Political Memes

Landlords are not greedy. They are inherently parasitic.

Hot take, but it's both. I make $40k in a major american city, and while it sucks I have a decent amount saved up, I live alone, and I've paid off all my debt (although I'll probably never be able to afford a home).

To be clear, I don't think anyone should have to cut the corners I do to live with financial security, and not everyone can (my partner is disabled, financial security is a pipe dream for them), but it isn't impossible for most people.

My own mother has been talking about leaving town and rather then selling her house, her plan is to rent the house out survive off the rent she collects.

on its own that wouldnt be outrageous, if it werent for the fact my mother is extremely irresponsible with money and her lifestyle and bad habits are essentially going to be paid for by someone else.

its opened my eyes on landlords.. a lot of them dont work, and they dont even do the minimum for their tenants. they just expect to get paid.

So someone is renting it out. It's all supply and demand?? I don't think landlord just leave their apartment empty unless someone comes with 1600 bucks rents.

In Denver here, it's hard to find apartment and 2 bed 2 bath close to boulder is 2500 bucks minimum. But people still want to stay close to boulder rather than living on cheaper town.

I used to pay $1100 for a 3 bedroom apartment 10 years ago, now a 2 bedroom is $2600+

There's a famous Agatha Christie quote where she mentions that when she was young, she never imagined she'd be rich enough to own an automobile or poor enough to not have servants in her house. At some point, the affordability of one shot way past the other.

In my lifetime, I've seen huge cost increases in housing, and huge cost decreases in most technological products. When I was a kid, the normal TV size was something like 20 inches, and cost more than a month's rent for a typical apartment. In 1990, the average rent was $447, according to this. I found a Sears catalog from 1989 with a 25 inch TV selling for $549, and a 20 inch TV for $318. It would be hard to convince someone from 1990 that one day the cheapest, shittiest apartments in the poorest neighborhoods would rent for more than a 60-inch TV per month. Or that the typical ambulance ride costs something like a month's salary of a factory worker.

That's the real problem with old people's sense of money. The human tendency is to assume that all products cost the same multiple of those products prices in their early adulthood, so the luxury products of their youth remain the luxury products of today. These old people are stuck in some kind of Agatha Christie style of cost comparison, without the self awareness, and thinking that someone who owns a cell phone should be able to afford to buy a single family detached house, or couldn't possibly be bankrupted by a single Emergency Room visit.

Having taken the point of this post as it was intended, we can also recognize that learning how to manage your money is in fact always a good thing. Will basic hygiene undo generations of economics? No, but we certainly shouldn’t NOT teach young people to manage their money.

I paid $750 for a 2br 30 years ago. I pay $850 for a 3br now. I used to live outside San Francisco, now I'm in Ohio.

We had to give up entirely on affording a house. There are ROOMS for rent at $1200 here. This used to be a low COL area until COVID. We had low infection rates so a ton of people moved here and we don't have the infrastructure to support them. We've been priced out of what living space we did have and since there's still the illusion it's cheap to live here, it's almost impossible to get a living wage.