With some of the stories I've read, you'd have to be positively insane to be a small-time landlord these days, especially in these large cities with kooky renter protections that make it nearly impossible to evict someone.

Go watch Pacific Heights with Michael Keaton for a fictionalized account but this stuff absolutely happens every day.

I saw one recently where the renter has not paid rent for six years and is unable to be evicted. It made national news.

So where does that leave the industry? You eventually push out the mom and pop landlords by making the regulations so insane it only leaves behind the large corporate property management companies and their army of lawyers. Who will collude and drive rents up. It's a vicious cycle and these cities are not helping one bit.

It is corrosive to the social contract when government policy tacitly encourages this behavior.

Don't register accounts to post vile comments like this. We don't care about the source; we care about the insinuation and the agenda, and everything it pattern-matches with. We've banned a previous account of yours for one of the most egregious comments ever seen here. Please stop wasting everyone's time.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48623195 and marked it off topic.

>...plenty of economic indicators suggest worsening financial duress for people already struggling. Costs are going up faster than wages, and inflation that took hold after the pandemic has proven painfully persistent.