Renters

Having been a renter from age 18 to 65, and moving almost every six months, as each lease expired and the rent was raised, in an eternal searcher for cheaper rent … renting is a slippery slope for people who live paycheck to paycheck ….

, I speak from five decades of experience …

I’m thinking it is not so much about corporate ownership as the whole idea of property ownership, because my worst landlords, by far, were individual property owners who could not afford to maintain their properties and usually took more from your deposit than was their fair share … because of their poor management skills, they often didn’t treat you well as a tenant, acting so fearful that they were going to be taken advantage of that they took advantage of their tenants preemptively … corporate management companies were far more professional … so maybe it’s not about the structure of management, but ownership.

Individual landlords who had inherited their properties were the absolute worst landlords of all. Not to say I didn’t have a number of good individual landlords who treated me very well, especially in the end, when they recognized they had a good tenant in me, just as I was turning in my key and their spotlessly cleaned home back to them.