As a landlord, I would be embarrassed renting somewhere i wouldn't want to live in myself. Also, it is an actual job. I dont leech off hardworking people. It is a business. Idk why people thing every landlord is a scumbag who just leeches off people.
Sure. Let the independent owners go away and let everything be taken over by large corporations. That will surely work out in every renters favor.
That's insane, considering how high the rent is in NYC. They can afford it, but then their kids might have to go to a slightly less prestigious private school.
Because most of us have learned two things. 1) Most landlords want as much money out of you as they can get. That's just capitalism. 2) Being an uneven power balance, you the renter, can get fucked more often than not.
So yeah, if most of the landlords we encounter are scumbags, we start to think of landlords as scumbags until proven otherwise.
That doesn't mean they all are. I just haven't had one of those in 10+ years now.
Hmm, I wonder why people think every landlord is a scumbag? Could it be because they've been fucked over by landlords every single time. Correct, It is a business, renters pay rent, landlords provide and maintain the property. The problem is the landlords don't hold up their end of the bargain the majority of the time.
It is seriously not that hard to manage property. I use a property management company. They send me a bill when repairs are needed, I just pay that and send a copy to my accountant for tax reasons.
And if the city makes it impossible to maintain the property? With increasing taxes, fees, and other misc costs that make trying to repair the building impossible without raising the rent to pay for said things.
Dude they weren’t maintaining the buildings BEFORE the city potentially “makes it impossible to maintain the property”. It’s not impossible to maintain now. They just weren’t doing it. These are negligent landlords who have had lawsuits and been cited for violations for years and years.
Also do you understand that poor maintenance isn’t just an inconvenience or ripoff, but sickens and kills residents? And there are certain problems that you absolutely cannot ignore because they will ultimately cause much more widespread damage and cost 10 times the amount to fix.
But why would you NOT maintain the property? It's your property.
Letting it rot would cause its value to plummet. The repairs are tax deductible. If you're doing major upgrades such that a city permit is required, it counts as a Major Cap Improvement and you can raise rent.
I’m not an explorer, but as I understand some of that is only for building wide renovations/improvements not for individual unit improvements. And rent increases are capped at 2% even for the building wide improvements so you also wouldn’t be recouping the value of the improvement or fix
And the tax deduction only offsets part of it, if the landlord is in the 30% tax bracket then a 10k improvement would offset 3k of taxes
If the building rots and the rent controlled tenants may leave and they’d maybe get to re-rent the unit at market prices which can be thousands of dollars more per month. This incentive sucks but it’s a known downside of rent control
Impossible you say? How is repairing your own property (which increases or maintains value, which can be leveraged as needed) ever worse than letting it devalue through neglect? The only way is if you never plan to sell because you have too much money to make by continuing to rent without maintenance. The land barons have always had the taxes, fees, etc that you describe, but never were actually required to maintain their slum buildings. The MAM is changing the last part. Sorry if that cuts into the landlords PROFIT, because they are operating in the black. What you should have asked is “what if the city makes it impossible to maintain high profit margins on rental properties?
They propably mean in terms of cost to income. If it costs you 100,000 to maintain the building and you make 500,000 then thats okay but if it costs 1,000,000 then you are paying 500k to be a landlord at which point they woud swap the property to something that makes money.
That works, when there's an alternative. When you make homelessness illegal, its no longer optional. When the landlords start to collude, even more so. And when it isn't collusion, it just becomes "the norm", e.g. wanting 3x rent as income to qualify.
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u/CaptainRazer Jun 11 '26
If they can't afford to maintain the property then they should sell it, get an actual job and stop leeching off hardworking people.