I think it's important to recognize that you or I may not be the ones at risk here, and the same convenience/safety tools that we don't think much about might have an outside impact on others. I was in a fancy managed apartment for a while and they had carded access, security cams, electronic package lockers, etc. That relationship is pretty unique in that I'm paying a lot of money for a more "luxury" experience, and I have more leverage if something goes awry. (This management company totally dropped the ball on making the actual units nice to live in, but that's another story...)

There are plenty of horror stories of landlords being shady, the classic one being coming up with an excuse to hold the security deposit. I really would not trust them with putting "smart" devices in my home. I once rented in a complex where the online credit card payment cost an additional $15 fee over walking to the office and handing over a check, because it was some service that they bought in that skimmed off the top. Rent-to-own also has a history of being predatory towards people with lower income. On top of the typically terrible value of renting to own, it's the same relationship as renting where a bad landlord could do all sorts of things, but now you have even more to lose since your money is locked up in the relationship.

> I'm paying a lot of money for a more "luxury" experience, and I have more leverage if something goes awry

No. That's a sales line.

There are so many cases where paying more gets you worse treatment. Enterprise software pops to mind. So do luxury hotels. A $150 room will have free wifi, free breakfast, and no surprises. A $500 room will nickel and dime you on wifi, breakfast, parking, non-smoking, gym, a valet you didn't ask for, and they'll tack on a few fake tax fees for good measure. Because they can.

> This management company totally dropped the ball on making the actual units nice to live in, but that's another story...

No, it's the ending of the same story. We've all been there, it sucks, and you have my sympathies, but please don't believe or repeat the sales nonsense. It's a bunch of socially normalized lies designed to close a deal, nothing more.

Yeah, that's fair. My take may have been a bit naive. It is a bit like Enterprise software, though. Even if you're getting screwed, they'll be polite to you at least. When I badly broke an appliance, they replaced it no questions asked. Going through the same with my current individual-owner landlord would definitely be an event.

"Cashless" is full of fees, especially for credit (not debit) transactions. https://www.google.com/search?q=rent+on+credit+card+points

"""thepointsguy.com › guide › paying-rent-credit-card Mar 9, 2020 - There is no publicly available, fee-free way to pay your rent or mortgage with a credit card. Due to bank interchange fees, accepting credit cards..."""

> "Tenant screening? I want to live with good neighbors."

And there's the other side.

A landlord has an obligation to ensure things are in good working order, pay the mortgage, upkeep common areas, and pay the taxes. Whether your tenant pays or not, those bills are still due. One tenant being late once is irritating but not catastrophic. Tenant(s) not paying for months burns through reserves quickly.

It's in everyone's best interest to ensure tenants can pay the rent.

> It's in everyone's best interest to ensure tenants can pay the rent.

Which is why it's so weird to see landlords advertising "no Section 8" (which is unlawful in California, FYI). Section 8 is an ironclad guarantee that you will get paid in full and on time every month.

https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa?query=%22no+section+...

In my state, Section 8 Assistance makes up the difference between a tenant's income and the market rate of the area. So the tenant is responsible for 1/3 of the rent and section 8 money is responsible for the rest, then the landlord is guaranteed to get the 2/3 from Section 8, but if the tenant doesn't pay their 1/3 you are out of luck. Eviction is a slow process here too.

But of course it means you’ll have “those people” as tenants, for whatever worst-nightmare definition of “those” the landlord can concoct.

In my property management experience (~80 units), Section 8 tenants have no assets and limited income, so when they incur thousands of dollars of damage to a unit, there is no recourse.

Non section 8 tenants have skin in the game: assets to pursue or income that can be garnished using a judgement if there’s damage beyond what a security deposit covers. This encourages a shared responsibility model where they treat the property with enough respect that the only damage is expected wear and tear (there are outlier events, kids will be kids and whatnot).

It’s not about race (in my case, at least). It’s about resources and means.

This is one of those small-time landlord urban myths. Section 8 tenants stay for a _lot_ longer than average, and because of that they are systematically less likely to trash the place.

By comparison someone with a high income and a lot of assets is very, very likely to leave as soon as they can, meaning even if they don't trash the place you still have a higher vacancy cost (which is a landlord's main risk) and because of their wealth you'll never get anything out of them other than the deposit, because they have and can afford lawyers.

That's academic theory, not reality. The actual behaviors and background of the tenants is what makes the difference, and people who have higher income tend to pay their bills.

Also vacancy management is an entirely different problem than quality of tenants and how they treat the property. Turnover of good quality tenants is much better than bad quality tenants who stay trashing the place for years.

Spoken like someone who has never actually rented to Section 8 tenants.

Can you provide data to backup your assertion? My data points come from experience of myself and other large scale residential landlords (100s of doors, a mix between Florida and Midwest properties).

Personally, I will happily take vacancy risk over damage risk. Vacancy risk is limited by monthly burn (mine is low for each property), damage risk is much greater amount imho.

HUD provides comprehensive data on length of tenancy for housing voucher program participants. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Lengt...

This part:

> and because of that they are systematically less likely to trash the place.

Anecdotally, my data agrees with HUD that Section 8 tenants who don't damage the property stay longer (although Section 8 makes up a small percentage of our total tenant population, primarily in the northwestern Chicago suburbs). Our costs have been high when (intentional) damage is done though (sometimes tens of thousands of dollars), causing the property to be in the red for years after.

One of our Section 8 tenants in Aurora was a great tenant; their son moved back in after a stint in a correctional facility, altercations in the front yard occurred, culminating in a drive by shooting attempt (I have the receipts to repair the bullet holes in the siding and replacement of the front door). Per the jurisdiction's rental guidelines and lease addendum requirements, we were required to terminate the lease (the jurisdiction's requirements, not ours). We helped them relocate out of state at our own cost.

There's nothing preventing any tenant from being related to criminals. The only thing shared in common among all housing voucher users is they can't afford housing. Imputing upon them as a class a tendency toward crime or other tendencies is the definition of prejudice.

> There's nothing preventing any tenant from being related to criminals.

The jurisdiction I mention specifically has mandatory landlord classes and lease addendum requirements to aggressively inhibit the housing of anyone associated with criminal activity (which includes the tenant(s) being held liable for any criminal activity that takes place on the property where they're not the victim). Background checks are mandatory for all adult tenants. Lease agreements with the mandatory jurisdiction provided lease addendum must be submitted to the jurisdiction's rental management department ("Division of Property Standards") to receive a rental license. I take no issue if you receive vouchers; if you're a criminal or associate with them, I can't provide you with housing (in this jurisdiction), and it's grounds for eviction based on a preponderance of the evidence (no conviction required).

https://www.aurora-il.org/356/Crime-Free-Multi-Housing-Progr...

https://library.municode.com/il/aurora/codes/code_of_ordinan...

https://www.aurora-il.org/DocumentCenter/View/4677/New-Landl...

Would it be possible to require insurance? Possibly as part of the rent?

When I tried researching it online, I could not find a policy that covered intentional damage / vandalism. Either be it a policy owned by the landlord or the renter. I'm guessing insurance companies are expecting your to get your money via a civil suit in that case. Would love know if there is one.

Isn't that what a personal liability policy covers? Some apartments I have been in required you to have one.

AFAIK personal liability is something like when someone comes to your house and slips on a puddle you have on the floor and hurts themselves and then sues you. It's not about damage you did yourself, on purpose, to the property you rent from someone else or someone else does on purpose against a property you rent out.

All the insurance policies were about accidental damage on either side.

Then why would an apartment require you to carry it and list them as the interested party? What would they care if it just protects you against drunk partners at your place that get injured?

Your insurance as the property owner can cover vandalism, theft, and other intentional damage if you choose (and you should for all the reasons listed in this thread).

When I tried shopping online for it as a research project, it explicitly excluded intentional damage in the fine print, and there was no extra option to purchase it separately. Could someone show me a policy that has that explicitly, or at the very least does not exclude it explicitly like I found?

I'm not going to share the details of my own policies, but every major insurer offered it to me without asking. Maybe it's state or region dependant.

Or are you talking about intentional damage by the owner?

More intentional damage by the renter for the landlord's policy. Usually the exception is under the wording of 'vandalism'. I think intentional damage by someone who bought the place is an OK thing to have an exception for. Although I wonder if banks have insurance for that case.

That's not correct. It is illegal to discriminate in CA against renters, based on the type of income. Section 8 in CA is not considered part of the renter's income. Section 8 does not guarantee that the rent will get paid in full and on time every month. There is a determination of rental percentage that is made initially and when the renter's income changes. Section 8 may actually pay up to 4 months late, but once it starts it pays very regularly.

SB 329 specifically redefined "source of income" to include section 8 and other assistance paid directly to the landlord.

http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?...

Don't believe my interpretation? Ask the landlords' trade association.

https://caanet.org/governor-signs-mandatory-section-8-bill

Thanks! It's been a couple of years since I've rented-out property in that neck of the woods.

Looking at the text:

  (2) “Discrimination” does not include either of the following:
    (A) Refusal to rent or lease a portion of an owner-occupied single-family house to a person as a roomer or boarder living within the household, provided that no more than one roomer or boarder is to live within the household, and the owner complies with subdivision (c) of Section 12955, which prohibits discriminatory notices, statements, and advertisements.
    (B) Where the sharing of living areas in a single dwelling unit is involved, the use of words stating or tending to imply that the housing being advertised is available only to persons of one sex.

> Tenant screening? I want to live with good neighbors. > Cameras in the apartment building? Yes please. I want to catch package thieves.

these two could be good or bad depending on the implementation. I would like to share my apartment building with people who won't make a lot of noise, smoke cigarettes in the stairwell, threaten or steal from me, etc. I really doubt that you can screen for this without having a lot of false negatives or false positives. I have no issues with my current neighbors, but I suspect that has a lot more to do with the neighborhood and price than any active measures taken by the management.

regarding cameras, I don't have any issues with cameras at the entrance point(s) to the building. I already have to swipe in with a keyfob registered to me, so it's not like I'm losing much privacy by having my face recorded. I think the residents benefit from having at least some record of what guests are entering the complex. I'm certainly not okay with more cameras inside the building.

> Landlord tech is certainly not good for city renters who think they deserve lower than market rent purely on account of (1) how long they have lived in the city and (2) how little they earn.

Why shouldn't low income earners pay lower rent? From a humanitarian perspective, it doesn't make sense to have a landlord greedily siphoning off the vast majority of a person's income, just so that person can have fulfilled the basic human right of not being homeless. It's parasitic.

If we want low-income people to be able to live in certain areas then the best solution is to just give them money and let them obtain housing at market rates. We can do that through income redistribution, by taxing high-income people (which may include some landlords among others). Forcing landlords to rent at below market rates distorts the market and causes artificial housing shortages.

>taxing landlords

Don't you think that would just drive up the market price ? (by restricting supply i.e. making landlordship less desirable)

Income is taxed at the same rates regardless of source. That doesn't make landlording any more or less desirable than other investments. In general all classes of long-term investments generate roughly the same risk-adjusted returns.

OP edited their comment, after I had already replied, from "taxing landlords" to "taxing high-income people (which may include some landlords)" so you missed that earlier nuance.

> "If we want low-income people to be able to live in certain areas then the best solution is to just give them money..."

yeah, that didn't turn out so well for higher education and healthcare. so no to that.

housing markets are distorted in a thousand ways. a solution like that might be appealing for its simplicity, but what we need to do is the hard work of rationalizing a death by a thousand cuts. start by aggressively repealing every zoning/building regulation that's not tied to solid safety concerns (and not nebulous and nefarious ones). eventually you'd be in a position to repeal (in CA) both prop 13 and rent control (but not saying that'll happen), which are complementary distortions, but only when the market is functioning well enough not to need (for sociopolitical purposes, not economic ones) them.

With that model, if the government are going to be effectively paying whatever the landlords demand for rent, then the best solution would be for the government to seize rental housing from the landlords (perhaps with some token compensation so they don't complain too much) and run it as a non-profit rental service, i.e. social housing for all.

Obviously not the best solution for the landlords, but, really, so what? Removing a class of parasites from the housing system would be a feature, not a bug.

Because they already get a tax break?

Why should the landlord fit the bill because Jonhy does want to live in a high sought place?

The 'humanitarian' causes are a way to disguise totalitarian acts.

We have laws, property and trade so we don't have to go back to primitive ways.

> Why should the landlord fit the bill because Jonhy does want to live in a high sought place?

It's just one of the very few risks a person of wealth might have to accept, should they decide to use their elevated position in society to inflict landlordism upon people.

if landlords are able to extract more profit than is reasonable for the service they provide (and I'd argue they often do), then that is a problem regardless of how well off the tenants are.

I agree that everyone should be guaranteed food, water, and shelter (at minimum), but I don't think anyone is entitled to live on the most desirable pieces of land in the world.

How do you decide what the "reasonable" threshold is? In my mind, the reasonable price is whatever the market decides. On what basis can anyone assert otherwise?

The nice thing about using markets to set prices and deal with scarcity is that they're self-adjusting.

markets are neat mechanisms, but no market exists in a sociopolitical vaccum, so such blind faith in them is misguided (to put it charitably).

without getting too far into the weeds, and because housing is a durable and necessary good that's proportional to both population and productive capacity, in a free and fair market you'd expect housing prices to track with inflation. that's the reasonable expectation. over time, we've seen housing prices detach from that baseline for a variety of reasons unrelated to its core responsibility of sheltering people. see, for instance, the case-shiller index.

those detachments are distortions to the idealization of a free and fair market to ensure house prices continually rise for political and personal gain, despite the lack of sound economic principles underlying that distended rise.

fair question. the way I am using "reasonable" here is very subjective. one rough way to look at it would be to consider the relationship between median household income and median rent for a 2BR apartment. in my area, median gross household income is ~$4250/month and median rent for a 2BR is ~$1750. so after taxes, the median household would be spending about half their net income to live in a median 2BR. to me, this seems like a lot.

my personal take is that the root cause of this is the culture and policy surrounding home ownership, particularly for the middle class. we encourage people to take out a mortgage to acquire a home as soon as possible, and we tell them it's not financially irresponsible for a single physical asset to make up most of their net worth. in fact, we tell them it's the best investment they could possibly make. we grant tax breaks and lower the required down payments to extend this opportunity to even more people. so we end up with a bunch of people who are either highly leveraged on their mortgage, or have paid it off but have minimal other assets. this makes it very important that house values keep going up, so we deliberately distort the housing market so they do.

something I'd like to underscore is that the housing market is very much not a free market. there are tons of restrictions on what type of things can be build, how they can be built, what they can look like, what they can be used for, etc. even if you think free markets are effective pricing mechanisms (and I mostly do), that doesn't really have much to do with the prevailing rent in most areas.

Living in a nice neighborhood isn't a human right.

If they want to pay lower rent, they can do so, but usually in a lower quality neighborhood.

Well, there are pros and cons but one of the issues I see, living somewhere that has dirt cheap council homes for some poor people, is it breeds huge resentment against low income earners and causes people to focus on "this development needs to be X% affordable" and totally ignore the question of "why are we not making the average home affordable instead of focusing on some lottery for the poor?"

But, of course, the political incentives are aligned to encourage homes becoming ever more expensive at the behest of homeowners.

Of course rent shouldn't be income adjusted. Neither should and other good be income adjustment. The price mechanism works and is a good thing.

What would be the point of striving for a raise if your costs increased proportionately to income? The possibility of a higher quality of life gets people to work hard and benefit us all.

OP never claimed that those with low income shouldn't pay lower rent, they simply claimed that "Landlord tech" is not good for those individuals. Someone is allowed to see the benefits to certain things while also realizing that it may not benefit everyone the same way.

To my reading of their comment, it was implied later on:

> The oppressors are not always landlords - they are [...] other tenants who sit on their rent controlled housing until they die.

Problem is that once you open the floodgates there's nothing preventing the tech being extended to use-cases that would be against you, or recourse when things go wrong and the "computer says no".

Yep. Go in to complain that the AC is still broken and they'll pull up their surveillance AI that shows every time you violated their overreaching curfew and guest authorization policies. Train the tenants to take what they're given and stay in line like good passive income streams.

All of those ideas or tech could be used for very nefarious purposes. Two sides to every story. The site pretty much handles all of the counterpoints.

- Tenant screening means local income or felons cannot live anywhere other than the worst crime ridden housing. It's neo-redlining or housing covenants.

- Cameras means persistent surveillance and monitoring of your tenants. Imagine this with facial ML tech.

- Brokers for home sales result in an uneven playing field and high potential for corruption. The incentive structure is not in the favor of individuals.

- Rent to own might increase default rates, debt and speculation.

It's hard to view this with much positivity.

>- Rent to own? The renter / owner divide has gotten wider in cities and we need solutions to fix this.

Careful with this one. It's called seller financing, and can easily be abused in predatory fashion.

Technology is orthogonal to system change. It can be used to bolster existing modes of oppression or oppose them. Sometimes even the same technology can be used to do both, based on who uses it!

The real question is what is being deployed, who's pushing for the deployment, and who is benefiting. Taking smart keys, I'm skeptical tenants will see any improvement in terms of physical security. But I'm very willing to believe landlords perceive a benefit from increased surveillance of their renters.

> The oppressors are not always landlords - they are brokers, real estate developers, law makers, voters, other tenants who sit on their rent controlled housing until they die.

Hmm but weirdly enough it seems out of your big list of oppressors I see rent-controlled tenants pulled out more often as a boogeyman than any of the others!

> Taking smart keys, I'm skeptical tenants will see any improvement in terms of physical security. But I'm very willing to believe landlords perceive a benefit from increased surveillance of their renters.

I dunno why you would single these out (I'm assuming you mean the RFID setups they have on most new apartment buildings?). seems like they pretty obviously increase security over everyone having a common mechanical key to the main door. makes it way less of an issue when someone loses a key and/or moves out; you just deauthorize their code. once you give a couple hundred people the key to the front door, you either give up entirely on having the main entrance be secure, or you have to replace the lock and hundreds of keys over and over again.

Have you actually had a landlord install cameras around your complex? I'm skeptical that you would actually want this if you'd experienced it in practice.

Yeah, the last thing I want my landlord doing is installing cameras on every approach to my front door and doing facial recognition and storing the footage for 60 days (yet, somehow, it's conveniently "not available" if a package of mine goes missing but it's for damn sure attached to the posting on our group discussion forum if someone's dog pees in the wrong spot).

Funny how 90% of anything landlords do--other than the existence and some light upkeep of the building--never seems to accrue to tenants.

My landlord installed cameras in the car garage a year ago after a series of car breakins. My car is in that garage, and I am not a thief, so why shouldn't I view improved security as a good thing?

If the camera were pointed at my door instead then I wouldn't like it much, but it isn't.

But the point of capturing package thieves was that it would be pointed at your door.

Beyond that, I don’t get why people want to capture footage of package thieves. It’s not like police actually go after these people. Has anyone here ever actually heard back, “yeah, we got the guy and here’s your packages!” Pretty rare as far as I hear.

In my building packages are left in the lobby. It would be pretty easy for package thieves to walk off with packages, but I've not heard of anybody having trouble with that here. From what I've seen package theft is more a problem for stand-alone suburban houses where packages are left on the front porch visible from the street. I think a lot of people living in such homes think there is value in cameras, and those cameras aren't being imposed on them by landlords. I don't know if there is any real value to those cameras though, and I suspect a better solution involves some sort of lockbox with a one-way door, similar to mail slots in front doors or bear-proof trashcans..

That is not a problem with surveillance though. Surveillance works to catch package thieves, it's that the government is dysfunctional and won't do the actual catching.

I do actually live in a complex with cameras on all the entrances. not sure where I fall between "complete apathy" and "somewhat approve". if I really wanted to get someone/something in without it being captured on camera, all I have to do is put it/them in the backseat of my car.

I'd actually love that (if it worked). The last apartment building I lived in in Seattle had packages stolen regularly from a locked room. It was an arms race between criminals breaking the glass window in the door to open it (wire added to the glass), destroying the lock (better lock installed), prying the door open with power tools (steel plates installed around the door perimeter). It felt like Russia in the 90ies (basically a 3rd world country) where people with anything to steal would install reinforced steel doors in their condos with some crazy locks.

One thing that did not work was adding lights and cameras, because in Seattle property crime is not crime. If the cameras were used to catch the guys and put them in jail for a long time, I'd be 100% for it. The only problem with surveillance in general is lack of choice/control of the watchers. In case of a small private organization like a n apartment building, this does not apply; surveillance is an unalloyed good IMHO.

Can you explain further?

>But being pro tenant doesn't mean you need to oppose everything that landlords do.

No, but I oppose the very existence of landlords.

Why?

I think it's a perverse display of greed, opulence and power and a driver of inequality that someone is entitled to a major portion of their tenant's paycheck every month. I don't believe someone should be able to generate an income from something they have or have acquired like a house or an inheritance instead of something they do, in the way of actual work. I don't believe it is a fair exchange of goods and I don't believe it's a particularly good way to distribute them either considering the sheer number of people who are homeless and the number of properties that lie empty simply because their owners believe they deserve to generate more passive income from them or just don't care enough.

To me, this comment highlights a complete misunderstanding and misrepresentation of landlord's motivations and interests that results in the publication of biased, slogan-riddled "research" like the submission.

> I think it's a perverse display of greed, opulence and power and a driver of inequality that someone is entitled to a major portion of their tenant's paycheck every month.

Generally, landlords don't feel entitled to a major portion of their tenant's paycheck every month. In fact, landlords want as little of their tenant's paycheck every month, because the higher that percentage is, the higher the likelihood the tenant will have issues paying the rent at some point during the lease.

Rents are generally set through market forces, not determining how much of an individuals paycheck can be extracted from them.

> I don't believe someone should be able to generate an income from something they have or have acquired like a house or an inheritance instead of something they do, in the way of actual work.

People shouldn't be able to use tools or implements of any kind to generate income? Maintaining a habitable property is work, though it can be infrequent and is commonly irregular.

> I don't believe it is a fair exchange of goods

Why not? People are exchanging money for a good (housing) which is no more essential than food or water, yet I don't see activists organizing to abolish grocery stores or farms.

> and I don't believe it's a particularly good way to distribute them either considering the sheer number of people who are homeless

People are generally homeless due to issues other than landlords. There is ample support for sheltering the homeless (though I'd like to see more), and almost all research indicates that the core issues with almost all homeless individuals is not a lack of supply of shelter.

> and the number of properties that lie empty simply because their owners believe they deserve to generate more passive income from them or just don't care enough.

And you wrap up with a statement that is solely based on some version of a landlord that easy for to you to hate, regardless of any relation to reality.

Your attitude is no better or more productive than those on the other end of the spectrum who vilify those who need assistance and base all their thoughts and opinions on insulting, inaccurate stereotypes of lower income households.

>complete misunderstanding and misrepresentation of landlord's motivations and interests...rents are generally set through market forces

Should their motivations and interests matter if market forces ultimately decide the outcome, which isn't "as little of their tenant's paycheck every month" as you contend for the average tenant?

>People shouldn't be able to use tools or implements of any kind to generate income?

This seems to conflate an apartment someone owns to, say, a laptop or another tool which they actively use to generate productive work. I don't agree with the comparison but I do agree that it is more grey than my parent comment portrayed it to be.

>than food or water, yet I don't see activists...

You haven't seen activists who protest the commoditization and sale of drinking water?

>And you wrap up with a statement that is solely based on some version of a landlord that easy for to you to hate, regardless of any relation to reality.

You're right, that was a strawman and bad form from myself. But I'm not sure the 17 million vacant homes versus the 200,000 or so recorded unsheltered homeless individuals per the 2019 American census[1] is that unrelated to reality. If you're suggesting that it is removed from reality in that the motivations for those properties remaining empty cannot be outright attributed to malice like I did, I would be open to that assertion but I'm not sure it matters as long as the disparity exists. I still feel it is fundamentally immoral.

I appreciate you engaging with the content of my argument in good faith and apologize if I have failed to return the favour.

1: https://checkyourfact.com/2019/12/24/fact-check-633000-homel...

I'll admit a primary source would have been better but this was easier to find on my phone.

> Should their motivations and interests matter if market forces ultimately decide the outcome, which isn't "as little of their tenant's paycheck every month" as you contend for the average tenant?

I don't "contend" that landlords want tenants who can comfortably pay the rent, it's standard best practice and common sense.

Regardless, I'm not sure why landlords are solely responsible for the status quo, to the point that you believe they shouldn't exist.

> This seems to conflate an apartment someone owns to, say, a laptop or another tool which they actively use to generate productive work. I don't agree with the comparison but I do agree that it is more grey than my parent comment portrayed it to be.

Yes, it does conflate the two intentionally. The distinction between housing and other man-made goods seems arbitrary to me.

> You haven't seen activists who protest the commoditization and sale of drinking water?

The protests I've seen about Nestle and others are generally focused on privatization of water in impoverished nations where people were previously using it as a free resource or centered around the terms of the contract with a water bottler.

I don't see activists in the US protesting the water company or telling people not to pay their water bills, which is what I had in mind when I made my previous comment.

> You're right, that was a strawman and bad form from myself. But I'm not sure the 17 million vacant homes versus the 200,000 or so recorded unsheltered homeless individuals per the 2019 American census[1] is that unrelated to reality. If you're suggesting that it is removed from reality in that the motivations for those properties remaining empty cannot be outright attributed to malice like I did, I would be open to that assertion but I'm not sure it matters as long as the disparity exists. I still feel it is fundamentally immoral.

Fair enough. I don't dispute that there are enough vacant homes to provide shelter to the homeless, but my issue was the assumption of malice (which is the case throughout your original reply to me).

> I appreciate you engaging with the content of my argument in good faith and apologize if I have failed to return the favour.

Same to you, it's always unclear to me why landlords are vilified and singled out as the one provider of necessary goods and services that are vilified and should be outlawed, so engaging in conversations like these are interesting to me.

I'm assuming your question is rhetorical however I do want to ask you why you brought race into that discussion? Instead of asking "what do you consider to be a good neighbor" you instead phrase the question to try and make the poster look racist or at least bring that option into readers heads.

Was there something in their post that made you believe they were racially motivated in their comments?

If the goal of a discussion forum is to have discussions why would you go at someone assuming the worst without first having a discussion and understanding where they are coming from?

The more interesting question is if the good neighbor selection process disadvantages black people. The poster's motivation isn't relevant to whether people are harmed by the results

There's plenty of history of housing discrimination against black people, and it's not novel that ML can be racist.

Unless somebody has sat down and asked "does this screening actually determine good neighbors, or just filter out black people?" It's probably going to be a racist algorithm

>I'm assuming your question is rhetorical however I do want to ask you why you brought race into that discussion? Instead of asking "what do you consider to be a good neighbor" you instead phrase the question to try and make the poster look racist or at least bring that option into readers heads.

I'm not gonna speak for GP but a lot of people are hair trigger about screaming racism because it's an easy way to reduce fundamentally complicated questions about standards and double standards of behavior based on economic class into a simple issue of good vs evil.

There's really nothing fundamentally different about Kevin the yuppie changing the oil in his "classic" 2001 4Runner on the street but when you start talking about people like Cletus, Manuel and Jamal doing the same on domestic minivans of the 90s suddenly there's a problem. The fact that Kevin's bank account has more digits to the left of the decimal shouldn't matter but for some reason it does...

> There's really nothing fundamentally different about Kevin the yuppie changing the oil in his "classic" 2001 4Runner on the street but when you start talking about people like Cletus, Manuel and Jamal doing the same on domestic minivans of the 90s suddenly there's a problem. The fact that Kevin's bank account has more digits to the left of the decimal shouldn't matter but for some reason it does...

I mean, I don't see much of a problem in either case unless they're routinely obstructing the right of way or leaving a half-built vehicle to rust in the front lawn.

sometimes seemingly small differences can change something from cool or at least acceptable to annoying. I used to live across the street from a guy with an immaculately maintained classic mustang. my nextdoor neighbors had a bunch of two-stroke dirtbikes that they would ride almost everyday. that mustang was incredibly loud, but it sounded awesome. the guy was really cool and would show me other exotic cars he was restoring all the time. the dirtbikes were not nearly as loud as the mustang, but they weren't interesting either, so I just found them annoying. despite the fact that they were basically doing the same thing, I'd way rather have the mustang guy as a neighbor than the dirtbike family.

One of the first comments on the webpage linked is:

> Stonelock biometric cameras have been installed in various residential buildings, in which tenants are forced to subject their faces to a technology proven to reproduce racial biases.

Race is a topic of the discussion at hand. It was omitted by the GGP, possibly as the GGP doesn't consider that to be of consequence (as it may not be to them, depending on which side of the camera's bias they are).

I don't read the GP's comment as attacking the GGP, so much as noting the omission.

Many (most?) American owner-occupants consider all renters to be "bad neighbors" with "no stake in our community". The GP should really consider before using such weaponized phrases.

You don't need much tech and screening to tell if someone is white (with a few widely publicized exceptions).