Landlord Party In Berkeley Ends In Fights

AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 312 points –
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berkeleyside.org
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"Landlords entering the party were greeted with shouts of “Parasite!” and “Get a job!”"
Some good news for today.

I had to do a double take and make sure they weren’t talking about tenants… weren’t there plenty of problematic tenants who don’t pay rent because they couldn’t be evicted?

I was a tenured property manager when all the shit went down initially and I didn't have a single tenant out of ~220 "take advantage" of the moratorium. I left the industry for lower paying work because of the owners' amorality.

This is the same as the "welfare queen" argument. Yes, there are a few people who take advantage of something that helps many others. That doesn't mean you stop doing it. At best, you make the system more robust.

There were, yeah. My neighbor tried using COVID as an excuse and ended up skipping state instead of going to court.

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Chants of “See our might, see our power, landlords get no happy hour” ... “Parasite!” and “Get a job!”

Love it!

About an hour into the rally, the picketers entered the venue ... Witnesses said a male attendee of the BPOA event [landlord] then slapped a female TANC member [protester] in the face and pushed her.

Thuggish landlords throwing their weight around? I'm shocked. Interestingly, police who were monitoring refused to enter the venue.

No one's profits are more important than anyone's right to shelter. While there'll never be justice in a world with landlords, at least there can be some nice music:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=aCiYmCVikjo

Landlords being massive pieces of shit? Well I never

Good. The petite bourgeois need to remember that they are part of the problem.

More importantly, they need to know that they only live as long as people don't turn against them.

Petit bourgeois.

It's all French anyway. I prefer to avoid using the academic terms when possible in first place, but there really isn't a replacement I can use in English

Little snobs? Shit head minority? Something like that comes to mind

Bourgeois = owning class

Proletariat = working class

If you get income from owning (stocks [dividends, capital gains], landlords [rent]) = owning class

If you get income from working (hourly wage, salary) = working class

I think that should work. What do you think?

I mean, it generally defines the interaction between classes, but there isn't really a simple term for petit bourgeois. They are technically members of the capitalist class, but if they analyzed their place in the class dynamic they would realize that their interests lay with the working class. They don't fit nicely in either square, so I tend to struggle with finding a term for them

I just say they have two parts to them. The working part and the owning part.

The working part works on the business and without it the business does not survive.

However the owning part is the part expecting an roi.

The goal of the small business owner is to separate the working and owning parts of themselves.

This fully happens when they hire employees, enough of them for themnot to work.

Then the small business owner is just an owner and their employees are the working class.

Outside the pub, tenant advocates were having conversations with passerby who disagreed with the protest. “Wouldn’t it be bad if we were celebrating landlords losing their homes?” one protester (left) said.

what a strange thing to say outside an event where landlords are celebrating being able to evict people again.

edit: i misread the article when i made this comment

Well that's the point. It'd be bad to celebrate other human beings losing their homes.

That's why they're protesting outside the landlord celebration of people losing their homes again.

oh it looks like i misread it. i thought the people who disagree with the protest were saying that it’s bad to celebrate landlords losing their homes. thank you for clearing that up

Would rather know which properties these people own and work full time to ensure they are empty at all costs.

Local clerk of court website can help you with this.

If you can get their names, you can know the property they personally own.

And if they're big enough to have a corporate name on the deed, then they will probably be registered with your secretary of state or whichever department handles business filings.

She said she then stepped out to request the presence of the police, who had been observing the protest, but they refused to enter the pub.

Interesting... police refused to step in at the request of the landlords.

They were landlords, so no pigs were allowed inside the building.

I wondered about the wisdom of having a high profile landlord party in Berkeley, of all places. Not sure if they could have chosen a much worse place.

Berkeley may well be the worst place ever to have a landlord party. Read the room.

Yeah, I'm sorry, but I really want people to think about what a rental world looks like if people can't be evicted.

Really think about it. What incentive does someone have to pay rent? None. You're essentially telling landlords that if they get an abusive tenant who refuses to abide by the lease terms they signed in good faith, they have no legal remedy and cannot control their property any more.

In such a world, why the hell would anyone invest in rental housing? Why would any sane investor build a new apartment complex or rehabilitate an existing one? Why would they seek a new tenant rather than just selling everything to some faceless megacorp which can afford to amortize out the risk or redevelop apartments into condos? And yeah, you might think, hey, property values will drop and people will buy rather than rent. But not everyone's going to be able to buy, and if we lose access to rental housing because it's gotten impossible to evict tenants regardless of the reason, it's going to really hurt anyone who needs or wants to rent, as well as provide a major barrier to private investment in constructing new housing.

Some of these landlords have been stuck dealing with abusive tenants for years without access to the law for recourse. Maybe the tenant is paying zero rent, but demanding that the landlord maintain paying large sums for upkeep and utilities. Maybe they're harassing the landlord or threatening their neighbors. We have no idea what's going on, and there are often very good reasons why someone gets evicted. Shit, maybe it's a shared housing situation and they're sexually harassing another resident.

Ending the eviction moratorium is a good thing, because if it doesn't get ended, then it'll be the end of rental housing availability. The entire system will collapse. And maybe that system needs some reform, but letting it collapse isn't a good end.

It's almost like this shit shouldn't be an investment at all.

Someone needs to build and rehab rental houses and put up with tenants. No one is going to do that for free.

Doesn't need to be free, it also doesn't need to be profit either.

Without profit, you're asking for them to sell their labor and expertise for free. Profit is the compensation people gain for the risk of making an investment, for the time and expense of doing what is necessary to manage and actualize that investment, and their expertise in knowing how to do so properly.

Well, expertise is a very, very generous term to use for landlords in any way, shape, or form. And let's be real, for how much profit they make off of the labor of other people, them having to break a nail wouldn't kill anybody.

Depends on what they're doing. Rehabbing a house that has been trashed or abandoned and doing so in a safe and efficient manner takes work and expertise.

You mean when they're finally forced to hire a contractor?

Have you ever been a landlord? It feels like you haven't, and are just repeating buzzwords like "they dont work but get money!".

Sure sounds like you have.. have you tried getting fuxked lately?

Since when are facts buzzwords?

  1. The state
  2. The state.
  3. Not for free, but the state.

Just like social housing. But for everyne.

If you want to own a home, buy it from the state.

If you can't afford it, rent it from the state.

If you want to buy it, but can't afford it, do the bank thing, but with the state.

Yeah, uh huh, okay. So go do that if you really think you can come up with public housing that isn't a fucking nightmare. And if you think you can get it passed. Until then, the rest of us have to live in the real world.

Yeah, uh huh, okay. So go do that if you really think you can come up with public housing that isn’t a fucking nightmare.

The FHA is already involved with lots of real estate transactions. The VA already provides some of the best loans in the country to military personnel. Just because you cannot envision the state being involved in housing without it turning into housing testaments from USSR doesn't mean it's not possible.

Yep, and the great thing is that people have other choices, too. I've got no problem with FHA, VA, USDA loans.

It's not public housing, you did not understand what I wrote.

You want the state to have a monopoly on rental housing and the sale of houses. That's what I read.

That's correct. How is this "social housing nightmare"? Instead of the bank owning your house, the state will.

Sounds awful. I don't want ownership of my house to be exposed to malicious politicians and underfunded, incompetent bureaucrats following Byzantine regulations.

Lmao, yeah... Now you get all that AND you're paying for it. Good luck.

Not really. We are in a best of both worlds situation here, with government credit backing competitive private loans.

Capitalism fanboys are the worst... You're either a landlord, a boomer or deranged.

"Best of both worlds". While housing crisis destroying lives of young people around the world. How fucking dare you.

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Whether I agree with the moratorium ending or not, celebrating people suffering is something horrible people do and I'm glad they got some comeuppance for it.

In principal, yes you are right. However, everyone knew it would end eventually. These people still owe their landlords the money. They will have their credit ruined, have an eviction and not be able to rent again. These are serious consequences. I doubt there's a ton of people who just chose that for no reason.

And "I don't want to be homeless" is a good reason to not pay the rent you can't afford to pay if there's an eviction moratorium.

I don't. People can be terrible.

I assume that "people" would also include these landlords you seem keen on defending?

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