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.
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.
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.
Yup. Fucking ridiculous.
I've been at the same place for ten years. My rent went up twice. I hate not having a private property owner. Unless I magically come across 150k for a house down payment, it's looking like corpos from here on out. Ugh
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
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."
I agree that the system we live in is partially responsible, but it has never motivated me to be a piece of shit. People are still responsible for their actions.
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.
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 live in a high cost of living area and still can't wrap my head around even the original price. That's nearly my yearly entire 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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