In medieval Europe, all property was owned by the aristocrats. There was no such thing as a middle-class landlord. Middle class people couldn’t own property. 99% of people were only allowed to be tenants.
But then America happened. And anyone was allowed to own property in America. The discovery of two gigantic continents just in time for the enlightenment revolution in ideals of equality broke the monopoly of the aristocracy.
Like all historical improvements, this one has been gradual. The “anyone” who was allowed to own property in America didn’t include women or slaves for a while. But it does now.
In spite of the rainbows and unicorns that I would totally expect to be seeing given that trajectory, the modern property ownership and rentership situation is an absolute rat’s nest of problems.
On the renter’s side, property values keep going up at an unsustainable rate. You have to be moderately wealthy to even think about property ownership these days. And the very wealthy buy property after property, for themselves and as investments, which perpetuates the inflationary cycle.
On the landlord’s side, the unbroken chain of tenants having issues with abusive landlords since the middle ages has been slowly, silently gaining access to the levers of power. And we are far enough along that evolution that small landlords are being punished so harshly that they are losing the will to compete with the large landlords.
My uncle, for example, decided to stop being a landlord when he discovered that, if a tenant were to become so unbearable that he decided to evict them, he was required by law to give them a month of unrestricted access to one of his most valuable possessions to do whatever they want to it. And the average unbearable tenant isn’t going to be able to afford to repair the damage they inflict even if my uncle were to be able, after huge investments in time and money, to win a court case.
My parents put the house I lived in from birth until about the age of six on the rental market when we moved. We still rent that house out today. And we have some horror stories.
For example, many years ago, between renters, we remodeled the house. Fresh paint, new counters and floors in the kitchen, brand new carpet in the basement. Then the new tenants moved in.
When they moved out a year later, we went inside to find cigarette burns on the living room carpet and walls, three missing walls and all of the brand new carpet in the basement gone. Just torn out. And they walked away. The security deposit does not come close to the cost of rebuilding three walls and recarpeting an entire floor.
And, like I said, even if we could have afforded the legal costs of going after them, what are the chances we’d have recovered the money lost? So my parents, the ones still liable for the mortgage and the maintenance, also took the hit for the deliberate destruction a couple of dicks decided to wreak.
My mom is passionate about property ownership, but my dad is a strict numbers guy. And he has the math to show that if we had sold the house and put the money in a standard stock portfolio, it would be worth 3 times more than the total value we did get. And a stock portfolio wouldn’t require all the time and labor.
So why should we stay in this? Why shouldn’t we take a big payout from a big landlord who deals with this stuff for a living, a landlord who will be just as big of a dick to the tenants, even though the majority are truly upstanding, as the worst tenants were to us?
