ID: A Sophie Labelle 4 panel comic featuring Stephie in different poses, saying:
Landlords do not provide housing.
They buy and Hold more space than they need for themselves.
Then, they create a false scarcity and profit off of it.
What they're doing is literally the opposite of providing housing.
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Oh my god, tell me about it.
Even when you want to rent a place and can afford to do so, landlords make the situation really difficult because many of them put up places supposedly for rent, but make it as difficult as possible for someone to actually qualify to rent it, since they're only doing it to inflate their net worth and having someone living there apparently devalues it. It took me over a year to find a place that actually was willing to let me rent it because most others would cook up bullshit reasons to reject me (my personal favourite being one that got mad at me and put me in their blacklist for... asking too many questions about their property???).
Like... I have money. They are offering a good in exchange for money. I am willing to spend money in exchange for this good. It shouldn't be this hard.
I'm in a similar situation. Add disability (which means at least 80% of properties aren't suitable without serious adaptation) and benefits to the equation, and I'm considered "too big a risk" (even though having me as a tenant means funnelling government money directly in to landlord's pockets). The polite landlords and agents will play along and pretend to take me seriously before they very obviously put my aplication at the bottom of a pile and never call me back, while some feel comfortable enough to openly discriminate against me, because despite the law saying they can't, no one actually enforces it, and they know they can get away with it. The ratio of applicants per property are so obscenely out of whack, they can place as many illegal conditions as they like, and people will continue to flock, borderline beg, to be allowed to spend 75% of their income on a shitty little hellhole.
I realised that I had to limit myself to only applying to places that are at least £100 less a month than I pay now, and even those automatically reject me on grounds of "affordability", meanwhile my landlord just keeps putting my rent up in an attempt to push me out so they can then charge the next person even more, and I keep paying it because I simply can't find anywhere else suitable to go.
To say it's distressing would be the understatement of the century.
That really fucking sucks, I'm so sorry you have to deal with this bullshit. Landlords really are the worst.
I appreciate it, back at you. None of us should be putting up with this bullshit.