Washtenaw County to Issue Stay at Home Order for M Students
October 20th, 2020 at 2:13 PM ^
I own two UM off campus rental houses and the students in both of them are self-isolating right now.
Not surprised to see this. And yes I know that 99.9% of the students will be fine but there are plenty of older folks that live in Ann Arbor as well - not to mention the outer circles of the spread hitting all facets of society.
October 20th, 2020 at 2:53 PM ^
The people upvoting you have clearly never lived in privately owned off-campus housing. In fact, all off-campus rental-property owners should be categorically barred from ever receiving upvotes.
October 20th, 2020 at 3:03 PM ^
I paid 500 a month for my off-campus housing residence my last couple years at U-M. Much, much less than I paid and would have paid on campus.
October 20th, 2020 at 3:08 PM ^
Tough crowd downvoting you, maybe you should have included that "/s"?
October 20th, 2020 at 3:37 PM ^
Possibly. Though if I'm being honest, I'm not sure how sarcastic of a remark it was. I made myself a target with the categorical comment because, of course, generalization is bad. For that, I'll take my lumps.
My experience was that off-campus in AA was price-gougingly expensive, in crap condition, and insanely difficult to come across, especially since I was paying my own way. Landlords were generally unresponsive to even basic issues. (3 weeks without hot water for example, hole in a closet floor in a different house in a different year). Ended upon in a house with a lot of roommates that provided the owner at least 10k per month in rental income for something that should have been condemned. And that was the cheap option.
So, downvote away. "I'm still standing here screaming 'Fuck the Free World.'"
October 20th, 2020 at 3:43 PM ^
Any time someone takes the side of the landlord, you pretty much know you can stop listening to them.
This really should be the default position of everyone who isn't a landlord, and I'm honestly surprised every time I see grown-ass adults sticking up for them. It's absolutely wild.
October 20th, 2020 at 4:07 PM ^
Disagree. I chose the University of Michigan so I could be a landlord.
/Sarcasm? Actually not sure.
October 20th, 2020 at 4:32 PM ^
Just think how much more you would have gotten out of your education if you'd gone with the intent of bettering yourself and finding a profession.
October 20th, 2020 at 5:09 PM ^
Investing in income producing is not a profession? Building equity and producing a return sounds like every damn business owner I know.
October 20th, 2020 at 5:16 PM ^
I'll stick with Adam Smith on this one.
“the landlords…love to reap where they have never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come…to have an additional price fixed upon them.”
October 20th, 2020 at 5:26 PM ^
Wouldn’t hurt to educate yourself and form your own opinion
October 20th, 2020 at 5:31 PM ^
And here I thought reading and studying the work of great thinkers was doing that.
But I guess if your ultimate goal is to belong to the leisure class you're not going to be a fan of Adam Smith.
October 20th, 2020 at 5:48 PM ^
You can do both without forming a division or biases. Your LL maybe unresponsive or negligent, and you have every right to voice your frustration. But don’t categorize others for investing in real estate to make a buck. You have a rights to take action against your landlord: small claims court, file a claim with the city etc.
October 20th, 2020 at 6:01 PM ^
Well no. I'm a fan of Karl Marx and I believe that all wealth is ultimately derived from labor. To that point, I've been working my ass off ever since I got out of grad school so I could buy our single commercial income property. And while I admit that there is inherent inequity in any system where housing is not a fundamental human right, I do not think that the UNHCR is going to call us to testify on how much we charge the LLC that rents our property...
October 20th, 2020 at 7:03 PM ^
Smith spoke very broadly about "rent" to include owners of natural resources who came about them by chance.
It's not necessarily an apt comparison.
October 20th, 2020 at 7:03 PM ^
Smith spoke very broadly about "rent" to include owners of natural resources who came about them by chance.
It's not necessarily an apt comparison.
October 20th, 2020 at 10:21 PM ^
He/they may not have rec'd the solid classical education that the UM once offered.
October 20th, 2020 at 4:08 PM ^
In my 20’s I rented in Chicago and NYC and found it better value to rent from a private landlord than an apartment building.
I don’t understand why you would generalize that all landlords should be viewed in a bad light.
October 20th, 2020 at 4:16 PM ^
My take was limited to off-campus college housing in AA. Since you bring up rental properties in urban areas, I'm curious whether your rentals in Chicago or NYC were subject to rent-control ordinances?
October 20th, 2020 at 4:47 PM ^
No they were not.
I didn’t edit my comment. Hard to tell on mobile, but are you talking to me?
October 20th, 2020 at 4:57 PM ^
I was, and it must be getting late in the day, because I reread your post and read it as something completely different. I'll remove my edit.
October 21st, 2020 at 4:02 PM ^
Have you seen the mod action sticky? Shop smart uses that place as his/her own personal attack/cancel thread on anyone that even remotely disagrees with him/her. I would have been far more surprised if he/she DIDN'T make sweeping generalizations and mindless attacks on groups of people.
October 20th, 2020 at 5:19 PM ^
I don't get this, are you against the concept of property ownership or just saying that all landlords are assholes?
If you are against property ownership, that is pretty weird and you are not worth talking to.
If you are just flame throwing and trying to get the point across that many landlords are assholes, I can get behind that.
October 20th, 2020 at 5:35 PM ^
I can't follow the lines on the conversation when it gets this big, so I'll answer in case you were asking me.
Landlords are assholes. Especially landlords in college towns. Cramming as many people as legally possible, the legality of which they've stretched by helping to elect their peers into local government, and doing the bare minimum in maintenance is not something we should celebrate.
When those people try to turn owning a couple of houses into a profession, we immediately see an increase in rents, an increase in blight, and downturn in civic engagement. I should know, because I used to be a Realtor to assholes like that, and learned first-hand how awful so many of them are.
October 20th, 2020 at 7:43 PM ^
Say the word and I will pay for your plane ticket to start a new life in a country that does things better.
Also, you might want to read Smith again. In those times, landlord didn't mean "dude who owned the off-campus house."
October 21st, 2020 at 4:43 AM ^
Unless you're also going to get him a job offer and a visa, cram it.
October 21st, 2020 at 12:35 PM ^
Will you pay to move his entire family too? Get them all good housing, jobs, and visas? As if “just move” is a legitimate option for most. Why don’t YOU just move? I’ll pay for YOUR plane ticket. This is a democracy and laws can change. If you don’t like that, tough luck.
Funny you invoke Adam Smith. Smith did not coin the term capitalism, nor did he believe in unfettered free markets and think that taxation is theft. In Smith’s day, there were plenty of poor landlords with small property holdings. Land was certainly distributed unevenly, which was a major factor contributing to the growth of British colonization. Starting colonies on arbitrarily claimed land where you displace the native inhabitants is out of fashion these days, and since all the land on earth is otherwise accounted for, it’s more than a little unfair to invoke a conservative sentiment like “if you do it like it here, leave”. A much more just and sensible option is to advocate for a land-value tax, i.e. a tax on the value of a property that stems from its location (i.e. what the property would sell for if it were an empty lot).
October 20th, 2020 at 6:00 PM ^
People don’t seem to understand that being a landlord is just a business, like being a small business owner, stock investor, or employee for another owner. It’s not all rich misers looking down at others. Some of them are people who don’t make much money and owning a property that nets a little income beyond the mortgage is a small part of it that keeps them above water. For others, it’s their only retirement income.
The stigma against real estate owners is antiquated and needs to go. Plus, it can be a tough business when you have people who don’t pay regularly and/or abuse a place you invested your only investment capital in. Regardless, there are “small“ landlords who serve people quickly and are nowhere near the big business stereotype most people think of.
October 20th, 2020 at 3:45 PM ^
If you would have stayed away from calling everyone who owns rental property, including the guy posting, scum, I would have been fine with it. I had 3 different off-campus housing experiences, overpaid, never got my security deposit back for bullshit reasons, and lived in shitty houses.
But over generalization IS bad. So you get what you get.
October 20th, 2020 at 4:03 PM ^
Hey sounds like we might have shared the same off-campus rental!
Oh wait nvm, all the off campus rentals make the House of Usher sound like a pleasant summer cottage. I've seen trap houses in Detroit's east side that are kept in better repair.
October 20th, 2020 at 5:12 PM ^
You are stuck in the past - AA off campus housing is nothing like that now.
UM now has luxury off campus living with multiple high end condo buildings that look more like Google HQ than anything you would recognize as off campus housing. Some of the new buildings have pools, spas, gyms, study areas, computer labs, cafes, decks, and tanning beds. You name it - they have it.
The "old dumpy" buildings that those of us remember from the past either get rented dirt cheap or sit empty these days.
My houses are in the middle - not luxury but fantastic location, reasonably priced (right by the stadium) and in good condition (given that they are 100 years old - they look great). I have tailgated with my tenants a couple of times and not only do they get party in their yard, they pick up $100-200 for parking cars each game. The current tenants in my house on Granger have been there for 3 years - with only one person turning over (he graduated). They are obviously very happy staying there or else there are plenty of other options available.
I would honestly live in one of my houses with my wife once our kids are grown up.
October 20th, 2020 at 5:40 PM ^
I was at Granger & White St for a couple years. #CoolStoryBro
October 20th, 2020 at 5:40 PM ^
I rented a 5 BR house from a private landlord off Packard near E Univ for $525/month. $105/month each. In today's dollars that would be $1875/month, or $375/month each. Other than the heating oil furnace it was not a bad place.
October 21st, 2020 at 4:47 AM ^
Ann Arbor landlords are not legally required to de-ice their parking lots in the winter, and that tells you everything you need to know about how totally fucked off-campus renters are.
October 21st, 2020 at 9:58 AM ^
Indeed categorical statements are likely to lead to downvotes.
As someone that is paying $1k per month for off campus housing right now for my daughter who is currently living on Hill St with 5 other girls, it's definitely gouging, but at the same time, the property so far has been well managed. OTOH, IMO getting gouged by the university for being out of state is way more egregious, especially now that classes are nearly all online. So, as a junior, she could have stayed home and saved us the housing costs, but I wouldn't have traded my years in A2 for anything and would hate to deprive her of the same.
FWIW, our landlord has been very good, and I don't blame him for taking advantage of the free market.
October 21st, 2020 at 7:05 PM ^
You’re not being gouged because the student is from out of state. The school is designed to prioritize kids from Michigan.
October 22nd, 2020 at 11:52 AM ^
As someone that is paying $1k per month for off campus housing right now for my daughter who is currently living on Hill St with 5 other girls, it's definitely gouging, but at the same time, the property so far has been well managed.
I'm not sure if things were the same (or roughly equivalent) back when I was there, but there's a noticeable difference in your daughter's situation and mine. I paid roughly the same, with more people, in a poorly-managed dump. But I paid it. Not my mom or dad. (Good on you btw). So I wonder if the market is priced with the expectation that mommy and daddy are footing the bill rather than some student on what is essentially a fixed income eating ramen four nights per week.
October 20th, 2020 at 3:19 PM ^
That'll show'em!!
October 20th, 2020 at 3:19 PM ^
Ace, is that you?
October 20th, 2020 at 3:24 PM ^
Han: The evil property investor. How dare someone make a return on their investment. Just selfish
October 21st, 2020 at 12:42 AM ^
I lived off-campus the entire time I was a student. The owner of the house treated us quite well, rooms were far less expensive than the dorms, and it was a short walk to classes. We could even, if we asked, help offset some of the rent by helping paint and other minor renovation work. Maybe it was the exception, but none of my friends at UM ever seemed unhappy with their landlords and those in the dorms (especially when they started with those "converted triples") hoped their parents would let them move to off-campus housing. Our biggest issue was parking.
October 20th, 2020 at 3:12 PM ^
It's actually 99.999%. There have been 2 confirmed COVID deaths from students.
October 20th, 2020 at 3:22 PM ^
UM students?
October 20th, 2020 at 3:59 PM ^
You can’t count my boy Blue! That was clearly to much excitement at one time.
October 20th, 2020 at 3:31 PM ^
Seems like a lot to me
October 20th, 2020 at 5:07 PM ^
https://www.mlive.com/coronavirus/2020/10/2-week-stay-in-place-order-issued-by-health-department-for-university-of-michigan-students.html
Per this Mlive piece 61% of the County cases are from U of M and Washtenaw County has been upgraded to a more serious level of cases by the State. This is exactly what many of us who live in this town have feared from the beginning when Michigan decided to brings students back on campus. It was a money grab pure and simple. MSU in this case got it right but not us.
So much for Michigan doing the right thing. If there was ever a case to be made to defer personal attendance until 2021 this was it. With any luck, we will have a vaccine available in the not too distant future and for many of us, life will resume some sense of normalcy. Good old Dr. Schlissel. Like the Daily has said more than once, we would be better off with someone else at the helm.
October 20th, 2020 at 3:26 PM ^
#BRINGBACKOPPONENTWATCH
October 20th, 2020 at 4:58 PM ^
Eat shit, parasite.
October 20th, 2020 at 2:13 PM ^
Perhaps the B1G positivity rules are still vague enough to allow the players to play on Saturday. They have been so remarkably disciplined - I would hate to see them lose the season due to the spread of the virus amongst their classmates who are not as cautious as them.