It’s a similar problem in Canada from what I can tell. I visited Vancouver BC for work a few years ago and the place I stayed in was an Airbnb rental in a building that had very clear markings stating that those types of rentals were not allowed. Nobody is checking nor enforcing that stuff, but at least if someone was made aware, something would happen to stop it? In the US it’s just a free-for-all for capitalists and landlords.
A house down the street from me (I live in the US) was torn down and replaced with a main house, and a second separate house on the back of the property. Both are rented out separately at what I’d imagine are exorbitant rates (for reference, a house down the other direction on my street is being partially rented for $5400/m and the other part at $3800/m). The driveway runs alongside the right side of the house and because 2 different tenants rent each house, the front house can’t use the driveway at all because they run the risk of blocking the other tenant. So now all of their cars litter the street (7 of them at one point when they had friends over).
I fucking hate landlords.
In Florida I toured a place that I thought was a house to rent but ended up being one of 7 apartments spread across the house, garage, and guest house. Literally the bathroom was in the kitchen and the hallway just had dry wall separating it in half. The stair well for one of the units was just nailed poorly to the outside of the house and wasn’t covered at all.
Incant imagine what parking would have been like.
Agreed on the hatred towards landlords.
I live in Florida too and see this all over my city. Tons of houses have been haphazardly carved up to make into apartments. It’s a double-edged sword because I want everyone to have a roof over their heads, but they are charging ridiculous rates that folks can’t afford anyway.
Oh yeah. I fled the state after my rent went from $1,500 to $2,700 a few years ago, with no work having been put into the shithole that I had to syphon dirty water from the air conditioner by hand to keep it from overflowing.
I can’t even imagine the convoluted thoughts that lead to thinking these places are fair to be priced like that. But you get your loan evaluation on your properties based on how much you charge for rent so suddenly it makes a lot more sense.
The landlords love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth.
- Adam Smith
Something in this quote triggered the meme that you can say anything and just attribute it to some famous dead person and people will assume it’s true. So i did the right thing and googled and it turns out the quote is at least mostly right. As i found it with my googling is: “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.” -Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, book 1, chapter VI I think that leaving out the “like all other men” might misrepresent the actual thoughts of adam smith a bit without proper markings i am still happy that i spent 20 minutes of my life fact checking a random comment on the internet.
If you read the entirety of both Wealth of Nations, and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I believe that you’ll find that pulling the segment of “like all other men” out of the original quote reflects the sentiments of Mr. Smith correctly. He used that phrase to mean all other men of capital, not the entirety of the human species. He spells that out in his previous work “A Theory of Moral Sentiments,” but to leave the quote unabridged allows for bad faith arguments against the spirit of the author’s self proclaimed intentions of artificially and quickly expanding wealth so that the nations could work together to create utopia eventually. Adam never intended us to stick with capitalism after the late 1800s by his own benchmarks in both volumes.
