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this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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I would say your aunt sounds like she found a way to try and make a living. You can certainly take issue with the system but she didn't make it. She sounds decent and not unlike my parents who bought some apartments in the early 2000s. What apparently people somehow don't realize, is that when you're not a corporation or running rental property like a huge dickhead, it's actually a lot of work to either pay others to do or to do yourself. The situation my parents were in was the bluest of collar jobs.
My mom cleaning toilets and filthy refrigerators, my dad dropping everything or getting out of bed to go fix someone's heat. This image that apparently 80% of commenters here have that they're just laying back collecting easy money couldn't have been further from the truth. They were working their ass off to make any money because they couldn't afford to hire most tasks.
They rented to people for under the market rate, they let old people stay over a year without paying. They drove significant drives to pick up rent checks from weirdos who couldn't handle mailing payments for some reason. The horror stories of how people abused their kindness and trashed their apartments are endless. SO many difficult tenants, and hundreds of thousands of back breaking hours later, they sold the apartments and made a little money. I will easily retire with more money than they made by writing software from the comfort of my home. Next to my parents' struggle with this, my life is incredibly easy.
But somehow, to a lot of lemmings, my work is honest and my parents are exploitative leeches who are morally bankrupt for their choice to take all that shit on (btw we have said nothing about the risk of enormous unexpected expenses or things like being sued by a tenant faking an injury and arguing in court it was your fault).
Is your aunt a parasite? sounds like she absolutely isn't. I'd say anyone willing to read what you wrote here and say she is, is probably an out of touch asshole whose opinion shouldn't be valued. But that may just be because I have the 20 years of watching my parents struggle to do that job and it wasn't easy for them except those few elusive weeks a year that somehow no apartments had anything break and no one moved. That entire 20 years they were afraid to even go on vacation because someone might have a water heater stop working or something.
Of course many would say "why wouldn't they just hire those maintenance items taken care of?!" I mean yeah of course, and I wasn't privy to their financial details all those years but it always sounded like they were only able to make money because they did most everything themselves. My parents were the ones exploited. By tenants being shitty and taking advantage sometimes, by the sellers, but most of all, by capitalism. They had to trade their lives for money, and nothing about it was easy. Anyone looking at the situation and unable to see that it was hard just honestly has no empathy at all.
This thread was a disappointing read. I have seen the spectrum, and corporate fuckhead landlords are complete scum. Honest, hardworking people who treat their tenants well are NOT, and anyone who tries to erase that nuance just wants to feel superior and probably should seek therapy (even more so than your average person -- we all need it).
If they are not charging rent for a year because they are letting an old widow live there, thrn thry are running a charity, they are not acting as a land lord.
Not sure what you want me to say about that. They certainly made a modest profit overall. Like I said, they had cheap rent. People are more complicated than just a label though.
Here lets try this. How do we talk about groups? I can say the Catholic church is against capital punishment, and that is true, but i also personally know many Catholics that are for capital punishment.
Can i not honestly say Catholics are against capital punishment?
If I say officially the church is against capital punishment am I reducing the complexity of of the Catholics that are for it?
How can i talk about landlords?
This post presents a specific question. I bore with you people on this. Read the post and my comment and move on. I'm not going to rehash everything 100 times for mental sloths
It sounds like your parents were less of landlords and more of providing. A normal landlord is absolutely charging enough to cover calling someone out and evicting people who cannot or will not pay.
Yes, and I would agree that even most landlords are unsavory at best. What I'm taking issue with are absolutist views that say 'no, without exception, x is true '. It's just thought-terminating mental laziness and it's not helpful.
The problem is systemic though. That's why it's a general statement. Just like super philanthropic billionaires exist, but we still say there should be no billionaires. You don't make a movement by adding asterisks.
Take a step back and realize that you just read that story and then compared my parents to billionaires. I could read that very charitably and say you only meant that generalizations are "helpful" for inspiring change, but even that doesn't sit right...
I'm trying to tell you that I don't think literally saying "ALL landlords are scum" is helpful. Take or leave but I don't think there's an honest way to deny that.
I could compare them to cops if that would make you feel better. Or the outdated western US water rights system. Landlords shouldn't exist in the form they do now. That somewhere, someone is doing it in the hardest way possible doesn't somehow make the system better.
Whatever you say. In every way that matters I myself am closer to a billionaire than my parents. And I'm not close. But don't let that stop your mentally lazy infighting with your own class, assuming you aren't a billionaire yourself
What you're not getting is that I don't care about your parents. They are neither good or evil to me. I care about the 99 percent of landlords exploiting people. The existence of one good person in a bad system does not make the system any less parasitical.
Lol the ONLY thing I get is that you don't care about my parents. Well, that and that maligning people you ought to want to rise up with is of no importance. Only declaring enemies whether accurate or not
At no point did I disagree that the system is bad and in fact I said it was. My entire underlying message is that hating individuals blindly helps the fucking system
If people don't even care if they are declaring war on their own fucking class, no wonder we still live under this bullshit. The Internet was a bad idea. I'd much rather think people like you wouldn't act like this because if we talked about what we do agree about the world probably wouldn't be such a depressing shit hole. but no, here we are exchanging blows for no reason
As a neutral outside reader, this person does not sound like they are hating on your parents specifically, and you come across as extremely defensive (understandably). Their point seems to be that the existence of a good cop doesn't make the police state tolerable, nor does the existence of a good landlord make the system of people owning other's homes tolerable.
Regardless of how good any landlord is, it would be better for homes to be affordable and owned by those that live in them. In the current system, some areas are unaffordable without renting, but that doesn't make the landlords morally good categorically, it means they're part of the problem that drives prices too high in an area. Owning property to rent artificially drives the price of real estate up. Ideally, renting should be far, far more limited or entirely phased out depending on the specific situation. No one is saying that your parents specifically are evil, but they are part of a larger system that is.
See the disconnect here is that somehow some seem to have the idea that I'm defending landlords in general, when all I'm really doing is trying to let OP know that I identify with their situation and find it shitty that so many people came into the thread so say essentially "nope no exceptions, your aunt sucks". We could all agree the system sucks and I think I did a decent job of saying I agree with that. I don't know that renting shouldn't exist but I definitely think its current state is unacceptable and we'd probably have a lot to agree on about the reasons.
I never expected that dude to "care about" my parents. I expected them to at least accept that their absolutes don't hold. Saying "I don't care about your parents" is not necessary and was just meant to be rude. 🤷♂️
When they said, "I don't care about your parents," it was an expression of apathy, not animosity. It was them telling you that they agree, and that their point is about the greater system, not that guy's aunt or your parents. You took it personally and got more defensive. Their absolute does hold, because it's in regard to a system. The point isn't that your parents are individually bad people, like you seem to think it is, it's that they're part of a bad system, and regardless of their individual actions, the system is still bad. Fundamentally, you, the other commenters, and I agree. They aren't trying to argue that you're defending landlords in general, the argument is that your defense of your parents excuses them from the system.
A fair and kind cop is still responsible for participating in an evil system, just as your parents are. They may be good people, with good intentions, and treat people well. No one is denying that. It's just entirely besides the point. They're still hoarding property that should be possessed by those that live in them, and housing should be cheaper. Without landlords and real estate conglomerates driving prices high, there should be a surplus of housing. Again, your parents might be good people, but they are participating in an immoral system. Even the best landlord is still a landlord, and while they are nowhere near anyone's first target to fix the system, they're still participating.
The best cop is still a cop, the best billionaire is still a billionaire, and the best landlord is still a landlord. It's nothing personal against them specifically.
Nope and I didn't say animosity. It was an expression of being a dick on purpose. Not sure how that could be misinterpreted.
No it doesn't and no it isn't. You don't get to just reject the premise of this post and reign down judgement on every rando you never met and be the precise type of asshole I mentioned in my first comment. You're rejecting any shred of empathy and therefore I have no reason to care about what you write.
Ditto to what I just wrote also with a side of "fuck that dehumanizing horseshit"
They didn't compare your parents to billionaires though? Are you unfamiliar with how analogies work...?
Their point was that my parents belong to a class of evil people, which I thoroughly demonstrated was false. And even if you ignore that, you can't pretend that chosen example was meaningless
This sort of landlord apologia isn't necessary and is actually harmful to the reputation of landlords like your parents, the OP's aunt, and their beneficiaries. You even managed to sneak some resentment towards tenants in there. Maybe after expenses the rental income was disappointing to them sometimes, but at the end of the day your parents owned other people's homes. Just be conscious of your station and have some quiet dignity about it.
This post is about the topic. I gave my opinion on it and why. I've done nothing to harm anyone, and I spoke about specific extremely shitty tenants.
I guess this is one of those cases where you decided a stranger is randomly lying and you know the real story. Have fun with that
Where did I say that you were lying?
This seems to imply that the tenants did nothing wrong, but we were mad we couldn't exploit them further. Which isn't true at all. I only mentioned the tenants behavior because I know that my parents gave them empathy and leeway and though there may have been some legit complaints against them (trust me my parents aren't perfect), I heard several crazy stories that for a small business owner who is being understanding and doing right by people, it comes off especially personal when those same people trash the apartment and then also don't pay thousands of dollars which they owed.
Tldr; some people are selfish and really suck to deal with and those people also end up renting apartments
I didn't imply that all tenants are perfectly well behaved. I implied that you a repeating the misconception that landlords provide housing, that they undertake a remarkable burden that makes them deserving of every cent of rental income they collect. It's a trope that elides the simple fact that renting housing is predicated not on any sort of actual work a landlord does, but rather the ability to withhold or take away housing from people. Stop pretending otherwise. Your parents are or were landlords. You dishonor them to try and sugarcoat it.
If I didn't think you were intentionally ignoring the point I would say you don't seem like a strong reader. I guess really what you're saying is that you're the horrible deadbeat tenant, needlessly destroying property and refusing to pay money you agreed to pay, and you're here trying to dress up being a shitty person in a pseudo intellectual argument. Otherwise it wouldn't really make sense for you to come along and strongly defend people that you literally only know are pieces of shit. Stellar priorities.
What kind of an idiot reads a story about blue collar workers getting people's home issues fixed at 1am and immediately responds LaNdLoRdS dO nO wOrK. Fucking pathetic brainrot bullshit. You are absolutely someone who would trash an apartment and fuck real people who you have pretended to be nice to out of $5000 and pretend you're morally justified.
Blocked.
I never said landlords do no work.