I strongly suspect that if a tenant asked to be paid to move out it would piss the landlord off even more. "Now they are extorting me!"
People love to appear generous but hate demands.
People love to appear generous but hate demands.
A workaround I sometimes use when my kid demands something is to refuse, then shortly after, offer something entirely different, and they're happy.
Legal basis? That costs a lot of money to determine sometimes. Let's just settle up and move on with our lives. $1,000 cash and you never ever have to deal with me again.
You seem nice, so I am happy to assume good intentions on your part. Do you understand how people could have difficulty finding the operational difference between your situation and a squatter that broke in?
I was not a nice person at this point, and my intentions were to have somewhere to sleep out of the rain.
I did at one point live in actual squat where people had broken in, the breaking in part happened before I got there, but I lived there for I guess what was the greatest summer ever. That was in a different city. I got out before the eviction happened, but what happened was that the landlord eventually figured out there were 7 hardcore kids squatting in this basement apartment and he came over and told them they had 24 hours to get out before he called the cops.
In that location, the cops would have come, and the cops would have kicked the kids out that day, like literally kicked them out. Kicked their asses.
In the other situation I describe, it was in a different city. Crime central. The cops weren't coming. Not to kick me out of a squat, not to kick me out of an apartment that somebody maybe had rented way back when. Not for anything. I could have set up a meth lab. Cops weren't coming.
My meaning is, if you're a landlord, you're signing up to deal with this shit, know what you're getting in to. In some places you just call the cops. In some places, $1,000 to get rid of a non-tenant like squatter me would be getting off super cheap. It would be a business decision.
This was introduced with the comparison to extortion. I dont think knowing the risks of extortion, makes the extortion just or moral.
In the context of general usage, calling something a "business decision" is an intentional severing of choice from questions of right, wrong, justice, and emotion.
At the end of the day, I guess I'm just objecting to the idea that the landlord won because the squatting only cost them $1000. I did some petty B&E vandalism when I was young and dumb, and wouldn't consider it a win-win for owners when we didn't destroy move property. Im assume you'd agree it isnt a win for the landlord if the counter-factual was no squatter, so I dont really have much to debate.
At any rate, thanks for sharing your personal stories.
No landlord wants to pay a tenant or squatter or whatnot to leave, but often it's the quickest and cheapest way to the goal; though if it becomes too common it ends up as a downside overall.
Some quite old (think 80-90s) landlording books I've read even talk about hiring a moving crew and a truck, finding a new apartment and paying the first and last month's rent for the tenant to get them out. Not out of goodness of their heart (though it may have seemed like that) but because those costs were less than lost revenue + cost of eviction + (potential) loss of a sale.
They already did something - they put up their money to buy this property. Now, if you want to use it for shelter, you need to give them something in return.
> They're willing to fight for the law to make shelter situations worse or nonexistence so they can charge more money.
In fact, it's just the opposite - by investing their money (which they could put into stock market, or spent on champagne, caviar and sexually attractive persons of their preferred gender) into the shelter market and then putting that property out to be rented, they are improving the shelter situation. If they didn't exist, then the shelter would not have been built, or you had to buy it outright to use it. Since many people can not afford to do that, and - for example, for young person just starting their careers - it makes no sense for them to do it, the existence of rental properties improves the situation on the market.
> If everyone had a home, there wouldn't be a housing market,
Where those homes would come from? Who would pay the costs for them being built? That's like saying "if everyone would be a bllionaire there would be no need to work for money" - but actually, if that were the case, we'd find ourselves in economic collapse, ask Zimbabwe, they had a lot of billionaires. Homes are a scarce resource that needs to be built using other scarce resources, so the situation you describe is not possible.
> naturally anyone involved in that ecosystem prefers there to be a shortage
A shortage is certainly preferable to any realistic scenarios where there's suddenly an abundance of homes for everybody (e.g. 90% of earth population dying out, or the civilization degrading so much that any random cave or hole in the ground is an adequate home now).
> They're the only market actor that expects no loses and fights for zero risk.
How it's zero risk? You put up an immense sum of money (frequently, that persons whole life savings) for a prospect of uncertain returns in the future (and certain expenses in form of taxes and maintenance). That's the very definition of risky investment.
> That's not business, that's authoritarianism.
I don't think you understand what "authoritarianism" means. Buying or creating a resource with the prospect of later giving other people temporary access to that resource when they need it, in exchange for compensation, is one of the most common business models in existence, you take advantage of it probably a dozen times a day, unless you live in extremely rural and isolated area - even then, how do you access the internet for example? Probably paying for access to somebody who invested in building the infrastructure for you doing so. This is literally one of the most commonest businesses ever.
> where somehow housing people requires killing all but 10% of the population.
I never said that. I said that is the one of the small number of realistic scenarios where housing suddenly becomes abundant without consuming massive amount of resources which are to be acquired from somewhere and yet nobody is paying for them. This is a common fallacy which does not take into account economic scarcity - to make enough something for everybody, and deliver it at the point they need it to be consumed, takes certain resources, and the housing is one of the worst cases since - unlike food, for example - it's very hard to produce it where it'd be cheap to produce, and cheaply transport it to the place where it needs to be consumed. With grain or rice, for example, doing this is commonly feasible. With housing, not so much - we currently have no plausible technology that allows to do anything like that. Thus, "let's just make enough housing for everyone" is not a realistic proposal since there's no realistic way to do it in a way we need it done. If you know how to do it, you are welcome to enter the history of the humanity as a hero. Norman Borlaug did it, maybe you could do it too. If you think you can, don't waste time arguing with me - spend time saving the humanity.
What do you think about farmers, grocery store owners, restaurant owners, etc? And hospitals, pharmaceuticals companies, etc?
> If everyone had a home, there wouldn't be a housing market
Who will build your house? You can't expect someone to build a house and give it to you for free, right, so what the builder will earn from that?
I mean I'm glad this guy is doing something that makes him feel good, but this felt like reading someone describing their commute to work as if it was WW2.
Now, the real question is: how does a skilled negotiator frame “pay me $1000 and I’ll leave tomorrow” in such a way that the landlord feels like a hero for complying? With a neutral third party suggesting this, it is pretty easy as OP post suggests, but if you're the tenant suggesting that I think it won’t be as easy.
It really isn't. They're a landlord. If one option loses them less money they'll pick that option. The finances will win because they're not putting the house on the market to get warm fuzzy feelings. If they've been a landlord for even a small number of tenants they're used to outrageous demands and know how to take them in stride.
They're more likely to accept the frame if it is nicely presented, but at the end of the day they'll swallow their feelings and choose the cheap option unless a tenant is being an outrageous bastard about the whole thing.
I agree that their feelings are important. But their finances are really the guiding star for their decision making.
It's a nice idea to think human beings are strictly rational, but they aren't. We've long known, homo economicus had his funeral in the 90s. Amos Tversky murdered him in an entirely rational way.
OK, kidding aside - purely rational decisions are extremely rare.
> but at the end of the day they'll swallow their feelings
People do many things, but they very rarely swallow their feelings. If you've ever seen a neighborhood lawsuit or a divorce, you've seen feelings be extremely powerful things, even if finances are involved.
"unless a tenant is being an outrageous bastard" is the operative phrase there. Feelings color what's considered outrageous. Sometimes, "he looked at me funny" is all that's needed to make an entirely irrational decision.
There's a whole bunch of studies clearly showing that people would rather take a monetary loss than a gain where they think the other party gets an outsized gain (not at their expense) as a result in the latter case. Humans are weird. Feelings matter a lot.
One of my favorites is this one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726819...
One of the examples in there is a choice about pay at work
A: You make $50,000; others earn $25,000
B: You make $100,000; others earn $200,00
And a very large number of participants would rather choose A, because that means they'd be relatively better off than their colleagues. Even if they end up with half the income.
He ran it for years.
You can even make (somewhat slimy) money by identifying these situations; there's money to be made in spiteful divorces, for example.
"Honestly, I'm worried I can't afford to move, you're a smart guy, I bet you're worried about that too. I get it, I don't want to be 'that' tenant." (label the negative emotion, empathize)
"How am I supposed to move so soon? It'd cost me $1500 and I can barely even afford the rent." (Anchor a price, turn it into problem solving)
"This is probably going to sound unreasonable, but could you help me with the move? That way I can be sure to be out on time." (Calibrated question to guide the conversation)