My boyfriend and I have discussed moving out of his parents’ house for many years now. We discussed renting, but then I realized it was just cheaper to buy a house in a small town. We wouldn’t even be able to afford to rent in the larger town over that’s closer to his job and a friend of ours told us about how a ghost company bought out her old place, raised the rent another two hundered dollars when they were already struggling to get by, and didn’t even tell people about it until two weeks before the new year. My friends were able to move out when they did only because of rumors floating around.
My mother and I were forced to live in an apartment after we moved when I was a teenager, but the only reason we got in was because the older guy who owned them knew my mom’s dad and used to go hunting with them when they were young. He was kind enough to cut us a deal. That’s literally the ONLY reason we didn’t end up on the streets. Her sibling said we could live at their place until my mother found a job, but about two weeks later kicked us out because “my husband and I have sex every Saturday and we just can’t do that anymore because your son is in the house.”
I knew what sex was, I was old enough to understand, and I told my mom that we could just leave the house for a while every Saturday. It really wasn’t an issue. But no, the person who convinced my mother to move multiple states away from where we used to and convinced my mom that the job market was absolutely booming (it was absolutely NOT) basically told us to fuck off.
Now that we lived in an apartment in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, my mom jobless and sending applications to any place around us to no avail, we were fucking stuck.
The apartment had many issues and the man and woman who helped the older man run the apartment were hillbilly rigging everything that broke so it just broke again. Over and over.
Eventually, and sadly, the owner of the apartments passed away (the guy actually built the apartments himself with the help of his son) and his son wanted nothing with the place. It took a good year for the apartments to sell to someone else. I went to school with her son and she was kind enough to not raise rent, but eventually she sold them off, too.
It was too much work for her husband and herself and her youngest graduated with me, so she sold the apartments to some jackass in Tennessee.
The rent doubled. There was fucking NOTHING we could do about it. The guy who bought them was hours away from us and had his underlings hire cheap labor to start ripping everything apart.
The people who lived in these apartments weren’t rich or had a lot of money. Many were elderly and had nowhere to go, yet they had to leave. My mother was one of them. I helped her move with my boyfriend and we found her a place, but holy fuck, apartments suck. Landlords especially.
Some rich fuck who has no idea what the local economy is like, buys some apartments for cheap, then thinks it is a good investment.
My boyfriend and I are doing our best to currently find a place, but not everyone can buy an entire house to live in. Not everyone has a good enough credit score or people to help them when they are in need.
I’ve seen a few people talk in the comments about how they own apartments and rent them and are “one of the good ones”, and sure, some landlords will work with people. I’ve witnessed it myself, but only out of luck as stated above. The vast majority of landlords are jackasses who only want to line their pockets with money, and even if it isn’t a specific landlord, some scam company can easily buy the apartments and fuck everyone over.
Being a landlord isn’t a job. Taking money from vulnerable people isn’t a job. If you go out of your way to work on the apartments you own, good for you I guess. Congrats. Woo. But you still chose to own apartments or rent out a house. You CHOSE to line your pockets with money from people who are desperate to have shelter, but not everyone has a choice in deciding to rent.