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On March 30 2020 11:52 Zambrah wrote:
I think Emjay is biased because his mother is biased as someone who owns more mortgages than they can handle.
So every post indicates that she is working with her tenants, but she's secretly in over her head and must gouge them to stay afloat. Obviously she sent her son to post this on TL for us to read because we're going to go to Hawaii and enforce rent. You can't seriously believe this? Please tell me this a joke.
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Or she was complaining to her son, and like all people sees only her own situation fully and thus complains with that viewpoint, her son, again not HER, her son, posts about it on a forum.
And you think you have all the details.
I'm sure you hear Trump say we're doing GREAT at this corona virus thing and you believe it huh, after all he SAID it!
I'm glad youre able to see the entire story so clearly through a few sentences from a forum post by the son of a person who owns lots of property is being negatively impacted, like most people, by the corona virus.
So to reiterate, you get second hand, one sided information, and you think you have the whole picture?
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Northern Ireland25372 Posts
Darn did I miss a good landlord discussion?
Generally a horrific sector, not sure how it is in the States but I don’t have a friend who doesn’t have at least one bad landlord experience, indeed one has just moved into a place and there’s damp, mould, one of the windows is broken and jammed open. Which of course can’t be fixed because the good citizen landlord is responsibly self-isolating.
Of course not all of them are pricks and despite my personal issues with ‘property/land hoarding’ I hope that reasonable and responsible landlords who don’t gouge their tenants and do such revolutionary things as basic maintenance don’t have people using this extraordinary situation to fuck them over.
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On March 30 2020 12:13 Zambrah wrote:
Or she was complaining to her son, and like all people sees only her own situation fully and thus complains with that viewpoint, her son, again not HER, her son, posts about it on a forum.
And you think you have all the details.
I'm sure you hear Trump say we're doing GREAT at this corona virus thing and you believe it huh, after all he SAID it!
I'm glad youre able to see the entire story so clearly through a few sentences from a forum post by the son of a person who owns lots of property is being negatively impacted, like most people, by the corona virus.
So to reiterate, you get second hand, one sided information, and you think you have the whole picture?
You don't need certainty of every detail to have a discussion. You can fill in any details that you disagree with and then a discussion will happen around those facts. I'd draw back to this question:
Even if we presume the absolute worst happened to this person and they deserve to pay no rent. Do you think there would be a better way to phrase their need?
Your opinion seems to be along the lines of: Yes, but I don't think that the tenant responded that way. The owner would be biased and exaggerated how the tenant responded to make themselves appear good.
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I think the argument in favor of the landlord is like arguing what color to repaint the titanic as it sinks. The position of the landlord in this scenario isn't sustainable and this current crisis has just made it obvious/undeniable.
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Some very weird stuff is going to happen between now and Friday with regards to rent being due from people with empty accounts. Some people probably don't have 3 weeks of food money.
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Wow, I didn't expect so much support here for Adidas, H&M and others not paying rent for their closed stores to their capitalistic scum landlords.
In Germany most of the political landscape are rather opposed to that.
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On March 30 2020 11:16 Zambrah wrote:
again, he doesnt actually mention their employment status, being two months behind on rent, lets say, and then being employed for four months is STILL not likely to give you that extra rent money, and thats charitably assuming they find employment that may not even EXIST two months in. When people are forced to live paycheck to paycheck missing one or two large payments and owing 1,000USD or likely much more isnt something you can easily just pull out of your ass in bad economic times.
Even if they found employment again it may very well be paying a lot less than they were seeing before the virus hit.
Lets not just assume these people have lots of saved money, and are employed at good paying jobs with no gaps during a time with record unemployment and the general paycheck to paycheck state of American living.
EDIT: well, if someone cant AFFORD to have lots and lots of mortgages maybe one shouldnt HAVE lots and lots of mortgages if they require others to pay those mortgages for them (which it sure sounds like Emjay's mom is doing.) Its not like shes a tenant who has the one place that they have so that they can live in it. If you take out lots of mortgages in order to have tenants pay your mortgage so that one day you will make lots and lots of money, I have very little sympathy for you past a certain point, and I think owning commercial property and multiple houses is past my certain point.
My parents improve the houses they buy to make it up-to-code to have home-care patients (this is a very Filipino thing to do in Hawaii, its quite common). This costs anywhere from 50k-100k investments when completely renovating a house. All of our tenants have home care patients, theyre not unemployed. With three home care patients you easily make an upwards of 100k a year.
My assumption is that the tenant intends to save as much money as possible and find a new home to live in once the 6-month period is up. Squatting is the preferred term I would use, I suppose.
edit: Also the argument that "a landlord has more mortgages than they can manage" thing sounds quite silly to me. Lets just say that my mom only invests into one home. But that one home ends up being the squatting tenant, would then my mom have more sympathy? lol.
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On March 30 2020 15:04 mahrgell wrote:
Wow, I didn't expect so much support here for Adidas, H&M and others not paying rent for their closed stores to their capitalistic scum landlords.
In Germany most of the political landscape are rather opposed to that.
well to be fair at least they're talking to their respective landlords and ostensibly have found rather amicable solutions.
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On March 30 2020 12:13 Zambrah wrote:
Or she was complaining to her son, and like all people sees only her own situation fully and thus complains with that viewpoint, her son, again not HER, her son, posts about it on a forum.
And you think you have all the details.
I'm sure you hear Trump say we're doing GREAT at this corona virus thing and you believe it huh, after all he SAID it!
I'm glad youre able to see the entire story so clearly through a few sentences from a forum post by the son of a person who owns lots of property is being negatively impacted, like most people, by the corona virus.
So to reiterate, you get second hand, one sided information, and you think you have the whole picture?
So what? Maybe she doesn't even own houses and the poster is a troll who made up the whole thing to begin with. It wouldn't change anything from the perspective of what is right or wrong in principle. Someone taking advantage of the crisis to scam his landlord is scummy if he would be able to pay and, especially, if the landlord isn't someone who can take the loss of income. That is just common sense tbh.
To clarify: I don't believe you're lying Emnjay.
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Since everyone is giving the personal experience of the landlords to humanize them, how about me giving my personal experience with my landlord.
Not that long ago, my wife and i were sold with the apartment we live in, like medieval serfs on their turf. That on its own didn't feel good, at all. Especially considering the added insecurity of him now being able to throw us out of our apartment on a three months notice if he decides that he or someone in his family wants to live there. He already announced that his son will probably want to live there in 2-3 years. So we are now living in constant fear as to when that happens, and how we are going to find a new, affordable apartment in Munich.
Immediately thereafter, the new landlord raised the rent by as far as he legally could. This was also the only thing he did with the apartment. It was very important to him to explain that to me, how we were paying little rent, and how the poor man who only just bought an apartment for a few hundred thousand euros as an investment really had no choice but to increase our rent.We have the choice to accept this, or try to find a new apartment close to munich, which is basically impossible.
My wife and i are both currently mainly students with some side income to pay the bills on our own. Most of our budget consists of the rent, electricity, heating and other fixed costs. Of the remainder of our money, food is the top expense, and we don't buy expensive food. We basically do not buy fun stuff. And still, this man who bought us has decided that he deserves the little money we have more than we do.
Now, with this crisis, my income has dropped significantly, because i finance myself through tutoring high school students, and those don't want someone else in their house right now. My wife luckily has a more steady source of income and doesn't have this problem. This was not planned to last forever, but this hits us at our most vulnerable. Here in Germany, no one is even thinking of reducing rent payments, or giving money to people like me.
We have some money (not gigantic amounts) saved up from our wedding, which we were hoping to keep as a buffer or possibly do something fun for ourselves with. Now, all of that money will probably go towards our owner. And there is nothing we can do about it. Because society decided that he deserves all of our money just for owning stuff, and that we should be the ones paying for the crisis while income from owning stuff should be completely untouched. He added no value to the apartment, he didn't create new living space for people by building new apartments, he just bought it and owns it now. And this crisis is something that we are expected to pay completely from our own money, while he gets to collect all that money and buy more stuff to get more money.
So excuse me if my empathy for the poor class of multiple-house-owners is very limited.
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My slumlord didn't change out the rattling windows to my apartment. They're definitely not energy efficient seeing as how high my heating bill was during the winter. He didn't do anything about the bedbug infestation either, so I bought some diatomaceous earth to spread around the apartment, which probably did nothing as I'm still getting bit. Ironically that's how I ended up with a bunch of n95 respirators when I bought them on the cheap since I didn't want these microscopic glass particulates in my lungs as I was spreading them around. Can't gtfo soon enough.
The slumlord before that kept my deposit because he was an asshole and I didn't have hot water because he didn't pay his gas heating bill that was under his name.
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On March 30 2020 19:24 riotjune wrote:
My slumlord didn't change out the rattling windows to my apartment. They're definitely not energy efficient seeing as how high my heating bill was during the winter. He didn't do anything about the bedbug infestation either, so I bought some diatomaceous earth to spread around the apartment, which probably did nothing as I'm still getting bit. Ironically that's how I ended up with a bunch of n95 respirators when I bought them on the cheap since I didn't want these microscopic glass particulates in my lungs as I was spreading them around. Can't gtfo soon enough.
The slumlord before that kept my deposit because he was an asshole and I didn't have hot water because he didn't pay his gas heating bill.
same story is repeated over and over by the people I'm organizing with against predatory slumlords leeching off workers (the mask thing is a corona twist), but black mold and other respiratory threats are common.
This situation gave tenant's the slightest bit of leverage so of course the slumlords that are used to having such a dominant relationship to their tenants are freaking out (despite the slumlords already having a bailout available).
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There are good and bad landlords, sure.
But there needs to be a societal change regarding basic human rights like shelter, water and food.
People should be able to eat the most basic sustenance or have something over their head to keep them relatively dry at the very least.
I'm afraid if we go to a more fundamental level on how this problem should be tackled (landlords don't like people squatting <--> tenants can't always pay rent) we'll just end up at the difference in personalities and it'll be once again a shouting match of 'who has the best/correct principles'.
And I don't have the time right now to go into a larger moral framework or how to set something up, but we should start from a point of agreement. Sure, tenants should pay their rent and landlords should be reasonable. How can we extend this and come to a compromise without starting to call people out for opportunistic squatters or scummy slumlords?
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I get the impresion that poles got bored out of the quarantine and are going out more than they should. Today i am in office as i need to sort some things out and as a side effect i have a nice view on the streets and traffic in the citycenter. During the morning the streets were almost empty which means a lot less people commuting to work during 'rush hours'. But during midday the traffic is much bigger, still smaller than usual but to a much smaller degree. To me this means people are going about doing their midday stuff almost as nothing have happened. I have bad feeling about how this is going to end.
I defiently agree that a topic on land/house/flat ownership would be ncie. I myself have few things to chip in on the issue.
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On March 30 2020 19:40 Silvanel wrote:
I get the impresion that poles got bored out of the quarantine and are going out more than they should. Today i am in office as i need to sort some things out and as a side effect i have a nice view on the streets and traffic in the citycenter. During the morning the streets were almost empty which means a lot less people commuting to work during 'rush hours'. But during midday the traffic is much bigger, still smaller than usual but to a much smaller degree. To me this means people are going about doing their midday stuff almost as nothing have happened. I have bad feeling about how this is going to end.
I defiently agree that a topic on land/house/flat ownership would be ncie. I myself have few things to chip in on the issue.
Some of the midday stuff might not be something that can be avoided. Especially groceries are simply necessary every few days in a modern society, or you don't have any food anymore.
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On March 30 2020 19:37 Uldridge wrote:
There are good and bad landlords, sure.
But there needs to be a societal change regarding basic human rights like shelter, water and food.
People should be able to eat the most basic sustenance or have something over their head to keep them relatively dry at the very least.
I'm afraid if we go to a more fundamental level on how this problem should be tackled (landlords don't like people squatting <--> tenants can't always pay rent) we'll just end up at the difference in personalities and it'll be once again a shouting match of 'who has the best/correct principles'.
And I don't have the time right now to go into a larger moral framework or how to set something up, but we should start from a point of agreement. Sure, tenants should pay their rent and landlords should be reasonable. How can we extend this and come to a compromise without starting to call people out for opportunistic squatters or scummy slumlords?
Same compromise that had to happen in the feudalistic systems from which these lords draw their title I imagine. A new system, in this case one that has many of the same vulnerabilities but humanity rather than profit driven framing.
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On March 30 2020 18:33 Simberto wrote:
Since everyone is giving the personal experience of the landlords to humanize them, how about me giving my personal experience with my landlord.
Not that long ago, my wife and i were sold with the apartment we live in, like medieval serfs on their turf. That on its own didn't feel good, at all. Especially considering the added insecurity of him now being able to throw us out of our apartment on a three months notice if he decides that he or someone in his family wants to live there. He already announced that his son will probably want to live there in 2-3 years. So we are now living in constant fear as to when that happens, and how we are going to find a new, affordable apartment in Munich.
Immediately thereafter, the new landlord raised the rent by as far as he legally could. This was also the only thing he did with the apartment. It was very important to him to explain that to me, how we were paying little rent, and how the poor man who only just bought an apartment for a few hundred thousand euros as an investment really had no choice but to increase our rent.We have the choice to accept this, or try to find a new apartment close to munich, which is basically impossible.
My wife and i are both currently mainly students with some side income to pay the bills on our own. Most of our budget consists of the rent, electricity, heating and other fixed costs. Of the remainder of our money, food is the top expense, and we don't buy expensive food. We basically do not buy fun stuff. And still, this man who bought us has decided that he deserves the little money we have more than we do.
Now, with this crisis, my income has dropped significantly, because i finance myself through tutoring high school students, and those don't want someone else in their house right now. My wife luckily has a more steady source of income and doesn't have this problem. This was not planned to last forever, but this hits us at our most vulnerable. Here in Germany, no one is even thinking of reducing rent payments, or giving money to people like me.
We have some money (not gigantic amounts) saved up from our wedding, which we were hoping to keep as a buffer or possibly do something fun for ourselves with. Now, all of that money will probably go towards our owner. And there is nothing we can do about it. Because society decided that he deserves all of our money just for owning stuff, and that we should be the ones paying for the crisis while income from owning stuff should be completely untouched. He added no value to the apartment, he didn't create new living space for people by building new apartments, he just bought it and owns it now. And this crisis is something that we are expected to pay completely from our own money, while he gets to collect all that money and buy more stuff to get more money.
So excuse me if my empathy for the poor class of multiple-house-owners is very limited.
Perhaps a silly question, but have you contacted your landlord and explained that you are really tight on money right now and would appreciate a temporary drop in rent?
Your post doesn't make it 100% clear but I get the impression that he jacked the prices up long before the corona crisis started? It's worth a shot to ask for lower rent in April at least.
I rent out an appartment myself. While I didn't proactively contact the couple living there if they were impacted by corona and wanted to pay less, I am very willing to compromise if/when they contact me.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On March 30 2020 18:33 Simberto wrote:
Since everyone is giving the personal experience of the landlords to humanize them, how about me giving my personal experience with my landlord.
Not that long ago, my wife and i were sold with the apartment we live in, like medieval serfs on their turf. That on its own didn't feel good, at all. Especially considering the added insecurity of him now being able to throw us out of our apartment on a three months notice if he decides that he or someone in his family wants to live there. He already announced that his son will probably want to live there in 2-3 years. So we are now living in constant fear as to when that happens, and how we are going to find a new, affordable apartment in Munich.
Immediately thereafter, the new landlord raised the rent by as far as he legally could. This was also the only thing he did with the apartment. It was very important to him to explain that to me, how we were paying little rent, and how the poor man who only just bought an apartment for a few hundred thousand euros as an investment really had no choice but to increase our rent.We have the choice to accept this, or try to find a new apartment close to munich, which is basically impossible.
My wife and i are both currently mainly students with some side income to pay the bills on our own. Most of our budget consists of the rent, electricity, heating and other fixed costs. Of the remainder of our money, food is the top expense, and we don't buy expensive food. We basically do not buy fun stuff. And still, this man who bought us has decided that he deserves the little money we have more than we do.
Now, with this crisis, my income has dropped significantly, because i finance myself through tutoring high school students, and those don't want someone else in their house right now. My wife luckily has a more steady source of income and doesn't have this problem. This was not planned to last forever, but this hits us at our most vulnerable. Here in Germany, no one is even thinking of reducing rent payments, or giving money to people like me.
We have some money (not gigantic amounts) saved up from our wedding, which we were hoping to keep as a buffer or possibly do something fun for ourselves with. Now, all of that money will probably go towards our owner. And there is nothing we can do about it. Because society decided that he deserves all of our money just for owning stuff, and that we should be the ones paying for the crisis while income from owning stuff should be completely untouched. He added no value to the apartment, he didn't create new living space for people by building new apartments, he just bought it and owns it now. And this crisis is something that we are expected to pay completely from our own money, while he gets to collect all that money and buy more stuff to get more money.
So excuse me if my empathy for the poor class of multiple-house-owners is very limited.
I honestly don't see the landlord as being as much at fault in your specific situation as you want to make it seem. It sounds like what happened is that the market price has grown to the point that you can no longer comfortably afford to live in/near Munich, and when the apartment changed hands, the new owner wanted a rent more in line with the market price. Probably especially true since if he were to keep the original rent price, after paying the new market price to buy the property, he'd be losing money himself. By the very concept of renting, unless you have an agreement to the contrary:
1. You are not entitled to be able to live in the same place forever; only through the duration of the contract you sign. So they're fully within their right to kick you out if they don't want to rent to you for any reason.
2. You are not entitled to a certain price well beyond the duration of this agreement if that price is well below market, and there are no legal rules to the contrary.
However, this isn't to bash your situation, just to point out that I don't think your disdain is targeted correctly at landlords who can afford to buy what you are renting. There are a few good topics of bad landlord behavior that come out of the scenario you describe that are better worth directing the anger towards:
1. Sometimes there is a legal agreement to the contrary that guarantees you a certain price. In the US, that often comes in the form of rent control, which after some number of years can leave apartments being rented for a small fraction of what their market price is for a city whose prices have gone stratospheric. Here, you see the scummiest landlord behavior you can find, doing anything and everything they can to squeeze the tenants that are legally entitled to what they're renting out of their property. Bribing them out is the most benign, but I've seen cases where these landlords try to force an elderly lady out of her property on the most benign violation of a technicality of the contract (e.g. a visitor who visited for 10 days and 2 hours when the duration limit is 10 days) and that large rental company will try to use their expensive legal team to win a frivolous case by brute force. That's far more extreme than what you're dealing with, where the landlord is merely doing the most that's within their legal right to do, but it reminds me of that scenario.
2. You mentioned that the landlord "didn't do anything other than raise the rent." In your particular situation I am inclined to think that that's not necessarily true - renting is mostly passive, but when something breaks, it's neither easy nor cheap to replace expensive components of a property that failed - but some landlords do genuinely just let their property rot because they make better margins on that than on fixing a broken roof or a gas leak or something of the sort. That definitely falls into GH's slumlord topic, a genuine bad-faith landlord practice. If the landlord will fix a broken window or a broken roof if they're damaged in, say, a hailstorm - this hardly applies to you.
3. As a point that is perhaps the most relevant to your specific situation, prices certainly have gone in an absurd direction in too many places. This wasn't always the case, but especially within the past 20 years - a few select cities (i.e. the only cities in our economy where there are jobs to be had) have skyrocketed in price to the point that they become unaffordable for the average new buyer. A mix of job destruction and loose monetary policy, which has buried hyperinflation in the price of assets (stocks and real estate) instead of in the price of a gallon of milk or carton of eggs, has made these prices lose all relationship with reality. And while governments are largely to blame for this, it's worth noting that big-ticket landlords - think Donald Trump, not the kind of landlord that owns four small apartments - have done everything they can to reduce the availability of affordable housing so that their own real estate suddenly becomes worth much, much more.
Some concerns here are genuine to be sure, but the disdain targeted at small-time landlords being screwed over by bad tenants is not at all warranted.
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We did not pay low rent before, either.
Basically, the maximum amount he was legally allowed to raise the rent by was the lower of either 20%, or up to average price in the area + 10%.
We were previously at about 95% of the average price in the area, now we are at 110% (+ a bit more because the lawyers he had check this argued that some of the stuff in our apartment, like a floor, makes it especially valuable). And i absolutely can blame him for that. He is not "losing" money on us. We were paying him a lot of money for our 60m² apartment 25 km from the center of Munich before. He was just not extracting as much money as legally possible from us, which he changed the second he got a chance to do so.
And sure, it is his legal right to do so. Doesn't mean that i need to be happy about it, or that i cannot see him extracting all that he can from us as a dickish move, when in fact the amount of money he raised our rent by would be a drop in the bucket for him, but basically all of our discretionary money we can spend on fun stuff gone for us, leaving us in a state where we give most of the money we earn to the guy who bought us. He could just have chosen to not raise the rent. He is already gaining about 5% a year just in the increase of the value of the property.
I am sure that there are some nice landlords out there who take fair prices. But a lot of them just see their tenants as money fountains that they need to squeeze the absolute maximum amount of money from.
Renting is passive, which is my problem. Someone who does nothing gets money, just because he owns stuff. Meanwhile, the people who actually do things have to pay to be allowed to use the thing they really have no choice but to use. This means that owning is better than working. But it is not as if i can easily get onto that train now that i realize that i should just own stuff and get money for zero work, instead of working for a living. Because all the good stuff has been grabbed generations ago. Leaving me having to work hard just to give everything i earn to the people who were born lucky and managed to inherit stuff.
If i work hard for all my life, and don't really spend any money on enjoying my life, and then invent a time machine to travel back to 1950, then i can also be part of that owner class. If not, they can just leech off of the stuff i do, and i have no choice about it.
And now in this crisis, they once again demand to be paid in full for their hard work of owning things, while i can't even work to gain that money. Why can they not be the people who take the hit for once? Why is it always the bottom rank of the ladder who has to shoulder all of the hardship, while the top always comes first when it comes to collecting money, and last when it comes to paying their fair share?
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