Reality Always Wins
By Mitch Berg
You may not win along with it, but that’s your fault for denying reality.
Speaking of denying reality: we warned MInneapolis about the inevitable end results of rent control, high taxes and onerous regulations (aka “everything the Met Council does re housing and transit policy”).
And yet every $%#$%$@# time their chickens come home to roost, they act surprised and angry:
The comments in that thread are lit, by the way; every metro housing advocate’s inner Lenin is showing.
April 4th, 2024 at 6:34 am
So why shouldn’t someone who has never worked a day in their life be rewarded with a penthouse suite?
April 4th, 2024 at 7:23 am
I know a landlord in St. Paul who has a couple of apartment sitting vacant despite getting dozens of email inquiries every week from prospective tenants.
He claims it’s cheaper to let them sit empty than to make repairs, and no lawyers to pay for evictions. He’s hoping to sell to A Greater Fool who will deal with them.
I suspect soon the advocates will begin teaching squatters to steal them. Draft a fake lease, forge signatures, apply for a change of address on your driver’s license, move in under cover of darkness. When the landlord calls the cops, show the fake lease and driver’s license receipt as proof of residency. The cops won’t do anything – it’s a civil matter. In eviction court, demand a trial and assert discriminatory wrongful eviction based on race, creed, familial status, transgender identity and wearing dreadlocks. Offer to settle out of court with the landlord if he waives all back rent and sets rent going forward at an “affordable” price.
April 4th, 2024 at 7:45 am
^ squatters… yes, makes sense. Sadly.
April 4th, 2024 at 7:57 am
And then, outta the blue, this popped up. A New York Real Estate Agent for Squatters. Well, why not? And as the TC metro leaders suffer from an inferiority complex viz a viz real Big Cities, why not here?
April 4th, 2024 at 8:05 am
Squatters? So put up phony lead or asbestos abatement condemnation notices. Maybe decorate a doorway or two with sneeze powder.
April 4th, 2024 at 8:24 am
Is it possible to eventually run out of fools?
The DFL seems to be testing the question.
April 4th, 2024 at 9:47 am
In the olden days, young people found roommates and lived in dumpy apartments in the crappy part of town because that’s all we could afford. Nowadays, young people want to live alone in nice neighborhoods with stainless steel appliances and granite countertops and what do you know, they can’t afford the rent. Well shoot, neither could we. The solution isn’t to complain about greedy landlords, the solution is to find someone to share the rent and live in a dump until you can afford better.
That’s one life lesson that never leaves. My wife isn’t afraid of Biden wrecking the economy. “We’ve been poor before. We know how to do it.” No, we don’t WANT to do it, but we could. Young people today, I’m not so sure.
And that’s not to mention the lowlives and ne’er-do-wells who have no respect for other people’s property, who won’t pay the rent because why should they, who will destroy the property then defend against eviction because the property is destroyed, who cycle endless “guests” through the apartment whenever the guest is out on parole and not committing a drive-by shooting somewhere . . . and no, this is not a racial rant, it’s a rant about White Trash of every race, sex, sexual orientation, and hairstyle.
If I send an application and the landlord checks my name against Minnesota Court Records Online, there won’t be a string of court cases for disruptive or damaging conduct nor a slew of evictions. A landlord could take a chance on me paying the rent and not causing damage to the property. How many of the people Robin4Mpls promotes can say the same? And she wonders why landlords won’t take a chance on them.
April 4th, 2024 at 10:49 am
Today’s young people have lived a life of relative affluence with their parents growing up. They have no reference for how to live cheaply. ‘Uh, live with literal strangers?!’
April 4th, 2024 at 10:52 am
Remember rooming houses?
$30/month for a single room with a stove and refrigerator and shared the bathroom with a drunk, a hippie, an old lady, a crazy lady and I look back on those days with fondness and longing. Never was more free.
April 4th, 2024 at 11:48 am
A recent exchange on Twitter between Rep. Hudson and @TheSotaSwede was eye-opening in demonstrating the contempt these folks have for the notion of private property: A proposed “vacancy tax”, presumably to punish those evil landlords who use math:
https://twitter.com/TheSotaSwede/status/1774867857714606419
April 4th, 2024 at 2:43 pm
I bet a big part of it, seeing that a lot of the high vacancy rates are in the “better” sections of town, is not just that “the rent is too **** high”, but rather what Bigman is hinting at; landlords are avoiding bad renters by refusing Section 8, and then by instituting background and credit checks. Section 8 is especially problematic because it bars landlords from declining renters, and makes it difficult to evict them.
Given that one gets about 1% of property value as rent, and that you’ve got to have a lot of repairs done by a licensed professional, I can see a lot of people letting properties lie dormant rather than renting to known troubles.
July 18th, 2024 at 11:00 am
[…] that did so much good for “affordable housing” in New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis and Saint […]