> #1 is annoying but has many solutions. You can call the cops, you can defend yourself, you can sue in the courts.
It's glaringly obvious that you don't live in a major city. Defend yourself? So you're advocating, in the US, that you engage in a shoot out with the criminal? Like a sister comment said, if your laptop is stolen out of your car, who are you going to sue? To live in a US city is to be surrounded by criminals who rule the streets with impunity.
> #2 is the most terrifying one since there is absolutely nothing you can do.
The US is still a democracy (to its own fault) regardless of how many Flock cameras exist and how they're being used. Why not advocate for changing laws around data use and retention. What is being advocated for instead is that we get rid of the cameras because of all of the theoretical potential harms, while losing the benefit that we get as a society right now (700k crimes solved/helped solved per year by Flock, including 10k missing persons cases). It's just maddening that people are leapfrogging to a theoretical scenario while victims of crime are truly suffering today.
Even with all this said, surveillance like this is certainly going to be one of the best ways to catch criminals and reduce crime over the long term. I hope the misgivings that we have around Flock won't close the door to us ever using this type of technology, in some way, in the future.
I spent 3 years in Korea, and that's probably where I will go back to retire after I exit. Crime there is extremely low - partially because of the cameras, but mainly because they're on top of it. They're able to spend time on every criminal, which deters anyone from breaking the law.
Contrary to SF, where I've called the police and provided evidence for an open and shut case, and the cops shrugged their shoulders. Flock cameras won't fix that.
American police seem to be a uniquely bad combo of false positives and false negatives. Failing to go after actual crime while also capable of using disproportionate violence in incidents that don't warrant it.
I used to live in china, which is by all means the dystopian surveillance state that we're all afraid that this could lead to. Don't misinterpret this as an advocation for that type of living; but it's simply interesting to note that when you ask any chinese if they would like to go back to the world of 30 years ago in terms of surveillance, essentially 100% of them will say no; they like it the way things are and not having to be afraid of being victim to any crime. Yes yes, a bird born in a cage thinks flying is an illness. I realize the irony in bringing this up. Yet it's just hard to ignore when you see delivery drivers leaving packages outside of buildings on the street in the most insecure manner and not having a single soul daring to touch it if they are not the intended recipient.
At the same time, on HN we are not even having a conversation about what a sort of tradeoff between surveillance and safety. I live in Seattle, actually just had ~$400 in buckets of paint stolen off my porch just yesterday. Yes, buckets of paint. I had a break in 2 months ago, and that was one of many over the years. This is in U-District, a high crime, but also oddly affluent neighborhood. I absolutely detest the fact that criminals run around the city with impunity committing crime after crime. It makes everyone's life here just a bit more miserable—there are so many people that don't want to move to the city because of the crime; there are all these invisible costs we are paying because of it.
So to think that cameras are such a no-go just doesn't make sense to me. Certainly there are ways to do it ethically. I think south korea is a great example, as well as many european countries. Honestly, I think it's just bizarre that every time Flock gets brought up on HN we all flip the bird to the supposed surveillance state without even discussing the tradeoffs.
It's more complicated in China not just because of people want a more safer environment, but also because of the culture and the social formation built by history.
Chinese were taught to grow in honesty and integrity explicitly for thousand years and it's becoming common consensus when more and more people are educated. When the bar raises and the gov is not given more freedom to the people, it's just nature to let the surveillance cameras grow to each and every inch of the land.
Me personally would chose safety over privacy though.
In China the pact (true or not is irrelevant) is that the State has this power and enacts it for the benefit of everyone.
In the US surveillance doesn’t have the same role, it’s just another figment of extreme profit making.
Flock has no role in the social pact, it’s just a dystopian company profiting from the current situation.
This is a mischaracterization. Flock helps solve around 700k crimes in the US per year and is involved in ~10k missing person cases (this claim comes from Gemini). It's reported to assist in around ~10% of crimes. To call what they're doing "dystopian" is ignoring the upside: it's certainly saved many lives, that's undebatable.
To me the fact tha policing through profiling all citizen is already a dystopia. The fact that a private company gets paid to do it and collect the data is even worse.
What about the upside though? Is that worth ignoring? There are so many crimes that can't be solved without having a camera watching the street. There is the potential for the government profiling, but cities have governance over their own Flock data and don't share it with the federal government, unless they explicitly opt-in.
Do you also want to install some surveillance software on your phone and laptop so it can watch what you do 100% of time?
You know in future it will really help to catch some criminals stealing copyrighted IP, watching some illegal types of porn or using some sanctioned Chinese LLM.
You will never find anyone who is against these cameras saying that they don’t reduce crime. Of course they do. The problem is what you give up to have that is far, far more valuable and we can point to the “Ben Franklin” quote here about those who would give up freedom for safety deserve neither.
The problem is the negative feedback between crime (and crime visibility through media), and the acceptance of surveillance in order to stop crime.
People really don't like public safety crime. Not only will they vote for surveillance, they will vote for public safety authoritarians like Bukele just to stop it.
They are thinking: What good is your abstract notion of freedom if I cannot leave my house at night, and I have to be hyper vigilant of violence?
I don't know the solutions to this. The media clearly plays a big role in this, but regulation of media and social media is its own can of worms.
One thing I am quite confident about is that actually stopping public safety crime without surveillance must be a priority, otherwise it's cart before horse.
This assumes the police even want to solve crimes. I'm not convinced they do. Everything I've seen points to them wanting to do the absolute bare minimum to not be disbanded, and that's it. Their primary goal is to get paid and go home. Well, solving crimes interferes with the "go home" part, so they don't. Normally, in a free market, you would fail if you can't do your primary purpose. Police have zero accountability to anyone, including the voter. They're systemically allowed to fail, and encouraged financially to fail.
I think this relies on anecdata rather than real data. Police obviously do solve crimes, if they didn't, the US would look a lot more like Haiti. They could be solving more, with better technology, but that doesn't seem like a discussion that we're willing to have on HN.
They are already militarized, they have the best technology in the world. Better than most nation’s militaries. It doesn’t help much, because the incentives are such that they don’t get rewarded in any way for solving crimes.
It’s not anecdata, it’s analyzing the incentive structures of our institutions. You have to do that analysis because nobody is going to be a hero. Yes, there are some heros, but there’s no systemic way to make people heros. You need structure.
Is it? In the UK we have a huge density of CCTV cameras and often you can barely get the police to write a crime report, let alone look at the CCTV. It doesn't really seem like the bottleneck.
Their lackadaisical attitude towards scams and misleading information on their platforms is just utterly mind blowing. The other day I was suggested a post from an account of a beautiful girl with 150k followers which, upon investigation, is not a real person but a character generated with AI; whose profile links out to a bunch of sites trying to get people to pay for nude images or download nefarious apps like gambling, crypto, etc. Though not technically illegal, it’s a total moral hazard and is yet another nail in the coffin in our goal to maintain an equitable society.
The people that work at the company are smart, and I’m sure many of them are compassionate. I just don’t know what kind of people can sign off on product decisions like this that truly erode trust, community fabric, and make our world ultimately so much worse. It’s heartbreaking that someone like zuck is the one leading this initiative, you could pick any random person off the street and they would lead the company in a direction that was better for mankind.
> 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?
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. When the government forces you to choose the first applicant who meets your selection criteria, your selection criteria becomes incredibly strict—720+ credit score, makes 4x the rent, etc. Especially when evicting a bad tenant becomes basically impossible, landlords work even harder to vet candidates, meaning there are a lot of false negatives that aren't offered housing. Seriously, you can't evict a tenant just because its winter? You know how many people take advantage of that — read my sibling comment in my thread. I myself in Seattle have dealt with multiple tenants who have done this so they could have free rent as their lease expired. What do you think this does to my tenant selection process? I up the bar.
> Maximum rent increase being capped also makes sense - I’ve been hit with 15-20% rent increases with no choice but to move.
You act like there's an oligopoly that dictates rent prices from their mountaintop that we all have to abide by. We live in a free market, and small landlords compete with large buildings for tenants. Creating these types of caps just makes the system less efficient — focuses efforts on the false pretense of tenants rights rather than the true equalizer like building more housing. And honestly, it just drives small landlords out of the market who can't handle it. This just leaves corporate landlords who are certainly less tenant friendly and will further this tenant vs landlord arms-race. 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.
I've lived in properties with no form of rent control whatsoever. Landlords issuing 10%+ rent increases is awful. it denies you the stability that's granted by fair/consistent rent increases. It erodes the community fabric by having a revolving door of tenants who live there 1-2 years before leaving.
I do agree that we should focus on other remedies such as building more. However, even in a market with ample housing, I'm not convinced that some Landlords would still just as happily take the 'I bet they'd rather a 10% rent increase than deal with the hassle of moving' gamble.
Most of the people I've met who are anti rent control/stabilization usually don't have the pleasure of a landlord who has decided to engage in such tactics. Almost always they argue from some place of guaranteed housing safety.
this is an issue that applies to people making 30k and also people making 300k.
I like the approach Finland took when it abolished rent control in the 1990s. Basically, you are not allowed to chain fixed-term leases indefinitely. If the actual intent is that the tenant stays until further notice, the lease agreement must reflect that.
Now, if you have an indefinite lease, the landlord can't increase the rent, unless the basis for the increase is already in the agreement. Typically the rent is tied to a measure of inflation, and the landlord chooses once a year if they should make the increase.
That's actually fine, but the people who oppose rent control would probably not accept that because that's basically the system (give or take) that already exists in places where rent control already exists.
My ex also had a lease that stipulated automatic 5% increases, until they made him sign a new agreement mandating the non-negotiated increase would be 7.5% instead.
NYC has a particularly spectacular brand of hostility towards tenants (the latest trend I've seen is, instead of broker fees, absorbent move in/move out fees paid to property managers).
> You should be able to select freely who you want to have live in your house
We already tried that. It turns out that people are racist, so now we need laws to protect against that. It sucks for all the decent non-racist folks but the alternative of not having those protections was far worse.
If you force people to have someone in their house that they don't want, they are not going to rent their house out. This will lead to less units on the market. Your point about racism is fair, but I don't think the answer is a solution that reduces rentable units on the market.
The one that actually exists? Have you never heard of the HUD fair housing initiatives programs? You hire a white actor and a black actor with the same job, income, credit, etc and if a landlord consistently refuses to rent to the black actors, you sic the DoJ on them for violating the Fair Housing Act
Nope, I hadn't heard of that. Neat. I see two problems though:
1. I can see this being effective against larger landlord that will have many units available every year, ensuring that adequate testing can be performed. But on smaller landlords with only a few units, it seems like it'd be hard to test. (for example, you get rejected from an apartment. The landlord rents it out to someone else. You file a FHIP complaint, but the landlord no longer has any units available so they cannot test.)
2. It seems like this is largely driven by complaints? If I was rejected from an apartment, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to glean whether or not it was based on race.
Re #2: I feel like people of the kinds of races that often get discriminated against have pretty decent radar when it comes to figuring out why they were rejected.
How is renting different from hiring in that regard? Nobody would consider requiring employers to hire the first qualified candidate, but at the same time, we don't allow employers to discriminate on the basis of race.
Why couldn't the same law apply to residential leasing?
Are we sure that law is working as intended? Or are employers simply not admitting to factoring race into the decision? It is next to impossible to prove a candidate was rejected on the basis of race, especially when you can legally reject someone for not being a "culture fit" on the team.
I'd also argue the stakes are higher when leasing, so landlords will be less likely to take a chance on a race they don't like. Most jobs in the US are at-will employment so you can be fired at any time for almost any reason, but evicting a tenant can be a long process.
>t is next to impossible to prove a candidate was rejected on the basis of race
It is possible to prove a company is disproportionally one or the other when making the claim. Of course when an industry has far less applicants or members of a certain group that's to be expected but still.
Consequentially I've heard of some pretty blatant race based selection especially in the US.
It's just that that selection ends up excluding white people (or east asians)
A while ago I even discussed with a hr person here on hn who was defending their hiring of that sort with the most flowery wording about 'just giving priority' or 'reaching out to members of their prefered group specifically' fist if all they get is not the desired group.
> 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?
Yes, discrimination based upon characteristics that aren't immutable is perfectly fine and something we do every day. I discriminate against my neighbor who invited me over drinks in favor of my best friend who invited me to his birthday. I discriminate against the potential hire who doesn’t have experience in this line of work in favor of the person who’s a nationally renowned expert. I discriminate against a tenant with a history of failing to make rent in favor of someone who consistently provides payment every month. People are different and valuing one over another in specific contexts is hardly scandalous. It only becomes a proble if you decide to discriminate against someone based upon immutable characteristics such as their race, sex, national origin, etc. because you’re not treating them as an individual.
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.
> if person A and person B both pay on time and don’t trash the place then they are quite fungible.
Based on those two sole criteria, no, they aren't. Person A might call weekly about trivial matters that they should be taking care of themselves (lightbulb burned out, oven needs cleaning, refrigerator water filter needs replacement, etc.), while person B just takes care of things and doesn't bother the landlord.
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?
This is such binary thinking. People have different ways of interacting with people. Some people are easier to deal with than others, and that was the parents' point, not that they never want to respond to reasonable complaints.
Landlords should provide well maintained housing and respond to reasonable complaints, and tenants should be swiftly evicted if they don't pay rent or destroy the unit they're living in. That's fair to both sides.
Your experience as a renter is not the same as the experience of a landlord. If you've been on your first job for a month and you pinky swear to pay rent on time and the next candidate has been on their job for 3 years then I'll take that candidate every time. It's a risk calculation. You are more likely to lose your job than the other candidate, and when you do and can't pay rent anymore and won't leave then that is a very expensive problem for me.
The same goes for savings, credit score, and other factors. These are not nearly as fungible as you seem to think.
> If everyone did that then how’s the person with a new job able to get a home?
That's exactly my point. If the regulations weren't so insane and burdensome (see other posters' points on not being able to evict promptly for nonpayment, for example) then the person with the brand new job would be able to quickly rent a home because it's not an undue risk for a landlord.
You can't ask landlords on the one hand to open their home to anyone, and on the other hand deny them the right to remove tenants that don't hold up their end of the bargain. Do you not see how that's completely unfair?
> You also have more capacity to absorb a short vacancy in case this person is to lose their job.
That is not a universal truth. Landlords have debt service/mortgage payments, taxes, maintenance, insurance and other payments. Especially smaller landlords actually do not - at all - have the capacity to absorb a vacancy or (even worse) a non-paying tenant.
> Can’t derisk your way out of everything.
Yes, but unduly moving risk from one party (tenant) to the other party (landlord) is certainly not the way to go either. If I just take your car and you don't have any recourse to get it back for 6+ months because the courts are backlogged and everyone else goes "well, you have a car, so you must be wealthy, what are you complaining about?" how would that make you feel?
Discrimination is fine, as long as the discrimination is not based on protected classes. If I were a landlord, I'd discriminate against people who act like assholes, for example, regardless of their ability to pay the rent, my rationale being that an asshole will likely be a problem tenant. And that I just don't enjoy dealing with assholes. Not sure "no assholes" is a reasonable thing to list on an official rental advertisement.
It's not rare. I repeat. It's not rare. I am a landlord in Seattle with ~55 active tenants/leases. Let's just say that I know of many landlords in the circles I run in that have absolutely stopped renting to leftie types because they've had so many issues over the last few years with many of them over litigating everything; and deciding not to pay rent over the smallest non-issues, or just not paying rent at all. I could cite case after case; and this topic is especially salient to me in the present moment because I am in fact dealing with one of these tenants right now and its a total nightmare. I will spare you the gruesome details of trying to work with this particular tenant but just trust me—I have an incredibly high tolerance to stress and this individual is doing their best to get as far under my skin as possible.
When the political class or the cultural zeitgeist tells you over and over that landlords are leeches and that "any attempt to profit off of housing is unethical"—people are going to take that to heart and have a hatred for even well-meaning small landlords. If you don't believe this is the attitude, go visit r/Seattle. The inflammatory language of politicians and cultural leaders sets the tone which plays out as legal battles and fights in properties across the city.
This obviously creates an adverse selection problem where small landlords illegally apply their own prejudices and biases in tenant selection. Honestly—could you expect them not to—when the repercussions of picking a bad tenant are so great? And when there are other demographic groups—like immigrants—who are absolutely, verifiably and consistently reliable as tenants. It used to be that it was the section 8 or low income type that were a huge problem but now there's an educated leftish fringe that landlords are also avoiding. Honestly with good reason, IMO.
Some homeowners just decide to not list extra rooms in their house outright. I remember hearing something like that Seattle has the highest number of unrented empty rooms in the country (though someone should fact check that). With the political climate the way it is here, it's obvious as to why this is the case.
Its spread across about ~ 6 houses. I'm definitely a small landlord. I deal with all tenant issues myself, handle all repairs, leases, and most importantly for me—maintain a healthy relationship (which has grown to many friendships). I use this term in contrast to a faceless, corporate landlord who owns larger apartment buildings. Small landlords and corporate landlords are nothing alike
55 isn’t small by definition and under the law. You may feel small because it’s just you, and you don’t realize how much you’ve accomplished or the asymmetric bargaining position that affords you but your perspective isn’t corresponding with reality.
That being said, I do think a system that tenant rights to be as abusive of legal process as we have in some states ends up hurting tenants themselves. I think our courts should move much faster so nonpayment is resolved faster. But I also think all landlords should be required to pay 20% of rent to a home building fund so that new housing actually gets built.
> If a landlord can charge 1200 instead of 1000 why wouldn’t they?
Because someone else could undercut them. If everyone is being levied the same toll, and everyone knows that, it’s not that risky to just pass along the tax.
> If a landlord can charge 1200 instead of 1000 why wouldn’t they? They’ll charge the maximum they can get away with, costs are irrelevant
This is rarely true. Only universally true for large corporate landlords where there is an entire corporate structure maximizing every dollar due to personal incentives put in place by executives/ownership.
Small landlords (yes, even those with 6 buildings) are almost never min/maxing rent like this. They are optimizing for other things like time investment and hassle factor. And even doing the right thing.
I've both rented and landlorded. In neither side of those transactions over decades was I either paying maximal rent or charging it. When property taxes went up as a renter, my small time landlord would show me the tax bill and I'd pay exactly the increase. Same went for when I had tenants.
I'd go as far as to say the majority of mom and pop landlords are not looking to charge maximum rent. They only start doing so when they have a problematic tenant they are trying to "manage out" of the unit.
>Small landlords (yes, even those with 6 buildings) are almost never min/maxing rent like this. They are optimizing for other things like time investment and hassle factor. And even doing the right thing.
Yup. Have a single residential in a otherwise commercial building in NYC. They pay ~50% market for a spacious 3 BR for a number of reasons; mainly because we have known them for a long time and they struggle with health issues so we never really raised them. Charging them market would put them on the street. They can afford the 50%, live nicely, and the commercial tenants pay market which pays for the building with a little leftover. If they ever move we will certainly charge more but I see no reason to gouge like others.
This is right. Increased costs are either passed on to tenants or decrease the landlord’s cash flow. Those are the only two options. I don’t have any data on which occurs more frequently. But what is true is an increase in expenses means less debt service is available so purchase prices come down.
Yes. And the other one is forced to charge 1200. So the other one can charge for example 1190. And the renters will choose the 1190. And then the next renter has to pay 1200.
Or the one without mortgage goes like I only get 800. Maybe instead I just throw this money in government bonds for better gains and save money...
Other option for same outcome could be just to charge any renter 20% on top of their rent. Which they directly pay to this fund. That would push rents down as they are able to pay less. Achieving exactly same effect.
Purchase prices will come down because the percentage of rent available for debt service will decrease. So the cap rate will be calculated on a smaller denominator.
If leads to building that floods the system with supply then rent won’t increase. Landlords and lenders would have to adjust purchase prices and cap rates so valuations would come down. So this would need be gradually phased in until normal. The government would need to support home builders, buyers and landlords. But eventually the housing stock supply increase would match and be tied to new household formation.
At the end of the day most economic activity is really an exercise in ratios. Some states don’t charge sales taxes. Some change double digits. Yet retailers are able to function in both environments.
What is clear is that rental and purchase housing is increasing beyond inflation since 2008 and COVID and that’s not good for tenants or landlords.
Being generous with your ~6 number to be either 5 or 7 houses you have either 7.8-11 people per unit?
That's slumlord territory and not any morally better than corporate landlords unless your average unit size is a 4 bed/2 bath.
Also there is zero world where you have 6 houses, 50+ people and can call yourself a small time landlord. That's being able to live entirely off of your rental income and a full time landlord. You could maybe, _maybe_ get away with describing yourself as a medium time landlord.
Small time is living in a 3 floor house and renting the other 2 floors, or owning 1 other home to rent.
I'm sure OP meant 6 houses with several units in it each, not 7-11 people per house. Otherwise the distinction between house and unit doesn't make sense.
This is a small time landlord. Large landlords have easily over 10000 units, and he is one half of a percent of that.
I hope he is able to live off the rental income. It's a big job to manage 55 units and keep everything in shape and administratively going, deal with turnover and so on.
nah, having 6 buildings(not houses, if were being precise with terminology here) with multiple units in each, is not a small time landlord. If you can live entirely off the rental income then you are a full time landlord and can at best claim that you aren't a large corporate landlord, but you don't get to invoke the idea that you are some sort of mom and pop situation renting out a spare unit, which is what people assume when you say "small time landlord"
I'm the OP—just chiming in, I can just hardly live off the rental income I make, but its a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE. Yes what I am is not analogous to someone renting out a few extra rooms. I just think my experience is analogous to that of a small time landlord in that I know each tenant very well and we have good relationships—and I manually handle each part of their tenant experience. To add more detail, I share a bedroom in a 25 bedroom house that I own, which accounts for a bit more than half of my tenants.
That's a telling detail. How many 'big time landlords' are in the position of living in one of their 25 bedroom units? I'm going to skip the 'share a bedroom' 'cos that might well mean something otherwise desirable. In the best case scenario I too would be sharing a bedroom, but it wouldn't be my best case scenario to be in a 25 unit building unless it was quite large and well built.
Sorry, I meant I live in a bedroom in the 25 br house. Its not a particularly nice or well-built house; it's a frat house near the UW campus in Seattle. As a matter of fact, I live in the basement in the smallest room in the house. I am not a fancy person and don't need anything more than the basic necessities to remain content, and I like the neighborhood here.
> I can just hardly live off the rental income I make, but its a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE
there is a large gap between "can live off of"(my words) and "a lot less than my salary as a senior SDE"(your words). If you're making more than the median household income which based on the fed numbers is ~84k/yr[1] you've crossed the line past small time landlord. You may be making less than that, but I am going to be surprised if you are with ~55 tenants.
I didn't invoke a "mon and pop situation renting out a spare unit" idea, that's your own that you're projecting on my comment.
I did say that they are a small landlord, and I stand by it given that a large landlord is several orders of magnitude larger than them. If in your world that's only a label you want to give someone renting out a single spare unit, then so be it. I disagree.
Those are effectively synonymous to me. The line in the sand that definitively makes you not a small time landlord is if you earn enough from rental income after expenses to make as much as the average job's income.
If you disagree I will need you to define what "small time landlord" means to you then so we can figure out the gap in our understanding.
"Small" is a word indicating that quantitatively relative to other things, it is less, i.e. Very Small < Small < Medium < Large < Very Large.
According to [1] (Doorloop, 2026), Greystar manages 823,581 units as the largest landlord. The 10th largest landlord is WinnCompanies with 120,855 units. These are "very large" to me. If we make a generous curve then a large landlord has 10% of those units, so somewhere in the 10,000 unit range, a medium landlord 10% of that or 1,000 units, a small landlord 10% of that or 100 units, and a very small landlord has the last interval of 1-10 units. Hence, 55 units is somewhere between very small and small.
The net effect is most of the people I know with a rental or two in Seattle will only rent via direct referrals from people they know, which also allows them to rent at a lower rate. Their properties are no longer available to the general public. The demand is high enough that this works. Sucks if you are new to Seattle though.
This kind of non-payment of rent abuse exploded during COVID.
I’m curious how they’re managing to do this. I don’t give any outward signals of being a “leftie type” but I absolutely am. Conversely, I know lots of people who have a very punk look but are super conservative.
> And when there are other demographic groups—like immigrants—who are absolutely, verifiably and consistently reliable as tenants.
I know someone with something like 120 units. Unassuming nice old lady that makes over a million a year. She tries to rent to immigrants as much as possible since they don't cause issues.
The best people to rent to are illegal immigrants, you don’t have to do things like ensure they have livable accommodation as they first sign of complaint you just phone up the authorities and they get kicked out.
The lefty landlords are an even bigger problem for housing affordability than the lefty tenants. They want the anti-property rights boot up the ass of anyone trying to build new homes or dwellings, under the auspices of endangered owls or environmental review or "character of the community" or the wetlands or whatever the current scam is. It's all the same commie shit but only for themselves and at the expense of everyone else, of course dressed up that the dumber and younger end of the tenants actually believe it's in their interest.
If you own 6 houses, you don't only have an income the size of a full-time job but also make money out of the appreciation of property prices. Couldn't you and your immediate family retire by just selling these 6 houses? Or is the situation different in Seattle?
Also you are saying you are also working as a senior SWE. How are you so involved with 55 tenants and balance a full-time job at the same time? I've known people with 1 tenant who needed days off to deal with their issues, I find it hard to imagine personally dealing with 55.
I could sell all of the houses and retire, yeah. Especially the poor performing ones, after accounting for the mortgage I am in the red on two of them every month. I don't know if I expect property prices to appreciate in Seattle as we're flooding the market with housing and in the US we're having some unstable demographic shifts so I try to select properties that perform well on day 1, going forward.
Yes, my family also asks me how I do it. I am just working constantly, from sunup to sundown; pretty much 7 days a week. I don't always do a perfect job juggling the responsibilities but I do my best and I think 99-100% of my tenants would say they're enjoying the accommodations; and I think my manager would say my performance is good. Hoping I can get married and start a family soon and at that point I think hiring a property manager would be the correct move. But I have a very high amount of resilience to stress and being upset so being consistently under pressure isn't too much of a problem for me personally.
Also keep in mind there are certain types of tenants that are lower maintenance than others, so proper tenant selection is important.
I just try to be the landlord that I would want to have. I respond to my tenants quickly, always give them concessions, let them pay late, or at a discount when they’re struggling, referred them to work at my companies, etc, etc. it’s not all about the money, it’s also being a good member of the community, for me. This is in contrast to a corporate landlord where your $1500 disappears into a void every month.
That’s awesome. When I was growing up my parents were denied housing because they had too many kids and were almost homeless one time until a nice landlord of the same religion agreed to rent to us. Please take your responsibility seriously as it seems you do.
That being said there are “professional” tenants that try to scam the system to the detriment of landlords and other tenants. I would fully applaud resistance to their efforts to take advantage of the system.
Much of the land in New England / northeastern USA was apportioned to proprietors without any service rendered, plus squatting on grandfathered regulations that no one else can take advantage of. The actual improvement is a service, but commonly it's something like a shithole house where the physical manifestation of the improvement is like 10% of the real estate value.
In someplaces like Kansas where people actually mixed their labor with the land (homesteading) to claim it and then improved it and the title transferred in capitalistic exchange, landlords are basically 100% providing a service. But in New York very little of the "value" provided has anything to do with services and labor mixed with the land as someone like Adam Smith envisioned as value generation. It's largely just some proprietor being handed land in the 1600s with the wand of a King, taking the shit by violence, then making regulations out the ass with violence (to make their shithole house pretend to provide a more valuable 'service') and then exempting themselves via grandfathering and then people exchanging title for same. Their service is a legacy of beating the shit out of Indians with weapons and then the populace with government and then allocating the value to themselves.
What exactly are you asking for? They clearly are expressing empathy for others’ situations.
I live in a managed building that is completely soulless. I needed to extend my lease by one month before moving out. They wanted me to sign a new 12 month lease at a higher rate, break it, and pay a two month penalty for terminating early. This took over a month to get to something remotely human.
There is absolutely a difference between someone treating people like people and bad landlords.
Also, they aren’t throwing their money into a void. They’re literally getting housing.
> From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.
Surely that's the case for all sorts of services we pay for. Renting a house is paying for a service. The money disappears and in return you get the service. A nice landlord (and by nice I mean - responsive to problems, following laws, empathetic to the tenant, trusting of the tenant etc) provides a better service than a bad one. Unfortunately you rarely know which kind of landlord you have until you move in.
I think it's fair to say that there are bad landlords, and that there are circumstances where landlords are exploitative. But that doesn't change the fact there are also circumstances where landlords provide a useful service to people. Buying a house isn't always practical - landlords should exist to provide a service to people who don't want long term financial commitments.
> From perspective of your tenants, that money still goes into a void, no matter how nice you are.
Not true for everyone. I was quite happy to pay my previous small time landlord. We had a very productive business relationship, at least from my perspective.
He fixed the large things and I didn't have to worry about it. In return I did basic maintenance and bothered him maybe once a year on average when something larger needed fixing.
I felt I got plenty of value from that relationship and my money certainly did not o into a void. My current mortgage though? Most of that goes off into the void of the market and I miss my previous living situation quite a bit most days.
What are you basing your judgment of OP on? He is listing various ways he goes above and beyond for his tenants even though he certainly doesn't have to. Your credit card company doesn't waive your late fees, yet he does when he knows tenants experience hardships. That's pretty awesome.
Also, the money doesn't go into a void: Tenants receive housing in return.
> but I think you've drunk a bit too much of your own kool-aid
That (rather judge-y) part negates the "nice" part your started out with. I don't think OP "drank too much of his own kool-aid", he simply listed all the nice things he does for his tenants, which are great and well beyond what you could expect from an unrelated party in a contract for a service.
I'd like to try and give you some sympathy, but my last landlord was a well-regarded property management firm who left me with no heat from the end of October to the weekend of Martin Luther King Day in New England, effectively only fixing it once I withheld rent, got on the local news, and was threatening a lawsuit. So, uh... yeah plenty of landlords have done a lot to earn that reputation for the class as a whole.
That's true, but I think when you pick a place to live in, you're not only really only interviewing the living establishment itself, but also the landlord/property management associated with it. I make an effort to do all of the tours of the units myself and establish good repoire with the tenants from the get-go. It's certainly inexcusable if a landlord doesn't fix things that impair living conditions—in Seattle we have a law that things of this nature must be fixed within 48 hours which I think is a reasonable law.
Yes I’m doing it for the money, I have to be compensated for my time and the financial investment obviously. People who decide to deceive me break not only a social contract but also a legal contract and a commitment they made at the time of signing a lease. If everyone acted like them, there would be no stable housing available for anyone. Talk about a bad take…
I never said my only interest is money. At your job, is your only interest money? Do you not feel a social obligation to your coworkers; want to do good for your teammate and your company? Again, talk about a stupid take, as if humans are one dimensional like that. Corporate landlords and hedge funds that own apartment sky rises are probably only in it for the money. You can't say the same thing about every small landlord just because they make a profit.
I'm an open source developer. To me, it tracks that people can have other motivations and balance those with money/survival and all. What nikkwong is saying is, you can want to do well, have social obligations, take action to serve the community and not just your own benefit, and even want to do so because you sleep better and have nicer interactions with people as a rule. That tracks, I believe it, that's what I do.
The critics here are trying to make the argument that no you can't. Any such motivation is completely pretend, and everybody is 100% always dedicated to only their own benefit, not taking any of these squishier benefits into account ever, and you're fooling yourself if you think otherwise and you're conning other people on purpose if you PRETEND otherwise. There is nothing but paperclip maximizing, and we're all robots but some of us are lying robots.
These critics exist, and I'm sure they live their beliefs. Sucks to be them, even when they include the literal wealthiest people in the world, because they live those beliefs. They're inflicting them on the rest of us, but it doesn't make them correct, it just means the rest of us have to deal with the harm they inflict. Cheers nikkwong, thanks for being more of a gray area, like a lot of us are :)
I'm sure some slave owners were 'nice people'. Still slave owners, right?
But I treat my slaves better than everyone I know and I only have half a dozen! I don't only have slaves for profit!
Slave owners in the south were actually far more likely to be better people than today's landlords because they had far less choice but to compete with other people who engaged in slavery than landlords of today.
The 'only' strawman and the projections, oh my. 'Every accusation is a confession' remains true. 'Sucks to be them', 'inflicting them on the rest of us'. Gee, the person on the internet you know nothing about is 'inflicting harm' on society. Think of the landlord's feelings, they appear to be hurt! Look, he accused someone with an already high paying job who landlords in his free time of only caring about money! Only he said, does he not know that there can be multiple motivating factors? He said only fellas, only! I rest my case, only.
Landlords are slave owners? Gosh. On the bright side, who knew Hacker News was so revolutionary?
Alex, how do you interact with AI? I don't, 'cos I don't use it. Are you one of the people who eke out performance gains by threatening to shoot the AI's dog if it makes a mistake? Or are you one of the people who are prepared to accuse those people of doing literally the same thing as extorting living humans?
I stand by, sucks to be the critics to whom everything is dominance and profit and nothing else merits the slightest consideration.
And yikes whoo boy does it suck to be a person who argues 'back in the day the slave owners were nicer than landlords of today because they had to compete with other slave owners'. WOW. what?
Good lord, renting a property to someone who voluntarily signs a lease is equivalent to slavery?! Give me a break.
I will say you're doing an excellent job of backing up OPs post. There absolutely are people with an unhinged view of reality who will aggressively try to screw over people they think are in the "wrong" group.
Arguing that poor people never try to abuse the system is some serious ivory tower BS.
Wow, way to not actually read what a person said, and then quote things and say they mean something that they don't.
I get that you don't like the concept of people owning property and renting it to others, but maybe stop arguing in bad faith?
Here's a hint: it's possible to be doing something for the money, but not only do it for the money. It's possible to operate a business, but also be a well-meaning person who treats customers of that business with empathy and compassion.
I don't know the landlord in this subthread, so I can't say if he's telling the truth about how he treats his tenants, but if he is telling the truth, he sounds better than the vast majority of landlords out there. Not just better, actually good.
Lefty tenant here. I def. stopped paying my rent a few times until my landlord fixed their shit or agreed to stop scamming me.
Last time I did it I signed a lease for a year, with 2 months of advance notice if I decided to leave (in the UK). I told them 2 months before the end of my lease, and they told me I had to wait for the end of my lease, then wait 2 months, and then I could be out.
I just stopped paying rent, and left them a horrible one star review on gmaps.
One day he showed up at my place (with soup who was coming to fix something) and tried to enter. I told him to stay out. And then he started crying and telling me how I could not just stop paying rent. I could tell how hard it was to be a small landlord.
I told him that I would resume paying if they signed smthg to agree to let me break the lease at the year end AND reimburse me the fees that appeared at the least minute, a year ago, right as I was signing the lease in front of them.
They agreed, reimbursed me my caution/deposit at the end, easy.
Would recommend just stop paying your rent if anything ever happens. I would do it again.
This is what HOAs are for. To ban the model of home sharing city wide is heavy handed if you're simple goal is to make existing tenants more comfortable. In a free market, people should be able to shop for what they want and make tradeoffs on the basis of price.
No indicator of AI writing is going to last forever. We really shouldn't over index on the oldest indicator (which is liable to decay first). People are starting to say "delve" more in verbal conversations. This treadmill will keep moving. Unfortunately we have little choice but to keep up with it.
Personally, I prefer the US approach. At least then everyone knows what they're dealing with and they can openly react instead of being forced into a fake dance between what is said and what is REALLY said.
The covert stuff gives some degree of plausible deniability and it causes a good amount of the population to be complacent and ignore reality. I don't see how this can be considered good for anyone but the people creating propaganda.
It's not like people have an unlimited number of places to work, even if they have Meta on their resume. Many of my colleagues (and myself included) had struggled in the job market in the past before landing at Meta. If it's work for Meta, or suffer more tumult in the hiring market; it's easy to understand why many might decide to take the offer even with the moral implications. I used to bring up politics in the office with coworkers and many people are simply unaware of the consequences of the company's products. There are a few different categories that these people fall into, but the main ones I saw in the office:
1) Chinese H1B holders who are happy to be working in the US at all, and generally apolitical (or view anything as better than the status quo of where they come from)
2) Just normal people who are interested in their own lives and have never been trained to think about the world in a big picture way (some overlap between 1&2 exist of course)
It's very western of us to always be tracking the conseqentiality of our actions even when we're just the cog in a wheel at BigCo. I think that it's the right thing to do, but this sort of reasoning largely absent in eastern cultures, or even for some in the west—even among those who are well educated. It's kind of hard to blame individuals when they either are rightfully consumed by worrying about their own welfare or are for whatever reason not as seminally hyperaware or woke as we can be in the west. Growing up I liked imposing my political philosophies onto everyone; maturity is understanding that even objectively righteous values are only useful for the right types of minds.
On the contrary, once someone has truly been made aware of the ramifications of their actions; it's more difficult for me to extend my sympathy to them. I consider mark and priscilla to be fully implicated based on their exposure to the harm that they're actively, willingly, knowingly causing. Other employees may never get that memo, though, people obviously avoid political talk in the workplace.
What Meta does (and here I want to be clear that you can replace Meta with Apple, Microsoft, Google, Palantir...) is eventually public knowledge, profusely discussed even on HN. This means substantial amount of people have been aware, for decades.
And even if "just quit" is not an option - why not push for policy to regulate these corps? Why is it that after all this time, these same corps now also own at least 1 branch of the US government?
And when the EU/Australia/China.. tries to regulate punish those corps, suddenly everyone comes out on HN to explain protectionism, overreach, some -ism, and "actually we need to give them the benefit of the doubt" etc... why not support that momentum?
> And when the EU/Australia/China.. tries to regulate punish those corps, suddenly everyone comes out on HN to explain protectionism, overreach, some -ism, and "actually we need to give them the benefit of the doubt" etc... why not support that momentum?
I really, really want to believe it's bot warfare. But there is this running theme of HN posters who think because something is _legal_, or because you can point at it historically and go "acktually it's always been like this", it's therefore _moral_ and we should not ever push back on the excesses of these awful fucking companies.
> And even if "just quit" is not an option - why not push for policy to regulate these corps? Why is it that after all this time, these same corps now also own at least 1 branch of the US government?
Because money is the current representation and approximation of power. It used to be "the yams," but now it's money.
You remind me of my former, younger self and I applaud the appeal you are making to our better selves. All I'm stating is simply that many people don't care, or can't be made to care. But further, there is a pontificating nature about the way you reason about these workers. In the case of my colleagues at Meta, many feel that they are so fortunate to be able to work in the US at all. Even if they did care, it would be rational for them to continue working there against their moral qualms anyways. Because no one would choose to go back to their home country and do the same work for a paltry fraction of the pay.
Not speaking philosophically. I'm just talking about my experience on the ground working with chinese (as a fellow chinese). Some of them are interested in global affairs, certainly, but I find it to be more common from people raised in the west.
> It's kind of hard to blame individuals when they either are rightfully consumed by worrying about their own welfare or are for whatever reason not as seminally hyperaware or woke as we can be in the west.
If you care that your employer is being unethical (such as storing your keystrokes), that's being hyperaware, woke?
I know the definition of woke can stretch like taffy, but it now seems dislodged from its origins concerning race and gender and is now just a vague disparagement of any speaking up to injustice.
Was quite tired when i wrote this; just want to be on the record saying that i don't necessarily think that people in the east haphazardly just do whatever they're told. there's more nuance to it than that; but i just observe generally that in the east there isn't a culture of political motivation or organizing, or democracy at all. So it's not at all surprising when people don't assign any political meaning to their work—even in the cases where one so overtly exists.
It's glaringly obvious that you don't live in a major city. Defend yourself? So you're advocating, in the US, that you engage in a shoot out with the criminal? Like a sister comment said, if your laptop is stolen out of your car, who are you going to sue? To live in a US city is to be surrounded by criminals who rule the streets with impunity.
> #2 is the most terrifying one since there is absolutely nothing you can do.
The US is still a democracy (to its own fault) regardless of how many Flock cameras exist and how they're being used. Why not advocate for changing laws around data use and retention. What is being advocated for instead is that we get rid of the cameras because of all of the theoretical potential harms, while losing the benefit that we get as a society right now (700k crimes solved/helped solved per year by Flock, including 10k missing persons cases). It's just maddening that people are leapfrogging to a theoretical scenario while victims of crime are truly suffering today.