Comment by AjithAntony | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AjithAntony | Hacker News Reader

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I think a lot of folks are having feelings about this line

>stuck paying someone else's mortgage.

What he meant was that when someone is not paying the rent, and you are evicting them, you are paying for the living expenses for a stranger who may holding your property hostage, who may be actively abusing the property, who may be deliberately prolonging the experience.

This does not feel good to pay out of your own pocket to shelter someone else's family for any amount of time. There is no recourse to recover the money. Your best outcome it to just get the property back as soon as possible, even if that means rewarding the bad tenant with more money. And in most places in the US now, evictions are not even possible due to virus lockdowns.

Not paying rent is theft. It hurts financially and emotionally when people steal from you.

And for the soft-hearted landlords who didn't screen properly, or took a chance on a sob-story, it was already months of slow-pay or no-pay before you started the eviction. Can you imagine someone stealing 4-6mo of living expenses from you?

Oh please, landlords are not employees working at the behest of their bosses, they are businesses that are in the business of selling a basic necessity of life: housing.

Compare these supposed woes to any contractor and their clients, and this sort of bellyaching would be just be laughed at. "Theft"!!! Come on.

Any landlord who thinks in these moral terms deserves to lose their shirt. It is a business!!!

And on top of that, it's not web design or some other sort of service. They are literally providing somebody's home. I have zero sympathy for any landlord that gets into such a business and then bellyaches about evicting somebody.

This is a cost of doing business. 4-6 months of rent should be cash on hand to deal with these sorts of things, and many (most? all?) mortgages for rental properties demand that you show you have that much cash before you can even get the mortgage. So even the banking industry is requiring these amateur landlords to learn basic biz before they can enter the game.

There's huge asymmetry here, landlords have lots of wealth, lots of flexibility, lots of recourse and backup plans, but their tenants often do not and often have no safety net whatsoever. If landlords start advocating for a basic social safety net, I may start to have sympathy. And some of their tenants might be deadbeats. But I've come across a tooooon of really shitty landlords, a few people that hit hard times that are doing their best to pay rent with their extremely limited means, and basically zero of the supposed deadbeat that landlords say are their perpetual problem.

> Compare these supposed woes to any contractor and their clients, and this sort of bellyaching would be just be laughed at. "Theft"!!! Come on.

I don't follow. The contractor isn't forced to work for months without pay against his will if the client stops paying.

> This is a cost of doing business. 4-6 months of rent

Losing 4-6 months of rent erases multiple years of profits on that property

> There's huge asymmetry here, landlords have lots of wealth, lots of flexibility, lots of recourse and backup plans, but their tenants often do not

By your logic all business owners similarly are very wealthy and can absorb large losses. So all businesses have a duty to give way several years of profits to needy customers. Food is a necessity of life. Do restaurants have a duty to let customers eat for free?

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