a solid chance of having to make expensive emergency repairs.

It's not as high-risk as, say, flipping houses is, but it's still high-risk enough that going into it without a solid safety net is a bad idea.

Smarkil posted...

And no, you're not for improving the ability to protect the rights of landlords because you are right now actively defending the most egregious offense against their rights. You can't say you're for it and also be against it.

Sure I can. I'm all for landlords being able to quickly evict tenants that are damaging the property, falling behind on rent for reasons they could easily prevent, or that misrepresent their ability to pay the rent when they sign the lease. I'm also for landlords being prevented from evicting tenants that are unable to pay rent only because of the devastating economic consequences of this unprecedented public health crisis, since that's something far outside of those tenants' control, and piling a widespread homelessness crisis on top of that for the sake of preserving rental income isn't going to help anyone but a handful of landlords that somehow don't feel they should lose income during a massive economic crisis.

Smarkil posted...

The problem in your case is the mom and pop landlords aren't getting the support everyone else is getting and very often only seeing the negatives. Tenants got support directly. Commercial landlords got support directly. The middle did not - as usual and are now dealing with the squeeze that comes from both ends.

Yeah, that is a problem. If the supports that are necessary to get landlords through that loss of income aren't making it to the landlords that really need it, the support system isn't working as it ought to be. Ditching the eviction moratorium will alleviate that disparity to some extent, but it's also going to end up doing a whole lot of harm as even landlords that have been enjoying those supports start booting people out and creating an unprecedented homelessness crisis. I don't know that that's going to balance it out, ultimately.

Smarkil posted...

So...I guess f*** the good landlords by not allowing them to have a legal recourse for resolving their issues which is how the system was built? Cool. Let's have more bad landlords and less good landlords.

The system naturally favours bad landlords already (again, by cutting corners to increase margins and buy up a larger portion of the available properties than landlords that don't cut corners are able to buy). Improvements need to be made to help good landlords out, but again, I don't know how to fix that (nor is it really my job to figure that out). Any system meant to benefit good landlords dealing with bad tenants will inevitably be abused by bad landlords dealing with tenants they just feel like screwing over (for whatever reason), so it's difficult to strike a balance between protecting landlords from bad tenants and protecting tenants from bad landlords. In general, I'm inclined to favour the latter, though, simply because becoming a landlord is a choice, while becoming a tenant is a necessity for anyone whose parents don't outright give them a house. Treating homelessness as a viable alternative to renting just isn't realistic.

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