Landlords aren’t ready for the responsibility of owning someone else’s shelter

Australia is in the middle of a rental crisis, in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, in the middle of an inflation crisis, in the middle of a climate crisis. It’s crises all the way down; a crisis babushka. 

Anyone attending a rental inspection could be forgiven for despairing upon seeing 40-50 people, all in the same situation, trying to fight for their own survival. You consider pushing a few of them down the stairs but worry the sympathy will give them the advantage they need to secure the place (simply to avoid a lawsuit). Everyone takes the elevator anyway. And why on earth are almost ALL inspections in the middle of the day on a weekday? Don’t they want their tenants to have jobs? 

But whenever you mention this sort of thing, you are bombarded – as this will be – by, presumably landlords, all claiming if you can’t afford the rent go somewhere else, or get government housing, as though low-income earners aren’t facing a wait of more than 10 years for a tenancy to get accepted. What’s a little 10 year stint of homelessness to secure a house, clearly you aren’t taking it seriously if you aren’t prepared to do whatever it takes!

And don’t pretend renters are not willing. I’m about to move house for the third fucking time in three years! Now, there were a number of things that contributed to this: COVID, owners moving their child back in, and most recently an owner selling the property after we pushed back on a rental raise. It’s painfully clear landlords don’t understand just how rough it is out here. I got trapped in an elevator in an apartment building in the city for over an hour the other day and still ended up applying for the place as the rent was only kind of unreasonable. 

It’s this callous shitty attitude that tells me the only thing I need to know about most landlords; the thing they themselves keep telling us over and over again, at all opportunities on all forms of social media as loudly as they can. 

Landlords aren’t ready for the responsibility of being in charge of someone else’s shelter. A shitty attitude egged on by real estate agents actively encouraging them to milk the market and hit their tenants like they are pinatas full of cash waiting to be cracked open. 

They’ve made it clear they are here for the money and aren’t ready to accept that life has changed, that ‘safe as houses’ is no longer a thing because banks, and this unremitting need to make the line go up caused the one stable thing we had in capitalism, houses, to collapse out of simple greed. And that was way back 2008! 

The irony of landlords making the statement they aren’t responsible to house you is they miss that it is their investment, which means they are responsible for the losses. It’s not your tenants’ responsibility to carry you through a recession. They didn’t adopt you, they have just as little responsibility for you as you seem to think you have for them, it cuts both ways. 

While I could be facetious and offer the same solutions landlords offer tenants when they struggle, e.g., eat at home, drink less takeaway coffee, eat less avocado toast, stop eating breakfast (a genuine suggestion from the WSJ recently), I know they don’t work. And I am not out here pretending I have solutions which simply translate to ‘stop trying to enjoy life and focus on paying the mortgage’. 

Nothing facetious, but here’s a genuine suggestion. Clearly landlords are incapable of caring for people. They have told us that much themselves. So, the housing market is perhaps not for them. It requires at least a little compassion as it doubles as somebody’s home. Plus, in the post-2008-GFC world it’s been proven housing is not the guarantee that people used to think it was and can fall hard at any time. 

So, if this is you, and you need a more stable way to make money where you don’t need to feel you’ll come face-to-face with the consequences of your actions, you need to sell your spare houses, take the earnings and invest in weapons of war. 

Now, you’ve heard the market is volatile, and it can be, but with a diverse portfolio you can ride out the dips. Just make sure you invest in something secure, not oil, or coal, those are dying, you need the only thing that has been consistent for years now: Lockheed Martin. 

Even the 2020 dip in the stock didn’t see it fall further than the lowest the stock price was in 2019, and it has risen fairly consistently since then. Look at that line go up!

Look at those numbers, that’s a secure investment. 

If you’re wondering why Lockheed makes consistent bank, it’s simple. Check out their product list. It’s government contracts for war, black hawks, rifles, missiles. There is an endless budget for war, huzzah! Nobody ever asks “How are we going to pay for it?” when a peacekeeping mission is announced. 

If you’ve never done it before it’s easy, you don’t even need a broker. Use an app like Sharsies which allows you to buy shares of stocks.

And at only $470.160 a stock, as per the printing of this article, your $800,000-$1M+ property will land you a great many stocks. If you’d done it at the start of 2021 you’d nearly have doubled your investment by now. 

Obviously you don’t want to put ALL your nest eggs in one explosive basket. Try diversifying your investments of mass destruction; you can also invest in something like Raytheon. Or find out what stocks the politicians are investing in and follow suit. Quiver quantitative gives you real time data on American senators, that’s the big leagues, they really love money. Nancy Pelosi and her husband are reported to have made around $46M in investments. That’d buy you a comfortable retirement. 

At the very least you’ll do less damage to the lives of young Australians (note: we will revise this article if conscription is reinstated). Open your financial future without losing out on investments that can potentially harm other humans. These humans are slightly further away so arguably do they even really count? Just remember, oil and coal are dying so stick to something secure: bet on war. 

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