From the titles, those publications seemed pretty mainstream. The posted article analyzed the landlord tenant relationship using a Marxist analysis. It's nonsense because Marxism has universally failed, and should not be used to analyze anything.
- Not running background checks or verifying income on tenants?
- Stopping listing sites like Zillow from listing foreclosures?
- Stopping cash RE transactions?
Sorry, but as someone who has been involved with properties for years I am going to use the tools and data needed to ensure I am finding the right tenants that can afford to live there and will respect my property. I really couldn't care less what the "Woke Police" think about it.
In civilized societies, the right to shelter is part of the social contract.[1] The Unites States does not provide this, so people are at the whims of private enterprises for their survival.
What the "woke police" are saying is that letting this kind of infrastructure spread is setting the stage for more inequality. A private, unregulated Big Brother ruling real estate for a few wealthy owners is the definition of oppression. Anger against aristocracy and feudalism is one of the reasons we fought for independence.[2]
Let's take your situation as an example. Unless you are fabulously wealthy, you are only one market crash and/or critical illness away from bankruptcy. Larger competitors will gobble up your assets for pennies on the dollar, and then everyone will refuse to rent to you because of your financial history.
Right now the system is working in your favor. What happens when it isn't?
I don't think the tech listed in this article are at odds with wanting government to provide more housing options. The number one thing to improve most situations is to just build more housing and stop inflating asset prices as a handout to the middle and (increasingly just) upper class.
It's possible this tech gives power to landlords over tenants. It's also possible that its a net benefit to society, even if landlord power is a big problem on its own.
So because there might be a market crash in the future and the system might no longer be "working for me", I'm not supposed to be able to use tools and data to screen tenants and verify their ability to pay rent?
The housing advocacy I've seen suffers from a motte and bailey dynamic: a certain kind of activist seems to really want to abolish prices and markets as tools for dealing with scarcity while insisting that they're merely trying to enact common sense tenant protections or maintain people's right to housing or something. The NIMBY opposition to new housing makes sense in this context: it shouldn't be developers (i.e., the market) that decides when to expand the housing inventory, but instead some committee.
I just wish these people be up front about their opposition to prices so we could have a clear discussion of who decides who gets to live where.
I really wish this page did a better job explaining why "landlord tech" is problematic. It doesn't really go deeper than mentioning erosion of privacy (without concretely explaining how that happens) and making vague statements about racial inequity and evictions.
As it is now, it reads like an appeal to the general resentment of "big tech" and of landlords ("if it makes their jobs more efficient, it must be bad!") than an actual exploration of the problem.
I don't doubt that the articles linked at the end describe some horrifying real problems, but making the audience sift through a list of links is not an effective way of motivating people.
Yah it came across to me as pretty one sided. I'd love to hear a balanced take on the subject and hear both sides of the story. Hotels abandoned traditional keys long ago. I don't get why security cameras are such a menace too. They don't prevent crimes but I'd sure love to know they were around if ever I was assaulted and they increased the odds of landing a conviction to get that criminal off the streets.
In most cases the tech is used as cover for eroding already minimal tenant rights and services. For example, one building I lived in switched to digital locks and the price for a lost key replacement went from $10 to $50. And according to them the digital key replacement process was much more efficient.
That could be due to several possible legitimate reasons in addition to the obvious. The key fee may have been set 20 years ago when 10 dollars was reasonable and not updated to cover labor and the deterrent effect for losing keys. When updating the new system, the cost could have been adjusted to keep up with the times. The new system could be genuinely more expensive to buy keys for (assuming like RFID) or require a more technical user to perform the update. Unlike metal keys that can be pre-cut often manual intervention is required to replace a dead key since there is a database association with the key that needs to be established. $50 is enough to be a deterrent and not enough to be considered excessive considering that replacing a car key can run over $200 for the fob alone depending on make and model.
I recently reverse-engineered the keyfob for my building because the official one is big, ugly and expensive to replace (after I've already paid fees to replace 2 lost ones).
The result was that 1) the system is absolutely insecure and can be cloned very easily and 2) all the hardware I needed to reverse-engineer & copy it (including several new key fobs) cost me the same amount as a single official replacement.
I don't think the building owners are setting the price either, it's the vendor of the "security" system that is reselling cheap insecure crap at 20x the real price and exploiting information asymmetry to sell them.
At least with low-tech solutions like old-style keys everyone is on a level-playing field and selling them for 20x the price wouldn't fly (because it is common knowledge that a locksmith can make you a copy for the price of 2 cups of coffee), but this kind of new tech allows them to get away with it, and this trend will only get worse as "landlord tech" advances.
Regarding car keys, the astronomic price you mention is also price gouging just because they can. The actual hardware is not expensive at all, it's just that they (officially) need to be programmed by the dealership and that allows them to set any price they want. Of course, there is software and tools out there (if you look in the right place) that will completely defeat the apparent "security" provided by such system so you're not even gaining anything regarding security.
I knew a facilities director who found out when people changed staff at one of the facilities he managed they wound up getting swindled by this crazy contract the locksmiths had the organization signed up with. The problem was keys were being copied and proliferated and accountability of who accessed which rooms and buildings in the complex was no longer manageable. The solved that problem but took an a host of other costs with key replacements and who owned the master key set. From what I remember the locksmith company owned the masters and charged a crazy amount for key copies. I forget the details exactly but I remember the sentiment of the director being that the contract was heavily biased in favor of the locksmith company.
Well I didn’t sign my original lease for that building 20 years before the switch so if the traditional re-keying process had become more expensive I assume they would have simply updated their lease terms.
Your list of vaguely plausible what-if scenarios is exactly what I’m talking about. Neither of us has any idea what the true costs are, but for some reason the tech makes us more open to accepting what is at the end of the day an erosion of tenant rights and services.
Agreed. The site leads with (interspersing my reaction):
> Is your building management moving online?
I'm more against apartments that don't use such tech; they make payment, maintenance requests, and communication a lot easier.
>Have new cameras been installed in your home or neighborhood? Has access to your building changed? For instance, you no longer have a standard key?
Security cameras and electronic locks are great, for the most part. The latter allows auditing of who accessed my place.
>Is your landlord using new payment, notification, or screening systems?
See first point. Although I note (from two difference places since moving to Austin) many to have moved screening over to "get a $100k liability insurance policy and you're good" (~$100-200/year).
With that said, given how FB et al have their tentacles in everything, now I am worried about how much privacy they bleed when I use such resident portals.
Security cameras and electronic locks are great, for the most part. The latter allows auditing of who accessed my place
I would like to audit the landlord's daughter. Seriously, who or what I'm bringing home is no one's business. There was a time when surveillance went overboard so much that they wrote restrictions on it into the Constitution, but unfortunately the Constitution puts restraints only on the government. You'd like to see them put onto private parties as well. And then there's information leaking. Jeff Bezos owns the nation's doorbell cameras, he knows who lives where and shares the information freely with the cops that no one trusts, all without a warrent.
Is your landlord using new payment, notification, or screening systems?
Having rented from bankruptcy artists more than once I'd really really appreciate a credit history of the landlord. A repair history of the building would be nice to have, too. Can't move into a place where the roof needs fixing but the owner is too overextended to fix it.
> Seriously, who or what I'm bringing home is no one's business.
sure, if you're renting an entire building. less so if you're sharing a building with other tenants.
> Having rented from bankruptcy artists more than once I'd really really appreciate a credit history of the landlord. A repair history of the building would be nice to have, too. Can't move into a place where the roof needs fixing but the owner is too overextended to fix it.
I bet you could get some of this if you offered to pay above market rent or if you show interest in a unit that's been listed for a while.
The landlord controls the camera and the access data, not the tenant, the probability that it will be used to help the tenant is way lower than the probability it will be used against the tenant.
I'm worried that the surveillance footage will be used to prove tenets commited a litany of frivolous tiny "violations", available to the landlord on a less than a whim, only a click, while if footage were to prove my innocence on a matter, they'll do everything in their power to delay...
I read this and realized I fully support landlord tech.
- Tenant screening? I want to live with good neighbors.
- Cameras in the apartment building? Yes please. I want to catch package thieves.
- Brokers for home sales? Absolutely - traditional brokers take 3-6% and drive up the cost of housing.
- Rent to own? The renter / owner divide has gotten wider in cities and we need solutions to fix this.
Landlord tech is certainly not good for city renters who think they deserve lower than market rent purely on account of (1) how long they have lived in the city and (2) how little they earn. But being pro tenant doesn't mean you need to oppose everything that landlords do. Technology is one the very very few ways an oppressive system can change. The oppressors are not always landlords - they are brokers, real estate developers, law makers, voters, other tenants who sit on their rent controlled housing until they die.
P.S. I'm a tenant paying market price for rental housing.
> "Tenant screening? I want to live with good neighbors."
And there's the other side.
A landlord has an obligation to ensure things are in good working order, pay the mortgage, upkeep common areas, and pay the taxes. Whether your tenant pays or not, those bills are still due. One tenant being late once is irritating but not catastrophic. Tenant(s) not paying for months burns through reserves quickly.
It's in everyone's best interest to ensure tenants can pay the rent.
> It's in everyone's best interest to ensure tenants can pay the rent.
Which is why it's so weird to see landlords advertising "no Section 8" (which is unlawful in California, FYI). Section 8 is an ironclad guarantee that you will get paid in full and on time every month.
In my property management experience (~80 units), Section 8 tenants have no assets and limited income, so when they incur thousands of dollars of damage to a unit, there is no recourse.
Non section 8 tenants have skin in the game: assets to pursue or income that can be garnished using a judgement if there’s damage beyond what a security deposit covers. This encourages a shared responsibility model where they treat the property with enough respect that the only damage is expected wear and tear (there are outlier events, kids will be kids and whatnot).
It’s not about race (in my case, at least). It’s about resources and means.
This is one of those small-time landlord urban myths. Section 8 tenants stay for a _lot_ longer than average, and because of that they are systematically less likely to trash the place.
By comparison someone with a high income and a lot of assets is very, very likely to leave as soon as they can, meaning even if they don't trash the place you still have a higher vacancy cost (which is a landlord's main risk) and because of their wealth you'll never get anything out of them other than the deposit, because they have and can afford lawyers.
Can you provide data to backup your assertion? My data points come from experience of myself and other large scale residential landlords (100s of doors, a mix between Florida and Midwest properties).
Personally, I will happily take vacancy risk over damage risk. Vacancy risk is limited by monthly burn (mine is low for each property), damage risk is much greater amount imho.
> and because of that they are systematically less likely to trash the place.
Anecdotally, my data agrees with HUD that Section 8 tenants who don't damage the property stay longer (although Section 8 makes up a small percentage of our total tenant population, primarily in the northwestern Chicago suburbs). Our costs have been high when (intentional) damage is done though (sometimes tens of thousands of dollars), causing the property to be in the red for years after.
One of our Section 8 tenants in Aurora was a great tenant; their son moved back in after a stint in a correctional facility, altercations in the front yard occurred, culminating in a drive by shooting attempt (I have the receipts to repair the bullet holes in the siding and replacement of the front door). Per the jurisdiction's rental guidelines and lease addendum requirements, we were required to terminate the lease (the jurisdiction's requirements, not ours). We helped them relocate out of state at our own cost.
There's nothing preventing any tenant from being related to criminals. The only thing shared in common among all housing voucher users is they can't afford housing. Imputing upon them as a class a tendency toward crime or other tendencies is the definition of prejudice.
> There's nothing preventing any tenant from being related to criminals.
The jurisdiction I mention specifically has mandatory landlord classes and lease addendum requirements to aggressively inhibit the housing of anyone associated with criminal activity (which includes the tenant(s) being held liable for any criminal activity that takes place on the property where they're not the victim). Background checks are mandatory for all adult tenants. Lease agreements with the mandatory jurisdiction provided lease addendum must be submitted to the jurisdiction's rental management department ("Division of Property Standards") to receive a rental license. I take no issue if you receive vouchers; if you're a criminal or associate with them, I can't provide you with housing (in this jurisdiction), and it's grounds for eviction based on a preponderance of the evidence (no conviction required).
That's academic theory, not reality. The actual behaviors and background of the tenants is what makes the difference, and people who have higher income tend to pay their bills.
Also vacancy management is an entirely different problem than quality of tenants and how they treat the property. Turnover of good quality tenants is much better than bad quality tenants who stay trashing the place for years.
When I tried researching it online, I could not find a policy that covered intentional damage / vandalism. Either be it a policy owned by the landlord or the renter. I'm guessing insurance companies are expecting your to get your money via a civil suit in that case. Would love know if there is one.
AFAIK personal liability is something like when someone comes to your house and slips on a puddle you have on the floor and hurts themselves and then sues you. It's not about damage you did yourself, on purpose, to the property you rent from someone else or someone else does on purpose against a property you rent out.
All the insurance policies were about accidental damage on either side.
Then why would an apartment require you to carry it and list them as the interested party? What would they care if it just protects you against drunk partners at your place that get injured?
Your insurance as the property owner can cover vandalism, theft, and other intentional damage if you choose (and you should for all the reasons listed in this thread).
When I tried shopping online for it as a research project, it explicitly excluded intentional damage in the fine print, and there was no extra option to purchase it separately. Could someone show me a policy that has that explicitly, or at the very least does not exclude it explicitly like I found?
More intentional damage by the renter for the landlord's policy. Usually the exception is under the wording of 'vandalism'. I think intentional damage by someone who bought the place is an OK thing to have an exception for. Although I wonder if banks have insurance for that case.
That's not correct. It is illegal to discriminate in CA against renters, based on the type of income. Section 8 in CA is not considered part of the renter's income. Section 8 does not guarantee that the rent will get paid in full and on time every month. There is a determination of rental percentage that is made initially and when the renter's income changes. Section 8 may actually pay up to 4 months late, but once it starts it pays very regularly.
Thanks! It's been a couple of years since I've rented-out property in that neck of the woods.
Looking at the text:
(2) “Discrimination” does not include either of the following:
(A) Refusal to rent or lease a portion of an owner-occupied single-family house to a person as a roomer or boarder living within the household, provided that no more than one roomer or boarder is to live within the household, and the owner complies with subdivision (c) of Section 12955, which prohibits discriminatory notices, statements, and advertisements.
(B) Where the sharing of living areas in a single dwelling unit is involved, the use of words stating or tending to imply that the housing being advertised is available only to persons of one sex.
In my state, Section 8 Assistance makes up the difference between a tenant's income and the market rate of the area. So the tenant is responsible for 1/3 of the rent and section 8 money is responsible for the rest, then the landlord is guaranteed to get the 2/3 from Section 8, but if the tenant doesn't pay their 1/3 you are out of luck. Eviction is a slow process here too.
I'm assuming your question is rhetorical however I do want to ask you why you brought race into that discussion? Instead of asking "what do you consider to be a good neighbor" you instead phrase the question to try and make the poster look racist or at least bring that option into readers heads.
Was there something in their post that made you believe they were racially motivated in their comments?
If the goal of a discussion forum is to have discussions why would you go at someone assuming the worst without first having a discussion and understanding where they are coming from?
One of the first comments on the webpage linked is:
> Stonelock biometric cameras have been installed in various residential buildings, in which tenants are forced to subject their faces to a technology proven to reproduce racial biases.
Race is a topic of the discussion at hand. It was omitted by the GGP, possibly as the GGP doesn't consider that to be of consequence (as it may not be to them, depending on which side of the camera's bias they are).
I don't read the GP's comment as attacking the GGP, so much as noting the omission.
>I'm assuming your question is rhetorical however I do want to ask you why you brought race into that discussion? Instead of asking "what do you consider to be a good neighbor" you instead phrase the question to try and make the poster look racist or at least bring that option into readers heads.
I'm not gonna speak for GP but a lot of people are hair trigger about screaming racism because it's an easy way to reduce fundamentally complicated questions about standards and double standards of behavior based on economic class into a simple issue of good vs evil.
There's really nothing fundamentally different about Kevin the yuppie changing the oil in his "classic" 2001 4Runner on the street but when you start talking about people like Cletus, Manuel and Jamal doing the same on domestic minivans of the 90s suddenly there's a problem. The fact that Kevin's bank account has more digits to the left of the decimal shouldn't matter but for some reason it does...
> There's really nothing fundamentally different about Kevin the yuppie changing the oil in his "classic" 2001 4Runner on the street but when you start talking about people like Cletus, Manuel and Jamal doing the same on domestic minivans of the 90s suddenly there's a problem. The fact that Kevin's bank account has more digits to the left of the decimal shouldn't matter but for some reason it does...
I mean, I don't see much of a problem in either case unless they're routinely obstructing the right of way or leaving a half-built vehicle to rust in the front lawn.
sometimes seemingly small differences can change something from cool or at least acceptable to annoying. I used to live across the street from a guy with an immaculately maintained classic mustang. my nextdoor neighbors had a bunch of two-stroke dirtbikes that they would ride almost everyday. that mustang was incredibly loud, but it sounded awesome. the guy was really cool and would show me other exotic cars he was restoring all the time. the dirtbikes were not nearly as loud as the mustang, but they weren't interesting either, so I just found them annoying. despite the fact that they were basically doing the same thing, I'd way rather have the mustang guy as a neighbor than the dirtbike family.
The more interesting question is if the good neighbor selection process disadvantages black people. The poster's motivation isn't relevant to whether people are harmed by the results
There's plenty of history of housing discrimination against black people, and it's not novel that ML can be racist.
Unless somebody has sat down and asked "does this screening actually determine good neighbors, or just filter out black people?" It's probably going to be a racist algorithm
Many (most?) American owner-occupants consider all renters to be "bad neighbors" with "no stake in our community". The GP should really consider before using such weaponized phrases.
Have you actually had a landlord install cameras around your complex? I'm skeptical that you would actually want this if you'd experienced it in practice.
Yeah, the last thing I want my landlord doing is installing cameras on every approach to my front door and doing facial recognition and storing the footage for 60 days (yet, somehow, it's conveniently "not available" if a package of mine goes missing but it's for damn sure attached to the posting on our group discussion forum if someone's dog pees in the wrong spot).
Funny how 90% of anything landlords do--other than the existence and some light upkeep of the building--never seems to accrue to tenants.
My landlord installed cameras in the car garage a year ago after a series of car breakins. My car is in that garage, and I am not a thief, so why shouldn't I view improved security as a good thing?
If the camera were pointed at my door instead then I wouldn't like it much, but it isn't.
But the point of capturing package thieves was that it would be pointed at your door.
Beyond that, I don’t get why people want to capture footage of package thieves. It’s not like police actually go after these people. Has anyone here ever actually heard back, “yeah, we got the guy and here’s your packages!” Pretty rare as far as I hear.
In my building packages are left in the lobby. It would be pretty easy for package thieves to walk off with packages, but I've not heard of anybody having trouble with that here. From what I've seen package theft is more a problem for stand-alone suburban houses where packages are left on the front porch visible from the street. I think a lot of people living in such homes think there is value in cameras, and those cameras aren't being imposed on them by landlords. I don't know if there is any real value to those cameras though, and I suspect a better solution involves some sort of lockbox with a one-way door, similar to mail slots in front doors or bear-proof trashcans..
That is not a problem with surveillance though.
Surveillance works to catch package thieves, it's that the government is dysfunctional and won't do the actual catching.
I do actually live in a complex with cameras on all the entrances. not sure where I fall between "complete apathy" and "somewhat approve". if I really wanted to get someone/something in without it being captured on camera, all I have to do is put it/them in the backseat of my car.
I'd actually love that (if it worked).
The last apartment building I lived in in Seattle had packages stolen regularly from a locked room. It was an arms race between criminals breaking the glass window in the door to open it (wire added to the glass), destroying the lock (better lock installed), prying the door open with power tools (steel plates installed around the door perimeter). It felt like Russia in the 90ies (basically a 3rd world country) where people with anything to steal would install reinforced steel doors in their condos with some crazy locks.
One thing that did not work was adding lights and cameras, because in Seattle property crime is not crime.
If the cameras were used to catch the guys and put them in jail for a long time, I'd be 100% for it. The only problem with surveillance in general is lack of choice/control of the watchers. In case of a small private organization like a n apartment building, this does not apply; surveillance is an unalloyed good IMHO.
Problem is that once you open the floodgates there's nothing preventing the tech being extended to use-cases that would be against you, or recourse when things go wrong and the "computer says no".
Yep. Go in to complain that the AC is still broken and they'll pull up their surveillance AI that shows every time you violated their overreaching curfew and guest authorization policies. Train the tenants to take what they're given and stay in line like good passive income streams.
I think it's important to recognize that you or I may not be the ones at risk here, and the same convenience/safety tools that we don't think much about might have an outside impact on others. I was in a fancy managed apartment for a while and they had carded access, security cams, electronic package lockers, etc. That relationship is pretty unique in that I'm paying a lot of money for a more "luxury" experience, and I have more leverage if something goes awry. (This management company totally dropped the ball on making the actual units nice to live in, but that's another story...)
There are plenty of horror stories of landlords being shady, the classic one being coming up with an excuse to hold the security deposit. I really would not trust them with putting "smart" devices in my home. I once rented in a complex where the online credit card payment cost an additional $15 fee over walking to the office and handing over a check, because it was some service that they bought in that skimmed off the top. Rent-to-own also has a history of being predatory towards people with lower income. On top of the typically terrible value of renting to own, it's the same relationship as renting where a bad landlord could do all sorts of things, but now you have even more to lose since your money is locked up in the relationship.
> I'm paying a lot of money for a more "luxury" experience, and I have more leverage if something goes awry
No. That's a sales line.
There are so many cases where paying more gets you worse treatment. Enterprise software pops to mind. So do luxury hotels. A $150 room will have free wifi, free breakfast, and no surprises. A $500 room will nickel and dime you on wifi, breakfast, parking, non-smoking, gym, a valet you didn't ask for, and they'll tack on a few fake tax fees for good measure. Because they can.
> This management company totally dropped the ball on making the actual units nice to live in, but that's another story...
No, it's the ending of the same story. We've all been there, it sucks, and you have my sympathies, but please don't believe or repeat the sales nonsense. It's a bunch of socially normalized lies designed to close a deal, nothing more.
Yeah, that's fair. My take may have been a bit naive. It is a bit like Enterprise software, though. Even if you're getting screwed, they'll be polite to you at least. When I badly broke an appliance, they replaced it no questions asked. Going through the same with my current individual-owner landlord would definitely be an event.
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All of those ideas or tech could be used for very nefarious purposes. Two sides to every story. The site pretty much handles all of the counterpoints.
- Tenant screening means local income or felons cannot live anywhere other than the worst crime ridden housing. It's neo-redlining or housing covenants.
- Cameras means persistent surveillance and monitoring of your tenants. Imagine this with facial ML tech.
- Brokers for home sales result in an uneven playing field and high potential for corruption. The incentive structure is not in the favor of individuals.
- Rent to own might increase default rates, debt and speculation.
> Landlord tech is certainly not good for city renters who think they deserve lower than market rent purely on account of (1) how long they have lived in the city and (2) how little they earn.
Why shouldn't low income earners pay lower rent? From a humanitarian perspective, it doesn't make sense to have a landlord greedily siphoning off the vast majority of a person's income, just so that person can have fulfilled the basic human right of not being homeless. It's parasitic.
OP never claimed that those with low income shouldn't pay lower rent, they simply claimed that "Landlord tech" is not good for those individuals. Someone is allowed to see the benefits to certain things while also realizing that it may not benefit everyone the same way.
Of course rent shouldn't be income adjusted. Neither should and other good be income adjustment. The price mechanism works and is a good thing.
What would be the point of striving for a raise if your costs increased proportionately to income? The possibility of a higher quality of life gets people to work hard and benefit us all.
> Why should the landlord fit the bill because Jonhy does want to live in a high sought place?
It's just one of the very few risks a person of wealth might have to accept, should they decide to use their elevated position in society to inflict landlordism upon people.
Well, there are pros and cons but one of the issues I see, living somewhere that has dirt cheap council homes for some poor people, is it breeds huge resentment against low income earners and causes people to focus on "this development needs to be X% affordable" and totally ignore the question of "why are we not making the average home affordable instead of focusing on some lottery for the poor?"
But, of course, the political incentives are aligned to encourage homes becoming ever more expensive at the behest of homeowners.
if landlords are able to extract more profit than is reasonable for the service they provide (and I'd argue they often do), then that is a problem regardless of how well off the tenants are.
I agree that everyone should be guaranteed food, water, and shelter (at minimum), but I don't think anyone is entitled to live on the most desirable pieces of land in the world.
How do you decide what the "reasonable" threshold is? In my mind, the reasonable price is whatever the market decides. On what basis can anyone assert otherwise?
The nice thing about using markets to set prices and deal with scarcity is that they're self-adjusting.
fair question. the way I am using "reasonable" here is very subjective. one rough way to look at it would be to consider the relationship between median household income and median rent for a 2BR apartment. in my area, median gross household income is ~$4250/month and median rent for a 2BR is ~$1750. so after taxes, the median household would be spending about half their net income to live in a median 2BR. to me, this seems like a lot.
my personal take is that the root cause of this is the culture and policy surrounding home ownership, particularly for the middle class. we encourage people to take out a mortgage to acquire a home as soon as possible, and we tell them it's not financially irresponsible for a single physical asset to make up most of their net worth. in fact, we tell them it's the best investment they could possibly make. we grant tax breaks and lower the required down payments to extend this opportunity to even more people. so we end up with a bunch of people who are either highly leveraged on their mortgage, or have paid it off but have minimal other assets. this makes it very important that house values keep going up, so we deliberately distort the housing market so they do.
something I'd like to underscore is that the housing market is very much not a free market. there are tons of restrictions on what type of things can be build, how they can be built, what they can look like, what they can be used for, etc. even if you think free markets are effective pricing mechanisms (and I mostly do), that doesn't really have much to do with the prevailing rent in most areas.
markets are neat mechanisms, but no market exists in a sociopolitical vaccum, so such blind faith in them is misguided (to put it charitably).
without getting too far into the weeds, and because housing is a durable and necessary good that's proportional to both population and productive capacity, in a free and fair market you'd expect housing prices to track with inflation. that's the reasonable expectation. over time, we've seen housing prices detach from that baseline for a variety of reasons unrelated to its core responsibility of sheltering people. see, for instance, the case-shiller index.
those detachments are distortions to the idealization of a free and fair market to ensure house prices continually rise for political and personal gain, despite the lack of sound economic principles underlying that distended rise.
If we want low-income people to be able to live in certain areas then the best solution is to just give them money and let them obtain housing at market rates. We can do that through income redistribution, by taxing high-income people (which may include some landlords among others). Forcing landlords to rent at below market rates distorts the market and causes artificial housing shortages.
With that model, if the government are going to be effectively paying whatever the landlords demand for rent, then the best solution would be for the government to seize rental housing from the landlords (perhaps with some token compensation so they don't complain too much) and run it as a non-profit rental service, i.e. social housing for all.
Obviously not the best solution for the landlords, but, really, so what? Removing a class of parasites from the housing system would be a feature, not a bug.
Income is taxed at the same rates regardless of source. That doesn't make landlording any more or less desirable than other investments. In general all classes of long-term investments generate roughly the same risk-adjusted returns.
OP edited their comment, after I had already replied, from "taxing landlords" to "taxing high-income people (which may include some landlords)" so you missed that earlier nuance.
> "If we want low-income people to be able to live in certain areas then the best solution is to just give them money..."
yeah, that didn't turn out so well for higher education and healthcare. so no to that.
housing markets are distorted in a thousand ways. a solution like that might be appealing for its simplicity, but what we need to do is the hard work of rationalizing a death by a thousand cuts. start by aggressively repealing every zoning/building regulation that's not tied to solid safety concerns (and not nebulous and nefarious ones). eventually you'd be in a position to repeal (in CA) both prop 13 and rent control (but not saying that'll happen), which are complementary distortions, but only when the market is functioning well enough not to need (for sociopolitical purposes, not economic ones) them.
> Tenant screening? I want to live with good neighbors.
> Cameras in the apartment building? Yes please. I want to catch package thieves.
these two could be good or bad depending on the implementation. I would like to share my apartment building with people who won't make a lot of noise, smoke cigarettes in the stairwell, threaten or steal from me, etc. I really doubt that you can screen for this without having a lot of false negatives or false positives. I have no issues with my current neighbors, but I suspect that has a lot more to do with the neighborhood and price than any active measures taken by the management.
regarding cameras, I don't have any issues with cameras at the entrance point(s) to the building. I already have to swipe in with a keyfob registered to me, so it's not like I'm losing much privacy by having my face recorded. I think the residents benefit from having at least some record of what guests are entering the complex. I'm certainly not okay with more cameras inside the building.
Technology is orthogonal to system change. It can be used to bolster existing modes of oppression or oppose them. Sometimes even the same technology can be used to do both, based on who uses it!
The real question is what is being deployed, who's pushing for the deployment, and who is benefiting. Taking smart keys, I'm skeptical tenants will see any improvement in terms of physical security. But I'm very willing to believe landlords perceive a benefit from increased surveillance of their renters.
> The oppressors are not always landlords - they are brokers, real estate developers, law makers, voters, other tenants who sit on their rent controlled housing until they die.
Hmm but weirdly enough it seems out of your big list of oppressors I see rent-controlled tenants pulled out more often as a boogeyman than any of the others!
> Taking smart keys, I'm skeptical tenants will see any improvement in terms of physical security. But I'm very willing to believe landlords perceive a benefit from increased surveillance of their renters.
I dunno why you would single these out (I'm assuming you mean the RFID setups they have on most new apartment buildings?). seems like they pretty obviously increase security over everyone having a common mechanical key to the main door. makes it way less of an issue when someone loses a key and/or moves out; you just deauthorize their code. once you give a couple hundred people the key to the front door, you either give up entirely on having the main entrance be secure, or you have to replace the lock and hundreds of keys over and over again.
I think it's a perverse display of greed, opulence and power and a driver of inequality that someone is entitled to a major portion of their tenant's paycheck every month. I don't believe someone should be able to generate an income from something they have or have acquired like a house or an inheritance instead of something they do, in the way of actual work. I don't believe it is a fair exchange of goods and I don't believe it's a particularly good way to distribute them either considering the sheer number of people who are homeless and the number of properties that lie empty simply because their owners believe they deserve to generate more passive income from them or just don't care enough.
To me, this comment highlights a complete misunderstanding and misrepresentation of landlord's motivations and interests that results in the publication of biased, slogan-riddled "research" like the submission.
> I think it's a perverse display of greed, opulence and power and a driver of inequality that someone is entitled to a major portion of their tenant's paycheck every month.
Generally, landlords don't feel entitled to a major portion of their tenant's paycheck every month. In fact, landlords want as little of their tenant's paycheck every month, because the higher that percentage is, the higher the likelihood the tenant will have issues paying the rent at some point during the lease.
Rents are generally set through market forces, not determining how much of an individuals paycheck can be extracted from them.
> I don't believe someone should be able to generate an income from something they have or have acquired like a house or an inheritance instead of something they do, in the way of actual work.
People shouldn't be able to use tools or implements of any kind to generate income? Maintaining a habitable property is work, though it can be infrequent and is commonly irregular.
> I don't believe it is a fair exchange of goods
Why not? People are exchanging money for a good (housing) which is no more essential than food or water, yet I don't see activists organizing to abolish grocery stores or farms.
> and I don't believe it's a particularly good way to distribute them either considering the sheer number of people who are homeless
People are generally homeless due to issues other than landlords. There is ample support for sheltering the homeless (though I'd like to see more), and almost all research indicates that the core issues with almost all homeless individuals is not a lack of supply of shelter.
> and the number of properties that lie empty simply because their owners believe they deserve to generate more passive income from them or just don't care enough.
And you wrap up with a statement that is solely based on some version of a landlord that easy for to you to hate, regardless of any relation to reality.
Your attitude is no better or more productive than those on the other end of the spectrum who vilify those who need assistance and base all their thoughts and opinions on insulting, inaccurate stereotypes of lower income households.
>complete misunderstanding and misrepresentation of landlord's motivations and interests...rents are generally set through market forces
Should their motivations and interests matter if market forces ultimately decide the outcome, which isn't "as little of their tenant's paycheck every month" as you contend for the average tenant?
>People shouldn't be able to use tools or implements of any kind to generate income?
This seems to conflate an apartment someone owns to, say, a laptop or another tool which they actively use to generate productive work. I don't agree with the comparison but I do agree that it is more grey than my parent comment portrayed it to be.
>than food or water, yet I don't see activists...
You haven't seen activists who protest the commoditization and sale of drinking water?
>And you wrap up with a statement that is solely based on some version of a landlord that easy for to you to hate, regardless of any relation to reality.
You're right, that was a strawman and bad form from myself. But I'm not sure the 17 million vacant homes versus the 200,000 or so recorded unsheltered homeless individuals per the 2019 American census[1] is that unrelated to reality. If you're suggesting that it is removed from reality in that the motivations for those properties remaining empty cannot be outright attributed to malice like I did, I would be open to that assertion but I'm not sure it matters as long as the disparity exists. I still feel it is fundamentally immoral.
I appreciate you engaging with the content of my argument in good faith and apologize if I have failed to return the favour.
> Should their motivations and interests matter if market forces ultimately decide the outcome, which isn't "as little of their tenant's paycheck every month" as you contend for the average tenant?
I don't "contend" that landlords want tenants who can comfortably pay the rent, it's standard best practice and common sense.
Regardless, I'm not sure why landlords are solely responsible for the status quo, to the point that you believe they shouldn't exist.
> This seems to conflate an apartment someone owns to, say, a laptop or another tool which they actively use to generate productive work. I don't agree with the comparison but I do agree that it is more grey than my parent comment portrayed it to be.
Yes, it does conflate the two intentionally. The distinction between housing and other man-made goods seems arbitrary to me.
> You haven't seen activists who protest the commoditization and sale of drinking water?
The protests I've seen about Nestle and others are generally focused on privatization of water in impoverished nations where people were previously using it as a free resource or centered around the terms of the contract with a water bottler.
I don't see activists in the US protesting the water company or telling people not to pay their water bills, which is what I had in mind when I made my previous comment.
> You're right, that was a strawman and bad form from myself. But I'm not sure the 17 million vacant homes versus the 200,000 or so recorded unsheltered homeless individuals per the 2019 American census[1] is that unrelated to reality. If you're suggesting that it is removed from reality in that the motivations for those properties remaining empty cannot be outright attributed to malice like I did, I would be open to that assertion but I'm not sure it matters as long as the disparity exists. I still feel it is fundamentally immoral.
Fair enough. I don't dispute that there are enough vacant homes to provide shelter to the homeless, but my issue was the assumption of malice (which is the case throughout your original reply to me).
> I appreciate you engaging with the content of my argument in good faith and apologize if I have failed to return the favour.
Same to you, it's always unclear to me why landlords are vilified and singled out as the one provider of necessary goods and services that are vilified and should be outlawed, so engaging in conversations like these are interesting to me.
I'm very surprised to see most of the comments here in favor of the "landlord tech" described.
Some examples, from the site, are movement recognition systems forcing you to perform a "humiliating dance" to enter the building, being forced to install multiple apps to maintain access to your apartment, and mandatory facial recognition to enter your apartment.
These are all real examples that are installed today! This is a disgusting violation of people's privacy.
how is facial recognition any more of a violation of privacy than signing a lease? the landlord already knows who you are and they already know that you live there.
And if that were the top complaint, that would be a great alarm to raise! That kind of thing is stupid and abusive. But they lead with "how dare they use an online resident portal and screen tenants". What?
Online portals have problems -- not everyone has equal access to the internet, and tenant screening has a whole host of problems.
Think about credit reporting companies, then imagine that they are even less credible, the results even more inscrutable, and more error prone. You think Equifax is doing a great job? The tenant screening companies are doing much, much worse.
You are giving landlords more power to turn away poor and minority tenants.
>Online portals have problems -- not everyone has equal access to the internet, and tenant screening has a whole host of problems.
Again, if the complaint were about that -- if they required you to conduct all business that way -- great! That would be a good point to lead with. But a) they don't, and b) every apartment I know with a resident portal has supported old-school interaction, so if there are counterexamples, I need to see them.
>Think about credit reporting companies, then imagine that they are even less credible, the results even more inscrutable, and more error prone.
Because credit companies aren't perfect, credit checks are evil and racist?
> Because credit companies aren't perfect, credit checks are evil and racist?
Not what I said at all. The companies aren't just "not perfect", they are considerably worse than that.
And yes, credit checks can be used as a form of digital redlining. They are not always used that way, but they absolutely are being used like that widely across the US.
That sounds exactly like what I just accused you of: criticizing the use of credit checks as racist simply because they can be used that way. At the very least, you're really overstating it as being "not at all" what you said, considering the very similar argument you repeated in the next sentence.
Also:
>The companies aren't just "not perfect", they are considerably worse than that.
The difference between "not perfect" vs "much worse" doesn't seem relevant here. As long as they're not perfect, they can be used exactly the way you describe, so it doesn't seem like a good argument to use to throw (vague) shade at credit checks.
Would you mind concretely spelling out how you think landlords should operate, so I know I'm not mischaracterizing what you're criticizing? It's easy to say "X has downsides", but a substantive discussion involves weighing the pros and cons.
Landlords should not be allowed to prohibit tenants based on credit or criminal history alone. E.g. "You must have a credit score of X00 to be considered" should be illegal.
Landlords should set criteria for who can be a tenant (perhaps based on income/income assistance/demonstrated ability to pay the rent), and accept the first candidate who meets all the criteria they propose.
Edit: Also, in case it is relevant, I am a property owner who rents out part of their home. I've never run a background or credit check on any of my tenants.
Can you remind me who in the thread advocated the view you're criticizing?
>Also, in case it is relevant, I am a property owner who rents out part of their home. I've never run a background or credit check on any of my tenants.
So you know nothing about the tenants you rent to? They're all strangers?
> Can you remind me who in the thread advocated the view you're criticizing?
You reduced the critique of the article to "How dare they screen tenants", which is a strawman that no one is proposing. I cited ways in which tenant screening is problematic (credit reporting and criminal background checks) in hopes of highlighting that it's not at all preposterous for someone to be critical of technology being used in this space.
> So you know nothing about the tenants you rent to? They're all strangers?
Sometimes. I know some people I've rented to. Others have been strangers. Ask for references, have a coffee shop conversation. I've had folks suddenly have life happen to them (and lose the ability to pay rent for a bit). It's not hard to treat folks like humans, imo.
>You reduced the critique of the article to "How dare they screen tenants", which is a strawman that no one is proposing.
The website -- and other commenters -- were citing "they do background checks" in itself, with no further commentary, as something inherently outrageous. What you're quoting was my (and several others') best effort identify what we thought was being criticized; this is really hard when no one will commit to a position, and when they do, it turns out their complaint is ultimately (see below) "oh, they didn't do my kind of background check, where I'd never make a wrongfully biased decision based on a coffee shop chat", which feels, to me, not morally superior.
>Sometimes. I know some people I've rented to. Others have been strangers. Ask for references, have a coffee shop conversation.
Gotcha, so you do a background check them, just not the standard, criminal/credit check, and feel like this is a morally-relevant distinction. You also base a lot of your decision about a hard-to-quantify "gut feel" from this coffee shop chat, and are sure you aren't allowing an insidious bias that you would criticize if a corporation did it (cf. "culture fit").
> so you do a background check them, just not the standard, criminal/credit check
These things are not at all equivalent. It's a laughable false-equivalency to suggest that calling a few friends/acquaintances of someone is at all similar to investigating their personal finances, debts, criminal history, employment records, etc.
> You also base a lot of your decision about a hard-to-quantify "gut feel" from this coffee shop chat.
When I have a unit for rent, it goes to the first person interested. This coffee shop meeting isn't an interview.
These folks are going to be living in my home, this is the most egalitarian way for both parties to understand "is this situation tenable for both of us?" It's not an assessment or gate.
How else will they know they want to live with my family?
That's why I didn't say they were. I was challenging you to explain the moral difference and you haven't yet answered that. Worse, you're not pretending that your coffee shop meeting isn't an interview, and is for their benefit:
>How else will they know they want to live with my family?
It's fine if you want to argue against the standard background check, but you need to actually articulate what is objectionable about it, and have some awareness of the similarities to the screening that you consider necessary.
> Ask for references, have a coffee shop conversation.
You understand that this is basically the service that the credit bureaus perform? Each creditor is a reference for the debtor, in a centralized location that is easy to access so people who are interested in determining the likelihood of repayment can quickly collect relevant references.
Please don't take this as some sort of endorsement of the behavior of the specific credit bureaus we have today, but I don't see the same massive distinction between your vetting method and running a credit/background check on an individual, other than yours being much less likely to produce an accurate assessment.
I think perhaps you misunderstand my position. I'm not interested in an accurate assessment, and I certainly don't want to hear from someone's creditors.
Creditors don't tell me what it's like to live with someone. You can be deeply bad at managing money but a fantastically respectful and considerate tenant.
The credit bureaus tell me nothing about the human except for some financial details that honestly shouldn't be any of my business anyways.
If you aren't interested in an accurate assessment, what is the point of your assessment process?
Many industries have found that creditworthiness is a good proxy for general responsibility, moreso than your "gut feel" I strongly suspect.
Your position is that somehow your seemingly arbitrary (and intentionally inaccurate?) assessment process is morally superior to those who actually want to obtain an accurate assessment of an individuals likelihood to honor the terms of the contract they are both entering into.
You and I are talking past one another, and I suspect we are unlikely to come to any sort of satisfying agreement.
I believe, fundamentally, a landlord who makes a profit is immoral. Therefore, I'm not interested in understanding someone's financial responsibility.
I believe financial responsibility is not an adequate proxy for general responsibility for the reasons I've stated above (criminal backgrounds, poverty, lack of education, etc) that shouldn't be barriers to getting housing.
My guess is that if we are unable to agree on credit checks as unnecessarily invasive, then I really don't think we'll come to a reasonable stopping point for "landlords are fundamentally an immoral enterprise".
If you'd like to have the last word in the thread, by all means.
I don't think we're talking past each other; I think you have some very strange definitions of commonly used words and terms or you're just being intellectually dishonest.
On the off chance you actually respond to this:
> I believe, fundamentally, a landlord who makes a profit is immoral. Therefore, I'm not interested in understanding someone's financial responsibility.
Are you not charging your tenants to occupy a portion of your home? If you are, you're profiting. If you aren't, everything else you said in this thread is misleading at best.
> I believe financial responsibility is not an adequate proxy for general responsibility for the reasons I've stated above (criminal backgrounds, poverty, lack of education, etc) that shouldn't be barriers to getting housing.
The entire risk management industry disagrees with you. I'll go with them over your half-baked beliefs.
> My guess is that if we are unable to agree on credit checks as unnecessarily invasive, then I really don't think we'll come to a reasonable stopping point for "landlords are fundamentally an immoral enterprise".
Something we agree on!
> If you'd like to have the last word in the thread, by all means.
Thanks for exposing me to a new level of cognitive dissonance, where a landlord claims that landlords are immoral and should not exist.
> I'm very surprised to see most of the comments here in favor of the "landlord tech" described.
I think it's not too surprising, this sort of post always seems to bring HN's resident landlords out to argue in favour of whatever happens to benefit them financially, and gives them more control over their tenants' lives.
It's a bit like how any topic here relating to social justice attracts hordes of far-righteous types peppering the comments with comically bad takes, before flagging the submission off the front page.
In my opinion, the reasons for the reaction here are:
1. The technology is "dual use" and the negative examples like you described can be regulated away in general, so the benefits remain and abuse is reduced and punished when it does occur.
2. The over the top bias inherent in the site is offputting to anyone not in completely agreement with the ideology of the creators of the site, which represents a fringe of American society in my experience.
When I'm at work, I'm almost the only person who is not (yet) a homeowner. When I'm with my friends, I'm almost the only person who makes more than $X and might be a home owner in the next 5 years.
You not talking to poor people is not the absence of poor people existing.
As I suspected, you have nothing but baseless insults and vague complaints to back up your opinion.
I can assure you that the views expressed by this project represent a fringe of the US population, and based on this interaction and previous ones with other individuals with a similar mindset, I sincerely hope it remains that way.
HN seems to be very anti-surveillance tech, I guess until it's the landlords doing the surveilling?
Housing should not be a commodity at all.
In my lifetime I've seen the landlord move from someone who might live on site to someone who has money to pay a property manager to manager their portfolio of properties. Your super these days is as likely to be an underpaid worker as anyone living on site.
All this tech is doing is further solidifying the powers of the landlord over the tenant, increasing the surveillance of tenants, and normalizing surveillance culture. I'm surprised to see it supported on HN of all places, which is usually very privacy oriented.
Edit:
To not just be negative, let me present some positive alternatives for discussion:
* Housing cooperatives -- Tenants can collectively own the building they live in, and decide as a community what technology works for them
* Tenants unions -- Tenants can collectively discuss what the property should be using, what the rules should be, and negotiate as a unit with their landlord.
what do you mean by this exactly? "commodity" usually means a fungible good (ie, one where individual units are interchangeable), which housing is certainly not (if you think it is, I have an old trailer that I would gladly trade you for your house). are you saying literally all housing should be free?
Housing should be priced by how effectively it houses people. The idea that housing is a market good that people can use as an investment vehicle undermines the actual value of having places for everyone to live at an affordable rate.
I believe everyone should have access to free housing should they require it, but that's different than housing should be free.
144 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadWhat is this Marxist nonsense?
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=tBsrpJAAAAAJ&hl=en
Whenever you see anything that's hosted on RiseUp, you know it's going to be intellectually bankrupt.
- Not running background checks or verifying income on tenants? - Stopping listing sites like Zillow from listing foreclosures? - Stopping cash RE transactions?
Sorry, but as someone who has been involved with properties for years I am going to use the tools and data needed to ensure I am finding the right tenants that can afford to live there and will respect my property. I really couldn't care less what the "Woke Police" think about it.
What the "woke police" are saying is that letting this kind of infrastructure spread is setting the stage for more inequality. A private, unregulated Big Brother ruling real estate for a few wealthy owners is the definition of oppression. Anger against aristocracy and feudalism is one of the reasons we fought for independence.[2]
Let's take your situation as an example. Unless you are fabulously wealthy, you are only one market crash and/or critical illness away from bankruptcy. Larger competitors will gobble up your assets for pennies on the dollar, and then everyone will refuse to rent to you because of your financial history.
Right now the system is working in your favor. What happens when it isn't?
[1] https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/housing/2019/09/housi...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/does-in...
It's possible this tech gives power to landlords over tenants. It's also possible that its a net benefit to society, even if landlord power is a big problem on its own.
I'm willing to take that chance.
If you are going to talk about risk, why not attack a few probabilities on those scenarios, then we can talk about insurance.
I just wish these people be up front about their opposition to prices so we could have a clear discussion of who decides who gets to live where.
As it is now, it reads like an appeal to the general resentment of "big tech" and of landlords ("if it makes their jobs more efficient, it must be bad!") than an actual exploration of the problem.
I don't doubt that the articles linked at the end describe some horrifying real problems, but making the audience sift through a list of links is not an effective way of motivating people.
The result was that 1) the system is absolutely insecure and can be cloned very easily and 2) all the hardware I needed to reverse-engineer & copy it (including several new key fobs) cost me the same amount as a single official replacement.
I don't think the building owners are setting the price either, it's the vendor of the "security" system that is reselling cheap insecure crap at 20x the real price and exploiting information asymmetry to sell them.
At least with low-tech solutions like old-style keys everyone is on a level-playing field and selling them for 20x the price wouldn't fly (because it is common knowledge that a locksmith can make you a copy for the price of 2 cups of coffee), but this kind of new tech allows them to get away with it, and this trend will only get worse as "landlord tech" advances.
Regarding car keys, the astronomic price you mention is also price gouging just because they can. The actual hardware is not expensive at all, it's just that they (officially) need to be programmed by the dealership and that allows them to set any price they want. Of course, there is software and tools out there (if you look in the right place) that will completely defeat the apparent "security" provided by such system so you're not even gaining anything regarding security.
Your list of vaguely plausible what-if scenarios is exactly what I’m talking about. Neither of us has any idea what the true costs are, but for some reason the tech makes us more open to accepting what is at the end of the day an erosion of tenant rights and services.
> Is your building management moving online?
I'm more against apartments that don't use such tech; they make payment, maintenance requests, and communication a lot easier.
>Have new cameras been installed in your home or neighborhood? Has access to your building changed? For instance, you no longer have a standard key?
Security cameras and electronic locks are great, for the most part. The latter allows auditing of who accessed my place.
>Is your landlord using new payment, notification, or screening systems?
See first point. Although I note (from two difference places since moving to Austin) many to have moved screening over to "get a $100k liability insurance policy and you're good" (~$100-200/year).
With that said, given how FB et al have their tentacles in everything, now I am worried about how much privacy they bleed when I use such resident portals.
I would like to audit the landlord's daughter. Seriously, who or what I'm bringing home is no one's business. There was a time when surveillance went overboard so much that they wrote restrictions on it into the Constitution, but unfortunately the Constitution puts restraints only on the government. You'd like to see them put onto private parties as well. And then there's information leaking. Jeff Bezos owns the nation's doorbell cameras, he knows who lives where and shares the information freely with the cops that no one trusts, all without a warrent.
Is your landlord using new payment, notification, or screening systems?
Having rented from bankruptcy artists more than once I'd really really appreciate a credit history of the landlord. A repair history of the building would be nice to have, too. Can't move into a place where the roof needs fixing but the owner is too overextended to fix it.
Yes, I agree they shouldn't be doing it arbitrarily. I mean that e.g. when I suspected unauthorized access (which happened).
sure, if you're renting an entire building. less so if you're sharing a building with other tenants.
> Having rented from bankruptcy artists more than once I'd really really appreciate a credit history of the landlord. A repair history of the building would be nice to have, too. Can't move into a place where the roof needs fixing but the owner is too overextended to fix it.
I bet you could get some of this if you offered to pay above market rent or if you show interest in a unit that's been listed for a while.
- Tenant screening? I want to live with good neighbors.
- Cameras in the apartment building? Yes please. I want to catch package thieves.
- Brokers for home sales? Absolutely - traditional brokers take 3-6% and drive up the cost of housing.
- Rent to own? The renter / owner divide has gotten wider in cities and we need solutions to fix this.
Landlord tech is certainly not good for city renters who think they deserve lower than market rent purely on account of (1) how long they have lived in the city and (2) how little they earn. But being pro tenant doesn't mean you need to oppose everything that landlords do. Technology is one the very very few ways an oppressive system can change. The oppressors are not always landlords - they are brokers, real estate developers, law makers, voters, other tenants who sit on their rent controlled housing until they die.
P.S. I'm a tenant paying market price for rental housing.
And there's the other side.
A landlord has an obligation to ensure things are in good working order, pay the mortgage, upkeep common areas, and pay the taxes. Whether your tenant pays or not, those bills are still due. One tenant being late once is irritating but not catastrophic. Tenant(s) not paying for months burns through reserves quickly.
It's in everyone's best interest to ensure tenants can pay the rent.
Which is why it's so weird to see landlords advertising "no Section 8" (which is unlawful in California, FYI). Section 8 is an ironclad guarantee that you will get paid in full and on time every month.
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa?query=%22no+section+...
Non section 8 tenants have skin in the game: assets to pursue or income that can be garnished using a judgement if there’s damage beyond what a security deposit covers. This encourages a shared responsibility model where they treat the property with enough respect that the only damage is expected wear and tear (there are outlier events, kids will be kids and whatnot).
It’s not about race (in my case, at least). It’s about resources and means.
By comparison someone with a high income and a lot of assets is very, very likely to leave as soon as they can, meaning even if they don't trash the place you still have a higher vacancy cost (which is a landlord's main risk) and because of their wealth you'll never get anything out of them other than the deposit, because they have and can afford lawyers.
Personally, I will happily take vacancy risk over damage risk. Vacancy risk is limited by monthly burn (mine is low for each property), damage risk is much greater amount imho.
> and because of that they are systematically less likely to trash the place.
Anecdotally, my data agrees with HUD that Section 8 tenants who don't damage the property stay longer (although Section 8 makes up a small percentage of our total tenant population, primarily in the northwestern Chicago suburbs). Our costs have been high when (intentional) damage is done though (sometimes tens of thousands of dollars), causing the property to be in the red for years after.
One of our Section 8 tenants in Aurora was a great tenant; their son moved back in after a stint in a correctional facility, altercations in the front yard occurred, culminating in a drive by shooting attempt (I have the receipts to repair the bullet holes in the siding and replacement of the front door). Per the jurisdiction's rental guidelines and lease addendum requirements, we were required to terminate the lease (the jurisdiction's requirements, not ours). We helped them relocate out of state at our own cost.
The jurisdiction I mention specifically has mandatory landlord classes and lease addendum requirements to aggressively inhibit the housing of anyone associated with criminal activity (which includes the tenant(s) being held liable for any criminal activity that takes place on the property where they're not the victim). Background checks are mandatory for all adult tenants. Lease agreements with the mandatory jurisdiction provided lease addendum must be submitted to the jurisdiction's rental management department ("Division of Property Standards") to receive a rental license. I take no issue if you receive vouchers; if you're a criminal or associate with them, I can't provide you with housing (in this jurisdiction), and it's grounds for eviction based on a preponderance of the evidence (no conviction required).
https://www.aurora-il.org/356/Crime-Free-Multi-Housing-Progr...
https://library.municode.com/il/aurora/codes/code_of_ordinan...
https://www.aurora-il.org/DocumentCenter/View/4677/New-Landl...
Also vacancy management is an entirely different problem than quality of tenants and how they treat the property. Turnover of good quality tenants is much better than bad quality tenants who stay trashing the place for years.
All the insurance policies were about accidental damage on either side.
Or are you talking about intentional damage by the owner?
http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?...
Don't believe my interpretation? Ask the landlords' trade association.
https://caanet.org/governor-signs-mandatory-section-8-bill
Looking at the text:
Our country has had a problem conflating the two.
Was there something in their post that made you believe they were racially motivated in their comments?
If the goal of a discussion forum is to have discussions why would you go at someone assuming the worst without first having a discussion and understanding where they are coming from?
> Stonelock biometric cameras have been installed in various residential buildings, in which tenants are forced to subject their faces to a technology proven to reproduce racial biases.
Race is a topic of the discussion at hand. It was omitted by the GGP, possibly as the GGP doesn't consider that to be of consequence (as it may not be to them, depending on which side of the camera's bias they are).
I don't read the GP's comment as attacking the GGP, so much as noting the omission.
I'm not gonna speak for GP but a lot of people are hair trigger about screaming racism because it's an easy way to reduce fundamentally complicated questions about standards and double standards of behavior based on economic class into a simple issue of good vs evil.
There's really nothing fundamentally different about Kevin the yuppie changing the oil in his "classic" 2001 4Runner on the street but when you start talking about people like Cletus, Manuel and Jamal doing the same on domestic minivans of the 90s suddenly there's a problem. The fact that Kevin's bank account has more digits to the left of the decimal shouldn't matter but for some reason it does...
I mean, I don't see much of a problem in either case unless they're routinely obstructing the right of way or leaving a half-built vehicle to rust in the front lawn.
sometimes seemingly small differences can change something from cool or at least acceptable to annoying. I used to live across the street from a guy with an immaculately maintained classic mustang. my nextdoor neighbors had a bunch of two-stroke dirtbikes that they would ride almost everyday. that mustang was incredibly loud, but it sounded awesome. the guy was really cool and would show me other exotic cars he was restoring all the time. the dirtbikes were not nearly as loud as the mustang, but they weren't interesting either, so I just found them annoying. despite the fact that they were basically doing the same thing, I'd way rather have the mustang guy as a neighbor than the dirtbike family.
There's plenty of history of housing discrimination against black people, and it's not novel that ML can be racist.
Unless somebody has sat down and asked "does this screening actually determine good neighbors, or just filter out black people?" It's probably going to be a racist algorithm
Funny how 90% of anything landlords do--other than the existence and some light upkeep of the building--never seems to accrue to tenants.
If the camera were pointed at my door instead then I wouldn't like it much, but it isn't.
Beyond that, I don’t get why people want to capture footage of package thieves. It’s not like police actually go after these people. Has anyone here ever actually heard back, “yeah, we got the guy and here’s your packages!” Pretty rare as far as I hear.
One thing that did not work was adding lights and cameras, because in Seattle property crime is not crime. If the cameras were used to catch the guys and put them in jail for a long time, I'd be 100% for it. The only problem with surveillance in general is lack of choice/control of the watchers. In case of a small private organization like a n apartment building, this does not apply; surveillance is an unalloyed good IMHO.
There are plenty of horror stories of landlords being shady, the classic one being coming up with an excuse to hold the security deposit. I really would not trust them with putting "smart" devices in my home. I once rented in a complex where the online credit card payment cost an additional $15 fee over walking to the office and handing over a check, because it was some service that they bought in that skimmed off the top. Rent-to-own also has a history of being predatory towards people with lower income. On top of the typically terrible value of renting to own, it's the same relationship as renting where a bad landlord could do all sorts of things, but now you have even more to lose since your money is locked up in the relationship.
No. That's a sales line.
There are so many cases where paying more gets you worse treatment. Enterprise software pops to mind. So do luxury hotels. A $150 room will have free wifi, free breakfast, and no surprises. A $500 room will nickel and dime you on wifi, breakfast, parking, non-smoking, gym, a valet you didn't ask for, and they'll tack on a few fake tax fees for good measure. Because they can.
> This management company totally dropped the ball on making the actual units nice to live in, but that's another story...
No, it's the ending of the same story. We've all been there, it sucks, and you have my sympathies, but please don't believe or repeat the sales nonsense. It's a bunch of socially normalized lies designed to close a deal, nothing more.
"""thepointsguy.com › guide › paying-rent-credit-card Mar 9, 2020 - There is no publicly available, fee-free way to pay your rent or mortgage with a credit card. Due to bank interchange fees, accepting credit cards..."""
- Tenant screening means local income or felons cannot live anywhere other than the worst crime ridden housing. It's neo-redlining or housing covenants.
- Cameras means persistent surveillance and monitoring of your tenants. Imagine this with facial ML tech.
- Brokers for home sales result in an uneven playing field and high potential for corruption. The incentive structure is not in the favor of individuals.
- Rent to own might increase default rates, debt and speculation.
It's hard to view this with much positivity.
Why shouldn't low income earners pay lower rent? From a humanitarian perspective, it doesn't make sense to have a landlord greedily siphoning off the vast majority of a person's income, just so that person can have fulfilled the basic human right of not being homeless. It's parasitic.
> The oppressors are not always landlords - they are [...] other tenants who sit on their rent controlled housing until they die.
What would be the point of striving for a raise if your costs increased proportionately to income? The possibility of a higher quality of life gets people to work hard and benefit us all.
Why should the landlord fit the bill because Jonhy does want to live in a high sought place?
The 'humanitarian' causes are a way to disguise totalitarian acts.
We have laws, property and trade so we don't have to go back to primitive ways.
It's just one of the very few risks a person of wealth might have to accept, should they decide to use their elevated position in society to inflict landlordism upon people.
But, of course, the political incentives are aligned to encourage homes becoming ever more expensive at the behest of homeowners.
I agree that everyone should be guaranteed food, water, and shelter (at minimum), but I don't think anyone is entitled to live on the most desirable pieces of land in the world.
The nice thing about using markets to set prices and deal with scarcity is that they're self-adjusting.
my personal take is that the root cause of this is the culture and policy surrounding home ownership, particularly for the middle class. we encourage people to take out a mortgage to acquire a home as soon as possible, and we tell them it's not financially irresponsible for a single physical asset to make up most of their net worth. in fact, we tell them it's the best investment they could possibly make. we grant tax breaks and lower the required down payments to extend this opportunity to even more people. so we end up with a bunch of people who are either highly leveraged on their mortgage, or have paid it off but have minimal other assets. this makes it very important that house values keep going up, so we deliberately distort the housing market so they do.
something I'd like to underscore is that the housing market is very much not a free market. there are tons of restrictions on what type of things can be build, how they can be built, what they can look like, what they can be used for, etc. even if you think free markets are effective pricing mechanisms (and I mostly do), that doesn't really have much to do with the prevailing rent in most areas.
without getting too far into the weeds, and because housing is a durable and necessary good that's proportional to both population and productive capacity, in a free and fair market you'd expect housing prices to track with inflation. that's the reasonable expectation. over time, we've seen housing prices detach from that baseline for a variety of reasons unrelated to its core responsibility of sheltering people. see, for instance, the case-shiller index.
those detachments are distortions to the idealization of a free and fair market to ensure house prices continually rise for political and personal gain, despite the lack of sound economic principles underlying that distended rise.
Obviously not the best solution for the landlords, but, really, so what? Removing a class of parasites from the housing system would be a feature, not a bug.
Don't you think that would just drive up the market price ? (by restricting supply i.e. making landlordship less desirable)
yeah, that didn't turn out so well for higher education and healthcare. so no to that.
housing markets are distorted in a thousand ways. a solution like that might be appealing for its simplicity, but what we need to do is the hard work of rationalizing a death by a thousand cuts. start by aggressively repealing every zoning/building regulation that's not tied to solid safety concerns (and not nebulous and nefarious ones). eventually you'd be in a position to repeal (in CA) both prop 13 and rent control (but not saying that'll happen), which are complementary distortions, but only when the market is functioning well enough not to need (for sociopolitical purposes, not economic ones) them.
If they want to pay lower rent, they can do so, but usually in a lower quality neighborhood.
these two could be good or bad depending on the implementation. I would like to share my apartment building with people who won't make a lot of noise, smoke cigarettes in the stairwell, threaten or steal from me, etc. I really doubt that you can screen for this without having a lot of false negatives or false positives. I have no issues with my current neighbors, but I suspect that has a lot more to do with the neighborhood and price than any active measures taken by the management.
regarding cameras, I don't have any issues with cameras at the entrance point(s) to the building. I already have to swipe in with a keyfob registered to me, so it's not like I'm losing much privacy by having my face recorded. I think the residents benefit from having at least some record of what guests are entering the complex. I'm certainly not okay with more cameras inside the building.
The real question is what is being deployed, who's pushing for the deployment, and who is benefiting. Taking smart keys, I'm skeptical tenants will see any improvement in terms of physical security. But I'm very willing to believe landlords perceive a benefit from increased surveillance of their renters.
> The oppressors are not always landlords - they are brokers, real estate developers, law makers, voters, other tenants who sit on their rent controlled housing until they die.
Hmm but weirdly enough it seems out of your big list of oppressors I see rent-controlled tenants pulled out more often as a boogeyman than any of the others!
I dunno why you would single these out (I'm assuming you mean the RFID setups they have on most new apartment buildings?). seems like they pretty obviously increase security over everyone having a common mechanical key to the main door. makes it way less of an issue when someone loses a key and/or moves out; you just deauthorize their code. once you give a couple hundred people the key to the front door, you either give up entirely on having the main entrance be secure, or you have to replace the lock and hundreds of keys over and over again.
Careful with this one. It's called seller financing, and can easily be abused in predatory fashion.
No, but I oppose the very existence of landlords.
> I think it's a perverse display of greed, opulence and power and a driver of inequality that someone is entitled to a major portion of their tenant's paycheck every month.
Generally, landlords don't feel entitled to a major portion of their tenant's paycheck every month. In fact, landlords want as little of their tenant's paycheck every month, because the higher that percentage is, the higher the likelihood the tenant will have issues paying the rent at some point during the lease.
Rents are generally set through market forces, not determining how much of an individuals paycheck can be extracted from them.
> I don't believe someone should be able to generate an income from something they have or have acquired like a house or an inheritance instead of something they do, in the way of actual work.
People shouldn't be able to use tools or implements of any kind to generate income? Maintaining a habitable property is work, though it can be infrequent and is commonly irregular.
> I don't believe it is a fair exchange of goods
Why not? People are exchanging money for a good (housing) which is no more essential than food or water, yet I don't see activists organizing to abolish grocery stores or farms.
> and I don't believe it's a particularly good way to distribute them either considering the sheer number of people who are homeless
People are generally homeless due to issues other than landlords. There is ample support for sheltering the homeless (though I'd like to see more), and almost all research indicates that the core issues with almost all homeless individuals is not a lack of supply of shelter.
> and the number of properties that lie empty simply because their owners believe they deserve to generate more passive income from them or just don't care enough.
And you wrap up with a statement that is solely based on some version of a landlord that easy for to you to hate, regardless of any relation to reality.
Your attitude is no better or more productive than those on the other end of the spectrum who vilify those who need assistance and base all their thoughts and opinions on insulting, inaccurate stereotypes of lower income households.
Should their motivations and interests matter if market forces ultimately decide the outcome, which isn't "as little of their tenant's paycheck every month" as you contend for the average tenant?
>People shouldn't be able to use tools or implements of any kind to generate income?
This seems to conflate an apartment someone owns to, say, a laptop or another tool which they actively use to generate productive work. I don't agree with the comparison but I do agree that it is more grey than my parent comment portrayed it to be.
>than food or water, yet I don't see activists...
You haven't seen activists who protest the commoditization and sale of drinking water?
>And you wrap up with a statement that is solely based on some version of a landlord that easy for to you to hate, regardless of any relation to reality.
You're right, that was a strawman and bad form from myself. But I'm not sure the 17 million vacant homes versus the 200,000 or so recorded unsheltered homeless individuals per the 2019 American census[1] is that unrelated to reality. If you're suggesting that it is removed from reality in that the motivations for those properties remaining empty cannot be outright attributed to malice like I did, I would be open to that assertion but I'm not sure it matters as long as the disparity exists. I still feel it is fundamentally immoral.
I appreciate you engaging with the content of my argument in good faith and apologize if I have failed to return the favour.
1: https://checkyourfact.com/2019/12/24/fact-check-633000-homel...
I'll admit a primary source would have been better but this was easier to find on my phone.
I don't "contend" that landlords want tenants who can comfortably pay the rent, it's standard best practice and common sense.
Regardless, I'm not sure why landlords are solely responsible for the status quo, to the point that you believe they shouldn't exist.
> This seems to conflate an apartment someone owns to, say, a laptop or another tool which they actively use to generate productive work. I don't agree with the comparison but I do agree that it is more grey than my parent comment portrayed it to be.
Yes, it does conflate the two intentionally. The distinction between housing and other man-made goods seems arbitrary to me.
> You haven't seen activists who protest the commoditization and sale of drinking water?
The protests I've seen about Nestle and others are generally focused on privatization of water in impoverished nations where people were previously using it as a free resource or centered around the terms of the contract with a water bottler.
I don't see activists in the US protesting the water company or telling people not to pay their water bills, which is what I had in mind when I made my previous comment.
> You're right, that was a strawman and bad form from myself. But I'm not sure the 17 million vacant homes versus the 200,000 or so recorded unsheltered homeless individuals per the 2019 American census[1] is that unrelated to reality. If you're suggesting that it is removed from reality in that the motivations for those properties remaining empty cannot be outright attributed to malice like I did, I would be open to that assertion but I'm not sure it matters as long as the disparity exists. I still feel it is fundamentally immoral.
Fair enough. I don't dispute that there are enough vacant homes to provide shelter to the homeless, but my issue was the assumption of malice (which is the case throughout your original reply to me).
> I appreciate you engaging with the content of my argument in good faith and apologize if I have failed to return the favour.
Same to you, it's always unclear to me why landlords are vilified and singled out as the one provider of necessary goods and services that are vilified and should be outlawed, so engaging in conversations like these are interesting to me.
Some examples, from the site, are movement recognition systems forcing you to perform a "humiliating dance" to enter the building, being forced to install multiple apps to maintain access to your apartment, and mandatory facial recognition to enter your apartment.
These are all real examples that are installed today! This is a disgusting violation of people's privacy.
Because I'm guessing your lease does not include a detailed writeup of everyone who will be coming and going from your place and when.
Think about credit reporting companies, then imagine that they are even less credible, the results even more inscrutable, and more error prone. You think Equifax is doing a great job? The tenant screening companies are doing much, much worse.
You are giving landlords more power to turn away poor and minority tenants.
Again, if the complaint were about that -- if they required you to conduct all business that way -- great! That would be a good point to lead with. But a) they don't, and b) every apartment I know with a resident portal has supported old-school interaction, so if there are counterexamples, I need to see them.
>Think about credit reporting companies, then imagine that they are even less credible, the results even more inscrutable, and more error prone.
Because credit companies aren't perfect, credit checks are evil and racist?
Not what I said at all. The companies aren't just "not perfect", they are considerably worse than that.
And yes, credit checks can be used as a form of digital redlining. They are not always used that way, but they absolutely are being used like that widely across the US.
Also:
>The companies aren't just "not perfect", they are considerably worse than that.
The difference between "not perfect" vs "much worse" doesn't seem relevant here. As long as they're not perfect, they can be used exactly the way you describe, so it doesn't seem like a good argument to use to throw (vague) shade at credit checks.
Would you mind concretely spelling out how you think landlords should operate, so I know I'm not mischaracterizing what you're criticizing? It's easy to say "X has downsides", but a substantive discussion involves weighing the pros and cons.
Landlords should set criteria for who can be a tenant (perhaps based on income/income assistance/demonstrated ability to pay the rent), and accept the first candidate who meets all the criteria they propose.
Edit: Also, in case it is relevant, I am a property owner who rents out part of their home. I've never run a background or credit check on any of my tenants.
>Also, in case it is relevant, I am a property owner who rents out part of their home. I've never run a background or credit check on any of my tenants.
So you know nothing about the tenants you rent to? They're all strangers?
You reduced the critique of the article to "How dare they screen tenants", which is a strawman that no one is proposing. I cited ways in which tenant screening is problematic (credit reporting and criminal background checks) in hopes of highlighting that it's not at all preposterous for someone to be critical of technology being used in this space.
> So you know nothing about the tenants you rent to? They're all strangers?
Sometimes. I know some people I've rented to. Others have been strangers. Ask for references, have a coffee shop conversation. I've had folks suddenly have life happen to them (and lose the ability to pay rent for a bit). It's not hard to treat folks like humans, imo.
The website -- and other commenters -- were citing "they do background checks" in itself, with no further commentary, as something inherently outrageous. What you're quoting was my (and several others') best effort identify what we thought was being criticized; this is really hard when no one will commit to a position, and when they do, it turns out their complaint is ultimately (see below) "oh, they didn't do my kind of background check, where I'd never make a wrongfully biased decision based on a coffee shop chat", which feels, to me, not morally superior.
>Sometimes. I know some people I've rented to. Others have been strangers. Ask for references, have a coffee shop conversation.
Gotcha, so you do a background check them, just not the standard, criminal/credit check, and feel like this is a morally-relevant distinction. You also base a lot of your decision about a hard-to-quantify "gut feel" from this coffee shop chat, and are sure you aren't allowing an insidious bias that you would criticize if a corporation did it (cf. "culture fit").
These things are not at all equivalent. It's a laughable false-equivalency to suggest that calling a few friends/acquaintances of someone is at all similar to investigating their personal finances, debts, criminal history, employment records, etc.
> You also base a lot of your decision about a hard-to-quantify "gut feel" from this coffee shop chat.
When I have a unit for rent, it goes to the first person interested. This coffee shop meeting isn't an interview.
These folks are going to be living in my home, this is the most egalitarian way for both parties to understand "is this situation tenable for both of us?" It's not an assessment or gate.
How else will they know they want to live with my family?
That's why I didn't say they were. I was challenging you to explain the moral difference and you haven't yet answered that. Worse, you're not pretending that your coffee shop meeting isn't an interview, and is for their benefit:
>How else will they know they want to live with my family?
It's fine if you want to argue against the standard background check, but you need to actually articulate what is objectionable about it, and have some awareness of the similarities to the screening that you consider necessary.
Background checks disproportionately impact poor and minority communities because they are more likely to be impacted by systemic poverty.
You understand that this is basically the service that the credit bureaus perform? Each creditor is a reference for the debtor, in a centralized location that is easy to access so people who are interested in determining the likelihood of repayment can quickly collect relevant references.
Please don't take this as some sort of endorsement of the behavior of the specific credit bureaus we have today, but I don't see the same massive distinction between your vetting method and running a credit/background check on an individual, other than yours being much less likely to produce an accurate assessment.
Creditors don't tell me what it's like to live with someone. You can be deeply bad at managing money but a fantastically respectful and considerate tenant.
The credit bureaus tell me nothing about the human except for some financial details that honestly shouldn't be any of my business anyways.
Many industries have found that creditworthiness is a good proxy for general responsibility, moreso than your "gut feel" I strongly suspect.
Your position is that somehow your seemingly arbitrary (and intentionally inaccurate?) assessment process is morally superior to those who actually want to obtain an accurate assessment of an individuals likelihood to honor the terms of the contract they are both entering into.
I believe, fundamentally, a landlord who makes a profit is immoral. Therefore, I'm not interested in understanding someone's financial responsibility.
I believe financial responsibility is not an adequate proxy for general responsibility for the reasons I've stated above (criminal backgrounds, poverty, lack of education, etc) that shouldn't be barriers to getting housing.
My guess is that if we are unable to agree on credit checks as unnecessarily invasive, then I really don't think we'll come to a reasonable stopping point for "landlords are fundamentally an immoral enterprise".
If you'd like to have the last word in the thread, by all means.
On the off chance you actually respond to this:
> I believe, fundamentally, a landlord who makes a profit is immoral. Therefore, I'm not interested in understanding someone's financial responsibility.
Are you not charging your tenants to occupy a portion of your home? If you are, you're profiting. If you aren't, everything else you said in this thread is misleading at best.
> I believe financial responsibility is not an adequate proxy for general responsibility for the reasons I've stated above (criminal backgrounds, poverty, lack of education, etc) that shouldn't be barriers to getting housing.
The entire risk management industry disagrees with you. I'll go with them over your half-baked beliefs.
> My guess is that if we are unable to agree on credit checks as unnecessarily invasive, then I really don't think we'll come to a reasonable stopping point for "landlords are fundamentally an immoral enterprise".
Something we agree on!
> If you'd like to have the last word in the thread, by all means.
Thanks for exposing me to a new level of cognitive dissonance, where a landlord claims that landlords are immoral and should not exist.
I think it's not too surprising, this sort of post always seems to bring HN's resident landlords out to argue in favour of whatever happens to benefit them financially, and gives them more control over their tenants' lives.
It's a bit like how any topic here relating to social justice attracts hordes of far-righteous types peppering the comments with comically bad takes, before flagging the submission off the front page.
1. The technology is "dual use" and the negative examples like you described can be regulated away in general, so the benefits remain and abuse is reduced and punished when it does occur.
2. The over the top bias inherent in the site is offputting to anyone not in completely agreement with the ideology of the creators of the site, which represents a fringe of American society in my experience.
*fringe of the HN demographic
Are you implying that the US population in general is more aligned with the ideology of the submission?
You not talking to poor people is not the absence of poor people existing.
I can assure you that the views expressed by this project represent a fringe of the US population, and based on this interaction and previous ones with other individuals with a similar mindset, I sincerely hope it remains that way.
Such as...?
Housing should not be a commodity at all.
In my lifetime I've seen the landlord move from someone who might live on site to someone who has money to pay a property manager to manager their portfolio of properties. Your super these days is as likely to be an underpaid worker as anyone living on site.
All this tech is doing is further solidifying the powers of the landlord over the tenant, increasing the surveillance of tenants, and normalizing surveillance culture. I'm surprised to see it supported on HN of all places, which is usually very privacy oriented.
Edit: To not just be negative, let me present some positive alternatives for discussion:
* Housing cooperatives -- Tenants can collectively own the building they live in, and decide as a community what technology works for them
* Tenants unions -- Tenants can collectively discuss what the property should be using, what the rules should be, and negotiate as a unit with their landlord.
what do you mean by this exactly? "commodity" usually means a fungible good (ie, one where individual units are interchangeable), which housing is certainly not (if you think it is, I have an old trailer that I would gladly trade you for your house). are you saying literally all housing should be free?
I believe everyone should have access to free housing should they require it, but that's different than housing should be free.