- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
The Berkeley Property Owners Association’s fall mixer is called “Celebrating the End of the Eviction Moratorium.”
A group of Berkeley, California landlords will hold a fun social mixer over cocktails to celebrate their newfound ability to kick people out of their homes for nonpayment of rent, as first reported by Berkeleyside.
The Berkeley Property Owner Association lists a fall mixer on its website on Tuesday, September 12, 530 PM PST. “We will celebrate the end of the Eviction Moratorium and talk about what’s upcoming through the end of the year,” the invitation reads. The event advertises one free drink and “a lovely selection of appetizers,” and encourages attendees to “join us around the fire pits, under the heat lamps and stars, enjoying good food, drink, and friends.”
The venue will ironically be held at a space called “Freehouse”, according to its website. Attendees who want to join in can RSVP on their website for $20.
Berkeley’s eviction moratorium lasted from March 2020 to August 31, 2023, according to the city’s Rent Board, during which time tenants could not be legally removed from their homes for nonpayment of rent. Landlords could still evict tenants if they had “Good Cause” under city and state law, which includes health and safety violations. Landlords can still not collect back rent from March 2020 to April 2023 through an eviction lawsuit, according to the Rent Board.
Berkeleyside spoke to one landlord planning to attend the eviction moratorium party who was frustrated that they could not evict a tenant—except that they could evict the tenant, who was allegedly a danger to his roommates—but the landlord found the process of proving a health and safety violation too tedious and chose not to pursue it.
The Berkeley Property Owner Association is a landlord group that shares leadership with a lobbying group called the Berkeley Rental Housing Coalition which advocated against a law banning source of income discrimination against Section 8 tenants and other tenant protections.
The group insists on not being referred to as landlords, however, which they consider “slander.” According to the website, “We politely decline the label “landlord” with its pejorative connotations.” They also bravely denounce feudalism, an economic system which mostly ended 500 years ago, and say that the current system is quite fair to renters.
“Feudalism was an unfair system in which landlords owned and benefited, and tenant farmers worked and suffered. Our society is entirely different today, and the continued use of the legal term ‘landlord’ is slander against our members and all rental owners.” Instead, they prefer to be called “housing providers.”
While most cities’ eviction moratoria elapsed in 2021 and 2022, a handful of cities in California still barred evictions for non-payment into this year. Alameda County’s eviction moratorium expired in May, Oakland’s expired in July. San Francisco’s moratorium also elapsed at the end of August, but only covered tenants who lost income due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In May, Berkeley’s City Council added $200,000 to the city’s Eviction Defense Funds, money which is paid directly to landlords to pay tenants’ rent arrears, but the city expected those funds to be tapped out by the end of June.
I have a single second property that I am renting out.
Actually, I don’t even live in the first property that I co-own because prices are so high I had to buy an hours drive outside of the city where I work. I am renting in the city.
I’m not complaining that I have to contribute to the mortgage, that’s just how it is. I am fully in agreement that house-hoarders are bad, but there’s a big distinction between that and a general ‘landlord.’
I would argue that the tenants do have something, which is “not a life living on the streets because landlording was illegal and they couldn’t afford to buy construction materials and pay builders to build them a house.” I have rented all my life, I have never lived in a house that I owned despite having my name on two houses,
I get where people are coming from, but their argument is “ban all landlords” without any consideration of actual reality that involves having capital and taking financial risk to construct housing. There’s something to be said about having a system in place that incentivises those actions. Maybe it’s the system and not the actors that should be blamed? Hate the game, not the player.
You need to understand that context is important. It’s clear that they are not against people like you, and that as I stated, they are using the term Landlord more as a job title than as a status of owning a rented house. I have already agreed with your arguments, I’m just saying that if you present yourself as the term that people have coined for “house-hoarders”, then you are going to have a bad time, even if technically that term is being misrepresented in the given context.
You shouldn’t tell them that they are wrong on blaming landlords, because what landlord is for you and them is different, you should tell them to find a better term, at most. The better way to approach this would be to ask for clarification of what they mean with landlords, and while for sure there will be extremists, people in general will agree that what they hate is house-hoarders and landlords that speculate with property, not people that own 2 houses and rent 1 of them to help a bit with finances in a fair way.
Respectfully, I am one of these people and I absolutely include landlords of any size. Economic rent of all kinds are unethical and unproductive, and that includes any landlord that charges more than what a property costs to produce and maintain (still unclear if @luthis@lemmy.nz is somehow underwater with his property, i’m not sure how that’d even happen) by nature of some arbitrary notion of ownership. The rent they extract is unproductive and exploitative, on top of the problem of them hoarding homes from the housing stock and artificially inflating home prices.
what’s he’s stating is that he has to pay a part of the mortgage with his own money, which tbh to me is completely normal, giving all the mortgage cost to the tenant is exploitative.
Also,
Idk, but if I bought a summer house with my savings and decided to rent it to gain a small extra income, that’s not an arbitrary notion of ownership, I bought that house with my savings.
In any case, if you are against anyone owning more than 1 house, then,
If I didn’t rent the summer house, it would have been unavailable to the market because I would use it maybe 2 weeks a year. We did use it a lot more when we purchased it but life changes and now we don’t. In the end we sold it but I don’t see it as unfair to rent it for a completely reasonable price (different country so prices won’t make sense to you, but it’s low, lower than 1/4 of what I earn in my actual job). In any case, I was just trying to clarify him why people were downvoting him so hard, since most people are not really against any kind of renting.
That’s interesting, and I actually agree. Seems like he is almost definitely not speaking from the US, but rental costs here are typically determined by passing on mortgage costs as a baseline, with a tidy profit of maybe 10-20% minimum added on top (i.e. a house that has a $1,500 monthly mortgage is charged at $1,800/month). This is how we get a “class” of people who compete for homes to rent out as a “passive income” which drives up the cost of housing for everyone. Regardless, the abstract notion that serves as a basis for this relationship is private ownership, and is the same regardless of what’s being charged. The “fairness” of the rent charged is completely up to the owner, and that’s why all landlords are tossed in the pot together, fair ones and unfair ones alike. Some rules can mitigate this (rent control), but really these are bandaids to what is ultimately a question of “private ownership”.
I don’t mean to be abrasive, but this is basically, “I don’t think this is unfair, because [i think] it’s fair and it’s normal”. The fact that our entire economic system is built upon what is definitively an abstract notion doesn’t somehow make it concrete. “I can do what I want with this house because I paid for it” is just as valid on first principles as “I can do what I want with this house because i’m currently living in it”. When people refer to people like myself as “extreme”, it’s this difficulty in looking beyond what’s common that makes it seem that way.
In the case of your summer house: the house you bought [with your savings] for 2 weeks out of the year is still a house someone else could buy to live in full-time. It’s this zero-sum that makes home rentals “economic rent” and problematic at large scales. Housing stock is limited, and the land that housing is built on is particularly so. By charging rent and extracting a profit, you’ve done two things: you’ve excluded that house from being bought by another person to make a home, and you’ve extracted extra that could be used by that person to save and enter the market later. What’s more, this is a problem that gets worse with time because once you own the home, it is worth more to simply keep it and rent out than it is to sell it, since you can charge enough for rent to continue paying the mortgage and a nice little profit. Why do we insist on continuing to incentivize this behavior?
So why wouldn’t it be more fair to commonly own the house with another person than to unilaterally own it and charge whatever rent you want?
To be even more accurate, if anyone charged more rent than what mortgage payments would be, no one would want to rent it because it would be more than double the price of other rental properties. There is a really big gap between rent and mortgage payments.
From what I’ve seen in my own neighborhood rent is way higher than the mortgage. The only people who do it are those who can’t afford a down payment and/or closing costs, though, of course, paying the extra in rent doesn’t help them.
Very different to the situation here. I ran some numbers earlier:
These comparisons are absolutely meaningless.
Show me a comp for a house for sale and a comparable house for rent in your market. If you’re just pulling averages for the market, you’re comparing the median HOUSE (i.e. a certain number of bedrooms PLUS private land, PLUS private amenities, ect) with average rental prices (i.e. a certain number of rooms in a SHARED building with SHARED amenities and SHARED parti walls, ect).
A straight comparison between a home rental and a home sale will absolutely show rentals being more expensive than a purchase.
Edit: The only exception to this would be if you purchased the house at the peak of a housing bubble, and are now renting the house out after the bubble has popped and so you are unable to sell without taking a loss.
Trivial. I even managed to find a house well under 1 mil. Weekly payments are over $1k for a mortgage. Compared with rental properties of similar size in same area where rent is around $600 per week.
Clearly, it does not.
Lol this guy is making this claim based on “average rent” vs “average home price”. He’s comparing houses to apartments in 50-unit buildings.
Nope. I made an apples to apples comparison here:
https://lemmy.nz/comment/2449229
This is just such an obtuse view. A person should be fairly compensated for their property, regardless of kind.
If you don’t believe in property ownership at all… then these positions are fundamentally at odds.
Rent extracted for property should be proportional to the property and the value an individual gains from the use of the property. I think we can agree to that. I also believe that reasonable profit can be expected for reasonable work / value.
To say that economic rent of all kinds is unethical and unproductive doesn’t make sense to me.
If one person invests their capital into a house and someone else wants to make use of that property, they should pay rent. How is that transaction unethical? The rent is payment for use of the other persons capital.
There are arguments about housing specifically as a basic right / need that changes the dynamic… but in cases where these needs are exploited for financial gain, it’s the exploitation that is unethical, not the basic premise of rent.
To explore the notion that rent should only be proportional to the value that the property produces, and frankly how insane that sounds… it only takes startup costs of the property to consider that those costs should also be included in the computation… again exploitation is the thing that is unethical, not the exchange for use of property fundamentally.
Is this wrong?
I think it’s important to point out that in this conversation, i’m taking “economic rent” as Adam Smith’s concept of “rent”. Modern economists amended this term to “economic rent” due to exactly this confusion you’re having, but basically “economic rent” is exactly that amount more than what it costs to produce/maintain a product. Conceptually, rent is an issue for Smith because it’s “unproductive”, basically it cannot be accounted for what it costs to bring a commodity to market. Another example of economic rent would include owning a marketplace others are dependent on (i.e. Amazon), or a private party owning an important passage for travel, and exploiting that ownership for financial gain. You could point out that this is also the case in “profit” (Adam Smith says the price of a good is related to wages + costs + profit), but the other thing that makes “rent” pernicious for smith is that the thing owned is commonly necessary for life/movement/production and not-reproducable. He was writing at a time when “rent” was what a “lord” extracted in exchange for allowing a serf to use their land, but housing operates on the same principle (housing is built on land and land is limited ((typically “land” is the thing that’s owned with the house on top of it, but condos are another recently invented concept that makes it even muddier))). A lord is generally a person that owns many many thousands of acres in an area, and serfs living in the area had to agree to pay rent to work on it simply because there was no other option.
So what I take issue with specifically is the profit extracted from rent, or that portion of rent that is beyond what it takes to produce or maintain a property. You rightly call this “exploitation”. Of course, the underlying issue is how that price is justified on the notion of ownership specifically: the person can charge whatever they want simply because they own it, others need it, and there’s no reasonable alternative in the same area. We could propose rules against charging more than what it costs (rent control), but that doesn’t exclude the owner from finding some other way to exploit that relationship for personal gain (i’d argue ABNB is another perfect example of an owner exploiting this ownership).
Why should we defend their right to own a property that someone else depends on to live in? I personally find that to be more obtuse than taking issue with landlords.
Nope, not underwater at all. It is normal to be paying extra on top of rent to cover the mortgage unless your deposit was like 90% or something. There is a really big gap between mortgage payments and rent payments.
Which risk? Any increase in taxes, mortgage rates and renovations are directly passed on the tenants.
At the end of the day, someone else if paying your mortgage because you could enter the market before they could.
And nowadays, simply having someone paying your mortgage isn’t enough. Landlords need to be cashflow positive.
What the hell are you talking about??
You think you can just renovate the bathroom and bill the tenant for the work?? That’s not how reality works.
Rent can also only be increased once per year and the tenant is able to appeal to the Tribunal if it is too much and the Tribunal can order the rent to decrease.
In terms of risk: When building: unforeseen expenses like complex earthworks, no access to building supplies and environmental issues that can blow out construction times by months or even years (this actually happened recently with gib), and all the while having to pay the mortgage when there isn’t a house to live in.
When renting: property damage from tenants, meth labs (it will be illegal to rent a property soon with a certain level of meth contamination), things requiring repairs in the house (I recently had to buy a new heat pump because the old one died), changes to laws like the recent one that requires older homes be retrofitted with insulation at cost to the owner, tenants moving out leaving you with the mortgage to cover yourself, job loss myself leaving me with no way to cover the extra…
I showed earlier that mortgage payments are more than double rent payments.
I’m confused, are you saying you’re charging less rent than the cost of the mortgage?
Yes of course. Rent is always less than mortgage payments until you’re in the final years.