landlords are the only investors I've encountered who expect their investment revenue to remain constant & level no matter what the market forces are

I don't get it. rental income is very simple and straightforward in terms of investment risk: you get a substantive cut of someone's employment income, so if their employment is hit, your investment is hit. yet here we have all these landlords with the shocked pikachu face

I think even moreso than being shocked by the prospect of tenants defaulting on rent, landlords are shocked by the prospect that if their tenants default on the rent, they could be morally or legally compelled to shelter them anyway. they're shocked by the backflow of entitlement

there's a real cognitive discrepancy in thinking tenants can and should somehow be compelled to cover your mortgage payments, irrespective of their material realities. like morality aside — surely you can see that the food chain only works if your prey are also fed?

I think this landlord (who is commenting unironically about a prospective rent strike) expresses the underlying crux of this mentality perfectly: landlords shouldn't be 'screwed equally'. if renters are screwed, it's only 'fair' if landlords somehow get to be less screwed.

I realize I'm basically circling around @nanpansky's observation — people can debate the morality of a rent strike all they want, but for many renters it isn't a choice, it's an outcome. if people can't make rent, the outcome is that they won't make rent. https://twitter.com/nanpansky/status/1238950483882061824

it feels insane to have to assert that people can't afford what they can't afford, but landlord logic is that while a landlord's "can't" (can't afford my mortgage without rental income) is immutable, a tenant's "can't" (can't afford rent without a job) can be willed into a "can"

if you're a landlord who needs rental income, you can keep repeating 'but you promised! but you owe me! but the bank!' as though it's an incantation that will give tenants their jobs back — or you can try to improve their material reality by agitating for universal basic income

to be clear, what landlords are really protesting isn't your potential inability to pay rent — it's their potential inability to evict you. landlords are indignant because they thought they'd get all the perks of investing in a vital resource and none of the moral imperatives

a good example from a webinar for landlords I saw today — this jeering paralegal filed to evict a sex worker tenant because although it's 'exceptionally dangerous' for the tenant to work during the pandemic, she 'had things available to her to get money' and 'that's her problem'

another example from the same webinar: the paralegal and a real estate broker (who owns 14 condos, a triplex, and an apartment building) talk about how to terrorize tenants into paying rent. the presumption is that with enough force, you can *make* a tenant able to afford it.

when landlords allude to 'communicating' and 'working' with tenants, they don't mean cutting their losses. they mean collections — such as deferring (not reducing) rent so tenants owe *higher* rent while recovering from unemployment, or pressuring tenants into high-interest debt.