My mother is a real estate broker, and before that my parents ran a property management company. Needless to say she deals with the buying and selling of a lot of rental properties, and she figures about 80% of the tenants cause damage to the properties, beyond what is normal wear-and-tear. About 20% of those tenants cause damage that easily exceeds the security/damage deposit. Holes in walls that aren't repaired, accumulation of junk/garbage, failure to upkeep the grounds (even just cutting the grass), stoves and fridges that were left so dirty they were damaged and couldn't be repaired so had to be replaced, etc. The most frustrating part was when something would go wrong (like a slow water leak) and it wouldn't be brought to the attention of the owner until the move-out inspection, so it was causing more and more damage as time went on. She just did a property inspection for a rental she was putting on the market for the owner and she had to call the property manager because of a leaking upstairs washing machine... water has been leaking down through the walls and ceiling for, "well, 3-4 months, anyway", but the tenants didn't think anything of it and hadn't told anyone... it's going to be almost $40k to fix the resulting rot. If they'd picked up the phone and called it could have been a $5 part. Then there was the grow-op she found last month... illegally tapped power, high humidity and condensation, etc. Thankfully that was nipped in the bud (so to speak) before any major damage to the house was found, the guy evicted immediately, and it was a $5k bill to fix and inspect the power tap. They will take the guy to court to recover the costs, but that doesn't mean they'll ever see a dime. Word of advice to anyone renting out their properties... don't just cash the cheques, do frequent inspections. That being said, there's a big difference for a lot of people between owning and renting... just think about rental cars and the shit that people do to them because, "meh, it's a rental".
I think you're kind of proving my point, as along with Odens *and Netts* example. The diffusion of responsibility leads the the end tenant to the apathy in their surroundings. It's just human nature to become indifferent, even openly resentful, to things that are just handed to you. Im not of the mind that there should be no safety net, that the poor have to be cut loose totally or something. Just that reimagining how we provide for them in a way that best maximizes their ability to help themselves. Ive always thought it should start with heavy education on the family planning side of things. Breaking the cycle of unwed teenage pregnancy seems like the most important factor in allowing them to progress into financial security. On one hand you're battling pious religous groups that demand a very narrow and unworkable approach to this. On another hand you have acedemic lead community groups that take any suggestion of changing a culture as a racist affront to minority groups*. * I had a college friend who got her masters in social work. Throughout college she worked at serval rehab and community centers. She told me once about the most disturbing incidence to her was the time she had offered some simple financial advice to one of her cases. Basically, don't loan family members large sums of money, focus on saving your own money for things like community college or home ownership, things in the long run will help benifit yourself and your children greatly. She was yanked in her bosses office and admonished for suggesting ideas that were counter to the poor communties' culture. A culture where, while helping family members with money, it left them in perpetual debt to one another.
This is probably the biggest point, for me. I think everyone who says, "we need to run things like a business" is absolutely correct... but not a big business with all that bullshit management and cost wasting, more like a scrappy startup that has to squeeze maximum use out of every penny. Having worked with a number of IT departments in provincial and federal governments, they made me angry about how stupid they were with their money.
100% A big part of the problem are the incentives to NOT get off of welfare, etc. Same goes for rent controlled apartments, etc.
Well, whether or not people who live in public housing or are renters treat their houses with less respect than homeowners wasn't the point I was responding to. It was more the very basics of the program itself. Like, in the places I've lived, public housing isn't "just handed to you." There's rent, it's just lower, and there are various requirements to be eligible for it. But I'm only familiar with the program in a small section of the country. So my actual question was if it's free in other places in the country, because that's how it's been discussed a couple times. (The other part of the question was whether it was the tenant or Landlord's responsibility to fix repairs elsewhere, but that was answered in a roundabout way.)
We have a wonderful situation here in California where rent control in some cities keep rents artificially low for established tenants, and prop 13 keeps property taxes artificially low for established property owners, and all the young people get dry fucked because they had the gall to be born too late.
I saw the "ownership" problem very commonly in international development: we would build a fantastic fucking thing that solved all sorts of problems and within 8 weeks, it was a shitty mess because no one maintained it, or took care of it. However this sort of thing is a chicken/egg scenario more often that people admit: no means for taking care of things (lawnmowers aren't free), and a lot of them had been abused in the past. Many of them literally didn't know their rights, and assumed once things got bad enough they would be kicked out. I dealt with one woman as a volunteer that literally wouldn't call to get her house fixed because she was deathly afraid her landlord would see stray cats that she fed and evict her.
I'm going to assume your assessment of the payment structure is universal. Which really doesn't change my point as far as diffusion of responsibility. For what ever psychological reason the amount picked up and the requirements that go with it aren't producing the results we need. I'm saying we need to explore different options with an honest discussion without each side banging their chest and shutting the debate down with the most extreme examples and name calling.
Okay man, I wasn't arguing with any of your points or making any kind of commentary about it. I was literally just asking if public housing was free elsewhere in the country.
It's not free anywhere I've lived, but I think the way it's been handled is questionable. I am not at all against rent control or subsidized housing, but in the places I've lived here in the states they've all had the same problem. If you're a person making 40-50k a year in the city you'll probably live in an apartment. You don't have to live in the ghetto at that income, but you can't really afford to live somewhere nice. However, you make too much to live in subsidized housing where you need to make 22-26k or less depending on the locations I've lived. The places for subsidized housing are actually way, way nicer than what most people can afford because they make 'too much'. For example, one in the city I live now has 8 swimming pools, a gated community, fitness center, club house, etc but you need to make like 23k or something to live there. It's just really odd to me. I'm certainly for subsidized housing, but I have no idea why it should include all that shit when you would need to make 80-100k to live somewhere comparable. I mean, I don't really care, especially since it doesn't affect me, and it doesn't piss me off or anything, but it's kind of hard not to say "why the fuck are tax dollars paying for all this extra bullshit?" Florida has a pretty bad min wage so I'm certainly in favor of some welfare, but that sort of excess just seems unnecessary and unwarranted.
Just read through the highlights of Trump's "eradicate NAFTA" plans, and I have to say, I'm not really that concerned about it... it doesn't seem like anything as "scary" as I was expecting. I'm actually for some of it... especially the "reduced cross-border duties/tariffs for online purchases". There are a few bricks and mortar companies that are pretty vocal about being against such an idea, but I'm not too sorry for them. Our bricks and mortar stores have kind of shitty supply lines that are quite different than the US for a lot of things, and it's not a good thing. If you're familiar with why Target failed, then you know what I mean. Even ordering something from Cabela's is bewildering... the US stores have a very different inventory than the Canadian stores, and I have to pay both the border tariffs and the exchange rate to buy the desirable product from the US. If they can't compete online, with the exchange rate in their favour, then Canadian stores can fuck off and I won't have any problem with that. Welcome to the new economy.
There are some things in there that are going to be up for some debate and fighting, but overall (at least with Canada), it's not looking like a "throw it all away and renegotiate", more of a fine tuning. It sounds like he wants to eliminate the trade deficit with Mexico, though, which could be a bit more "fun".
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40646625 "Let [the ACA] fail." Serious question: are there provisions set to roll out in 2017/2018 that will impact how it works? I was under the impression that after 8 years, it more or less did what it was supposed to do: prevent insurance from kicking you off for getting sick, expand coverage/higher taxes on the wealthy to fund the additional costs, and provide local markets for people whose employers don't provide insurance. What is left to kick in that might "fail"? Also, I know this is contentious as fuck, but wouldn't a repeal make the whole situation much, much worse in terms of uninsured, insurance companies making up reasons to deny coverage and no damage control for the staggering costs?
I'm no expert, but my understanding is that if it's repealed and Trumpcare is passed, it basically reduces coverage, saves money for corporations, and allows insurance companies to make more money. (That's very oversimplified, but I think that is where the main push to get rid of the ACA is coming from... donors to the GOP who stand to gain big time). Of course the ACA has some issues of its own, especially for the small to medium sized company who can't afford it, and others who could get insurance cheaper before the ACA, but those are the areas that even Obama was saying needed to be tweaked. I can't help but think that this whole healthcare thing will be an ongoing iterative process, and it seems to me that the initial plan was a decent stab at it. It's just short-sighted and foolish and a grandstanding talking point to say, "we're going to just throw it away"... especially when you have nothing to replace it with. From what I hear, this shit is complicated, yo, and can't be reduced into simple talking points that fit in a Tweet.
https://qz.com/1022831/why-doesnt-the-united-states-have-universal-health-care/ Interesting history on WHY this evolved to be such a quagmire.
I find it interesting that the same person can think "single-payer healthcare = Russian Communism = BAD", but "Trump camp meeting with Russian powers in secret = NO BIG DEAL"
I think the problems with the ACA are much larger than you're insinuating. I don't personally care that 2% of whatever number it is had to go to a different doctor even though that seems to be such a constant talking point. That said, premiums have consistently been on the rise, and I'm very skeptical that they're going to get better. Liberals have mostly blamed this on republicans sabotaging the bill - and that's a fair point - but it's not the only cause and it's kind of hard not to see that the bill was overly optimistic in its objectives. There's also the issue that in many situations businesses can't expand because of ACA regulations and then some people on the ACA exchanges still can't afford the care they need because the premiums are crazy high and then you're paying extremely high deductibles on top of it. The biggest fear is that Obamacare will enter a death spiral. It's hard to assess the likelihood of that happening, but I think it's quite possible mainly because if you ever have an option between an employer plan or the ACA you will choose the employer plan almost 100% of the time. By comparison the ACA is a really, really shitty health care plan. As a result there isn't enough healthy/ well employed people signing on and I don't think it's a problem that's going to fix itself. You can't really have a program survive with only poor/sick people in it. That said, I totally agree that a straight repeal would be a lot worse. The real solution would be to slowly transition to a public health care system. They are by far superior both in cost and quality based on the results, with virtually no exceptions, but for whatever reason a large portion of the country is fanatically against the idea. Like so many issues healthcare has very much become a 'make up your facts' topic.
Many of the American stores/companies stationed here are more like an Off-Broadway version of themselves. Target managed to fuck itself up perfectly in Canada. Hell, even Netflix sucks here compared to America unless they've changed it lately.
You couldn't be more wrong... all the original US licensing deals that Netflix had for their movies, etc., when they launched have expired, and because Netflix is becoming a huge threat to a other content creators, they've had a hard time getting the same quality as they did when they first launched. Not so here in Canada... we have way better selections than the US does.