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rynlingContent warning for real talk about money, how nice it is to own instead of rent, and how much I hate landlords for denying this privilege to people who aren’t extremely lucky.
I once admitted to someone on Tumblr that I was homeless at several points during high school and college. I don’t generally like to talk about this, as it’s not really a story, but I wanted to explain to this person that I don’t come from privilege, and that I know that it’s like not to have any money. They responded by saying that, if I was homeless, then I had no idea how difficult it is to own a home.
That was – and I can’t emphasize this enough – extremely rude, but I sort of understand what they were talking about. Namely, if you find a video on YouTube with a title like, “Easy Home Repair in Five Simple Steps,” what that means is that you’re going to have to pay a licensed professional at least $400 to work for at least two hours straight using highly specialized tools.
In December, I will have lived in my house for nine months, and I’ve had to do something like this twice (once with the plumbing, and once with the gas). In addition, there’s some electrical work that eventually needs to be done and will cost $1200.
So here’s the thing – it’s fine!!
When I was in DC, I lived in a rent-controlled building. My monthly rent for a modest one-bedroom was about $2350 a month, which is about $600 less than average in the area. When I moved to West Philadelphia, my rent for an even-more-modest one-bedroom was $1750 a month. The condition for renewing my rental contract for 2022 was that they increased the monthly rent to about $2400 a month, which I couldn’t afford. I didn’t live in shitty apartments, but they weren’t particularly nice apartments either.
Now, between the mortgage and the property tax, we pay about $1300 a month on our house. Utilities are around $100 a month, give or take. This is actually less than I paid every month for a Horrible Murder Apartment in a Horrible Murder Neighborhood when I first moved to Philadelphia in 2006.
It’s nice to have an “extra” several hundred dollars every month now that I don’t have to pay rent. It’s really nice! (Maybe I’ll actually be able to pay off my pandemic credit card debt lmao.) And if I have to pay a contractor to maintain the property every four or five months, that’s fine. Like seriously, that person on Tumblr was just being rude. Having a house is great!
This begs the question of what landlords are doing with all that extra money. I know it takes money to hire contractors and keep full-time maintenance people on staff, and property taxes are serious business, but still. If you’re making at least $1000 of profit on each tenant every month, that adds up. And let’s be real – landlords cut corners everywhere and don’t maintain their properties unless lawyers get involved, so that profit isn’t going into upkeep.
Renting suuuuuuuucks, and it sucks that you can’t buy a house without a substantial down payment. We paid $80,000, which was the bare minimum, and we only had that money because someone in my husband’s family died of Covid. We were doing our best to save money, but there was no way we were going to be able to save $80,000. Not in our natural lifetimes, at least.
And it’s shitty, because there’s so much you can’t do if you don’t have money because you’re trapped in a constant cycle of being skinned for rent. Like, how are you going to have children? How are you going to start a business? How are you going to pay for medical procedures, god forbid? How are you going to save for retirement?
And like, how are you going to save money to put a down payment on a house if you’re paying more than half of your monthly income to rent? If you don’t have some sort of inherited wealth, you’re fucked. And this is in Philadelphia, which is made of literal garbage. I’m sure it’s worse in places where property has actual value.
I understand the necessity of having rental properties – for students, for example, or for people who want to live in a city center instead of a residential neighborhood, but still. Seeing these concepts from economic theory play out in front of my own eyes has been a revelation.
TLDR: I always hated landlords on principle, but now that I understand actual property values and the actual cost of property maintenance I hate them even more. All day I dream about the redistribution of wealth.
I once admitted to someone on Tumblr that I was homeless at several points during high school and college. I don’t generally like to talk about this, as it’s not really a story, but I wanted to explain to this person that I don’t come from privilege, and that I know that it’s like not to have any money. They responded by saying that, if I was homeless, then I had no idea how difficult it is to own a home.
That was – and I can’t emphasize this enough – extremely rude, but I sort of understand what they were talking about. Namely, if you find a video on YouTube with a title like, “Easy Home Repair in Five Simple Steps,” what that means is that you’re going to have to pay a licensed professional at least $400 to work for at least two hours straight using highly specialized tools.
In December, I will have lived in my house for nine months, and I’ve had to do something like this twice (once with the plumbing, and once with the gas). In addition, there’s some electrical work that eventually needs to be done and will cost $1200.
So here’s the thing – it’s fine!!
When I was in DC, I lived in a rent-controlled building. My monthly rent for a modest one-bedroom was about $2350 a month, which is about $600 less than average in the area. When I moved to West Philadelphia, my rent for an even-more-modest one-bedroom was $1750 a month. The condition for renewing my rental contract for 2022 was that they increased the monthly rent to about $2400 a month, which I couldn’t afford. I didn’t live in shitty apartments, but they weren’t particularly nice apartments either.
Now, between the mortgage and the property tax, we pay about $1300 a month on our house. Utilities are around $100 a month, give or take. This is actually less than I paid every month for a Horrible Murder Apartment in a Horrible Murder Neighborhood when I first moved to Philadelphia in 2006.
It’s nice to have an “extra” several hundred dollars every month now that I don’t have to pay rent. It’s really nice! (Maybe I’ll actually be able to pay off my pandemic credit card debt lmao.) And if I have to pay a contractor to maintain the property every four or five months, that’s fine. Like seriously, that person on Tumblr was just being rude. Having a house is great!
This begs the question of what landlords are doing with all that extra money. I know it takes money to hire contractors and keep full-time maintenance people on staff, and property taxes are serious business, but still. If you’re making at least $1000 of profit on each tenant every month, that adds up. And let’s be real – landlords cut corners everywhere and don’t maintain their properties unless lawyers get involved, so that profit isn’t going into upkeep.
Renting suuuuuuuucks, and it sucks that you can’t buy a house without a substantial down payment. We paid $80,000, which was the bare minimum, and we only had that money because someone in my husband’s family died of Covid. We were doing our best to save money, but there was no way we were going to be able to save $80,000. Not in our natural lifetimes, at least.
And it’s shitty, because there’s so much you can’t do if you don’t have money because you’re trapped in a constant cycle of being skinned for rent. Like, how are you going to have children? How are you going to start a business? How are you going to pay for medical procedures, god forbid? How are you going to save for retirement?
And like, how are you going to save money to put a down payment on a house if you’re paying more than half of your monthly income to rent? If you don’t have some sort of inherited wealth, you’re fucked. And this is in Philadelphia, which is made of literal garbage. I’m sure it’s worse in places where property has actual value.
I understand the necessity of having rental properties – for students, for example, or for people who want to live in a city center instead of a residential neighborhood, but still. Seeing these concepts from economic theory play out in front of my own eyes has been a revelation.
TLDR: I always hated landlords on principle, but now that I understand actual property values and the actual cost of property maintenance I hate them even more. All day I dream about the redistribution of wealth.
