IMO, part of the attitude problem is the notion that the apartment owners are “rich” and they are “poor” which entitles them to all sorts of slack, and no matter how much they take advantage of that the basic notion never changes. Those rich apartment owners have more than enough money than they know what to do with and I’m here struggling to get by, and they shouldn’t be trying to squeeze me with all these petty rules and such.
In addition, once you’ve adopted the no-money public assistance lifestyle, much of the consequences that society holds out for this type of destructive behavior doesn’t apply to you. Suppose you don’t pay your rent and destroy much of an apartment in the process. If you’re a middle-class individual working for a living and relying on your job for support, and hoping to advance in your career and to build up some assets, there are serious consequences for such behavior. You can have your assets seized, and your reputation trashed which will hurt your reputation and career. If your approach is to live off the dole, then that same behavior is pretty much consequence-free. You are not going to be sued, because the landlord knows you have nothing to sue for. You don’t have to worry about losing your source of income, because it’s mostly from the government and you don’t lose that. You don’t have to worry about your career and reputation because you’re not going anywhere career-wise anyway, and in your social circle most people share your attitude about fat-cat rich landlords.
Complementing the above, the laws in many areas reflect the voting power of lower-income advocates, and are based on an assumption that the primary need is to protect helpless tenants from greedy and unscrupulous landlords rather than the reverse. This makes it very hard for landlords to evict people who decide not to pay their rent, for example, and the like. So if you’re a tenant who makes a lifestyle out of this type of behavior and knows the rules, you can really work the system in your favor.
If a Section 8 tenant gets evicted for any reason, they automatically lose their Section 8 forever, and in the entire United States. Yes, people who are evicted for not paying their rent, illegal activity, and other such nonsense have asked us “How could you do that to me?”
We evicted one person for selling drugs. She left her three large guard dogs, so we called Animal Control, and had them taken away. They had to be tranquilized to do so. The dogs were deemed them dangerous, and put them to sleep. She sued us.
ETA: Section 8 tenants know how to work the system, and tend to sue people. I’ve faced a lot of frivolous law suits on the matter. If you don’t take all your belongings out of the apartment within 30 days of moving, it’s deemed abandoned and we can do what we want with it. These tenants will come back two or three months later and want their stuff back, and sue you for it.
Seattle did approve a $15/hr minimum wage recently and ::gasp:: it’s having effects on people who don’t earn wages! Who could have predicted that increases to the minimum wage would have undesirable side effects?
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The lesson here is that landlords have a nose for increased purchasing power in the community and will raise rents accordingly. Rent control puts the kibosh on this.
Depends on the local market conditions … if a fix-income tenant is just able to pay $400/mo, landlord raises rent to $600/mo, fix-income tenant moves out and new tenant pays the $600 … that’s a great business plan.
Evicting can be so difficult, that my friend who runs several buildings will occasionally bribe bad tenants who are behind on their rent, or messing the place up. He says “I’ll come by next Saturday at noon, and if you’re moved out, hand me the key and sign an agreement to terminate your rental I’ll hand you $500 cash.”
As mentioned - many of the people who end up needing help just to buy food and pay rent, are there (if not physically disabled) because they have difficulty making good choices in life. Even if not deliberately destructive they have difficulty discerning good and bad choices.
For example - did someone assume that a bathtub is a bathtub, ignoring the fact that acrylic ones are not the ideal receptacle for barbecues, even worse that enameled steel; perhaps someone once saw a cast iron clawed bathtub used as barbeque (hopefully, outdoors) and assumed anything would work.
But yes, the major problem is that people of limited means are difficult to chase. Years ago, I remember reading a bulletin board about tenants and landlords in Toronto; it basically descended into a gripe about tenants who seriously exploited the system, and the board that gave them chance after chance to present their case, thus delaying evictions; a tenant playing the system right could avoid eviction for 6 months or more. i.e. it took some months to get a hearing scheduled. Then the tenant did not show up, and complained to the board they were unable to make the appointment, meaning the hearing was re-scheduled months down the road again. Or they would bring up bogus(?) complaints about the landlord’s failures, causing adjournment while these problems were looked into. The Landlord association had started a bad tenant database somewhat similar to a credit reporting agency.
Both completely valid points … it depends on the amortization rates … I use three years so that the extra $200/mo is $7,200. Mine you, that’s based strictly on my local market conditions, which can best be characterized as “chronic housing shortages under intense inflationary pressures”.
Remember, the time between tenants is an ideal and cost effective time to make capital improvements. That cost is separate from “sprucing up” the unit for the next tenant. Just slapping a coat of paint on and making minor repairs is not that expensive, say roughly $1,000 including my own labor. Even thrice in three years, the remaining $4,000 is pure profit.
I thought it could be attached for child support, current or (more likely) delinquent. The people I’ve known who got it (BTW, one of them is a man) received money that was as much as 40 years in arrears, and their exes could have as much as half of it garnished. :eek: Too bad, so sad, should have paid it at the time.
My grandmother lived for several years in a senior tower that also allowed people younger than 55 to live there if they were on Social Security; one of her best friends there was a woman in her 40s who had MS, and there were some young adults with Down Syndrome or who used wheelchairs who lived in that building. She was on Section 8, although I’m not sure she fully comprehended what it was. She just knew that she paid about $125 a month for a 1BR apartment that would otherwise have cost about 3 times that much.
Rental rates are, in part, based on the number of people who can afford and are willing to pay rent at a certain rate. When their wages increase more minimum wage folk will want to move into their own apartment, however since the number of housing units remain stable, oftentimes the government has highly incentivized the non-building of new working class apartments through rent control and other similarly flawed programs like green space programs, the price of rent will go up since there are more people looking for housing and have more money to do so.
I tend to avoid DSS (UK social security) for my UK properties. There are certainly a lot of great people who would make good tenants on DSS, but it is an unfortunate fact that the percentage of poor tenants is greater there.
UK law makes it quite difficult to get rid of problem tenants, and the potential damage of getting someone who will distress the neighbours, damage the property or similar means you try to minimize the chance of this happening.