Happy Labour Day to people who are not landlords.

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All the landlords I know have more than 1 job. My boss is the landlord of 7 rental properties. He also owns a local breakfast diner and his ass is there every Sunday on that grill flipping eggs and bacon with his employees. He also owns a private security business. If one of the guards calls out sick. Its him that covers their shift. And he pays himself for those hours at the same wage he pays the employee hes covering.
My uncle. Owns 2 rental properties. He also runs an electronics recycling business where he loads and hauls E-Waste and he does that and all the manual labor of it by himself.
My old landlord. Young guy about 30. Boughtkmy building from the previous slumlord owner during the pandemic. Dropped 25k putting brand new stairs and decks on the building for safety. During a time where the average going rate on the market for a 1 bedroom apartment was 1100$ he chose to leave all of our rents at 700$ a month because he didn't feel right about screwing people.
I am not a landlord. I have no desire to be a landlord. But not every landlord is a lazy sack of shit.
- A lot of people like to think the world is either black or white with no in-between. As someone who works in construction and renovates houses a lot I can confirm that there are definitely good land lords as well as bad ones. My gf rented an appartment from old people before I met her and she paid almost nothing (400 euros all-inn), you can't even get social housing for that here. And the state of maintenance was excellent. Also in the more rural areas here the private rent sector seems to be run by mostly decen people.
  Then sometimes we have to renovate ex-student housing and a lot of times those buildings are absolute dumps (to the point where you can barely call them habitable) with insane prices. Especially in the large cities I see some really bad practise. Thankfully a lot of those malicious kind of landlords are put on trial (hence why we start renovating after they sold the property).
  Disclaimer: I don't live in the US and tenants have a lot of rights here to the point where landlords are forced to provide a certain standard of living. Unfortunately (foreign) students seem to not know this, this is the reason you mostly see malpractice with students here.
- Agree. My mother owns a lot of land in the suburbs of my city. She sold a large amount of land in order to fully pay for my entire undergrad. She could leave her day job right now, but she really likes what she does and thinks of landlording as a side job for her in order for me and my sister to have a comfortable life.
  
  Your mother's tenants paid for your undergrad, and their kids probably took out student loans.
  
  Oh god the calamity.. They had to take out student loans?!!
  
  They are also working. They are performing skilled, useful labor that actively benefits other people. A landlord is not. Working a side job unrelated to landlording does not suddenly make landlording a job that deserves pay.
- Your boss works one regular day a week and covers the occasional shift for a sick employee, but the rest of his income comes from the labor of his tenants and employees. I'm sure he's a nice guy. I've had nice bosses and landlords. But there's a pretty unequal exchange of labor here. With surgeons and most other high-paid workers, the high wage pays for student loans and years of unpaid student labor.
- That's totally fine, just don't light no grill.
- there were kind and hard working slave owners too. the institution itself is bad.
  realestate is simply the best and safest investment you can make in most of the civilized world today, in the same way that owning land and buying slaves to work it was the best investment 300 years ago.
  At the end of the day its just waste. If money spent on housing isnt going towards making more and better housing you end up with a choke in supply that raises the price of housing, which hurts the efficiency of society as a whole .
  Maybe if renting is only allowed for the party that built the house, it has to be rent to own, and is only allowed for say, 50 years after its construction. Have building codes to ensure it'll be solid for a long time. With that investing in realestate could be both profitable and societally beneficial.

424 comments