Landlord brags about only raising his elderly tenants rent from $1100 to $1450 instead of raising it to $2000: ‘She’s moving out to California. I’m happy I didn’t displace her.’

He sounds like such a nice guy.

How do you feel about landlords? Your opinion of them probably depends a lot on where you live and the people in your life. If your beloved dad is a landlord, you’re less likely to hate landlords. If you’ve never rented before and have only lived in a house that you or your family owns, you might feel kind of neutral about landlords. If you have rented your entire life and seen how unstable it can be to live somewhere where the monthly rent increases every single year without question, I would 100% understand why you’d hate landlords. 

I do believe that there are good landlords out there. My grandma has lived in the same apartment since 2011, and her landlord hasn’t raised her rent once. Heck, her landlord was invited to her 95th birthday party! If I had the same rent that someone in my building would’ve had in 2011, I would invite my landlord to my birthday party too! In my experience, the best landlords are the ones with jobs besides landlording. My grandma’s landlord doesn’t rely solely on rent payments to fund her life. 

In my experience, the worst landlords are the ones who think you should be grateful they let you live in their building. They think they’re doing a benevolent service because, technically, they could be overcharging you, but they aren’t, at least according to them. I think it’s better to look at renting as a business transaction. As a renter, I am paying a landlord to provide me with the service of living in their building. I can shop around and find a different place to live, and the landlord can reject my request to live in their building for any number of reasons. While I am in a more vulnerable position because I don’t own a house and the landlord does, that doesn’t mean I am indebted to them or owe them my deepest gratitude for giving me the opportunity to live in a building. Any landlord who constantly thinks their tenants should be grateful for the bare minimum, like the hot water working and the ceiling not caving in, is a red flag as far as I’m concerned. 

Older people are extremely vulnerable to rent hikes because they are usually retired and on a fixed income. They can’t just go out and start delivering pizzas at night to bring in some extra money the way that a 20-year-old could. New York City has a program that helps senior citizens who make less than $50,000 a year stay in the apartments they’ve been in for years by freezing the rent. Unfortunately, not all elderly people have access to frozen rent, like my grandma or the elderly citizens of NYC. The elderly woman in this story paid $1100 in rent for years for her apartment. That was until a new landlord bought the building and started charging her $1450. The worst part is that he publicly gave himself a pat on the back for not doubling her rent, because he could.