Landlords are parasites, ask me how!
May. 25th, 2021 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alex_antoninSo... starting from a post on Reddit about replacing gendered words with non gendered words, we got to a good long post about why landlords are parasites:
KraZwhale: how is landlord sexist?
burningonyx: Probably because lords are always men. Anyway, a better term for landlord is "parasite."
forced_metaphor: Uh Jesus. Fucking sue me for renting out a room in my house. Wtf. You don't have to live there.
burningonyx:
I'm not talking about people who sublet. I'm talking about people who buy up houses by the dozens and then drive up the property values so that poor people can no longer afford to buy houses and then extort money from those poor people and paint themselves as providing a service when what they're really doing is making it impossible for anyone other than the insanely rich to buy a house. I'm talking also about corporations that have hundreds of houses and apartment buildings, charging ridiculous amounts of money and making billions in profits by preying on the poor while doing basically nothing in exchange. Landlords also pressure banks into rejecting home loans for poor people. I could afford a $300 a month mortgage on a house, but because of my income I'd never be seriously considered for a home loan, and even if I was, the landlords have all driven the cost of the available houses up to 10 times what they should be.
Furthermore, let's look at cost versus what you get for it. Landlords would have us believe that my apartment, which is a combined kitchen/living room, a bedroom, and a single bathroom, should cost $700 or more a month to rent. That's $8400 a year... for what? A place to sleep and eat every day? If it was rent to own, I could kinda see it. But a place to eat and sleep is literally all I get for it, my landlord doesn't even fucking do maintenance. Oh, they have maintenance guys, but they don't do any actual work. I had to get my toilet seat replaced because these assholes bought the single most shittily made toilet seat in the world. A week after they replaced it, it broke again. So I just gave up because clearly they're more concerned about their 99% profit margin than in doing anything useful.
And even if they were great at maintenance, and didn't cheap out, how would that be worth $700 a month? For $700 a month I could buy a new computer every month. If I saved $8400 in a year, I could buy a car.
But think: $8400 a year, from a single apartment. This building has 20 apartments in it. That's $168,000 a year. I could buy an entire house for what these assholes make in a year by charging people for the right to exist. And these assholes own like 10 properties, just in my area alone. I know at least one of those has like 50 apartments in it. And all of these properties are actually low income apartments, so I'm paying $200 a month for this apartment, and they get a government subsidy for the rest of that $700 a month. These people are making millions of dollars every year off people who can barely afford to eat even with their rent being largely subsidized. And they're charging us the maximum amount they're allowed to charge. They could be charging less and still getting their full $700 per apartment, but they're like "Nah, we're going to charge as much as we're legally allowed to charge. So what if a difference of $20 means the difference between running out of food before the end of the month?" Hence why I call landlords parasites. Because they do nothing but suck the money and life out of us who live in poverty.
But oh, sure, go ahead and think that I give a single solitary fuck about you subletting a single room. As if that's even remotely close to the same thing.
Basically, you're not a landlord. You're a serf with delusions of grandeur.
Burningonyx:
Oh and, not only do I get nothing out of my part of the $8400 a year I make for these assholes, I can be evicted at any time for not paying rent one month. I've been living under this company's management for like 10 years. So basically, I can sink thousands of dollars into fattening up these parasitic worms over the last decade and all that pure profit I made them means nothing to them if I miss a single payment. Miss a single payment, boom, I'm out on the streets. They're making thousands of dollars from just me existing in a space they've squatted down on, and I don't even get the benefit of some flexibility if something happens to fuck up my income unexpectedly.
Don't start in about the laws around evictions. That's one parasite keeping another parasite in check. Landlords wouldn't hesitate to throw me out on my ass the day after a missed rent check if they could get away with it.
Yes, the government are also parasites. But that's a whole other rant.
KraZwhale: how is landlord sexist?
burningonyx: Probably because lords are always men. Anyway, a better term for landlord is "parasite."
forced_metaphor: Uh Jesus. Fucking sue me for renting out a room in my house. Wtf. You don't have to live there.
burningonyx:
I'm not talking about people who sublet. I'm talking about people who buy up houses by the dozens and then drive up the property values so that poor people can no longer afford to buy houses and then extort money from those poor people and paint themselves as providing a service when what they're really doing is making it impossible for anyone other than the insanely rich to buy a house. I'm talking also about corporations that have hundreds of houses and apartment buildings, charging ridiculous amounts of money and making billions in profits by preying on the poor while doing basically nothing in exchange. Landlords also pressure banks into rejecting home loans for poor people. I could afford a $300 a month mortgage on a house, but because of my income I'd never be seriously considered for a home loan, and even if I was, the landlords have all driven the cost of the available houses up to 10 times what they should be.
Furthermore, let's look at cost versus what you get for it. Landlords would have us believe that my apartment, which is a combined kitchen/living room, a bedroom, and a single bathroom, should cost $700 or more a month to rent. That's $8400 a year... for what? A place to sleep and eat every day? If it was rent to own, I could kinda see it. But a place to eat and sleep is literally all I get for it, my landlord doesn't even fucking do maintenance. Oh, they have maintenance guys, but they don't do any actual work. I had to get my toilet seat replaced because these assholes bought the single most shittily made toilet seat in the world. A week after they replaced it, it broke again. So I just gave up because clearly they're more concerned about their 99% profit margin than in doing anything useful.
And even if they were great at maintenance, and didn't cheap out, how would that be worth $700 a month? For $700 a month I could buy a new computer every month. If I saved $8400 in a year, I could buy a car.
But think: $8400 a year, from a single apartment. This building has 20 apartments in it. That's $168,000 a year. I could buy an entire house for what these assholes make in a year by charging people for the right to exist. And these assholes own like 10 properties, just in my area alone. I know at least one of those has like 50 apartments in it. And all of these properties are actually low income apartments, so I'm paying $200 a month for this apartment, and they get a government subsidy for the rest of that $700 a month. These people are making millions of dollars every year off people who can barely afford to eat even with their rent being largely subsidized. And they're charging us the maximum amount they're allowed to charge. They could be charging less and still getting their full $700 per apartment, but they're like "Nah, we're going to charge as much as we're legally allowed to charge. So what if a difference of $20 means the difference between running out of food before the end of the month?" Hence why I call landlords parasites. Because they do nothing but suck the money and life out of us who live in poverty.
But oh, sure, go ahead and think that I give a single solitary fuck about you subletting a single room. As if that's even remotely close to the same thing.
Basically, you're not a landlord. You're a serf with delusions of grandeur.
Burningonyx:
Oh and, not only do I get nothing out of my part of the $8400 a year I make for these assholes, I can be evicted at any time for not paying rent one month. I've been living under this company's management for like 10 years. So basically, I can sink thousands of dollars into fattening up these parasitic worms over the last decade and all that pure profit I made them means nothing to them if I miss a single payment. Miss a single payment, boom, I'm out on the streets. They're making thousands of dollars from just me existing in a space they've squatted down on, and I don't even get the benefit of some flexibility if something happens to fuck up my income unexpectedly.
Don't start in about the laws around evictions. That's one parasite keeping another parasite in check. Landlords wouldn't hesitate to throw me out on my ass the day after a missed rent check if they could get away with it.
Yes, the government are also parasites. But that's a whole other rant.