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Sydin posted:"I don't think anyone should own property at all, also please allow me to defend landlords for multiple paragraphs." oh ok if we're doing this: i'm a leftist, also encouraging everyone to become petty capitalists with a direct material interest in limiting the supply of a fundamental human right is good 
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Jul 30, 2020 06:28
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Sydin posted:"I don't think anyone should own property at all, also please allow me to defend landlords for multiple paragraphs." Framing this as attacking petty bourgeoisie while holding up landlording as the superior choice is peak
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Jul 30, 2020 06:30
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I'm gonna feed both you assholes to a guillotine, take it to PMs or something. No need to make the rest of us deal with your slapfights
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Jul 30, 2020 06:34
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The Glumslinger posted:I'm gonna feed both you assholes to a guillotine, take it to PMs or something. No need to make the rest of us deal with your slapfights Sorry for debating and discussing!
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Jul 30, 2020 06:34
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Yeah god forbid people talk about land use policy in the California politics thread.Cup Runneth Over posted:Sorry for debating and discussing! See! Common ground! To de-escalate a little, what I mean by "homeownership" is the idea that homes should appreciate in value over time, and that owning the place you live in is virtous or desirable. This socio-economic paradigm has been a huge mistake that's produced terrible effects for the country at large in the last 50 years. Places like Tokoyo have kept the cost of living down in urban areas through constant construction, but there's huge resistance to that here due to the idea that property prices dropping is bad. That's what I'm arguing against. And the main obstacle to changing that isn't just landlords, it's homeowners generally. I don't think individual homeowners are bad, although homeownership is much more likely to make you reactionary. But the whole system is a huge economic policy mistake. To put in more simply, homeowners are just as big a part of the problem as landlords, because they have the same incentives as them, and are a much bigger and more powerful voting bloc. Fill Baptismal fucked around with this message at 06:47 on Jul 30, 2020 |
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Jul 30, 2020 06:35
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To be fair, I thought I was back in the SF local thread My bad
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Jul 30, 2020 06:42
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Still Dismal posted:To de-escalate a little, what I mean by "homeownership" is the idea that homes should appreciate in value over time, and that owning the place you live in is virtous or desirable. This socio-economic paradigm has been a huge mistake that's produced terrible effects for the country at large in the last 50 years. Places like Tokoyo have kept the cost of living down in urban areas through constant construction, but there's huge resistance to that here due to the idea that property prices dropping is bad. That's what I'm arguing against. And the main obstacle to changing that isn't just landlords, it's homeowners generally. I don't think individual homeowners are bad, although homeownership is much more likely to make you reactionary. But the whole system is a huge economic policy mistake. OK, well, what I mean by homeownership is owning your home. I don't think that's a concept that should go away, let alone be supplanted by tenantry. And while people obsessed with property values are bad, that doesn't make landlords better. Prop 13 creates a lot of perverse incentives for homeowners in California, and it wasn't created by homeowners -- it was created by Howard Jarvis. Again, you're blaming the cogs for the machine. Frankly I hate landlords so viscerally I'd be quite happy if they were eradicated from the state and all residential property was either empty or owned by the people living in it. You seem to think that this would be worse than the opposite extreme that I mentioned in my previous post -- I just can't agree with that. We'll never see eye to eye on it. If people don't own their own homes they should be owned by the State, or the concept of property ownership should be eradicated entirely. Nothing else is acceptable. Coercive landlord-tenant relationships are violence. Fundamentally, controlling the roof over your head is better than paying someone to do nothing but not kick you out on the street. Landlords provide no service. Rental properties are an investment vehicle in which actual tenants are seen as a nuisance, and landlords would really just prefer to collect their rent and serve eviction notices, and nothing else. A landlord is like a cop: no matter their personality, they will never be a good person. If they want to be, they should stop being a landlord. Homeowners have some very perverse incentives in this state and the capitalist system does encourage homeownership to make people more conservative. That doesn't make homeownership an inherently reactionary position. Other states don't have this problem to nearly the same degree, but all states hate landlords. Like I said before, I suspect you have this point of view because you're coming at it from a YIMBY perspective where homeowners are a primary obstacle to new development and landlords generally are not, but I think it's seriously misguided. Cup Runneth Over fucked around with this message at 07:16 on Jul 30, 2020 |
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Jul 30, 2020 07:14
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Cup Runneth Over posted:OK, well, what I mean by homeownership is owning your home. I don't think that's a concept that should go away, let alone be supplanted by tenantry. And while people obsessed with property values are bad, that doesn't make landlords better. Prop 13 creates a lot of perverse incentives for homeowners in California, and it wasn't created by homeowners -- it was created by Howard Jarvis. Again, you're blaming the cogs for the machine. Everything good about home-ownership (legal protections, more attachment to the community, etc) is not intrinsically tied up with owning the land in which you live. The project of making home-wonership widespread is an inherently reactionary one. Here's William Levitt, of Levittown fame, one of the architects of the modern American suburb: quote:“No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do.” And you know what? He's right! Homewonership, and the drive to make it widespread, is and has been an inherently reactionary project from the start. And it's been a hugely successful one! There's tons of research showing that homeownership makes you oppose taxes and just generally feel more like an atomized individual, unwilling to participate in, and in many cases actively opposed to, any kind of collective good, especially ones that you don't benefit directly from. If there are no good people that are landlords, than the only good homeowners are ones who act against both their material best interests and the way in which their built environment predisposes them to act. Prop. 13 significantly exacerbates these issues but does not cause them. This is far from the only state in which any effort to build new housing is met with screaming opposition, these perverse incentives exist in every metro area in the country. Austin, New York, Virginia, you see the same thing in all of these places. And this is barely even toughing upon the racial dimensions\history of things like single family zoning (poo poo, look at what Trump's been tweeting about that lately) or the environmental impact of sprawl. Basically, to use your analogy and possibly mangle it a bit, I think that you've been convinced by cogs in the machine that they in their current form are an inevitable part of the machine, and that so long as it exists they will, when neither is true. Fill Baptismal fucked around with this message at 07:47 on Jul 30, 2020 |
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Jul 30, 2020 07:42
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Home ownership needs to be decoupled from the profit motive. To do this requires removing the need for homes to always appreciate in value. To do that requires removing the need for a 30 year A fuckton of government housing and funding for maintaining it would be a good start.
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Jul 30, 2020 07:44
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Make em tear them down every twenty years to meet new building codes.
Dr. Fraiser Chain fucked around with this message at 08:00 on Jul 30, 2020 |
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Jul 30, 2020 07:48
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Complications posted:Home ownership needs to be decoupled from the profit motive. To do this requires removing the need for homes to always appreciate in value. To do that requires removing the need for a 30 year  That and providing an alternative source of building and maintaining wealth for people. A massive expansion of local government bonds would be ideal, giving people a secure place to park their money and providing a funding source for local governments that isn't property taxes.
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Jul 30, 2020 07:54
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Still Dismal posted:
What? Many "landlords" are in fact corporations that own hundreds or thousands of units. They're powerful enough to have lobbying groups that shape local policies and can (and have) defeated attempts to reform the system. Any sins the individual homeowner has accrued by participating in the system is multiplied a hundredfold by the landlords who are the ones that built the system. And landlords do not "provide housing". They are simply middlemen who exploit the fact that housing is hard to obtain due to scarcity, credit scores, and deposit requirements to leech a living off of a broken system. Since all landlords seek to make a profit they are, by default, charging above the cost of housing to their renters. Therefore, everyone who is currently renting a property would be able to afford paying to own their property for less than the cost at which they are currently renting it if they actually had fair access to housing. Many Californians pay 50% or more of their income in rent. It is an enormous transfer of wealth from the working class to the bourgeoisie and corporations for no benefit whatsoever . Nevermind that millions of units of housing sit completely empty due to the calculus of landlords and speculators. Landlords are not better than homeowners.
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Jul 30, 2020 10:09
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Goodpancakes posted:Make em tear them down every twenty years to meet new building codes. Yeah, let's make sure only the wealthy can own a home.
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Jul 30, 2020 11:28
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Have you seen my apex seals? I seem to have lost them.
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Homeowners are worse than landlords certainly is a take
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Jul 30, 2020 17:32
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I vote and take part in numerous things seeking to drop my area's average house price value dramatically because in the situation where I actually succeed to an appreciable extent, I don't need to angrily guard my small slice of land hoping that it's going to keep my family from being homeless in the distant future... as well as it simply just being the right thing to do. It is a lie to say that owning a house makes one opposed to communism or whatever, it's just said to make idiots feel better. It really is blaming the cogs for the machine they were placed in.
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Jul 30, 2020 18:21
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As a homeowner who seeks to restrict the supply of housing in my immediate area, it's good to know that I am a class enemy. All the new local housing here is brand-new developments of sprawling suburbs over former pasturelands with zero long term planning, when TPTB should be prohibiting that poo poo and promoting higher density construction along existing transit corridors. God drat it would be nice if this state had actual urban planning, instead of the letting the pasture-to-suburb grifters run wild.
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Jul 30, 2020 18:43
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I think part of the problem in the argument is that capitalism necessarily abstracts and commodifies normal human life behaviors. The vast majority of people, I suspect, when asked about the benefits of homeownership, would say it's good to have stability and a place that you have a right to modify to your needs and that no one else can just take from you arbitrarily. That's a relatively normative human experience, historically. Capitalism takes this normative experience and abstracts it into a complex financial enterprise, with the result that people who are able to understand it in those terms can cultivate their wealth by buying "starter homes" and then trading up, buying homes and then renting them out for higher than the mortgage, etc. The normative experience of having a stable place to live that you have full rights over and the freedom to modify to your needs doesn't necessarily have to be coupled with private property in the financial sense. It could be rendered with a lifetime lease to a house or condo or whatever, with the lease reverting to the state at death or whatever. That would satisfy the majority of people's desires when it comes to home ownership. However, at present such a system doesn't exist, and so if people have the wherewithal they might try to purchase a home if the normative experience I described is important to them. It's loving ridiculous to suggest that this is a worse behavior than systematically acquiring property for the strict purpose of denying that normative experience to people, which is what landlording is. Capitalism makes us all into petty capitalists whether we want to or not, but people who are super keen on all that are much more destructive than people who wind up in that position whether they will or nill.
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Jul 30, 2020 18:47
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I would so happily live in reasonably priced public housing and invest my money in other things. I really hate that home ownership is basically the only route to financial stability right now. I particularly hate the layers of legal incantations, shibboleths, and reams of paperwork you have to go through. I'm about to go into the process of buying a house and it is causing me serious anxiety.
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Jul 30, 2020 20:23
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My home ownership was not intended to be speculative, it was opportunistic. To wit: in 2009 housing prices temporarily collapsed and I was faced with a probably once-in-a-lifetime window to actually afford to buy a house in the bay area at a net cost (mortgage, interest, insurance, taxes, maintenance) that was at or lower than my already a little below-market rent. It's crazy to attach some kind of moral failing to my making that decision. There's no actual ethically superior choice here, I'm living within a system that I can hope will change but in the meantime I have to make immediate choices; continue to enrich a landlord with my rent money, or buy a house and set a more or less fixed-cost for my housing for the next 30 years with a lower cost after that. In the last decade, however, I've been basically gifted with a pile of equity I didn't earn and don't really "deserve", because housing prices in my neighborhood have nearly doubled. Ought I to take out a big home equity line of credit and give all the money to charity, and then pay interest on that because it's a loan, and because I can't sell? I really can't sell. If I did, I'd immediately have to rent, and rents are now much higher than my mortgage, and so I'd be forced to leave the bay area, but my wife's employment is tied here, my parents need my help and they're stuck here, my sister and their family need us and they're stuck here... even if we accepted as a premise that my continuing to own my home and have an on-paper equity increase that I didn't earn as a premise, what exactly am I supposed to do with my nominal good luck? Here's what I think the answer is: I have an obligation to vote for and support and press for policies that are in the best interests of getting housing to everyone who needs it, irrespective of whether those polices would actively reduce my equity. In other words, despite the perverse incentive that arises as more and more of my net worth is represented by this single "investment," I have to vote against my financial best interests because I'm acutely aware that my position is not due to skill or virtue that deserves a big financial reward, but simply luck and good timing that a majority of people simply didn't get or couldn't access, through no fault or failing of their own. Maybe if I'm doing that, I could be excused from the guillotine? Maybe not everyone who is just struggling to do their best within this system needs to be demonized in order to achieve change?
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Jul 30, 2020 21:04
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Leperflesh posted:
This is it, this is the whole thing. Homeownership as currently constructed gives people a specific set of incentives. Most homeowners aren’t going to vote against their interests likes this. I don’t think you or any other homeowner is a bad person because I don’t think there’s much point to thinking about these things in terms of individual morality rather than incentives. but homeowners as a bloc are certainly a huge obstacle to expanding housing and combatting sprawl. And there’s a lot more homeowners than there are landlords.
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Jul 30, 2020 21:52
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lmao just pay ur rent!!   
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Jul 30, 2020 22:18
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When I think of landlords, I definitely think of people who don't regularly block new housing development. Landlords: Absolutely no incentive to keep new housing out of their areas. Goddamned angels, the lot of them.
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Jul 30, 2020 22:39
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Landlords also don't have huge reserves of capital. The only important thing is individuals with their individual votes. The fact that the wealth accrued by homeowners is basically totally illiquid isn't relevant to this conversation. The only political force that exists, anywhere, is an individual's vote. The fact that landlords are capable of turning other people's income into their political power through rent extraction is not worth looking at. There are not very many landlords, therefore they are not a hugely influential political force compared to homeowners, who again, are mostly dealing with abstract, illiquid assets.
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Jul 30, 2020 22:46
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If you think homeowners don’t actively block affordable housing, I suggest you go to the next community input session for affordable/low income housing that you can, because it will very quickly disabuse you of this notion.
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Jul 30, 2020 23:05
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Still Dismal posted:If you think homeowners don’t actively block affordable housing, I suggest you go to the next community input session for affordable/low income housing that you can, because it will very quickly disabuse you of this notion. No one thinks that, we just think that landlords do the same thing but more.
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Jul 30, 2020 23:08
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No one is suggesting that homeowners don't trend conservative/obstructionist. The thing that literally everyone is bumping up against in your argument is that they are a more important impediment to equitable housing policy than landlords, which is completely ridiculous given the discrepancy in liquid capital/the qualitative difference in owning one's home and extracting rent from people to live on your property.
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Jul 30, 2020 23:08
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Homeowners as a bloc are an obstacle to expanding equitable housing. This isn’t to say that landlords aren’t also, or that they don’t do bad things. They do. I’ve personally seen landlord groups attempt to block efforts to expand tenant protections in my city. But if all you had to worry about when wanting to build low income housing was opposition from existing landlords, most (not all) of the obstacles would be gone. I mean somehow straight up said it ITT, the only way for a homeowner to be in favor of addressing housing as an issue in their area is to act directly against their self interest. They have the exact same set of incentives that landlords do. They are part of the problem, and the nature of the electorate especially in local elections, where this poo poo gets decided, means that they are in practice most of it.
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Jul 30, 2020 23:22
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There are more homeowners who vote to maintain the status quo, but the landlords are orders or magnitude more evil and self-dealing about it. Regardless, you can't lose sight of the fact that people still need a place to live as the end result of policy, and hopefully a place to live that they like and are personally invested (emotionally) in. People like passing things on to their descendants. People like having privacy, especially in their homes. A policy that bulldozes all single family homes in favor of highrise apartments would be not only unpopular among the large number of people who live in "better" conditions than that right now, but it would be wasteful to destroy all of the housing and infrastructure just for the sake of standardization. No matter how you change the economy and politics and monetary motivation, a lot of people are always going to want a big enough house with some outdoor space. Telling them no, they have to live in the city, that will never persuade enough people to matter.
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Jul 31, 2020 00:00
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Still Dismal posted:If you think homeowners don’t actively block affordable housing, I suggest you go to the next community input session for affordable/low income housing that you can, because it will very quickly disabuse you of this notion. Of course there do this. The point is, so do landlords, and worse .
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Jul 31, 2020 00:06
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This is why SFers bitch about YIMBYs.
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Jul 31, 2020 00:56
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Infinite Karma posted:
If you want to have a sprawling single family house go ahead. This is a huge country with vast amounts of open space. But the unspoken second half of “I want a lawn and nature” is often “and I want to be able to easily access a major metro area and all of it’s amenities”. It’s not the homeowners in the middle of nowhere who go out of their way to block affordable/dense housing, it’s the ones in or near cities or their commuter suburbs.
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Jul 31, 2020 01:12
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Still Dismal posted:Homeowners as a bloc are an obstacle to expanding equitable housing. This isn’t to say that landlords aren’t also, or that they don’t do bad things. They do. I’ve personally seen landlord groups attempt to block efforts to expand tenant protections in my city. But if all you had to worry about when wanting to build low income housing was opposition from existing landlords, most (not all) of the obstacles would be gone. Do you not understand that an huge portion of rental properties are not owned by some random dude, but enormous corporations with billions of dollars at their disposal? One company, Greystar Real Estate, control half a million rental units just by themselves. They absolutely have the power to make or break legislation and you conveniently keep ignoring that in favor of arguing that the amorphous collection of homeowners with little working capital or organization are somehow more politically powerful.
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Jul 31, 2020 02:01
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So I'm in LA for three more weeks house sitting. and I have family in the area are going on Sundays to a church that is defying the governors orders, and holding indoor worship. (and outdoor, which is what my family does but still) This guy. Who hosted Kirk last night at the service. Like, WTF. Also, not in that video he mentions that if you try to bust him he's got federal agents on his side and if you try to stop them they'll arrest you and then harass you in the jail cell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaUTgrwvuuM
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Jul 31, 2020 02:52
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Class Warcraft posted:Do you not understand that an huge portion of rental properties are not owned by some random dude, but enormous corporations with billions of dollars at their disposal? Yeah but how many votes are in that corporation?!! Not as many as there are homeowners in CA! This is a very nuanced and leftist take
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Jul 31, 2020 02:54
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Class Warcraft posted:Do you not understand that an huge portion of rental properties are not owned by some random dude, but enormous corporations with billions of dollars at their disposal? Do you not understand that class interest is A Thing? There doesn't need to be a nefarious council of homeowners organizing things for them to as a bloc oppose things like new housing (which they demonstrably loving do!), because their material interests are aligned to do so. If you talk to the people who actually build affordable housing, the obstacles in their way isn't some sinister megacorp, it's the boomer lawyer who proabbly votes for democrats who bought their craftsman in San Mateo in the 80s and shows up to every single neighborhood comment meeting that is held to oppose the proposed apartments with BMR housing near Bart because it will ruin his parking. e: gently caress it, wer're shouting past each other, as you can probably tell this is something I could post about for days and if anyone wants to keep arguing about this in like the urban planning thread we can. But I'll stop derailing this thread. Fill Baptismal fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Jul 31, 2020 |
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Jul 31, 2020 03:28
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Here's a question: if you oppose homeownership as being reactionary what exactly do you think homeowners are blocking from being constructed? Whose pocket is your activism in? I'm guessing ideally you would want big dense apartment buildings, right? Lots and lots of tenants packed into desirable downtown real estate? Gee, I wonder why big corporate property managers don't oppose those. And here you are spouting off about class interest.
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Jul 31, 2020 03:40
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lmao i'm just some dude you loving weirdo, I'm not in anyone's pocket, I would just like to not have to live with roomates until I'm 45. And uhh yeah? Why shouldn't there be lots of people living in urban cores with easy access to public transit and economic centers? What exactly is sinister about this? lol are you saying that only big developer shills wants people to not have to commute from the suburbs or some poo poo? Yes, there should be abundant and affordable housing in areas where lots of people want to live, on what planet is that a bad thing?
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Jul 31, 2020 03:47
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"Property ownership shouldn't be a thing" is fine enough idea in the abstract but it's not realistically feasible given our current economic systems to deride people simply for buying a house because you find it morally reprehensible. There is no idealistic option where you dwell on a property but also don't own it or have to pay somebody who does own it to live there. You either buy or you rent, and renting means sending money to people who do own property, almost always multiple properties because they have at least one they rent and another where they live, which by your own logic of property ownership = bad in all circumstances makes renters complicit in enriching home owners and allowing them to continue to flex political power as well. Like not to drag out the old and tired "no ethical consumption under capitalism" argument but you're telling people they're evil for owning property when they only have two options and they're "own property" or "rent property from people who own property, in many cases for a higher monthly cost than a mortgage would be." Not everybody buys a house because they see it as an investment vehicle. Many people do it for the long term stability it provides over renting. Does it generally cause people to build up a ton of unearned equity, particularly in California? Yes. Does it tend to make homeowners trend more conservative and NIMBY to protect that equity? Yes! But that has to do with the larger socio-economic realities of our society where for the vast majority of people outside the 1% if they own property it's the only source of financial security they have whatsoever, and for them protecting that equity is life or death. That is a failing of our current economic systems more than it is the fault of a working class family buying a starter home. tl;dr your crusade against all home owners as the literal spawn of satan ignores the modern political and economic realities most people face.
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Jul 31, 2020 03:56
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Sydin posted:
I agree with most of that. I don't want to send individual homeowners to the gulag or anything. But they as a bloc, and the specific policies that create that bloc, are bad. I think it's possible to be a good homeowner, but only if you're acting against your own financial self interest the entire time. Which most people aren't going to do. Alright, I will stop derailing this thread for real now.
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Jul 31, 2020 04:04
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In light of the above, my gripe with landlords is that many of them really aren't providing any services at all, or are doing as much as possible to avoid performing the services they're supposed to perform, all the while saying "well, you wouldn't want the government to be your landlord, think of all the good service you'd lose out on in the current arrangement! I'm currently moving out of my old place in a now-gentrifying, formerly very economically depressed area of Oakland, where the landlords are, by and large, perhaps not the most transparent in their dealings or interested in providing stellar service. My interactions with them have been primarily: * Paying rent, through a box, because they don't provide an address or online payment portal. Whatever, that's within their rights, but given the amount you pay for bay area rent and what they're presumably paying in taxes to hold the place (that they've certainly owned it long enough for Prop 13 bullshit to let them set rents based on value well above the taxed value) I'd like some modicum of service beyond "owning a building and letting units in it". Can't really force that though, since your housing is probably the thing you're least able to leave for a competitor easily. * Attempting to call regarding issues. It's a crapshoot if they ever pick up the phone, and they don't return messages/respond to texts ever. I got locked out on a Saturday and they managed to eventually respond and provide a new set of keys on Monday--I can't imagine what they'd do if, say, a pipe burst or the building caught fire. * Not really knowing who to contact, since it wasn't really discussed during move-in--all I have is aforementioned mostly useless phone number. Through discussion with other tenants I've learned that there is some dude that's there as the "on-site manager", but there's no signage about this, and the guy in question apparently speaks virtually no English, only Lithuanian--I think he's the owner's cousin or something and it's more an arrangement to give him free housing in exchange for doing groundswork. That's... kinda in compliance, but I think you could argue that they're not quite fully in compliance with https://govt.westlaw.com/calregs/Document/I16BCF570D45311DEB97CF67CD0B99467?contextData=%28sc.Default%29&transitionType=Default * Conducting a wonderful dance to move out with the owner's lackey, who appears to be literally the only person in his employ able to perform inspections on somewhere around 50-100 units (dunno exactly--my building has about 30 and I know that they own multiple medium-size properties, but the ownership records are so obfuscated that it's hard to say). He initially said he'd need me to wait around for a 4-hour window in which he might show up because he's busy doing other inspections, which I challenged, saying I could provide a much shorter window for me to arrive when he's ready. The day of he asked for a specific time, and if I was okay with him conducting the inspection without me present. I responded "lol no", so we arrived at the appointed time, he walked around for like 10 minutes and took pictures, and said he was done. I asked for the itemized inspection report on the spot, but this was apparently impossible because he had to run to other inspections. When pressed on this--as best I understand the requirements, if I'm present for the inspection, the report has to provided at the end, not left for later--he basically panicked and ran the gently caress away. I kinda relented at this point, since I didn't think chasing after him was likely to make him say "oh, no, whoops, I was wrong". * After the aforementioned bullshit, sending an email saying he hadn't performed an inspection for cleanliness because I "hadn't moved out yet" (legally, yes, the lease ends on the 31rst, but I've moved out already, physically, which is readily apparent because there's basically gently caress all in the unit still) and that "the presence of my belongings in the unit" prevented him from conducting a cleanliness inspection (there was like, idk, a trashbag, a roll of TP, a bag with some broken old CO2 detector that I couldn't find the exact model to replace, and a box with a fuse with it, which I'd left because I figured the maintenance people would appreciate the free TP if nothing else, and maybe the next tenant could use the spare fuse). When pressed on the content of https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CIV§ionNum=1950.5 he basically said that he didn't need to itemize things that needed to be clean before I'd actually vacated and hung up on me--keep in mind he'd had every opportunity to just say "hey you need to move these last items out also before I can complete the inspection", but nope, just ran out the door. * Finding after returning to the apartment to remove those last items (based on his email, I guessed that he wanted me to!) to find that someone had entered the unit (door wasn't locked the same, stuff was moved). The maintenance staff confirmed the lackey had told them to perform an inspection right after I left, and they did, which is kinda odd, since they were definitely there while both I and the lackey were present (I saw them!), and he could have called them up to do it then. Guess that was just toooooooo hard. Keep in mind, I'd explicitly denied permission for inspection without my being present already, and there was no request for a subsequent inspection at an agreed upon time, so this is de jure illegal if they maintain that I haven't moved out--any inspection must be scheduled in agreement by both parties as far as I understand it, until such time that we're in agreement that I've vacated. The maintenance staff were, understandably, confused about this and called the lackey themselves to try and clarify. Upon realizing that I was present, the lackey hung up again, but the maintenance staff were happy to provide a recorded statement about their understanding of the event. It's all a confusing mess of things--hey, I get it, owning and leasing property in America, in the bay area especially, has historically been a good way to build lasting wealth, especially for people who may not have been offered other options. But there seems to be this strange dichotomy where the landlords in question--as best I can tell--aren't exactly the poor downtrodden souls that would need such an out. If they were a black family in Oakland struggling to build generational wealth by any means possible, well, hey, I'd have some sympathy: while I don't think holding property is the most socially useful way to do this, it's what American society offered, and I can't really fault people for taking what they can. You do what's necessary in the environment you live in, and if you're black, well, whether your ancestors were landlords or not doesn't really matter (they probably weren't--I don't think the slave ships were exactly filled with the upper echelons of African society circa 1500, rather the opposite, more likely the not-upper echelon people the upper echelons wanted to be rid of), since your ancestors were forcibly ripped away from their history and society to be enslaved in another. In my case, the landlord appears to be the child of a Lithuanian landlord (by no means low-class--he was a lawyer and served as an officer in the army) who fled Stalin's purges of the kulaks and NEP-men, and his lackey appears to be descended from some high-caste (read: also landlords) people around Mumbai. I don't know as much of the Indian history, but I feel like both would reasonably have a historical understanding of feudalism and its consequences based on their background--India wasn't exactly a socialist egalitarian paradise when the British moved in; there's quite a long and storied history there. It seems neither have learned anything from what happened in their countries, that their takeaway was "welp, guess we can't be landlords in the old country anymore, but by god that was OUR RIGHT, and we're happy to perpetuate our practices in our new country, because all that unrest, all that pain, all that suffering, well, it was just an aberration, a flash in the pan: our profession, the profession of owning property, is just and good, and we are happy to continue it having escaped the reaction to it in the lands our ancestors came from--the lower classes there clamoring to say it wasn't just, they were wrong, their concerns invalid nonsense, and any such concerns in our new country are just as invalid. The small folk are ours to rule, it is our divine right. We seem to have a non-insignificant population of refugees who say "no! the revolt against our system in our ancestral lands was unjust! we desire to continue that system elsewhere in the world, for it is right and good, and nay to any that would challenge that notion!" without any shred of understanding why events in the old world occurred as they did, only the notion that they were not the events that should have occurred, and that they should rightly and justly preserve the old system as best possible outside it, that this time, this time, the people will recognize the landlords' god-given right to extract profit from the land and those who live on it, that nigh re-inventing serfdom, albeit some sort of modernized serfdom, is the best and proper course of action, and that they will build a new landlord paradise where all are happy, at least insofar as "all" is "the landed classes". When I was a child, my teachers told me that America was founded to break free of this, that we welcomed the tired and poor to build a new society different from the old. It seems now that this wasn't true--whatever society we may have strived to build out of whatever people, that we instead have transplanted the same people that created problems in the old world into the new, and that they've done their damndest to just rebuild 18th-century Europe or India as they were then anew in our time. The other thing I was taught, less through teachers than through media, was that government CANNOT provide housing, as it's too incompetent, and the failures of the projects show this. It seems, however, that the capitalists landlords are no less incompetent, or if they are competent, that they twist the competency to their benefit, not to build better housing for all. I am not sure why I should want an incompetent landlord I cannot remove because they are not the government over an incompetent landlord I can vote out, and am rather curious about the whole failure of the projects, which seem now to be more a matter of the people living there having little political power to force good management, less that the management was wholly incapable. It's especially strange having seen places where government housing IS competent--Singapore is quite far from the US in many many ways, but they do seem to have good housing that's government managed and home to people of many ethnicities and varying political power. Such doesn't seem so impossible as it has been portrayed. tl;dr: gently caress landlords, they're a bunch of people that are sad they got kicked out of their country as the populace revolted against feudalism, and decided to relocate somewhere else that wasn't in a state of revolt against it yet to reestablish the same system as best they could, perhaps more slyly, to try and avoid the catalysts towards revolt that led them to leave. they don't do anything useful, and they don't want to do anything useful, they just want to extract rents, and will probably try to do the same if we don't die in climateapocalypes and manage to work our way into space (The Expanse is speculative fiction, but with what Musk and Bezos are trying for, it probably ain't that far off the mark!). Do your part and vote to end Prop 13 for commercial owners, and canvas to convince others to vote the same way you can. You can either vote for slow reform now or expect  later, and while the latter may sound appealing, it does kinda suck at the time of all told, with the historical record considered.
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Jul 31, 2020 04:39
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