Slashdot Mirror

You don't want a very wealthy tenant - you want one rich enough to pay the bills, poor enough not to be able to lawyer up if you decide to raise their rent or evict.

This is strange advice. You want a *good* tenant, regardless of ability to "lawyer up" and helps if that person has shared connections (as they will be burning more bridges than just with you if they go nuclear).

A good tenant is happy to keep the place clean and is not shady. A more affluent tenant is great because they're more worried about their image and less likely to be forced to sub-sublet the place (AirBnB) or deal drugs/etc.

You have far more candidates if you a) leave a bit on the table and offer good tenants perks like a slightly lower rent and b) verbally or contractually limited rent raises.

I've actually used AirBnB from both sides, and although I'd agree it needs some more regulation I think it can be a good thing.

The first time, I got a few weeks in a nice room in a city I could never afford to stay in, and my host got some much-needed rental income.

Second time around I was let down by a flatmate leaving suddenly and without paying their back rent, and was able to make enough renting out their room for a couple of weekends to cover me until I could get someone in legitimately. I was technically in violation of my lease doing that, and I felt kind of bad about it, but the alternative was not paying rent myself.

Both examples are of rooms in a house shared with the occupier; I think it's an important distinction. There should be a mechanism to short-term-sublet the property you live in - the current situation is that it's generally legal to let someone stay with you, so long as they don't pay you, which is just stupid and unenforceable. It should be a simple matter to rent out a spare room; AirBnB helps with the logistics, but it would be nice for both parties to have legal clarity regarding the arrangements.

On the other hand, people who buy up property just to AirBnB it should have to have the same permits and zoning as other commercial businesses. There are places in some cities where entire blocks of flats have just been subdivided into slum-level housing and let out at a huge margin. It's not a spare room at that point; it's a business, and should be treated like one.

They already get a cut, its the rent they are already getting paid.

If they want a 'cut' of the Air BNB revenue than they should have put the property on AirBNB themselves, and dealt with the risk of not having a solid income that doesn't depend on random people booking the property like the person who is currently paying you ... even if no one bothers to rent from AirBNB.

Any land lord that think they get more needs to be taken out back and shot in the face repeatedly, along with the cable and telecom people who pull this same sort of shit.

YOU GOT PAID WHEN YOU RENTED THE PROPERTY THE FIRST TIME ASSHOLES, FUCK OFF.

Charge more for the property or put no-sublet clause in the lease. You made your bed, fucking sleep in it.

Not necessarily.

Suppose rent controls force landlords to rent property out at below-market rates? Is it "fair" that a tenant can then sublet at market rates - even if the lease specifically prevents subletting?

This is not a simple situation.

PS - you come across as someone who has never been responsible for anything in your entire life.

They already get a cut, its the rent they are already getting paid.

If they want a 'cut' of the Air BNB revenue than they should have put the property on AirBNB themselves, and dealt with the risk of not having a solid income that doesn't depend on random people booking the property like the person who is currently paying you ... even if no one bothers to rent from AirBNB.

Any land lord that think they get more needs to be taken out back and shot in the face repeatedly, along with the cable and telecom people who pull this same sort of shit.

YOU GOT PAID WHEN YOU RENTED THE PROPERTY THE FIRST TIME ASSHOLES, FUCK OFF.

Charge more for the property or put no-sublet clause in the lease. You made your bed, fucking sleep in it.

I have an apartment. I am legally prevented from charging "market value" for my property due to rent control laws, especially for long term residents.

Now you happen to be a tenant and you got a really sweet deal on an apartment. However, because you're an asshole, you decide to exploit the difference between what I actually charge you and what the market could actually bear*. And now you're bitching about my actions, which are limited by the law with which I must abide by to do business in the location? Nevermind the no-subletting clause in the contract *you* signed. Because, fuck you, I'm getting mine.

Jesus fucking christ.

Self-entitlement is strong in this one.

In short, if you're going to hack the code, AND if you're going to lurk for upwards of a decade in order to be recognized by the community as sentient so that you can re-contribute your changes, then you will prefer today's Open Source ecosystem.

If you are on a tight budget and you are willing to bend your processes like taffy around infrastructure that hackers thought would be a good idea years ago and then forgot to cook it all the way through, or support as the code began to age, then you'll eke by on Open Source. If you lack respect for IP, you might also mix in some pirated copies of closed source software.

If you fear IP, and/or have the money to sink into software then you are generally going to buy either closed source, or enterprise licensed software. Because your money acts like a class equalizer, you don't have to bear the brunt of financing a feature that millions of people (who aren't hackers) already want. Instead, authors who want your money are actively trying to guess what you would like in order to sell to you and millions who share your (common, probably easy to divine) preferences.

More Open Source communities really need to grow a bit of sophistication and learn to reward hackers for meeting aggregate needs in order to end the cycle of circle-jerk that's asphyxiating the industry. There will never be a "Year of the Linux Desktop" until the needs of common Desktop users are actually satisfied by a Linux distribution.

I've seen "code bounties" (normally only offered by medium to large businesses) and I've seen bug/feature trackers with voting mechanisms (where the developers pan straightforward fixes years old with more votes than all other entries combined), but I haven't yet seen these concepts combined: where users could donate money into separate code bounty pots to clarify their aggregate interest in fixing specific non-critical bugs or implementing specific features. I think that sort of approach might make a big difference. Let the patcher and the community's governing body share the bounty by some split, to encourage actually accepting patches in favor of thumb-sitting. In case the feature becomes obsolesced by changes elsewhere, perhaps an Escrowed Assurance Contract would be the way to go?

Then you don't have to personally bribe some entrenched developer by paying him $100/hr to write every line of code, test, and sublet-bribe every other impacted task leader just to see (for example) GIMP get some feature everyone already wants and every other graphics package has had since the dawn of time. Non-RGB colorspaces, perhaps? Honest, I used these in Photoshop v2.5 in 1992, and Jasc Paintshop Pro v4 in 1995. Wouldn't it be great if Linux X11 (I've tried Redhat, Debian and Ubuntu over the past decade) allowed you to specify monitor sizes without hacking text files? Parallel service bootstrapping? You know, I've always wanted a tagged filesystem. I think I could rally support for one easier than I could just raise the needed funds by hand.

They typically have no idea what ads they're actually running - the ad-server operators buy space and time on the major page, then sublet that out to random people.

Best thing to do, based on limited correspondence with a website ads guy, is to contact the webmaster & let them know about the rogue ads, and then the site owner can block ads from the random sublet-ee in question.

Close, but no cig. Norway leads the tax league. But Sweden isn't that far behind. Compared to the U.S., you can expect lower salary and higher taxes. And stuff is more expensive to buy; a litre of gas is almost a US$, a pint of beer is roughly US$ 4 (incl. taxes). Accomodation is fairly expensive, and if you chose to live in Stockholm it could be close to impossible to find an apartment unless you're OK with third-hand-subletting out in the 'burbs.

He hasn't as far as I know had any funding or direct interest himself in 2-4 years. I spent 2-3 years following the seasteading project while looking into my own plans (I lean socialist, not libertarian. All the seasteading plans, including the independent Mariana project were basically 'land' based ponzi schemes that only worked if outside investors paid for development, and outside renters payed for upkeep. The 'initial investors' as it were had their whole business plan based around subletting the seastead and providing paid services to captive audiences. None of it was egalatarian or different from terrestrial based options, nor in fact all that different from the plans for Liberland.) That is part of why the project hasn't gone anywhere, 10-12 years on.

As far as Thiel goes, he was on-record around the time Trump became president backing away from his support for Seasteads and saying the legalities of them didn't look good. (They don't, UNCLOS specifically denies the claim of territory to floating entities, artificially constructed islands, etc.) The whole concept is so legally shaky without a flag of convenience based in a country with essentially no laws or reciprocation agreements that it won't make financial sense except as vacation homes for the ultra wealthy, or a commune for a bunch of middle class socialists following Woody Guthrie's 'This land is your land.' song. That is the platform itself is shared both in cost and upkeep and everyone has an equal share in its long term well being.

Did you read what you linked or just the title?

You can sublet for a max of 30 day, with a max 10% surcharge only if the place is furnished (plus a 10% surcharge from landlord), must maintain that as your primary residence, and need your landlords consent (which can't be unreasonably refused).

So yes, technically a rent-stabilized apartment can be sublet ... briefly. It cannot be perpetually used as a for-profit rental unit by the original tenant like many are doing. Also, that applies to rent-stabilized, NOT rent-controlled. Those cannot be sublet. Also, section 8 (subsidized housing) typically prohibits subletting.

You are entirely misinformed regarding the involvement of the police in tenant-landlord disputes.

Police only get involved in immediate life-safety (violence, fire, flood, etc.) or criminal (trespass, theft, violence, etc) situations. The Sheriff's department handles evictions, but only after a final court order directing them to do so. They have ZERO to do with reviewing evidence and determining anything.

If tenants stop paying rent, move in a few friends, AirBnB a couch or 5, and trash your apartment you have to take them to court. That's the ONLY legal means to evict them. Call the police all you want but there's basically nothing they can do unless they witness a crime or immediate life-safety issue.

The underlying (but of course they can't admit) reason behind this system is to make it much more difficult to illegally rent, sublet, or AirBnB apartments while also collecting evidence to prove the misuse in court should people persist. People are (generally) crying about privacy to protect and perpetuate their illegal activities.

Your right to privacy doesn't extend to breaking housing rules or laws. People seem to think privacy gives them this blanket right to hide illegal things and demand that everyone look the other way even when it's blatantly obvious what they're doing.

As someone living in NYC and dealing with the situation created by things like AirBnB and illegal rentals/illegal rents/rent stabilization or control/subsidies/and so on I'll share some insight:

First off, it's common for people to abuse low-income, subsidized, or stabilized rentals. Extremely common even. Some of that is borne of necessity - people living on a fixed income who simply cannot afford to live here and don't have any money (or ability for the elderly) to move. Much of it is greed though. NYC has 1/3 of the the entire countries low-income rental units. Many of those people AirBnB or sublet or similar to make substantial money (some low-income apartments literally go for under $100 a month vs. the $2-3000+ they'd rent for otherwise). Or you have planned communities of low-income people - not the city planning them, but whole communities who intentionally are low-income so and rig the system so they basically get all the apartments. Anyone who's gone through the jewish portion of williamsburg knows this. Amazing how their low-income apartment complexes are all jewish people (nothing against jewish people, but it's incredibly obvious they have taken over those buildings).

The system is heavily abused, flawed, and any kind of correction becomes a huge fight of 'but mah privasy' while landlords following rental rules are trying to not support someone's illegal rental business on their backs. That's not to say there aren't plenty of scumbag landlords of course.

I didn't mention subletting. The rent-stabilization rule in NY is not that "the people who were the original tenants under rent control still live in the apartment" as you state but rather that the original tenant(s) must be physically in that apartment for (1 + 365/2) days per year, every year. So it's a bit like being under house arrest except without having committed any crime beforehand.

If they are being illegally sublet then they are not "affordable." They are being sub-letted out at a profit, illegally, by the people who's rent is being controlled by the government.

If the people who were the original tenants under rent control still live in the apartment then the rent control is valid and they are allowed to stay at the low rent as the law intended.

A tenant can sublet their apartment, with the landlord's permission, and for a 10% fee. The tenant can not establish primary residence elsewhere - if they do, and the landlord can prove it, the lease can be broken.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/rent...

Keeping the information from law enforcement makes the whole system useless. If you find that your Tennant is violating the lease, subletting illegally, over occupying the property or what have you then you need to go to the police to have them evicted. The police will want evidence and the system provides that. This is almost certainly the exact use case the landlord has for installing the system, monitoring access to their property.

The tenants are living in rent-stabilized or rent-controlled buildings, which offer highly discounted rents. However, the tenants are required to use the discounted apartments as their primary residences. The city does not want tenants to turn around and sublet their apartments at market rates, and pocket the difference. So landlords have been installing cameras to see who is living in the apartments. The facial recognition system is another step in that direction.

Privacy is more important than any of that. I vote to throw everyone out of the airlock who disagrees.

The tenants are living in rent-stabilized or rent-controlled buildings, which offer highly discounted rents. However, the tenants are required to use the discounted apartments as their primary residences. The city does not want tenants to turn around and sublet their apartments at market rates, and pocket the difference. So landlords have been installing cameras to see who is living in the apartments. The facial recognition system is another step in that direction.

That would be a great way to evict the drug dealers and crooks who are subletting. Would also be good to keep out the German Shepherd that was an 8 lb dog when the lease was signed.

Just because "some people" are abusing some aspect of something, what does that actually justify in terms of infringing on the rights of all citizens? It's ~100% sure that not 100% of tenants are subletting!

You can't just say 'anything goes because some % of people are abusing AirBNB,' that's 100% retarded.