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Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

How does one accumulate $500K in damages and debt in 1 year? That's like $41k/month.

buy three cats, and zero litter boxes, and zero litter. make sure they aren't neutered. get a single male cat since, hey, he's got needs.

cook lots of greasy ass food and drain that oil straight down the sink. toss condoms, paper towels, hell, ANYTHING, down the toilet, since it's basically a trash dispenser, right?

once you're done having the cats pee their way through the foundation (cat urine DESTROYS houses) and destroying the plumbing, steal some copper on your way out with some friends.

oh, and this is a pre-war establishment where everything is absolutely not up to code.

Some people don't take kindly to being kicked out, even if they're in the wrong, and there's not a lot you can do to stop them from causing hundreds of thousands in damages while you go through the process of evicting them.

The first house I lived at in California was part 2 of that - previous owners destroyed the place during a foreclosure, so we got what was previously an $800k house for $400k in a short sale by a bank. Took ~$50k to fix up because we were willing to do the work ourselves over about a year.

It was disgusting. Glass and other obstructions flushed down the pipes, literal feces on the walls, holes everywhere, missing parts of the ceiling, fixtures ripped out, etc.

Move-in process was essentially move all our stuff to a storage area, continue renting until we'd made the place no longer a biohazard, then we moved in slowly as we fixed up rooms.

But hey, a few hours of work a day for a year essentially saved a year of a FAANG salary on the place.

Damn. Props to you but i would rather be 400k poorer instead of doing that.

Was told by local sherrif who handled judgment related asset seizures as well as foreclosure sales that in our state the original owner can do as they wish, even after a court ordered foreclosure sale, until they day they are required/made to vacate. He had seen all kinds of wanton destruction by the outgoing former owners simply out of spite with repair bills likely in the 10s of thousands, if not more.

That's a little different than a tenant who is renting wrecking someone else's property though, as the sheriff said in the case of foreclosures it's still their property up until the forced vacate date and they can technically do whatever they want and can't be sued for the damages, whereas tenants can but in most cases it's simply not worth it because the people you're suing usually don't have any assets or positive net worth in the first place.

Legally different but still grudge and destruction with no or negligible chance of recourse.

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