How can people afford this? To meet the 3x gross income requirement you'd need an income of $14,995 * 12 * 3 = $539,820. At that point you might as well just buy a house instead of renting.
The Palisades (where the largest fire is burning right now) house some of the wealthiest people in the country that just lost homes worth over $3 million on average. It’s scummy (maybe illegal?) to jack the prices up and these people are also rich enough to pay it, for the most part.
The other fires going on are a different story, but the address is near the Palisades without being in the danger zone.
I think it’s marketed to people who had a home and lost it.
Because this isn't for individuals. Corporations rent houses like this. Movie studios, music labels, executive perks for the c suite, and more recently YouTube streamer companies. When you have clients that need to travel a lot it's offered as a perk for them to "live" in one of these fancy houses. Executives who only stay with companies for a few years are easier to recruit if they don't have to hassle with buying or selling a home during a relocation. Or in the modern times YouTubers who need to a fancy house to stream from for content.
Rental costs are expenses, owning is a taxable asset.
That assumes someone will give you a mortgage and that you have multiple thousands of dollars saved up for closing costs, which unfortunately is the reason people are forced to look for rentals and are greeted with...that.
That's true for a lot of folks, but if you can manage 15k/month rent, then you absolutely have financial options and easily get savings.
California is super expensive because everyone makes a lot of money compared to other state medians.
Yeah everyone does. That's why there are no homeless people in California.
I've been looking for a new apartment the last three months. After Jan 1st all of them owned by a rentail company raised thier asking price.
Annual price increase is 35%. Who tf gets a 35% raise every year?
It's the corpo landlords causing the problem. My private landlord never did any of that.
Private landlords are about to get harder and harder to come by...it's about to be corpos all the way down. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/how-wall-street-bought-single-family-homes-and-put-them-up-for-rent.html
I think a bigger threat than corporations buying single family houses is that there are certain types of housing that will likely never not be owned by a single entity such as the large apartment buildings with shared entry areas.
I think the YIMBYs need to start adding "ownable units of housing" to their list of things to look for when developing new housing structures. A lot of places in California are starting to build again, but they're building a lot of corporate-owned apartment buildings with hundreds of units that only help further consolidate the housing market.
My neighborhood did a mixed development model and I think that's the way it should go: some apartments, some townhouses, some condos. Stop letting a single company own the entirety of the new housing units you're building.
First house I bought was a duplex because it let me afford the mortgage. I bought a 110 year old home in disrepair and spent years of hundreds of hours and tons of my money slowly fixing up the place. I proactively do maintainence, I charge slightly below market rents, and my renters know me on a first name basis and call me for random things unrelated to the house and I'm happy to help. I respond within hours of any request, even if just to let them know when I'm off work to come fix whatever is going on.
Half the homes on my street are now owned by a single person who is trying to buy me out. He's okay, but the homes aren't super well maintained and he does his best to juice profits by cutting a few corners. He probably owns a few dozen homes. He's driving up rents through a mini local monopoly in a niche in demand area.
I compared my return on my investment to what I would have gotten if I just put the money in stocks, and the main reason it looks okay is only because the value of the houses have been driven up by these corporate investments.
I empathize so much with the frustrations with landlords here (and damn do I hate the term), but I don't see a real bridge to dealing with the problem that doesn't squeeze out people like me trying to do it right by the renters and force these properties into the hands of the corporations. Not a single person who has lived in my duplex since I bought it can afford to buy me out for what I've got in it, let alone what I could get on the open market. They've all enjoyed living there and the updates I've made, and most of them were in town for only a few years before moving (graduate students/young professionals).
Mostly just a vent. I get why people like me get demonized on here, but it's pushing out those of us trying to do it better than the rest. I've debated selling for awhile, but the next person won't be as good to the community in all likelihood. And none of the renters have been interested.
California, where the apt is, limits rent increases to 5% plus the annual increase in the consumer price index (inflation)
*except not if it's more like a house and if the landlord is renting only a small number of properties (don't remember exact wording)
5% plus inflation is still triple the typical inflation 😟
My private landlord was pretty based tbh. Rented out one half of his house because he didn't need it, it was dirt cheap, and well maintained. Loud as shit in his garage all the time, but for $300 a month that was easy to sleep through
Corpo landlords can burn though. Someone in Franktown, Colorado should find Monarch's HQ and help make that happen
In a capitalist society, raising prices on victims due to supply and demand is rational behavior.
The problem here is less with the landlord and more with the system we live in. It motivates everyone to have antisocial behavior.
Did you really just say don't hate the player hate the game
Sartre seems to agree, kind of: "I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary."
Completely agree.
The landlord is a piece of shit.
The system that drives people to act like pieces of shit is a bigger piece of shit.
And I definitely think the landlord can both be acting rationally and be a piece of shit. I also don't place all the blame on the landlord, and even though anyone with a 10k plus apartment for rent has WAY more money than me they and I are likely in basically the same boat when compared to the actual capitalist class.
I can't help but think from a scientific perspective that when a population is forced to fight for resources, aggression in that population also increases.
In the most basic terms, how would you expect a colony of mice to react in a scenario like this? A dwindling supply of food, along with a shrinking supply of shelter... I'd expect to see a steady increase in violence over time.
I can't see this ending well, and I certainly have felt a steady degradation of hospitality and compassion in the last decade or so.
Is there even a way to combat this? I feel like the cultural zeitgeist has been so polluted with individualism it's almost impossible to get the general public to agree to policies that don't directly benefit themselves.
Just build more houses and more multi-use buildings. Proper planning can solve this.
Of course, that's one aspect of it, my comment isn't about policy. I'm sure we both agree on what needs to happen in terms of policy.
I'm just pointing out that there doesn't really seem to be enough support for such plans or policies.
shout out to [email protected]
I can’t see this ending well, and I certainly have felt a steady degradation of hospitality and compassion in the last decade or so.
After the Reddit API fiasco, but before I made this account, I spent a year avoiding all social media. Since coming back, things aren't the same. There seems to be a lot more hostility, with a lot less reading comprehension, turning into feedback loops of inane and pointless arguing. It's hard to hold an enjoyable discussion on a forum (like the way it used to be) when all it takes to start a fight is something as normal and human as being unable to find the exact right word for something.
It's not only Lemmy. Spend enough time reading comment threads almost anywhere online these days, and you can practically feel the undercurrent of tension. To the best I can tell, people are stressed, people are scared, and people are looking for any excuse to lash out. Any minor confusion, brain fart, or mistranslation is now an excuse for someone to break out their pitchfork. It doesn't even take a mistake either - even calm, well thought-out, carefully worded comments aren't immune. It almost feels like landmines have been planted across social media, and it's concerning.
I thought for a second this was the price to buy, that's how fucked the market is.
I live in a high cost of living area and still can't wrap my head around even the original price. That's nearly my
yearlyentire salary. What the fuck.Edit: I meant nearly the entirety of my monthly income per month, so a year of rent would cost about everything I make annually. Before tax.
It’s Luigi time
Wahoo
If anyone has access to a genie wish, might I suggest:
"I wish any rental that saw the rent on it raised by more than twice the inflation rate, once it is no longer occupied, would instantly burst into flames and burn to ashes in a way that damages no other rental unit."
Granted, landlords insurance pays for a new building and lost rent. Now renting it for even more money.
Maybe for the first few, but after awhile it would be common knowledge that raising rents too much magically causes building to burst into flames. Insurance doesn't cover intentional acts. If you deliberately burn your own house down, insurance isn't going to cover that. Plus every insurance policy would exclude coverage for this sort of entirely predictable and preventable fire.
I wish it was illegal for a single entity or organization to own more than three residential buildings at one time
This is why Luigi must be acquitted.
Wow I'm quite surprised the fires haven't affected that unit in particular
This is America! It's not a horrific tragedy with lives lost, many others seriously injured or afflicted with new long-term health problems, their most precious possessions reduced to ash, countless people being made homeless with absolutely no options for places to go... it's an opportunity!
It seems to me the only way to win at capitalism is to lose all sense of compassion and empathy. When a population turns from cooperation to wholly exploiting each other it can only lead to a breakdown of society - which is something I fear we'll witness in the next four years.
To be fair this isn’t specifically a landlord thing. This is a capitalism thing. And it’s happening everywhere and every day. From your grocery store to your pharmacy to your university. The essence of capitalism is to exploit all opportunity for as much value as possible.
This is the system humans have chosen to live under. And zeroing in on the landlord isn’t productive.
chosen to live under
We are forced to live under capitalism and its exploitation. Landlords are part of the problem.
I'm not sure most of us really had much of a choice.
Humans didn't choose it just like humans didn't choose feudalism. They formed over time as production and technology got more complex, meaning society is bound to change again and again in the future as well.
How much you bet once those homes are rebuilt, it'll stay like this?
You remembering them will not inconvenience or affect them at all.
Hang All the Landlords
Mao, is that you?!
Mao would have made me face the wall for being an anarchist
Let's
Execute
Landlords
I'm not a Maoist but he did have the right idea about landlords.
Lol
No, LEL
To be fair, if they're renting to the people with movie star-level money, then I'm not sure I can blame them.
I'd have a sliding scale based on imdb credits.
I don't mind some landlords. A municipality being a landlord can be good, not everyone wants to buy a home outright. Renting is low commitment, low effort.
Okay except that's not the situation we find ourselves in. Renting isn't a problem, and being a landlord is not intrinsically wrong or immoral but the system that governs land ownership has consolidated many properties under a small number of financial portfolios. Such a small number in fact that it makes a collusion of a duopoly extremely easy. These aren't a single family who subdivides their home to help cover some of the mortgage we're talking about. These are enormous capital investment firms which view housing as an asset that's garunteed to appreciate in value and renting as a benefit of the investment. Those capital investment firms don't see a house as a place for someone to live, it's an asset they can hold to plump up a spreadsheet. That's the problem, not landlords be evil but that the system rewards evil landlords.
But there's a shitload of municipal housing, they're a (when combined) a huge landlord and use that and land policy to deliver more affordable housing. As a landlord they're pretty reasonable.
If you have a permanent residence, you should own that residence. The only reason to rent is if you don't plan on living somewhere for a long time, and I don't know a single person who fits that description. I understand that there are legitimate reasons to rent, but those reasons don't account for the nearly half of all houses being rented out.
I think that this bad behavior stems from memories of trauma. Inherited, generational, even genetic.
Imagine surviving a literal famine. Where the only people who didn't die horribly were those who fucked over their neighbors.
It's the kind of thing that leaves a mark.
The solution might be therapy. A year shrooming in the woods.
This is bad but it’s rich people fighting rich people - kind of as it should be.
You're fucking cuckoo if you don't think this is illustrative of a larger action that has/will also "trickle down" to the renters in studio apartments - "I came here to exploit human tragedy for profit and chew bubble gum... and I can't chew bubble gum with this mouth full of caviar" -landlords in LA right now
Surely, the difference will be donated to a fire victims fund. In this way, landlord steals from the rich to redistribute to the poor.
Maybe the fire needs to spread to some areas.
Supply and demand, unfortunately.
