Idk man. Thread also features a guy who just flips properties writings novels about what a good guy he is.
I have never had a single landlord perform maintenance. When I have rented homes from a homeowner (who isn't a "big" landlord but a "small" landlord who only rents out one property), they have never had time to do repairs and I have basically had to arrange those repairs myself, keep the proof of payment, and try my best to negotiate some kind of legal arrangement where those repairs I pay for get subtracted from my rent.
When I have rented apartments from a big invisible absentee landlord (usually not even a person, but a corporation) the "job" of arranging repairs (hiring other people over a phone) is usually taken care of by some administrative functionary. Usually a person in an office who does not literally own the complex.
Even if landlords were paying for and arranging my home repairs and maintenance for me every single time, there is little doubt that the rent they are extracting goes above and beyond that. They accumulate wealth passively, which they often use to subsequently buy other properties, so they can accumulate wealth passively from more people. None of my "rent" I pay goes towards actually owning the land I live on, meaning I will be paying rent until I die, never owning where I live, and always enriching some other land-owning person passively through a significant portion of my paycheck, which already represents less than my labor, because capitalists are also taking rent in the form of surplus value. So I am double rented, once by my boss, and once by my landlord. And I suppose triple by taxes.
landlord perform maintenance
if they actually did work you would call them a superintendent or property manager or something, they are owners
superintendent chalmers, I hope you're ready for an unforgettable luncheon
ive had maintenance staff at property mgmt company do repairs but i basically had to hound the company repeatedly, in once case for a year, had to take photos of the broken thing in question and send it to them in writing in email, so there would be record of it, so they would be afraid of me pursuing it legally and having it substracted from rent. also, it helped that i got to know the maintenance staff and tried to keep a good relationship with them and be sociable, as that seemed to help get priority, as they are often very overworked
in some cases (like plumbing repairs ) I cannot arrange a plumber to do it because they are not allowed to by law in the region where i was at but they did respond to emergency number when i called at least and the maintenance guy got some overtime for it, so that seemed to work.
that said in most cases the hassle was so much that I would just perform the repair myself, which is really what they hope you do. I second hand know it sucks to be disabled and have to relly on the company to fix anything because I've heard so many horror stories and complaints about that before
it's such a fucking uphill battle to get even the most basic shit done
I would just perform the repair myself, which is really what they hope you do.
I hate that shit. "We won't fix your rotten windows but here's a bottle of mold remover and a tin of paint"
even when you do get help or repairs from a small individual landlord (after months of badgering them), they're not actually going to organise professional help, they're going to send their dipshit large adult son/nephew who's watched a few youtube tutorials to half ass it. took the prick years to do something about the mold but now my wall is just uneven bare ass plaster
I've heard about people paying to have things fixed then legally withholding that rent. How long before HVAC guys start offering "we'll argue with your landlord for you to get it paid for" as a service? Why hasn't this happened yet?
I think I see “ableism” used in bad faith more often than good these days.
Yeah as a disabled person its really fucking frustrating seeing the word used as a cudgel to defend the indefensible like this. Completely takes away the word's power.
I remember seeing a post about a doordash strike and seeing one of the comments like "maybe you guys should reconsider before disabled people who can't drive to the store go hungry because of you"
reminds me of the guy who said that some people had to buy Oreos, even when Mondelez was being a dick during contract negotiations, because they had a tummy ache or IBS or whatever it was. They basically called people ableist for daring to suggest that they eat something other than oreos and sweets which I thought was a hoot.
Sure, some landlords have the separate but related job of “maintenance guy,” a job they should be paid a reasonable salary for.
That is completely separate from the “job” of landlord, where you extract rent value in exchange for nothing, far above a reasonable salary for building maintenance.
I’d be fine paying “rent” if my rent was just $200 a month to pay for maintenance and office staff. Apartment complexes with dedicated staff do seem to run a lot better, and I’m all for the community collectively paying for some people to take care of that. When I lived in a condo owned by just one old lady, the condo above us had a water leak and it took over a week to start fixing it bc they couldn’t get in contact with the owner - Large buildings should definitely have one set of people in charge of taking care of the whole thing.
You could just hire people to repair your house and keep your fucking equity
Like, fuck, make a handy friend! I fix shit for my friends whenever I can, it's part of being a good comrade. I have the ability, they have the need.
Some women are traumatized by men, and landlords provide a service by making appointments with repairmen so women don’t have to go through that. By denying women landlords, you’re being a misogynist.
Is there some kind of pro-landlord media blitz underway? I just heard the same shit on a fluff
podcast I listen to, with homeowners saying they wish they could just rent the place they live infucking brats
homeowners saying they wish they could just rent the place they live in
this kind of propaganda is being pushed by imperial core "service economy" capitalists who don't actually produce goods because all the manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to the third world (because the labor there is cheaper due to imperialism). Service economy capitalists rely on slowly turning everything into a subscription service model where you pay a flat fee monthly for a "service" you often don't have time to use (think of the gym, netflix, etc.) so they can accumulate wealth without you even needing to buy any literal commodities other than the vague overpriced "service" that you forget to use, slowly goes up in price, and that is always terribly difficult to cancel. This is pushed as a good thing because the "service" often takes the "problem" of needing to own your own stuff away from you. Subscribed to a gym? Don't need to own your own exercise equipment. You will own nothing and be happy. You will have rent extracted from you by a thousand parasites and you will be happy.
I mean, tbh. I do actually prefer not having to actually be personally responsible for literally all of the structural factors that go into maintaining where I live (i.e. plumbing, gas, electricity & maintenance of the physical structure of the building itself).
Mainly because I'm pretty sure I don't actually understand any of them well enough to know when they're a problem, or what to do about them, and I'm pretty sure I couldn't actually afford to keep up with repairs to those systems if I lived in an independent house.
The problem here is not collectivized living, the problem is that one guy (or a corporation of people) gets to personally extract wealth from people living there.
It is in fact very much like the gym example that you gave. It doesn't really make sense for every person on earth who would want to work out from time to time to own their own personal bench, squat-rack, plates set, dumbell set, cable machines & treadmill/stationary bike. That's a shitload of infrastructure all to facilitate like 45-90 minutes worth of activity per day, for just one guy. And that assumes a person who is significantly more motivated to train that p much 90% of people. And it actually doesn't make much sense for every single person/family to own their own individual house either. It's just the only way to escape landlords in our present arrangement of things.
I mean, tbh. I do actually prefer not having to actually be personally responsible for literally all of the structural factors that go into maintaining where I live (i.e. plumbing, gas, electricity & maintenance of the physical structure of the building itself).
Most people feel that way, if I had to guess.
Mainly because I'm pretty sure I don't actually understand any of them well enough to know when they're a problem, or what to do about them
Even if you did it wouldn't be any fun having to do it. Landlords also don't know about this stuff either, usually. They usually hire people to perform these duties.
I'm pretty sure I couldn't actually afford to keep up with repairs to those systems if I lived in an independent house.
Rent is always more than maintenance. Otherwise the landlord wouldn't profit. If maintenance were actually more than they were charging you for rent they wouldn't have a profitable enterprise, which is the whole point of being a landlord, to passively make money off of others paying you a significant portion of their income. So if you can afford rent where you currently live chances are you could afford maintenance in a house of roughly the same size as your apartment. What will really set you under is mortgage and the absurd interest rates that come with it.
The problem here is not collectivized living, the problem is that one guy (or a corporation of people) gets to personally extract wealth from people living there. It is in fact very much like the gym example that you gave. It doesn't really make sense for every person on earth who would want to work out from time to time to own their own personal bench, squat-rack, plates set, dumbell set, cable machines & treadmill/stationary bike. That's a shitload of infrastructure all to facilitate like 45-90 minutes worth of activity per day, for just one guy. And that assumes a person who is significantly more motivated to train that p much 90% of people. And it actually doesn't make much sense for every single person/family to own their own individual house either. It's just the only way to escape landlords in our present arrangement of things.
Agreed.
What in the fuck type of moron would say something like that, there are so many companies and individual dudes that you can pay to do all the maintenance and upkeep tasks for you. Like what the fuck do people think a maintenance handyman is?
If you really want to LARP at playing/paying rent, just ring up a local handyman and hand him $200 a month whether or not you needed anything done.
"You know what would be great? If I could pay basically the same amount of money for my house but not reap any of the benefits that equity would provide." - no one
Well on one hand, they aren't smart and are radlibs. On the other, how the fuck can they pay a mortgage without knowing what equity is? If they're not the actual densest motherfuckers on the planet, then I seriously start to wonder whether Black Rock and Friends are greasing podcaster palms
Pretty much every boomer has/had a mortgage and they are some of the stupidest people I know when it comes to finances. The game was so rigged in their favor they don't need to know anything.
As a disabled person who lives in a corporate apartment complex, yeah its true that I can't do repairs for myself. But speaking as someone who pays my rent TO the disability agency that provides various services to me (its subsidized, so its not that much, but its still like 45% of my social security income so I dont have much left after) and then THEY pay rent to the actual corpo that owns my complex, I think those kinds of services shouldnt be provided by a fucking landlord. It should be part of the social safety net, or a community thing, or something.
It's bullshit that 45% of your income goes to rent. That's fucking insulting. "Oh sorry, you're not what we consider to be perfect, so I guess you have to just live in poverty"? Bullshit. That's just the wrong way to run a society.
I've said it before: it's good news that capitalists don't understand what capitalism is.
This guy thinks we live in a labour society, doesn't understand that capitalism is defined by capital.
This is good news because it means people just need a tiny bit of education. They don't support capitalism; they don't know what it is.
Antithesis: Reversal of dogma and ideology isn’t a tiny bit of education, it’s downright impossible for most people. Especially when the “common sense” produced by commodity fetishism is the default.
Paternalistic education by a vanguard party is not what will bring a revolution. Class consciousness is learned through experience, not a textbook. And unfortunately I don’t see a path for the average person to learn how capitalism works except by being crushed and excluded by it. Revolution is like jumping from a burning building. It doesn’t happen until jumping is less scary than not jumping. For the average Western worker, whose lifestyle is propped up by international exploitation of cheaper labor, it is simply not bad enough yet.
Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China's 600 million people is that they are "poor and blank". This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing. Poverty gives rise to the desire for changes the desire for action and the desire for revolution. On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written; the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted.
Today’s proletarian and petty-bourgeois workers are hardly the blank slates whom Mao helped liberate from semi-feudal imperialists.
So, yes, building management is indeed a job. The average full-time building manager earns $92,000 USD for managing around 150 properties, and arranging maintenance, repairs, and upgrades for all of them, often doing nonspecialised tasks personally. I strongly doubt there's a landlord above "old lady with a spare room" level who actually puts in that level of work.
liberals trying for the 8,973rd time to categorize hating landlords as a bigotry equivalent to racism, misogyny, and homophobia
I've rented from a present landlord 2 times. Once was terrible and they charged me for a cleanup fee for my dead roommates shit and a bedbug ridden sheet(husband owned a screen printing shop on the first floor).
Second time was a dude renting out his late mothers house for under market, took a wad of cash I'd collect from many people, and showed me his sick hovercraft he pulled out of the woods and restored.
Neither were very fast with repairs but at least the latter looked 100% the other way when the place reeked of weed.
Completely unrelated to this post, but I just had to replace the electric shower and it was a nightmare. Whoever installed the last one was a complete fucking cowboy. I've had to sort of continue the bodge job they did because I cannot afford to retile the room. Arrrrrrhhhhhhhhggggg!
Fucking love folks who cut corners on the border of WATER and ELECTRICITY...that I'm supposed to STAND IN. Worst electric bodge I've had to clean up was a light fixture that didn't have an associated box, it was just screwed to wood with the wires taped in place on the wood. Beyond sketchy.
“Electric” and “shower” are words I don’t really love next to each other
They are extremely common, and very safe. They will short out long before you are at risk of electrocution.
wait so the electricity is used to heat the water? is this for houses without a hot water heater?
Yeah, it heats the water. I have hot water heater but the pipe that goes to the shower is not connected.
They are super, super common, I am surprised you've never seen one.
You're in the UK, right? In the US our circuits are mostly 110V, so you don't have the kind of juice you need to heat up water quickly.
I don't think they're allowed in my country, although I have seen a YouTube video about them, and seems like people who die because of them die installing them improperly rather than from the electricity.
Still sounds extremely sketchy on first explanation. Water+electricity sounds bad even though it's clearly not in this case.
I've never heard about them before. Maybe it's because district heating is virtually universal where I live and cheaper than electric heating.
