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We don’t have an instance stance on landlord apologia, but maybe we should make one, based on the number of people from other instances defending these mooching rent-seeking parasites.
i hope you do; seeing it is a depressing reminder of how much americans think that exploitation like this is okay and even more depressing to see people exploited like this want to perpetuate it.
/me sorts by controversial
Landlord said to me “property tax has gone up. This is my only form of income. Will need to increase rent”
Told him “yeah, everything has gone up and my paycheck is still the same”.
Like, these types of relationships are so parasitic. This is the “nice” mom and pop style landlord too that every liberal seems to want to give a pass too.
Sure, are they less bad than the big corporate faceless landlords? Yes. But the entire relationship is the problem.
They get to justify forcing me out of my home because the value of the house that they own WENT UP.
That’s why their property tax is more. They literally own something that is more valuable and making it further impossible for me to ever buy a place of my own.
If they offered to let you buy it for the fair market value of the home, would you? That’s the only viable way for them to extract that house value without evicting you. A fair answer could be absolutely, and perhaps that should be something renters are given some rights to do, but just pointing out that a tax assessment doesn’t mean they have usable money unless they can do something to cash in.
I literally asked. He said he’s not selling.
That is unfortunate.
Old guy or younger guy? If this is their retirement income, they would probably be better off selling it and putting the proceeds into a nice account.
Of course those accounts also profit off of the inconvenience of others, but with social security all messed up, some form of screwing with the active working generation is needed to model retirement of the older generation, and a financial account is less egregious than sitting on potentially available housing stock.
I think I can answer most of your questions by saying he comes over to discuss the lease in a Mercedes Maybach. An SUV that starts at $178,000.
I don’t think age or other things really matter at that point.
He owns multiple properties and houses.
But, still, my entire point is that this relationship in itself is what needs to die. It’s not this individual dudes fault. It’s a system that allows people like this to exist that produce nothing.
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If that’s their whole retirement investment (as they said it’s their only income, no idea about us retirement details) if they don’t increase your rent, their net income will GO DOWN. Prices of everything also went up for them, if you think it’s hard with constant income, imagine with declining income.
The value of their house going up is useless to pay for bread.
You should get a bigger paycheck, average wage growth is around 5% in the US, higher than inflation even.
Sounds like they should get an actual job, rather than expecting someone else to pay for their retirement; someone who probably won’t get to retire themselves
If it’s their only income source I assume they are retired. If they aren’t, you are absolutely right.
Why do we have to sacrifice our future ability to retire and own a house because they bought all the houses and retired first?
How are the two related? It’s not a zero sum game, there’s new houses being built all the time.
There are studies recently released that show that the people who are buying houses 20 years ago are the same people buying houses today. It is a zero-sum game because nobody else is able to buy a house, especially not if they’re younger.
If that’s their whole retirement investment maybe they should get a job
They probably had a job for many decades, it’s how they bought and paid the house.
And now they are taking away the next generations ability to buy and pay for a house by making them fund their retirement.
People Mike that are not tge reason housepricees increase so mich that is 99% big speculators owning thousands oft units and hiking prices and rents.
How are they taking it away? There have always been people who rent and people who buy. Someone renting doesn’t prevent you from buying.
Sorry why should you pay NOW for a guy that workED many decades? Can you pay me for the work I did yesterday?
You know what’s the fastest way to make landlords disappear? Ask about some broken shit around the house that they are required by law to fix. Radio silence for months guaranteed. Until the next rent increase of course.
For a lot of them, they don’t even care if there’s tenant turnover, especially if its a high-demand area. There’s no incentive to fix a broken AC; the tenants already signed the year lease. They can get to it next year when its time to clean up the place for the re-listing.
If it’s a longer term tenant, the landlord is actually disincentivized from fixing the AC, because they can fix the AC and jack the rent way up as soon as the old, abuse tenant inevitably leaves.
One of my friends suffered through this during the recent heat wave. They’ve been told there’s no budget for AC despite a recent $50 rent hike.
Their landlord is an independently wealthy multimillionaire — they don’t even need the money!
If i had Jeff Bozos money, I’d buy a bunch of houses and offer them to the homeless to get the back into society. Fucking bozo Bozos is. And that’s why I’ll never have Jeff Bozos money.
Capitalism rewards the worst most selfish hoarders of wealth. How can we build a system like this and expect this type of altruism? Makes no sense. The system was always broken.
Oh, I know. I was just explaining why I’ll never be a billionaire. I care about people. Sad that that’s a fact of life
“understood, create a factory town and offer housing in exchange for employment.” ~ Bezos
is that not the only way to do it?
When I married my wife and she moved in we tried renting out her house with a property management company. She got one tenant and had that tenant for over 2 years with no complaints and we never raised the rent, just enough to cover taxes going up too.
But when we wanted to move to a larger house we gave her an 8 month notice we couldn’t renew since the market is so bad and we needed to sell. And my wife wasn’t profiting at all, she was still in the red from the repairs and setting up the house to rent out. We offered her like $10k off the price.
Anyway long story short, the tenant gave us hell for those 8 months, and when she moved out we found she never complained about anything because she ignored all the problems which made things worse and the house needed thousands of more dollars to prepare and sell.
She’ll never try being a landlord again, she hated it and the tenant shit talked her “landlord” on Facebook all the time like she was some evil monster.
I don’t know how anyone else does the landlord thing, this must be all the ones run by evil corporations.
This was a house my wife bought for like $150-180k originally.
Cry us a river
Yeah being a landlord makes you into the bad guy despite intentions. You’ll always make back whatever “losses” you incurred in equity, because we have a crazy for profit housing market.
Landlord/renter is an abominable financial relationship.
Tough shit. Must be so inconvenient for you to not keep up on repairs to your own building. That’s on you.
No sympathy for landlords.
No sympathy lmao, you dont get to cry
Standard rent is at least 1-1.5% of current not original value per month and taxes are about that per year.
you probably bought for 150 you earned 100,000 when it ballooned up to 250k rented it for at least 2500 a month x24 months or 60,000 paid 6000 each to taxes and management pocketed another 48,000
When you sold realizing that cool 100k you naturally had to do all the repairs and upkeep you had been putting off so you ended up coming out of pocket for “thousands”
In the end you netted 140k for doing 10 hours work once whereas the median worker earns 200-250
You probably charged here so much to ensure you made the “market rate” eg people like you that she had no funds saved to actually move and you probably nickel and dimed her deposit away for stuff that was actually on you.
Where am I wrong?
Wow lots of assumptions here. My wife only rented it out enough to cover her expenses (mortgage, insurance, property management, etc). She only netted $100 a month as “profit” but that doesn’t include taxes at the end of the year, and she was paying towards $6000 she owed to house repairs. It doesn’t include repairs needed from normal wear and tear and tenant damage.
A lot of your assumptions are based on profit towards selling the house, which in this situation means its not sustainable on its own without you covering everything out of pocket.
The real kicker here is that her tenant made more money than my wife. The tenant was making at least $10,000/month per bank statements.
Your other comments are false also. State laws here are very clear on what can be charged as a deposit.
None of that was my point though, and I realize sharing that here on a meme was dumb on my part. I’m not looking for sympathy, I was just feeling a rare moment of sharing an experience often overlooked: two hard working people who independently buy a starter home, meet later, and one moves in with the other and tries to rent out their house. Landlords aren’t always evil but your reply demonstrated all the immediate assumptions and biases. After all, why should anyone be allowed to own more than one home, right? Especially if they try to rent it out? I guess Air BNB is better.
A lot of us lived in rentals and heard talk about the dream of rental supplemental income, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be and not really feasible without an insane rate or having enough cash to not pay a mortgage. It’s probably why more companies are trying to buy up houses.
Wow what a messed up situation. Surprising to hear the tenant was wealthy. I still maintain that the only winning move is not to play.
If your wife was only clearing 100 per month in profit from a rental house you all must be just amazingly bad at whatever you were doing and should have sold the house as soon as you weren’t living in it. Rent has skyrocketed and home value continually risen quickly for the last 40 years. I’m not even sure how this is possible.
I have managed a building with 8 units before. Never again.
I once had a lady’s ceiling collapse. I then come to learn she’s been putting a bucket out to catch water for months, never told anyone about it. What should have been a quick 15 minute fix ended up being a total nightmare.
Had one dude who was a heroin addict. Kept flushing needles. The plumbing had to be taken apart multiple times to get his needles out.
Had a lady who kept adopting cats, wouldn’t get them fixed. She would then let them out into the hall to spray the walls with what was basically straight ammonia, except grosser.
I could go on all day, trash fires, fucking litter, a phycological inability to break down cardboard. I think my blood pressure just spiked writing this.
You couldn’t pay me to be a landlord. People are awful.
If it’s any consolation, I’m in an 8-unit owner-occupied condo rn and my kitchen ceiling collapsed last week because the HOA refused to fix a roof leak for almost two years. So now what should have been a couple hundred dollar roof patch is thousands of dollars coming out of my HOA payments.
Bullshit you just didn’t do any maintenance
people will ignore problems if they think someone else will deal with them
Yeah we know you did
Very similar situation.
Mod removed my post without reason. Maybe cussing offended them.
The market seems to self select for bad landlords. All the well intentioned ones I know got burned and stopped renting.
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NGL if you are paying 2/3 of your income to rent you need to move to another part of the world.
Owning 1 extra property and renting: Okay
Owning apartment complex and renting: Okay
Owing millions of single family homes and duplexes and rent hiking/price hiking the entire market: not okay
Owning 1 slave: Okay
Owning a dozen slaves: Okay
Owning hundreds of slaves: not okay.
/s obviously
/uj
Of course slavery and landlordism aren’t identical in every respect, but they both are based on a parasite class doing no work, and extracting labor value from people who do. Large-scale vs small-scale doesn’t make landlording any more ethical.
Do you have a problem with public housing or are landlords okay when it’s the state?
Publicly-owned and controlled housing is the solution to this problem, yes. Then rents, upkeep, and all housing questions are determined at the level of public/political decision-making and not by petty tyrant landlords acting only in the interests of profit.
You support this alternative with completely a completely different dynamic and incentives??
Another win for pithy internet hypocracy gotcha debatelord!
It was a reasonable follow up question, governments are corporations after all and they stated they oppose all landlord/renter situations
governments are corporations
no
When you’re ready to be a communist we will be waiting
Since when is communism against administration and social planning? Since when have Marxists said governments are corporations? This is deeply silly.
I wish people here understand this. It costs money to buy property, and so effort needed to be applied into buying one was done beforehand by being good with money. Rich people don’t need to go through this, and should rightfully be criticized.
Being exploited in the past does not justify exploitation on your part in the future.
Exploited? You mean working to earn money, like everyone else?
Not like everyone else. Capitalists do not work for their money, they exploit workers through paying them less than the value they create.
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Landlord = banned. Your kids will get back at you some day, no doubt about that.
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I know this will be downvoted to hell, but this whole let’s rally against landlords is kind of stupid in my opinion.
You can say the exact same thing about a bank that gives you a lone, they do zero work and get money.
Or a company that leases or rents out cars.
For a landlord you can make the argument that a home is a primary life necessity. But when you borrow money from a bank it’s pretty much the same thing.
Some people don’t want to stay in a place too long and like the option to rent. Also it’s not like a landlord hard zero risks, you can get tenants that are horrible and trash a place.
Just to be clear I’m not a landlord myself, but also not someone that just hates them because it’s a thing now.
I think we should make the same argument against banks, leasing, and other highly financialized capital.
Maybe but there is a market for it. To me it’s crazy people (students) in the Netherlands pay 15 euros a month for a bicycle, while you can find a working second hand one for about 100 euros.
Same goes for cars, I always save and buy second hand, I would never even consider borrowing for a car. Rather have an older model than debt.
But some people are different and don’t mind to pay extra for less hassle, like the bicycle thing. They replace it when you get a flat tire for example.
For some people that’s also what they like about renting a house, roof has a leak? Landlord has to fix it.
The utility of being able to borrow a use-value rather than needing to own it is a real thing, the form under capitalism is the problem, and is where exploitation and usury comes in. Better to have public transit, bikes included, at non-profit rates or even subsized to be free at point of service.
sure, however ownership still has a place in that public/borrowed goods typically have usage restrictions that make sense for the health of the device but limit its utility. such as using an SUV/truck to do yardwork or repurposing a bike as an elliptical.
Sure, renting vs owning is fully accomodated by public and personal ownership. Private usury is a drain on social wealth.
tf is “social wealth”?
The overall wealth in society. Usury produces absolutely nothing of value, and purely exists as a legal means to serve as a drain on resources. Landlords are such an egregious example of usury that they have been near universally hated for as long as they’ve existed, even by liberals.
As a fellow Dutch, you’re overpaying your secondhand bikes ;)
I mean you can always find cheaper, but 100 euros on markplaats will definitely get you a decent bike. I tried to sell my old one (we where moving and I didn’t want to take it with me). It still worked even the brakes and gears, although it was a bit rusty, anyway even for 15 euros almost no one showed up. Maybe it was too cheap.
I would go for the cheaper one and just bring it to the Ns bike repair for a checkup and let a specialist make it very good again. But a 100 bike on marktplaats will indeed net you a very decent and potentially even great bike
Also it’s not like a landlord hard zero risks
Then they should sell instead of renting.
In the Netherlands the laws got a lot stricter in the last few years (because we have a housing crisis) a side effect is that some landlords sold rental houses. The price too buy a house did not go down at all. But for anyone that wanted to rent a house it got much and much worse. There where people outbiding other people on rent. It got ridiculous.
like the option
Nobody likes renting. Nobody likes moving. If there wasn’t the premium cost from renting, there would be less pressure on these people to change their life arrangements.
When I was in college, renting made sense. I wasn’t going to be there but like two years. I wouldn’t have hardly accumulated any equity and had the pain of trying to sell at the end.
I’ve known people with like two year work assignments where renting made sense.
I cannot fathom it, but I have a coworker who swears by renting even though he hasn’t moved in years and has no intention to move ever. I think the ‘mantaining your own house is scary’ articles hit him hard and he’s now convinced that owning a household means you are somehow constantly having to fix things yourself for lots of money. So he may have been bamboozled, but certainly limited term living makes sense.
That’s not really true, one of my friends rented an apartment for about 2 years specifically because he didn’t knew if he wanted to live abroad or in a different city. Same goes for my sister she really didn’t want any long term commitments to have the freedom to go anywhere. She didn’t even wanted a 1 year phone contract.
Lots of young people rent because it gives them more freedom and less burden when they want to move.
Also about the premium cost, it really depends on the laws, like in the Netherlands after you have rented a house for over 1 year, the landlord can only raise the rent a certain percentage. Some people have been renting the same apartment for 30+ years and pay a ridiculous low rent.
It’s really interesting that rent can only raise by a small amount each year there. I’m rolling around in my head whether that would work in the US. What happens when the assessed value of the property raises over the years and causes the taxes to skyrocket? Do the landlords just sell the place in that case? I could see that being a good way to keep the market moving and give people a chance to enter owner-occupied homeownership.
You can sell, but you’ll get way less for a house that has a tenant, because the new owner can’t kick them out. I know someone that bought a house for a really great price, because it had a tenant that had lived there for 50 years or so. It was basically a 10 year waiting game until the tenant died (he was old when this person bought his place). But after that he sold the place for almost double what he paid. I do have to add that in those 10 years the housing market also went up a lot.
I want to add it might seem I like landlords, I don’t, but if we want to get mad at someone it should be the system we accepted as a people.
Brother, what Lemmy instance do you think this community is on? You aren’t going to get a good discussion with this topic here.
This is such a shit show of a post.
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Please use gender neutral inclusive language, instead of landlord, use the gender neutral term, landleech.
I was ready to hate on this post… but you right.
Seconding this motion
How do people still argue that landlords are useful and necessary?
People not understanding the actual cost of owning and maintaining a house is my only argument for landlords. Or if you maintain it yourself it’s a knowledge and time requirement.
Not saying landlords did a great job maintaining the rentals I’ve lived in. But there was definitely a point in my life where renting made more sense than owning a house.
We really need more control on rent prices so only high density housing is rentable. Or something, I don’t have answers for why my shitty house is worth 70% more than it was 5 years ago.
My housing coop charges 38% market rate rent, maintains the common area, has a property manager, and provides units fridge/stove/furnace/AC, on 46 three bedroom townhouses.
So either landlords are wildly inefficient with their expenses, or they are taking a crazy margin over their operating expenses.
Right, I’m not arguing that landlords are good. They seem to be a symptom of a system set up to encourage their shitty behavior.
I do wonder if a housing co-op is protected by law in some way. Or more likely it relies on a few people having good intentions who are running it. A housing co-op with no intent of profiting, ever, would be a good system imo.
Well yeah that’s where I live.
There are regional housing federations that deal with helping the governance of these organizations https://www.housinginternational.coop/members/co-operative-housing-federation-of-canada/
These are all non-profits, that have bylaws governing them. If there’s a weird situation the coop can go into receivership and a new legal board established to resolve those problems.
There are companies that would do the maintenance for you, so I think if that was your concern, you could roll the dice with those while still actually owning the house.
But I will say if you aren’t going to be somewhere more than 2 years anyway (university or a work assignment), renting could make sense.
You don’t need a Lord to maintain a property though. That is the function of a superintendent, which is a role small landlords sometimes assume, and yes that is a job that should be compensated.
But it has nothing to do with owning and rentseeking.
By being landlords or personally knowing landlords.
My parents own multiple rental properties and completely straight face told me it’s a charity cause they rent to people who can’t afford homes.
Meanwhile I’m engaging with my mutual aid group every week handing out about 400 meals, and survival gear for people who can’t afford anything.
Glad their fucking charity has turned enough profit to pay off the rentals, their main home, and their vacation spot though. /s
If they’re making profit, how in the world can they possibly think it’s charity?
The people saying that are usually hoping to become landlords themselves.
I just found an article (from 1955) by my grandma where she argued that she prefers renting over building a house because she has more freedom that way. She can move more easily because she doesn’t have to find a buyer for her house, she doesn’t have to worry about something breaking because that’s on the landlord to fix and she doesn’t have to go into debt to live somewhere.
As far as I know she never owned a home, always rented. But all her kids bought houses.
Sure, but it sounds like she’s never been evicted for no reason.
And her rent probably didn’t take 100 hours of labor a month.
That does sound like a regulation problem in the capitalist hellacape that is the USA more than anything. I live in The Netherlands and evicting someone here is very difficult. A landlord needs to make his case in front of a judge and everything. There’s one reason with which they can evict a tenant with a bit more ease and that’s to use the property themselves, but they need to prove why they need it all of a sudden. And even then they need to pay the tenant roundabouts €7000 to help with the move.
I had a coworker liked that. He enjoyed renting because it meant having fewer responsibilities.
I disagreed, and countered that renting means being more dependent on somebody else. Some landlords are excellent at responding to repair calls, but there are so many more that will leave you hanging for an indetermined amount of time, while leaks continue or appliances break. Personally, I’d rather not have the quality of life in my own home be dependent on someone who doesn’t really care about me.
Sadly, I don’t have much of a choice. I would prefer being able to pick my own repair people or just fix simple things myself. Alas, like so many others, I work full time but remain stuck in the rent trap. So much for freedom.
One of my coworkers said the same thing. After the third time they were forced to move they caved and bought a condo.
One of my big concerns is that access to psychological benefits of keeping a pet gets to be gatekept by the whims of someone else.
I’m also that coworker. Bought a 1995 build house in 2013, and sold it last year. Holy cost of maintenance. Roof, foundation, HVAC, plumbing, gutters, siding. We upgraded the windows too, so that was a choice, but nothing else was. Didn’t have money for professional interior upgrades because we were maintaining the structure itself instead.
If I ever buy a house ever again, it will be a condo so I’m only responsible for the INSIDE. As of right now, after all that, I’m happy renting. I’m so disinterested with painting and whatnot, that it doesn’t bug me to have white walls.
I do agree that the pet situation sucks though. We have 2 “aggressive breeds” that were strays we picked up off the street years ago (2016 and 2020), a Pit mix and a Dobie mix. Finding someone to rent to us with those was a chore. And for the few years we rented out our home (military. Lived in it while we were stationed there, rented it out for a few years, moved back in when we returned to the same duty station), we didn’t have a breed restriction.
We’re about to move across the country again, and I’m STOKED to be moving into an apartment. Rn we’re renting a SFH and it has been so nice knowing that money we had saved up isnt about to disappear because the water heater broke or whatever.
FYI: You might “only” be responsible for what is inside your condo but you are 100% on the hook for the costs external to your unit.
Surfside in Miami has forced all of the Condos to re-imagine their finances. Some units are being hit with $100,000 Special Assessments to repair the foundation, or facade, or just keep sufficient balance. There is no way out of this except to sell. They can charge you whatever they want, whenever they want.
Also “external” problems are also yours. One of the 5 units above yours flood into yours? That’s a civil problem between you and the whichever unit it is. Good luck finding them, and getting your money. Even if you get it. You still have to deal with the trouble.
Had condo suffer water damage 11 times in 8 years due to various reasons caused by units above. Basically on your own. Condo board is not getting involved. You get all the problems of someone else’s lack of maintenance, and none of the benefits of your own maintenance.
Condo Fees went from $110/month to $930/month because ‘fuck me’ I guess. No control over that either. You can petition the board but it’s full of old nosy fucks.
Oof, glad I read this so we know what questions to ask/red flags to look out for if we ever do pull the trigger on purchasing a condo!
COA fees going from $110 to $930 is fucking wildly crazy work. Did they at least tell you WHY it shot up like that?
And its also crazy that special assessments cab be billed for that high per unit. We’d be fucked! I thought the point of paying COA fees each month was supposed to spread the cost of maintenance around/ensure there are savings in the bank to cover major repairs!
Either the fees didn’t jump straight to $930 from $110 or the person didn’t do due diligence in reviewing the condo’s budget before they bought.
They kinda are necessary, given how they’re the byproduct of capitalism’s private property model and its commodification.
You could technically remove them by having the state manage all the housing, but that’s overly idealistic given how that’d go against the ruling class interests which would cause heavy lobbying by big landowners. It would also make the state a monopoly landowner which would have its own implications.
In other words, they’re necessary not because they’re useful, but because of how dogshit the system is.
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People? Like IRL? I’ve only ever seen it happen online.
And then they raise rent. For what? They haven’t upgraded anything. They haven’t added any of that value to the property. Every year the house gets older. Cars lose value every year even if you maintain it perfectly.
The land is what’s gaining value, not the structure on it
friend bought a house and was super excited about it. it cost her a pretty penny.
It had black mold and almost killed her children. The landlord claimed they had no idea (they did)
they left (sold the house) for more than what she paid for. This was in California, the housing market is completely and utterly f****
Bought a house, but there was a landlord?
yeah typically when you buy a house you get it from a landlord…
do you think houses are sold on amazon?
Based on my experience, a house on the market is usally being sold by someone who lived in it. The seller being a landlord is plausible, but I’d usually just generically refer to that party as ‘the seller’.
Landlords tend to hold on to their revenue streams harder than a person holds on to their own residence.
where does the person move to then after selling the house they live in? could it be…they have another house thus being a landlord?
you are right on the second part, though.
Usually they have moved into their new home and have their uninhabited house on the market trying to get rid of it.
Maybe I’m missing implication in another culture, but around me landlord specifically refers to someone owning a home that is being actively rented/leased by another. If you haven’t had tenants, you aren’t considered a landlord
They probably bought it from someone who previously had rented it out.
That is just patently untrue.
I’m not a landlord but the taxes go up every single year. Home insurance goes up every single year. Both often by a lot. Compared to 2019 my taxes are up 45% and my home insurance is up 500%.
The land value is up purely because they ain’t making any more of it.
The cost to repair everything goes up every year. A part of my washing machine broke again. Part was $20 in 2017. Part was $60 4 months ago. Post Tarifs it will probably be closer to $100. Nevermind the labor if I can’t DIY.
Plenty of reasons for costs to go up each year.
Real question is :
Why the fuck aren’t the wages going up?
If that too kept up with inflation since the 1970s then we’d all be happier then pigs in shit.
And then they try to fuck you over when you leave the place by pinning all the costs of normal dilapidation on you. Fortunately where I live the law forbids it but it doesn’t stop them from trying every time.
Good tenants make the neighborhood more desirable. So the rent being raised is a way to punish good Tennant, and steal their hard earn benefit from their existential labour.
If there were only a set number of cars available and creating more was prohibitively expensive, cars would appreciate in value as well.
And to be clear, I’m not talking about the house; building more of those is expensive, but doable. It’s building more land that’s the tricky part
When I did a vacation in Sri Lanka our guide told us some cars appreciated in price because the government increased (I believe it was that) import taxes.
Edit: Appreciation due to car scarcity
Same happened everywhere during covid.
It’s mind-bending that a car now cost what a new house cost, when I was a kid.
The cost of goods should go up. It is a healthy sign of the economy. The fact that wages don’t is the problem.
(This was way after covid).
If I remember it correctly, the government is heavily restricting import of foreign brands.
Our guide drove an imported japanese EV.
Hey, those buildings and apartments aren’t gonna rent themselves! /s
