Tag: rent

Community Tales

Community

Part 1

A couple of weeks ago, I got up one morning, went dowstairs to get some coffee and wake up. Dad, since he’s been staying here, normally gets up before me (at least he did before I started working again) and makes a pot of coffee. Dad was sitting at the desk where we put his iMac and he was scrolling through Yahoo! news or Facebook or something.

A cherry turnover on a plate next to a coffee mug in the shape of BB-8 from Star Wars. Both are sitting on a computer desk. In the background on the desk are a pair of computer speakers, the arms for a computer monitor, a USB hub with cables coming out of it, and a stack of Oregon Megabucks lottery tickets.
A perfectly normal breakfast: cherry turnover and coffee in the shape of BB-8.

I made my coffee drink. I take my 20 oz. BB-8 coffee mug and add about 2 ounces of half-and-half, 2 ounces of chai concentrate, and two tablespoons of chocolate syrup then fill the rest of it with brewed coffee. I call it, “coffee”. Then I walked over to where dad was sitting and scrolling. Took a look outside, saw grey but no rain.

“Another gray day,” I said.

“Yeah, where’s our sun at?” dad said. He shifted in his seat a bit. “Had to go out front for a smoke.” My apartment, a townhouse, has a back patio where he normally goes to smoke, but if it’s raining, he goes out front because the overhang usually protects him from the rain better.

“Oh? But it’s not raining.”

“I just wanted to see if Glasses [nicknamed for her privacy] was out there.” Dad is, despite his age, an incorrigible flirt, and he’s been talking to the woman who lives next door. Just small talk, I’m sure, but he’s more extroverted than I am, so he likes talking to people, especially women. He made a sound halfway between a grunt and a chuckle that indicated to me, embarassment. “She’s got an eviction notice on her door.”

My stomach sank. I’ve been there. I’ve had to deal with no money and rising debts. I was kinda going through that now, actually; if it wasn’t for dad’s help, I would be a month or two behind in rent myself. This story is before I landed my job, when I was still hunting. My empathy for my neighbor kicked in, hard. I carefully opened my front door, saw no one was out there, cracked open the screen, looked to my right. Sure enough, a large legal paper was taped to her door.

She’s a single mom, with a teenage-ish daughter who may or may not work. I think Glasses works, not sure. I am also well aware that just having a job does not mean someone can pay the bills, especially the rent. I went back inside.

“That sucks,” I said. Dad grunted again in agreement. I wondered what he was thinking. I didn’t think he would be inclined to help her out, though he certainly could if he wanted to. I wouldn’t judge. He’s been helping me and I appreciate it immensely. I’m also quite aware that when I was much younger, he would have probably been against providing me with any kind of financial help. But people change over the years.

When I was a kid, for various reasons related to my probable neurodivergence as well as incuriosity about the world and general distaste for doing irrational things like labor, I did not like or want to work at all. Now, while I still hate doing irrational things for irrational people, I also know that I need to do a certain amount of it so I can continue to live indoors and eat food I didn’t pick out of the trash. Fucking capitalism. And maybe dad feels better about helping me when he knows I’m doing my best to helpl myself?

Glasses, though. Regardless of her circumstances, I wouldn’t wish the anxiety of possible eviction on anyone. If the sheriffs’ deputies come, I pledged to stand in their way.

Profiting from Human Suffering

Politics

The property management company that manages the apartment I live in raised my rent this year. Previously I was paying $1373 a month for a 2 bedroom, 1 1/2 bath two story townhouse in far outer Southeast Portland; after the raise it’s $1508/month; essentially a 10% increase, $135/month more. The last time my rent was raised was April 2022, when it went from $1250 to $1373, another 10% increase.

I am not a researcher, so I tried some google searches to see how the cost of living has increased in the Portland, OR area over the past four or five years, but google is useless now, full of crap results that are there because search is no longer a core feature of Google; advertising and artifically-generated plaigarism has taken the top priority. But I do know it’s gone up; it’s gone up everywhere in the US, by, like, a lot. And I can find that Portland currently has a cost of living index that’s almost 25% over the average for the rest of country. It’s expensive to live here, even more expensive here than a lot of other places.

And I have to point out that the cost of living index is calculated on prices for real things. The index is based on things like rent, utilities, groceries, gas; real things everyone needs to buy in order to, y’know, live. Saying “the rent has gone up because the cost of living has gone up” is putting the cart before the horse. Raising the rent has the direct effect of increasing the cost we all pay for living.

There’s another direct effect of increasing rent. Every time average rent goes up in an area, there’s a marked and measurable increase in homelessness. That makes sense, right? Don’t sit there and tell me that homeless people are just lazy and don’t want to work and are a drain on society, because none of that is true. People are homeless because they can’t afford housing. And they can’t afford housing because we treat housing like a reward. It’s not a reward. It’s a fucking human right recognized by nearly every nation on earth by way of the United Nations; a right ignored by the bully on the block, the United States, because our oligarchs can’t hoard our wealth if we don’t pay them for something that should be every human’s birthright.

I wonder if the people who work in the property management company that manages my apartment complex make that connection when they drive to and from work, past the encampments and crumbling motorhomes and cars parked surrounded by the trappings of people trying and often failing to live their lives. Do you think they realize that raising rent for me and my neighbors directly results in more homeless people? I know it nearly put me out on the streets; luckily I have family to fall back on for now, and I (probably) have skills that an employer will need and hopefully eventually agree to pay me to use on their behalf.

If they do, I hope they feel shame, at the very least. It won’t stop them from increasing rents, not soon. The sickness of feeling entitled to make a profit off of things human beings will die without is endemic to our society and it would take a lot of long-term effort (and probably violent protests, if past human rights fights are any indication) to alter that entitlement. But here’s the thing: the people that work for the property management company might not have been the ones to decide to raise the rent, and they might not have picked the amount the rents go up. They might have offloaded that decision to… an algortithm. They get to keep their hands clean, and at least one company, RealPage, can make a profit by charging profit-making landlords for the service of abstracting their profit-taking. This is the horrible cyberpunk dystopian future I read about back in the ’80s.

Haha, sigh.