Yeah my rent was set to increase 7% if I’d stayed put.
I believe here there is a limit to the total rent … my last go-around with them involved this. My asking price was just within this limit, but if I made the capital improvements they requested, the price was above their limit. This was a case where I was within State law, but outside Section 8 rules. I was being quite helpful by giving them directions to the State courthouse where they could sue me if they wanted too …
Don’t you consider this an undesired side effect? Minimum wage workers are getting a 50% increase in income. That’s going to be reflected in prices of things like rent and parking, but people on Social Security and other government programs have not gotten an increase income. Therefore, their relative buying power has decreased.
As someone whose younger brother received SSI (disability) checks for years, the money is not guaranteed and not always stable. The amount on the check changes at times, the check sometimes doesn’t arrive on-time, and they periodically review his eligibility. So we’re not contrasting a stable, guaranteed income to that of a paycheck for a worker. My income is certainly more stable than his, and I’m not on any sort of assistance.
This has never happened to me, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. I would say this situation comes up far far less than just simple financial irresponsibility. Perhaps a job is more stable an income than SS, but both are stable enough … as long as the job isn’t at a law firm, then both are treated the same.
Housing benefit (now called Local Housing Allowance for private tenants) can still be paid direct to the landlord - all the tenant has to do is tick a box on the form to ask for that to happen. It is paid in arrears, but since the landlord always asks for at least a month up front, that shouldn’t really be a problem.
Apart from prejudice, one of the other reasons in the UK is that landlord insurance is higher if you let to someone on benefits. I’m not sure how that works if a person becomes unemployed during the tenancy.
I had to give up my PhD due to landlords not accepting housing benefit tenants. I had a studentship for the fees, but I also had a very young baby so would not have been able to work for the first two years - childcare costs would have dwarfed my income. However, since I had a very young baby the chances of my rent not being paid were much lower than for other tenants. I had recent references from two landlords, had a reference from the uni, and was prepared to pay 3 months in advance plus the deposit (my Grandad was going to lend it to me). Absolutely ideal tenant.
But nowhere within two hours’ travel of the college would accept me. I know some people will say only two hours a couple of times a week… but that would have been eight hours’ childcare for a tiny baby starting at 6am. Such childcare simply did not exist. Add in travel costs and financially it just wouldn’t work. And trust me, I did everything I could to find somewhere. I was even offered a place in the family halls at the uni, but housing benefit refused to pay there.
So instead of completing my PhD and becoming an academic, quite possibly coming off housing benefit when my daughter was two or three (when childcare costs reduce and I could have picked up some work at the college or elsewhere), I had to move back to my hometown and was unemployed for four years. Managed to rent there because it’s a much poorer area, which is also why there was less work available.
Please tell me that this is a whoosh, and these are not your actual opinions.
But if they are your actual opinions… what on earth is the premise for your belief that an increase in the minimum wage is meant to give landlords a little extra cash, and not the wage recipients themselves?
It’s sheer folly looking at it as a “50% wage increase” when someone goes from $10 an hour to $15. Because if they’re trying to pay rent anywhere while making ten dollars an hour, they are probably subsisting on ramen and potatoes, and going without nearly everything you probably consider a necessity.
The intent is meaningless.
Not a whoosh … it’s capitalism … if all my suppliers have to pay their minimum wage workers 50% more, my cost goes up … if my costs go up then I’m raising rents … that’s called inflation. I add a little extra for margins, who are you to condemn a return on risk?
The tenants park a stolen Buick in the living room, they pack and move, doesn’t cost them a penny … it’s the landlord who pays to replace twelve foot of wall.
Phaw … the system is rigged … haven’t you been paying attention … rigged against the poor … the rich are getting richer and this is how they do it … might not be a very good system for the poor, but it’s a great system for the rich.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve a couple of loose ends to clear up before I leave on my monthy two-week paid vacation.
Absolutely! SSI as in retired older persons is fine. In my part of the country there are literally thousands who are “disabled” on SSDI - meaning they have successfully been declared as not having the mental capability or too much “psychological damage” to hold a job. Meaning they were 16 year old dropouts, 16 year old pregnancies with no family support, Oxycontin addled stoners, having minor criminal histories that preclude them from most employment, etc.
I personally knew one couple who declared that they “had it made” when both were declared disabled at age ~35 and then could receive $1400 CASH/month + some level of guaranteed health care while they watch TV or go fishing. I know they have been evicted 3 times in the past 5 years.
Welfare recipient support services are literally an industry in Appalachia.
Woot … $1400 per month … damn, I have to work two days a month to earn my money … just not fair to hard working AMERICANs.
Why use minimum wage increases as a trigger to increase rent ? The minimum wage increase or the social security and housing subsidies increases, reflect “inflation” so the landlord might use these as their indicator of inflation. They can say that they find it difficult to use inflation figures directly because the tenant will say that they didn’t receive a higher income yet, to them inflation didn’t happen yet. So the landlord may well use the inflation indicator that directly affects their tenants…
Back to the original … there can be a number of reasons.
One is that the rent is meant to be treated as income. Because the social security recipient reports the rent paid, the government knows the landlord is getting that much rent.
Also, a social security recipient stays in the property form any more hours a day and therefore costs more to the landlord in terms of wear and tear… and other costs if there’s any other costs the landlord has to pay… such as water, garbage, or something.
I worked in rental property management for 26 years, so I know something on the subject.
We had Section 8 tenants who felt they shouldn’t have to pay their share of the rent, which was sometimes as little as $16 a month (“Well, you’re getting most of it”). We had them move in boyfriends, baby daddies, relatives, friends, and all sorts of people, despite the fact that the lease clearly stated who was supposed to be living there (T"hey are not living here." They are just staying here"). We had tenants who didn’t pay their electric bill, and when service was cut off, rang extension cords from the public hallways (fire hazards, but "Well I need electricity). We had people who demanded we take their Section 8 (we always turned them down). We had tenants who wrecked the place, and then called the City on us, reporting an uninhabitable structure. And we had drug users, drug dealers, gang members, and one guy who was attacked in a chainsaw. And lots of them who asked to borrow money (You have it, and I need it).
In short, some people on section 8 and other forms of government assistance view life as a free ride, where they should do whatever they want to do with no sense of other people’s rights or responsibilities.
Rents are based on what the market will bear … higher minimum wage means the market can bear higher rents. I’m raising rents another 10% right now for a total of 35% since the Great Recession started, if for no other reason to cut back on the number of applications I get every week. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had a unit ready to rent sit empty, almost always the people are moving in before I’ve finished even cleaning … just crazy market conditions.
Either people pay the higher rents or they’re homeless …
ETA: I’ve had the same experiences as Annie has had … simple disrespect I’d say.
I’d say it’s more of a sense of entitlement, coming end the general idea of “Yeah, but the rules don’t apply to me.”
I had people tell me “You have to take my Section 8.” No, I do not. I can’t use it as an excuse not to rent to you, but it’s easy enough to find another reason (rent payment history, credit report, police report, or just “This person is a better candidate”)
Let’s face facts here: Most working people know how the world works. They have a sense of responsibility and other people’s rights.
It’s worse than that: landlords can be refused insurance for having DSS tenants.
It’s two different topics, tenants who are getting rent subsidies (either US or other country versions) and tenants getting US ‘Social Security’, which is the OP topic, which means a federal government paid old age (and/or disability) pension paid to the pensioner.
The answer would be that in markets with rapidly rising rents, Social Security recipients are only getting a pension which increases at the rate of inflation. Landlords might not prefer such tenants both because of the known slow growth of the tenant’s income, and lower likelihood, probably, of high turnover of such tenants. In a strong (non rent controlled) market it’s less hassle to get a new tenant to pay more when a previous one leaves voluntarily than it is to make existing ones pay more or get into trying to make people leave.
And it’s amazing anybody would question whether big minimum wage hikes have negative side effects. Of course they do, among them being less employment for people whose work is worth less in the market than the new minimum, higher costs for the people who purchase the goods and services produced by minimum wage workers which tends to also be other low income people, and higher costs for stuff like rent in areas where a significant part of the renters are minimum wage people. People who don’t get the minimum wage hike will suffer.
This doesn’t mean not to ever raise the minimum wage. But if there was no downside to it, then every economic problem could just be solved by raising it to whatever everyone would like to make. We know that wouldn’t work (I hope) so there obviously must be negative side effects, and the issue is where these ramp up practically speaking to the point of making a further min wage increase undesirable. It depends on local conditions in time and place, and value judgments. The former consideration suggests that if $15 is just right for Seattle, there are other parts of the US for which that’s too high.
A friend of mine is the manager of an apartment complex. He used to accept Sec 8 tenants but doesn’t anymore because of their irresponsibility. He’s related a number of fairly outrageous stories about subsidised renters. Here are two of his tales that stuck in my mind:
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Two Sec 8 families lived in adjacent apartments. The families became close friends and decided that it was far too much trouble to walk out into the hall and knock on the door when they wanted to visit one another. Their solution? They carved a large, man-sized hole into the wall between the apartments. It was a bearing wall, and the apartments above them collapsed.
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A Sec 8 tenant wanted to hold a party featuring a pig roast in the complex’s lawn. My friend the manager told him no, absolutely not, do not dig a fire pit in my grass. So what did our enterprising tenant do? Why, he filled his bathtub with charcoal, lighted it, and slung the pig carcass onto the coals. This set off the fire alarms, caused the entire building to be evacuated by the FD, and ruined his bathroom, the bathroom above and the one below. The tenant showed no remorse; his only response was irritation that he and his buds never got to eat pork.
I am a manager of an apt complex. I also do rent-ready repairs and clean up for a major real estate management company in my town. I can confidently tell you from years of experience that section 8 tenants are much, much rougher on properties. To the extent that during a 6 month lease they can sometimes nullify any profit the landlord might have made. It’s not prejudice, it’s statistics.
It’s also much harder to get them to pay at all, much less on time. Throw in the eventual legal fees and you rarely make a profit.