The Berkeley Property Owners Association’s fall mixer is called “Celebrating the End of the Eviction Moratorium.”
A group of Berkeley, California landlords will hold a fun social mixer over cocktails to celebrate their newfound ability to kick people out of their homes for nonpayment of rent, as first reported by Berkeleyside.
The Berkeley Property Owner Association lists a fall mixer on its website on Tuesday, September 12, 530 PM PST. “We will celebrate the end of the Eviction Moratorium and talk about what’s upcoming through the end of the year,” the invitation reads. The event advertises one free drink and “a lovely selection of appetizers,” and encourages attendees to “join us around the fire pits, under the heat lamps and stars, enjoying good food, drink, and friends.”
The venue will ironically be held at a space called “Freehouse”, according to its website. Attendees who want to join in can RSVP on their website for $20.
Berkeley’s eviction moratorium lasted from March 2020 to August 31, 2023, according to the city’s Rent Board, during which time tenants could not be legally removed from their homes for nonpayment of rent. Landlords could still evict tenants if they had “Good Cause” under city and state law, which includes health and safety violations. Landlords can still not collect back rent from March 2020 to April 2023 through an eviction lawsuit, according to the Rent Board.
Berkeleyside spoke to one landlord planning to attend the eviction moratorium party who was frustrated that they could not evict a tenant—except that they could evict the tenant, who was allegedly a danger to his roommates—but the landlord found the process of proving a health and safety violation too tedious and chose not to pursue it.
The Berkeley Property Owner Association is a landlord group that shares leadership with a lobbying group called the Berkeley Rental Housing Coalition which advocated against a law banning source of income discrimination against Section 8 tenants and other tenant protections.
The group insists on not being referred to as landlords, however, which they consider “slander.” According to the website, “We politely decline the label “landlord” with its pejorative connotations.” They also bravely denounce feudalism, an economic system which mostly ended 500 years ago, and say that the current system is quite fair to renters.
“Feudalism was an unfair system in which landlords owned and benefited, and tenant farmers worked and suffered. Our society is entirely different today, and the continued use of the legal term ‘landlord’ is slander against our members and all rental owners.” Instead, they prefer to be called “housing providers.”
While most cities’ eviction moratoria elapsed in 2021 and 2022, a handful of cities in California still barred evictions for non-payment into this year. Alameda County’s eviction moratorium expired in May, Oakland’s expired in July. San Francisco’s moratorium also elapsed at the end of August, but only covered tenants who lost income due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In May, Berkeley’s City Council added $200,000 to the city’s Eviction Defense Funds, money which is paid directly to landlords to pay tenants’ rent arrears, but the city expected those funds to be tapped out by the end of June.
Oh, boo hoo. A landlord actually having to do work. How awful, this is truly a tragedy of unspoken proportions
Been a landlord for almost 20 years. I’ve rebuilt some of these houses myself from an auctioned off unlivable disaster to a safe, clean, maintained property. To imply landlords don’t work is such a narrow sighted view of reality. I got a glimpse during covid of an eviction moratorium a tenant that had quite a bit of hardship and I worked with her for 5 years pre-covid. Heating oil run out she couldn’t afford I filled it out of pocket for her and her family. If she needed flexibility on rent timing I worked with her. When she snuck an untrained dog classified as an emotion support dog that chewed up the house’s 70 year old woodwork stairs and balusters. I worked with her. When covid hit and the moratorium was about to go live her lease was up1 month prior. She ceased paying rent and utilities, I was informed I’d have to cover all her expenses during the moratorium. If she hadn’t had that lease end right before this moratorium she would’ve continued staying there for free while I covered her family’s entire housing and utilities. In the end my thanks for covering her and enforcing the lease end date was an entire house abandoned and full of trash and pest. Took my wife and I almost 2 months and close to $5000 to clean, repaint, repair/replace that property on top of the maintenance costs. This isn’t a black and white situation…
Tldr, I guess: Evictions are a last resort for people who have had an agreement no longer be met by the other party. Should never have mad a moratorium on that legal process imo, it needed to have flexibility to help both parties not just shoulder 1 party with all the responsibility. The party is in extremely poor taste but I can understand their relief if they have similar tenants they can hopefully divest of after years of what my example held. I wouldn’t have been able to do it for 3 years financially or mentally.
The distinction is in the role of being the owner of the property versus the property manager and superintendent.
Landlords that also assume the role of property manager or superintendent for the land or buildings they lease do work.
But their role as owner and collector of rent is divorced from upkeep. The wealthier the landlord, the more removed and absentee they can be from their property. And the reality of that specific dynamic is just shining in the example of this kind of party.
You seem to have this idea that landlords don’t work? I am a landlord and I have to work full time to help cover the cost of the mortgage. If I don’t, the tenant will get kicked out by the bank when they take back the house.
I think you have it backwards. The tenant is supposed to pay you.
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I’m just a middle man for the bank.
you realize that after the mortgage is paid, you will have a fill house at your name and the tennants will still ahve nothing? Yeah you offer them a service but complaining that you have to work to pay the mortgage sounds SO entitled, to be honest. Of course you have to work to pay the mortgage, we all do! You might be a good landlord, but when people complain about landlords it’s usually about big landlords whho have several properties, not people that have a second house that they rent. People that say that “landlording” is their job.
If this is not you, this doesn’t apply to you and commenting as if you were one will only work against you,
I have a single second property that I am renting out.
Actually, I don’t even live in the first property that I co-own because prices are so high I had to buy an hours drive outside of the city where I work. I am renting in the city.
I’m not complaining that I have to contribute to the mortgage, that’s just how it is. I am fully in agreement that house-hoarders are bad, but there’s a big distinction between that and a general ‘landlord.’
I would argue that the tenants do have something, which is “not a life living on the streets because landlording was illegal and they couldn’t afford to buy construction materials and pay builders to build them a house.” I have rented all my life, I have never lived in a house that I owned despite having my name on two houses,
I get where people are coming from, but their argument is “ban all landlords” without any consideration of actual reality that involves having capital and taking financial risk to construct housing. There’s something to be said about having a system in place that incentivises those actions. Maybe it’s the system and not the actors that should be blamed? Hate the game, not the player.
You need to understand that context is important. It’s clear that they are not against people like you, and that as I stated, they are using the term Landlord more as a job title than as a status of owning a rented house. I have already agreed with your arguments, I’m just saying that if you present yourself as the term that people have coined for “house-hoarders”, then you are going to have a bad time, even if technically that term is being misrepresented in the given context.
You shouldn’t tell them that they are wrong on blaming landlords, because what landlord is for you and them is different, you should tell them to find a better term, at most. The better way to approach this would be to ask for clarification of what they mean with landlords, and while for sure there will be extremists, people in general will agree that what they hate is house-hoarders and landlords that speculate with property, not people that own 2 houses and rent 1 of them to help a bit with finances in a fair way.
Respectfully, I am one of these people and I absolutely include landlords of any size. Economic rent of all kinds are unethical and unproductive, and that includes any landlord that charges more than what a property costs to produce and maintain (still unclear if @[email protected] is somehow underwater with his property, i’m not sure how that’d even happen) by nature of some arbitrary notion of ownership. The rent they extract is unproductive and exploitative, on top of the problem of them hoarding homes from the housing stock and artificially inflating home prices.
what’s he’s stating is that he has to pay a part of the mortgage with his own money, which tbh to me is completely normal, giving all the mortgage cost to the tenant is exploitative.
Also,
Idk, but if I bought a summer house with my savings and decided to rent it to gain a small extra income, that’s not an arbitrary notion of ownership, I bought that house with my savings.
In any case, if you are against anyone owning more than 1 house, then,
If I didn’t rent the summer house, it would have been unavailable to the market because I would use it maybe 2 weeks a year. We did use it a lot more when we purchased it but life changes and now we don’t. In the end we sold it but I don’t see it as unfair to rent it for a completely reasonable price (different country so prices won’t make sense to you, but it’s low, lower than 1/4 of what I earn in my actual job). In any case, I was just trying to clarify him why people were downvoting him so hard, since most people are not really against any kind of renting.
This is just such an obtuse view. A person should be fairly compensated for their property, regardless of kind.
If you don’t believe in property ownership at all… then these positions are fundamentally at odds.
Rent extracted for property should be proportional to the property and the value an individual gains from the use of the property. I think we can agree to that. I also believe that reasonable profit can be expected for reasonable work / value.
To say that economic rent of all kinds is unethical and unproductive doesn’t make sense to me.
If one person invests their capital into a house and someone else wants to make use of that property, they should pay rent. How is that transaction unethical? The rent is payment for use of the other persons capital.
There are arguments about housing specifically as a basic right / need that changes the dynamic… but in cases where these needs are exploited for financial gain, it’s the exploitation that is unethical, not the basic premise of rent.
To explore the notion that rent should only be proportional to the value that the property produces, and frankly how insane that sounds… it only takes startup costs of the property to consider that those costs should also be included in the computation… again exploitation is the thing that is unethical, not the exchange for use of property fundamentally.
Is this wrong?
Nope, not underwater at all. It is normal to be paying extra on top of rent to cover the mortgage unless your deposit was like 90% or something. There is a really big gap between mortgage payments and rent payments.
Which risk? Any increase in taxes, mortgage rates and renovations are directly passed on the tenants.
At the end of the day, someone else if paying your mortgage because you could enter the market before they could.
And nowadays, simply having someone paying your mortgage isn’t enough. Landlords need to be cashflow positive.
What the hell are you talking about??
You think you can just renovate the bathroom and bill the tenant for the work?? That’s not how reality works.
Rent can also only be increased once per year and the tenant is able to appeal to the Tribunal if it is too much and the Tribunal can order the rent to decrease.
In terms of risk: When building: unforeseen expenses like complex earthworks, no access to building supplies and environmental issues that can blow out construction times by months or even years (this actually happened recently with gib), and all the while having to pay the mortgage when there isn’t a house to live in.
When renting: property damage from tenants, meth labs (it will be illegal to rent a property soon with a certain level of meth contamination), things requiring repairs in the house (I recently had to buy a new heat pump because the old one died), changes to laws like the recent one that requires older homes be retrofitted with insulation at cost to the owner, tenants moving out leaving you with the mortgage to cover yourself, job loss myself leaving me with no way to cover the extra…
I showed earlier that mortgage payments are more than double rent payments.
I’m confused, are you saying you’re charging less rent than the cost of the mortgage?
Yes of course. Rent is always less than mortgage payments until you’re in the final years.
There is absolutely little to none. No matter what you serve the same function, and no matter how “good” of a person you are, a landlord will always be a social parasite.
mf lives in the confines of capitalism 🙄🙄🙄
And not just capitalism, but for you a concept of “social housing” seems to be absolutely alien. Vienna is an example of a western city that is a prime “fuck you” to this “argument”.
What fucking risk huh? What risk that any other person living in their own home don’t take?
“Oh the property might burn down.”
Mine can too fucker and you don’t see me complaining. The problem here is, your mortgage is being paid off by your tenant and who’s keeping the property at the end of the day? Not him that’s for sure!
“Oh but I pay my part!”
So If you split the payment, split the property too fucker.
If anything, the tenant takes more risk by renting because if he loses his job or sustains an injury he’s fucked because he has no property of his own he’s guaranteed to live in.
Sincerely, fuck you. I hope your tenant finds a better deal and that both of your properties burn down you entitled ass.
Oh and keep this in mind:
“The Maoist uprising against the landlords was the most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, leading to almost totally equal redistribution of the land amongst the peasantry”
No, you are an investor who assumes risk of non-payment. Maybe you are a bad investor who shouldn’t be renting? In that case, you should sell the property to someone who is a better investor, possibly the actual occupants.
The tenant cannot afford to. That’s why they are renting.
See, here’s the thing. If you’re a bad owner you should take a loss.
Even if I insanely decided to take a loss, the bank would not give them the loan.
Then the price isn’t low enough.
The tenant can’t afford to because rent seekers reduce the available supply of housing. If they can afford to pay you rent then they can afford to pay a mortgage, and the profit you derive from that relationship is representative of what they could be saving for a down payment if you weren’t leaching off of them.
You are part of the problem.
Wrong again sonny.
The average house price is now over 1 million. If you buy a house for 1 mil with a $200k deposit (unreachable for the vast majority including me) then your weekly payments are over $1200 excluding rates.
To rent a property it is very easy to find a multitude that sit at the $600 per week mark and some even lower for the same number of bedrooms.
So “If they can afford to pay you rent then they can afford to pay a mortgage” is stupid. Mortgage is literally double the cost of rent.
Lol this is completely meaningless:
Suffice it to say: I don’t fucking believe you. Even in NZ, straight comparisons between mortgage servicing costs of a house and rental pricing of the same house would show weekly rent is more expensive than the weekly mortgage servicing costs. There’s good reason for that, too: in a market where the home is worth more than what can be extracted in rent, you would definitionally make more money selling the property than renting it out (and nobody would be doing it)
Edit: The only exception to this would be if you purchased the house at the peak of a housing bubble, and are now renting the house out after the bubble has popped and so you are unable to sell without taking a loss.
You’re a housing provider, not a landlord. If you aren’t making anything off of the houses you lease then you aren’t the subject of the ire of renters.
Ignore those goons saying you’re a bad investor. It’s noble of you to not leech off of the people who you rent to, and at the end of the day, the equity of the house is still yours.
The issue here is that they self identified as a landlord, when they simply are renting their second/first house. it’s not the same situation, but the way they explain it sounds quite entitled and when people lack the whole context, it makes them look very bad. Furthermore, according to another comment of them it seems like they would like to be more like another commenter that is presenting as an actual, evil landlord (probably as a joke). Sooo… yeah.
Thanks buddy. I’m also (ironically?) a renter too. I’m grateful to have the ability to live close to work without having to take on the cost of buying a house in the city.
Sounds like you’re not cut out for this. I’m a landlord and I take pride in never working. My tenants pay my mortgages as well as most of my living expenses (the employees at the businesses I own pay for the rest of my expenses plus my retirement savings). I hope one day you become better at being a landlord and don’t have to work any more.
Landlord solidarity
Thanks for your optimism sensai, but I’m afraid I’ll be working until retirement.
Take a another look with an advisor in whatever country you are at. Its usually much easier to get a property second time around. Im not aware of your local laws and how banks can refinance you but there should be possibilities. Its good to spread risk. I used to have one property and it brought me stress knowing one single bad tenant could financially ruin me.
Sounds like a good idea but things are too unstable in the market right now. Not to mention the deposit.
Sucks to suck, try getting good at landlording like me!
This is a joke, but he legitimately does sound like a bad investor. The problem is, you can become a property owner simply by buying and being lucky. There’s no skill required.
So there are a lot of people like that who say “it’s hard to own even one property”, as if collecting rent and mailing some checks is hard. I know someone who has like 6 properties, even commercial property. It’s not a “full time job” even with that many.
Updating properties to sell or rent for more money is work, but the actual act of owning property is mostly waiting for checks to come in. Honestly there should be a test on laws in the local area to rent out property. Lawyers need a test just to read and write contracts; real estate agents have a test.
Bad property owners shouldn’t be allowed to take their stupidity out on tenants. If you don’t live in the building, you should need to pass a basic test for a license that can be revoked.
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