I’m in the USA. I bought my first house last September, and I now live in a little neighborhood that’s primarily white collar working class families. It’s a really adorable neighborhood tucked away in a hard-to-find nook that’s less than a mile from the center of our very large city. The house was about $500k, which is…decent. You couldn’t buy a house for that price in any other city anywhere near this size, much less one so close to the city center, public transportation, schools, parks, etc. In NY, where I’m from, you couldn’t get this for ten times the price we paid.
We’re lucky – we’re lucky for a lot of reasons, but, specific to this house, we’re lucky because the houses in this little neighborhood don’t come up for sale very often. The people in the neighborhood love it here, so they rarely leave. Previously, living in apartments and “condos” (which is just a word classists use to differentiate themselves from the lower classes who live in “apartments”), turnover was pretty high – but here, people move in and stay for decades.
I love the atmosphere that creates – the friendliness, the warmth – it’s really nice. But it’s not lost on me that these people are out of touch – they don’t know how everyone else lives anymore – how they used to live. (And I love that about them. I can’t wait to be that out of touch.)
The financial and domestic stability these people are used to is crazy. It’s like culture shock. Sure, there’s some financial risk when it comes to mortgage rates, but it’s *nothing* compared to how landlords gouge renters.
Renting doesn’t just suck because you’re not building equity (or “generational wealth” if you’re old enough to remember back when that was a thing). It also sucks because you never know the fate of your living situation. Is your rent going to double? Is your building going to be sold and the rules you depended on arbitrarily change? The fact that landlords have so much power, so little responsibility and accountability, is disgusting. At least at work, we can strike – kind of – but landlords have no such weakness. Moving out is a much more expensive and challenging burden for us than it is for them – so our only “leverage” is pitiful – it’s generally an empty threat.
Landlord power is even more unbalanced than employer power – and employer power is already unbalanced af. In fact, the way (in the US) we’re tied to our jobs via healthcare – they learned that from landlords. The landlord/tenant relationship is the prototype for the worker/employer relationship. In the face of a conflict, a landlord’s stability is relative to how many properties they own – the more properties they own, the less likely they are to be impacted by a single tenant- and, worst case, the threat is a temporary financial setback.
For the renter, the consequences of a conflict with a landlord could destroy your life, permanently.
Fuck them.