> I suppose trillion-dollar companies aren’t as willing to take risks.
Which to me makes no sense, surely you have some budget for risks if you are a 1T company? I suppose their risks are more moonshots to some degree like the Apple Car but nevertheless, I do miss the old presentations.
Presumably at the time of sale they had rights to it. They lost it later, but should have at least had secured rights to people who bought the damn thing.
Turns out that I was really out of my depth when it comes to ins and outs of a car at the chassis level. I also realized that if I can’t toy with it in my free time then I’m not going to pursue it as a career. Working on cars needs a lot of space which a broke college student doesn’t have.
> I closed my linkedin, and I went to go work in the trades as a diesel mechanic.
Love it! A score of years ago, I considered being an auto mechanic after graduating HS but then ended up back in CompSci.
Did you have to go back to school? Did you find a shop that would take you in as an apprentice? And if they did, how did you convince them you can/will be good at the job?
Yeah but you can’t eat your cake and have it too. Part of renting is responding to complaints. If you don’t want to do that then you shouldn’t be renting.
I had a landlord ask me “you’re not going to call me for basic things right?”. I’m paying you money, I’ll call you whenever I want. Didn’t rent from him. You can tell me do it yourself but why would I put money into someone else’s property?
> Does this "first tenant" rule not incentivize people to apply immediately, sight unseen
Is that a bad thing? Presumably that means they liked something about your rental. Happened a ton during COVID.
> Or maybe they can even bail before the credit check is done, if they can see all of their candidate apartments in that time
I highly doubt this happens in practice. It can be like $50 per application easy - renters are in general cost conscious. I certainly only put down the fees on apartments I’m serious about (usually two max). Why waste money?
Homes do have a lot of expenses but it depends on when you bought your home. If you have a cheap mortgage then rents can quite easily cover repair costs. Landlords also minimize the maintenance costs by cutting costs wherever they can. I also never said they shouldn’t make money - they absolutely should, otherwise nobody would want to be a landlord.
But, I think you are overly harsh and your comparisons misplaced. Homes are quite inelastic and a necessity for everyone. They are very unique category of assets. Financial impacts to a landlord vs a renter is also quite lopsided - a landlord has far more “financial padding” to account for macroeconomic shocks compared to a renter, so you end up with some protections in case of sudden job loss. They have morphed into something worse now, but the intent makes a lot of sense.
I get where you’re coming from, but none of them are scarce inelastic resources. The work one especially doesn’t feel like discrimination.
It’s also very different - you’re hiring someone to do a job for you, vs wanting someone who’ll pay rent on time and not destroy the property. A mediocre employee vs an excellent employee can make any huge difference to a business.
That’s not the case with renters - if person A and person B both pay on time and don’t trash the place then they are quite fungible.
I’m not denying any of that. If you don’t pay rent it makes sense that you’re evicted. This is completely okay with me, and the city should change their rules around it.
The issue is that housing is a necessity, and the relationship isn’t an equal one. A landlord can usually absorb vacancy, repairs, or a bad investment decision; a renter can’t easily absorb losing their home or a sudden 20% rent increase.
> You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house. If you're a building owner, there are reasons that you might want to be able to have freedom of choice in choosing who you have live in your building.
That’s basically discrimination? Make a strict selection criteria, that’s fine. The city also has affordable housing for people who don’t qualify. You set what works for you, why do you care if it’s too strict?
I am not acting like there is an oligopoly, but not having tenant protections means tenants are at the mercy of shitty landlords. And there are a TON of them. Am I not supposed to have any rights, and the landlords gets to do whatever they want? Free market doesn’t mean regulation free.
Edit: you said “We should be creating incentives and making it easy for individual homeowners to become landlords (at least in Seattle) if we want the paradigm to improve.” - what do you propose? What about landlords who don’t want housing built because they like owning a scarce asset? What kind of rights do you think tenants should have?
> The problem is that there will always be more voting renters than voting landlords. So in a purely democratic system, policies which favor renters at the expense of landlords will always be supported.
I don’t know about that… the voting landlords (NIMBYs) sure make it a point to reduce development “to preserve their neighborhood character”.
> The only effective way to protect tenants is to set public policies that encourage new housing development
Which the local landowning population promptly block with NIMBY tactics. Have you wondered if that has any impact? Not everything is some progressive boogeyman.
Doesn’t help that the landlords want to squeeze the renter for what they are worth. It’s weird to me that shitty landlords are normalized but shitty tenants get a (rightfully) bad rap.
These laws become the way they are because landlords brought it upon themselves for the most part - they’re keeping assets that have massively increased in price and want to extract more and more out of the tenant.
If you have a home that’s paid off your expenses are basically just property taxes, maybe they should do what they can to keep good tenants instead of chasing profits.
Apart from maybe being a little more flexible on evictions, none of the other reasons seem problematic.
For instance not renting to the first qualifying tenant is a common root for discrimination. Why wouldn’t you rent to the first qualifying candidate?
The giving tenant three month rent thing is for a very small circumstance - for example huge rent increases if the tenant income is low, condo remodeling, etc. The wording is: “landlords who issue a housing cost increase of 10% or more (within a 12-month period) must pay relocation assistance if the affected household earns 80% or less of the Area Median Income and chooses to move.”
Maximum rent increase being capped also makes sense - I’ve been hit with 15-20% rent increases with no choice but to move.
It seems like you don’t like the tenant having any rights, and you want to impose your will upon them.