this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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NGL, that's the situation for a ton of landlords that have a handful of rental properties.
When I got out of school and into my first apartment, the woman that owned the apartment building I lived in lost her other rental building because she'd been on razor thin margins with it.
Also, the guys that lived there had apparently damaged the hell out of it and she couldn't manage the repairs, so she had the bank take it back.
The family that owns the property that my husband and I have been living in actually own the buildings outright.. and we've been absolutely lucky in being able to stay in the same space for decades, which we love.
If you find landlords that are good people that don't jack the rent sky-high, take care of the space and be good to it.
Meanwhile the apt I've lived in for 5 years has changed ownership 3 times, each time rents raise.
Flippers are the bane of human existence.
The apt I started renting in the middle of COVID started at ~850 bucks. Which was at least 100 bucks higher than the previous renter (i talked to her and she paid less than 800, most likely around 700 bucks). At some point they sent me a letter saying, "we didn't increase rent during COVID but our expenses require us to do it right now so this is your new rent. At least in my country they are capped at the rent increase, but I was thinking like, what the fuck are you on about. You made at least a 100eu increase profit in rent in comparison with the previous renter since i started living here, and you have the fucking audacity to say you didnt increase rent because of COVID? Go fucking hang yourselves. Landlords are parasites and parasites should be eradicated.
They could, you know, actually do work for once?
Like improve society, instead of being a parasite?
I mean, I rent the upstairs of my house, and I work and my fiance works. I raise the rent when I have to and don't when I don't. I've found that regardless of how good I try to be to my tenant, there will always be people that call me a leech.
I wanted a house. I bought a house. A big one, for a really good price. I've put work into it, building it's value. As stated, I work to pay bills, as well. But, the extra money from my extra resources (livable, maintained space with working amenities), is earned and I do work for it.
That said, it would, also, be silly to think that I would let a stranger live in the house that I am working to pay for, for free.
the value is not earn because the rent you can extract (the value) correspond to no labour of your own, it is instead decided by the location and the quality of the place (the city/neighborhood, not the house) you live in, in terms of jobs, public amenities, … This value is created and increased thanks to everyone else work (creating new jobs, paying taxes from labor, providing labors …) but not by your “job” has a landlord.
Hence the rent you get is not earned, it is extracted from land prices. If you want to learn more, read “the wealth of nations” by Adam Smith :).
It takes work to set up an apartment and maintain a house. And there are other expenses.
It does and it can be quantified. I can guarantee you that it is not as high as the price asked. Most of the price comes from the land price.
Moreover, your house price depreciate in reality but rent and buying price increase? That doesn't make any sense, unless the land price are increasing. And this increase is due to other people's work, not the landlord.
Old house should be cheap, labor is cheap, yet people pay 30%+ of their salary in rent. Imagine the same with a car instead of a house, that could never happen, so what is the difference ;)? The land.
Labor isn't really cheap. As a home owner, I can tell you that getting a plumber, electrician, sewer guy, appliance repair guy, roof repair guy, squirrel trapper guy, eavestrough guy, etc, etc. are all very expensive and it adds up. Plus property taxes, major stuff like roof replacement every 10 years, grass cutting, painting.
But yes, it's also property values that go up - and that makes it more expensive to buy land because more people want to use that land. And as a result, the value of renting goes up. You could rent on the outskirts of town for much less; but you want to live in a nice spot just like everyone else. So how else do we proportions out the land except by attributing value to it and doing trades?
when I say labor is cheap I mostly mean the landlord “labor” since this is virtually nothing. It’s not that expensive. It’s never 30%+ of your paycheck, most houses need nothing most of the time. Most of the rent/buying process of housing is land (aka dirt) value.
It’s not so much that you want to live in a nice place, it’s more than one must. We need to bring land prices down it would be better for the economy, for future generations, and for social equality.. We can:
Look up how Vienna does it, or in the US, the rezoning associated with rent controlled guarantees (without those guarantees rezoning increases land price)
They do.. they run a small grocery store that actually has whole foods with fresh fruits and vegetables and modestly priced meats that isn't horribly expensive and maintain the most affordable apartments in the entire city.
Right downtown.
In what is now an overpriced retirement ghetto filled with million dollar starter homes owned by insufferably stuffed old shirts and 3.5k per month apartments rented to Boston commuters.
They work their asses off to build an actual community of native residents.
Pretty much everyone they rent to has local resident ties here to what used to be a working class, working port city.
Your cynicism is noted, but you make some incorrect assumptions. It's not ALL as bad as you think out there. Find those gems, they do exist.
happy for you, but "find those gems" is a crazy thing to say when there are like four gems among millions of people who need a place to live
It's crazy to suggest looking isn't worth it. It's not trite sentimentality.
It's luck, and one may never get lucky if they don't look in the first place.
Not everyone will be as blessed, yes.. absolutely true.
Never will I deny that but in the end, we have to look out for our selves first before we can help others. This is one thing you may want to look for, if you want to get a stable footing underneath you.
Big cities and metropolitan areas are becoming increasingly toxic to stay in if you're starting out or have an average level of hustle. You gotta be some sort of capitalistic superman and most people aren't. God knows, I'm not.
However it's despairing when the sentiment is framed which says there is no good in owning a rental, because people are not good.
Not every property owner in a capitalist society is a capitalist pig.
Find places where you can be part of a local community where people network and live and work together and have a shared history that goes back decades.
The thing I've notcied is that rootlessness, that is, constantly moving from place to place as our society encourages, turns every new person that moves into an area into a stranger, and that is the crux of the matter. (I grew up homeless in the 1970's and lived in the back of a VW bus, so I understand this perfectly) It's how you keep millions of people poor. We're driven by capitalism and it's handmaiden of consumerism to cut ourselves loose, and in doing so, lose the anchors of community that allow people to stay in one place and save.
Oh no.. we can't have that!
I'd say the larger argument everyone should pivot on is how the homeless problem and the unaffordability issue - for EVERYONRE not a millionaire - (and that's most of us) comes directly down to the trillions of dollars worth of untaxed investment wealth being put into private real estate equity.
It's got to get to the breaking point where the middle class is finally turfed and joins the rest of us.
This is coming like a slow-motion tidal wave and for sure Trump has accelerated the slide with his corruption and crminality.
Beautifully so. The bourgeois get salty when their comforts are pinched.
I expect you'll hear the air raid sirens of financial petulance coming from that comfy, fat middle in a handful of years, if the economy continues on its current trajectory.
They might be not as bad, but they are just less broken in a broken system.
Amen to that. We are ALL broken by this system, in one way or another.
I don't think they could.
My landlord was like this until she saw housing prices increasing. Decided to divorce her husband and take over the property we were living in. Because of the state we live in and that she had not signed a paper lease with us that year (and we did not bring it up for fear of rent increases), she kicked us out with 30 days notice, after never missing a payment for nearly 10 years. She did move in but now the place is rented out again.
We anded up buying a house by crushing all our savings and overbidding with inspection waived in a market full of house flippers and corporations at the highest prices of all time. We make high salaries and our housing costs tripled, just in time for Trump 2.0 so now all of our other costs are doubled. We are house poor and living like we used to when we had a shitty apartment right after my wife graduated college, when we made less than a third what we do now.
All the progress just to be backstabbed by a landlord. No, I don’t trust them, I don’t trust any of them. Mao was right.
Why didn't you rent someplace else or go with a cheaper house?
I mean all's fair for calling out the shitty behavior of the landlord but then your actions after that seem rather self-inflicted, you could have just downsized if you couldn't afford the place you are in and not become house poor.
I want to drive a fucking porsche, but I can't afford it without going broke so I drive my 12 year old Hyundai.
Edit: I see personal responsibility is not a big thing for lemmings, sure Op got screwed by their landlord by putting him on the street with 30 days notice, but then the landlord didn't hold a gun to their head to buy a home they can't afford and make him and wife house poor, that was all on them...
Everything in my area was in probate or was falling apart - would have taken months and just as much money to make them livable (I’m talking collapsing plaster, leaky windows and roofs, asbestos, unfinished renovations, etc). It’s a great area but NOTHING was for sale (our agent said the amount of homes on the market at the time was less than 1/5th what it normally was). We had to fight against house flippers and corporations for bids (and we lost two) and we only had 30 days. I didn’t want to move my daughter out of the area where her friends were nearby and the schools are good. I can’t rent because no one allows pets anymore and we have a large dog. We didn’t want to quit our jobs and try to find new ones in a market where it was unlikely either of us would find work in our field (and it’s only gotten worse since). No matter what we did we were going from renting at around 20% of our net income to buying around 45%; even at a smaller place; even renting, it would have been the same. Honestly we made the right decision moving where we did considering what else was available.
But besides all that
No one would have had to panic buy while trying to save their lives that we worked DECADES to get to because of someone else’s infidelity or whatever if that bitch didn’t give us the boot for her own selfish reasons. Which is why: fuck landlords. Which was the point of my post. Why should my life get turned upside down because of some fucking cunt and her greed and/or divorce? Why even have a system where she can spend my paycheck for 10 years and then just flip me the bird?
Why don’t you go fucking lecture someone else, asshole.
Here is the thing man, if you have a daughter and a career and you have settled down and don't want to be forced out, buy your own house... Renting exists for people who are okay/want flexibility and having/needing to move, if you have settled down and don't want to be exposed to the risk of being forced out, buy your own home.
I know introspection and personal responsibility are not your strong suits, but basically you exposed your family to the risk of losing your housing and then you blame someone else for it...
I mean I hope you did some Rent Vs Own Calculations, but if you wanted to settle down in that area yeah, then you did make the right decision, just a bit too late, once you got forced into it.
Here are two great videos on rent vs own. if you want learn some financial literacy, if don't ignore it. https://youtu.be/aU7v87EhDBI
https://youtu.be/IPXhBgJlpws
p.s.:
if you have a 30 year mortgage you are paying more interest than principal for about 20 years, basically paying for the profits of the bank and then if you go bankrupt you lose the house anyway and get flipped bird, just FYI.
First of all paying your obligations on time is not a flex and doesn't earn you special treatment, most people do this.... Secondly, you clearly just wanted to keep paying the same rent in an area where costs went up, I refer to you my video above by Ben Felix, really well timed for your situation to learn some things from it...
Finding fault with the good renter who did everything by the book is deplorable.
As you know we are in housing crisis and finding affordable house is extremely difficult. Maybe they couldnt find an available house in their area. You dont know their situation.
The fault is not with the renter, but with the buyer...
Housing isn't a luxury, you can't just decide "prices are too high right now, I'm not going to buy / rent any of these places." What are they going to do, live out of their car until prices come down?
I'd be shocked if there weren't cheaper options around...
You haven't been paying attention
You want to tell me that all options in an area completely disappeared? As in all cheaper houses are gone, moving further away from the city and buying cheaper there. All other rent options that wouldn't have tripled OPs housing cost, all of that is gone?
I will need some proof for that to believe, thanks.
What proof would you accept? Do I need to list every single house that is for sale and rent within a certain area?
I'm not interested in your sealioning. You are asking for proof that you know is literally impossible to provide ("how do I know that is every listing?) and we both know even if I could provide it the goal posts would move to "just move somewhere else then" as if that is cheap and easy and readily available to everyone.
You are being disingenuous at best, or you are completely ignorant as you how unreasonable your 'argument' is. Either way there is no value in continuing.
I swear to fuck, you're screwed either way. You rent, the landlord takes too much cash, gives you a shitty place to stay. You have renters, they destroy your property and don't pay on time. Fuck sake.