Did you guys know most rental properties are made of wood?
Unrelated but apparently worker termite colonies will molt into reproductive adults in the absence of a queen and many hobby sources supply worker termites to most US states! It can be a fun and fulfilling hobby for those of all walks of life.
Lemmings continue to vastly underestimate who landlords are.
In fact, fewer than one-fifth of rental properties are owned by for-profit businesses of any kind. Most rental properties – about seven-in-ten – are owned by individuals, who typically own just one or two properties, according to 2018 census data. And landlords have complained about being unable to meet their obligations, such as mortgage payments, property taxes and repair bills, because of a falloff in rent payments.
Individual investors owned nearly 14.3 million of those properties (71.6%), comprising almost 19.9 million units (41.2%). For-profit businesses of various sorts owned 3.7 million properties, or 18.8%, but their holdings totaled 21.7 million units, or 45% of the total. Entities such as housing cooperative organizations and nonprofits owned smaller shares of the total.
only about half of individual landlords reported net income in 2018, with the rest losing money on their properties. Such losses can, under certain conditions, be used to offset other taxable income.
I’m glad to see some actual numbers. I am curious how quickly that is changing. I was a social worker for ten years until the last few months, and I would help people find housing all the time. It feels like there used to be more “mom and pop” landlords when I first started compared to now. Now I see this corporate players for the majority of rental listings.
I think the high price of housing will eventually prevent most individuals from buying a rental property, and like every other industry, the immensely wealthy corporations will take over. My last landlord paid $800 per month for her mortgage on the place. If someone wanted to buy a comparative property to rent out today, their mortgage would be closer to $5400 per month. There aren’t a lot of people who could commit to that. The ladders are being pulled up.
Ok, now what conclusions do you want people to take away from this information?
Possible takeaway: There are worse people / entities that could own the apartments and houses that are being rented out.
If that’s the only takeaway, it’s still not going to make me feel sad for landlords.
If they created an LLC, then whatever happens to their business, they can always just get a different job and their own housing situation will remain stable.
If they didn’t, maybe because they couldn’t get a large enough loan to buy property without putting up their own collateral, that was presumably their choice.
I don’t want anyone to lose access to housing (or food, or healthcare), but I’m much more worried about renters ending up unhoused than landlords.
I don’t want anyone to lose access to housing (or food, or healthcare), but I’m much more worried about renters ending up unhoused than landlords.As it stated, most are charging reasonable prices at or below market price. Meaning they are one tiny dam blocking hundreds of thousands of people who can’t afford to live in that city from being homeless. It’s one of the biggest takeaways when you read the article.
Most landlords, the large majority, are essentially people who decided to put their savings into equity rather than tossing their money into a big giant pile for the rich to make themselves richer, aka, the stock market. Sometimes you toss it somewhere and just lose it.
Their price to pay for that equity are taxes and upkeep. Their payoff is selling it when they retire or giving it to their children or grandchildren. I don’t think I’ve ever rented from any suburban or rural landlord that wasn’t in one of these two positions.
These people aren’t megacorporations buying up land from potential homeowners. They’re people in their 60s and 70s now realizing that their investment more often than not was a poor one. They subsidize their tenants allowing them to live in cities and areas they normally wouldn’t. And when they die, the homes are going to children to either sell for a quick buck to fund their own kids college or moving into them when they’re house is now too big since the kids just moved.
As always, the gamut of possibilities is way too wide for such anti-human extremist propaganda that gets pushed then eaten up by people who should know better.
So far the worst outcome for landlords that you have posed is that they “realize that their investment was a poor one”.
And yes, I want that landlord’s grandchildren to be able to afford college (which I think should be free for all, paid for by tax increases on the rich).
But you have to admit that we’re talking about vastly different worlds here, right?
What percentage of renters live paycheck to paycheck and are at risk of living on the street?
What percentage of landlords are at risk of living on the street?
What percentage of renters expect to be able to leave enough in money and assets to their children, so that those children can afford to pay college tuition for the renter’s grandchildren?
I agree with you that dehumanizing people is wrong. I agree that landlords can struggle too.
I agree that there are worse people / entities that could own apartment complexes and houses.
But you haven’t really convinced me that I should worry about the general well-being of the landlord class, or that it’s worth my time and energy to chide renters who say mean things about them online.
The one thing is would you end up with your soul mate again and even if you did it wouldn’t be the same relationship you had back then. I thought about this and have 3 kids and don’t know if I would want to give up on my kids because there’s no way I could say goodbye to my kids and never see them again.
Just a reminder that she didn’t actually explain why she was tearing up a picture of the Pope, she just pulled out a picture of him and tore it up without context. Nobody understood wtf was happening.
Yeah, there is a lot of revisionist history about this. This was well before the sex abuse story came out. The idea that that’s what she was protesting was lost on everyone.
John Paul II had an attempted assassination a decade before this (where he literally met with his attempted assassin to offer forgiveness), and was also leading efforts to apologize for past church participation in things like the holocaust, the slave trade, oppressing women, and even executing Galileo.
This is not to defend him. He absolutely ignored sex abuse and deserves hate, but when O’Connor did that, he was immensely popular. Tearing up his picture while singing Bob Marley’s War (a song about racism and inequality) was just a protest of which the purpose of which no viewer could figure out. She merely said “fight the real enemy” and didn’t reveal any additional reasoning until she sat for an interview a month later.
not sure about other languages, but with Polish Google is still the most useful one, Bing and DDG don’t even hold a candle to it, that said i still think Google went to shit hard
I didn’t mean literally a car, I was going a long with their metaphor.
I saw a Veritasium video where they use a massive engine as part of a whole facility that tests buildings for earthquakes. That’s not something that’s going to be a problem. And in some applications, fossil fuels are what makes sense to use.
We should definitely use them in as few applications as possible, but yeah, if you wanna act like we should stop using them completely, in all applications, you can keep hallucinating.
Man, I don’t know what right wingers y’all are talking about.
I come from a super right wing family and all them MFs think this is a bad idea too (though to be fair, they’re def on the conspiracy theory “everything is to get a microchip in my blood/brain” side of things).
I suppose my instinctive reaction isn’t to assume someone’s politics would determine how they react to Musk.
My first real assumption would be that tech/engineering types are the only ones who’d really think about him at all (in both directions). Like, I do have an uncle who occasionally brings him up whenever theirs news on SpaceX’s rockets (though usually this gets brought up in the context of “new technology sucks” and “what was wrong with the rockets that carried up Voyager” and such).
So yeah, I really don’t think I’d describe anyone as “gargling Elon’s cock” except those who still have good will for Tesla.
Nobody said anything about FAR right. In fact, you’re the one who’s characterizing people as extremists for disagreeing with you, a typical centrist move.
That and anyone who explains to the left that they too would like a better nominee, but we can figure that out after this crucial election cycle…during every election cycle for their entire life, which are the only times they discuss politics.
Honestly I haven’t heard any of my right wing coworkers etc… talk about this particular company, but I have heard a lot of elon worship from them. IE I hear a lot of them talk about how he’s gone so pro free speach with twitter. (and they tend to ignore me when I point out that he’s censoring every bit as much as the old twitter, he’s just nicer to the nazis and less nice to the left.
Ugh, yeah, that is a point of frustration I have with the family.
For them, it’s not so much “look what Musk is doing” so much as “look at how much better Twitter’s gotten”, which is particularly ripe cause none of them even use the platform. As I think on it, that probably means the big Fox talking heads are saying things like that.
I never got into Twitter myself (just never really understood / took to the format), which is kind of a shame cause I’d really like to be supporting Mastodon in this years surgance of the Fediverse.
I come from a super-right wing family too (but from Europe) and they really are in love Elon because it’s like “a dog being out of control” in the billionaire group, the one who is brave enough to go against the rules, defying the “cancel culture” and the unidirectional thinking imposed by political correctness.
Yeah, I hate how toxic just politics in general get. Like, it feels like any time anything political gets brought up, everyone leaves their good will and sense of humanity at the door, ya know?
I do enjoy how much tech-focused content is on Lemmy, but it also feels like there’s a higher concentration of toxic leftist type posts.
That’s definitely a thing I miss about the good ol’ reddit days: being able to scroll for days without seeing anything political. Or rather - being able to filter out all the political subs and not feeling like you were missing out on the larger conversation on the platform.
Unfortunately, everything is political, and this has always been true, and will never not be, as long as humans exist. If you were able to ignore politics, it just means you were unaware of them, likely because they weren’t hurting you or anyone you cared about. The uptick in “toxic” posts in the last decade is because more people are in danger now, and are highly aware of it, and more people are actively dangerous, and are stirring the pot. It didn’t get more political, it got more dangerous.
In general I would argue that he has a good reputation, due to good marketing mostly. A great lot of people see him as some sort of “illuminated visionary” who fosters innovation for the Good™ and will save humanity with SpaceX, Tesla, etc. [I don’t agree personally to any of it but that’s another story].
Ugh, yeah, I don’t hate the guy, but I also think that anyone who still thinks he’s a visionary hasn’t actually been paying attention to his work/how his companies are going lately.
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