[blackshoe]

PassedOut, on 2013-December-07, 08:09, said:

Many years ago, I took as a tenant in the first rental property I ever bought (a triplex) a single mother with subsidized rent. I found that the system worked well. I had to make sure that the building met code and was well-maintained, with regular inspections. The tenant paid the government a portion of the rent (I don't know how much) and the government sent me a check for the full rent each month. So I got normal rent and the tenant got a nice place to raise her children at a bargain. In fact, she was a great tenant, and took very good care of the place.

This kind of thing seems like it would work well, even as leery as I am about welfare statism.

[Vampyr]

blackshoe, on 2013-December-07, 19:11, said:

This kind of thing seems like it would work well, even as leery as I am about welfare statism.

This is the system here, and it doesn't work very well at all.

[blackshoe]

Vampyr, on 2013-December-07, 20:03, said:

This is the system here, and it doesn't work very well at all.

Okay, what did I miss?

[PassedOut]

blackshoe, on 2013-December-08, 12:43, said:

Okay, what did I miss?

Yes, I'm wondering too. Worked fine for me and for my tenant, and it seems like a good idea for children to grow up in a nice, well-kept home.

[Vampyr]

PassedOut, on 2013-December-08, 15:50, said:

Yes, I'm wondering too. Worked fine for me and for my tenant, and it seems like a good idea for children to grow up in a nice, well-kept home.

I don't want to get into it, but I'll just say that council estates are usually hellholes of crime and drugs, and if you let your private property be rented out through the council it is almost a guarantee that it will be trashed.

[kenberg]

Oh yes, we have these large areas of subsidized housing here as well. You don't want to live in them. Or walk through them. But I am thinking that Passed had a different experience. Having a family in with other families, the difference being that some of one family's rent is being subsidized, is a lot more hopeful. I have mentioned in other places that in the 1940s my parents rented out (no subsidy other than my parents, this was the 40s!) the top floor of our house (a small house, the top floor is smaller) to a mother and her two daughters. It worked, at least it reasonably well worked.

Of course I am largely ignorant of the magnitude of the problem today. Perhaps it is just too large. But a family having troubles, put into a functioning neighborhood and helped to survive there, is a very good approach.

[Vampyr]

kenberg, on 2013-December-08, 16:44, said:

Having a family in with other families, the difference being that some of one family's rent is being subsidized, is a lot more hopeful.

This is the way it is when private homes are rented through the council -- you have a rental property in a normal area, and you rent it to the council, who pay you a market rent, and the tenant pays a lower rent to the council.

My friend has such an apartment next door. The tenants are a woman and her child, but the boyfriend is there when he is not in jail; the woman vacillates between having a restraining order against him and getting back together. The police are always being called for one reason or another. He even steals other people's mail in case it has money in it.

This is not unusual. Another problem is that people who choose to have lots of kids and no jobs get houses that working people can only dream of living in, in areas that are totally out of reach for almost everybody. There was a story in the paper recently about a woman on benefits who received a huge house in the country for her and her children, and who is thinking about buying a second pony.

[PassedOut]

Vampyr, on 2013-December-08, 17:03, said:

This is the way it is when private homes are rented through the council -- you have a rental property in a normal area, and you rent it to the council, who pay you a market rent, and the tenant pays a lower rent to the council.

Not exactly. I did not rent to the government, but to the woman herself, after I interviewed her and was pretty sure that she meant what she said. Her old place was in an unsafe neighborhood, and she very much wanted take her kids to a better place. This was a three-family place, and she was a fine tenant. If she had caused trouble, I'd have had her evicted.

I did have an occasional bad tenant back in the day, but none of them had subsidized rent.