All Forum Posts by: Ruth C.

@Dave G.: Exactly. It looks a typical Big Tech unicorn/commercial enterprise harvesting information from visitors that could be sold to parties interested in exploiting this entire situation. There's nothing anywhere on the site that suggests that it's affiliated with any official government agency, and Wikipedia lists Fiscal Note (the company running Voter Voice) as a "a privately held software, data, and media company."

If you know who Robert Moses is and if you know the backgrounds of the politicians who are signing off on "canceling rent" and "eviction bans" (Trump, de Blasio, Cuomo), then you do know what is going to happen, and you know that these are not uncharted waters. 

Eviction moratoriums may be unprecedented on a nationwide scale, but they're indicative of power plays in real estate and urban development that have been around for decades on a limited scale, especially in NYC.

So, I would tell the OP to not listen to anyone who doesn't have enough historical background about Robert Moses and the New York politicians who were not only influenced by him, but have been going by his playbook for years now. If they don't have any intimate familiarity with NYC-style manipulation when it comes to real estate and urban planning, how can they argue that no one knows what will happen? What is it about these guys using the same tactics on a national scale as opposed to just in NYC for decades makes a nationwide eviction moratorium unprecedented and therefore unable to predict? Nothing. 

What is "Voter Voice"? It just seems to be another Big Tech unicorn like Change.org trying to make money by making itself as a middle man between consumers/voters and sites that already provide direct access or services. That's all. There's absolutely no reason to think that your signatures on this site are being sent to anyone. The entire site is just one big sales pitch ("What We Do", "Demo", etc.).

If you want your voice heard, write directly to your officials. You don't need a unicorn started by millennials and GenZs to do it. For the record, if anyone wants to know where I "get off," I've been running websites since 2000, and this site has all the signs of a startup using copywriters to make itself look official. It's not affiliated with any government agency or figurehead. It's run by a company called Fiscal Note that sells software.

Yes. And I noticed that in all the mayhem this week, George Carlin is suddenly trending in social media and being written up in the mainstream media. Carlin was a misanthrope and nihilist, so what a coinkydink that with everything that's going on, now his name is being brought up this week to introduce to a new generation of young people to admire and idolize. 

What does your situation have to do with I'm talking about?

My parents had a single mother on welfare who would buy hundreds of dollars of brand new, expensive home decor and throw everything out in boredom two weeks later, only to do it all over again. I know this because every week we had to sort and throw out garbage, and every month we were sick from the heartache of having to put this gorgeous, barely touched, expensive decor out for curbside pickup. Was she using Rent-A-Center? No. She was so flush with cash from milking the system that like a kid in a candy store, she'd buy the most expensive thing she could find, get bored, throw it out and then buy even more expensive stuff the next go-around. Before you make excuses for her, just know that she later had her child taken from her because she was plying her daughter with alcohol to make her sleep at night.

The person that I talked about earlier (who got the $1000 phone) was spoiled rotten as a kid. As a teenager, she started stealing from her father when he stopped spoiling her. Later, when she became an adult, she would always buy the most expensive things in cash. She plunged herself into a hole so deep that she declared bankruptcy twice before the age of 40 and had her mother paying off her credit card bills and another relative financially supporting her kid. If you ever told her to live within her means, resort to financing or buy things on the cheap, she'd look you up and down with a sneer because in her mind, she's not really poor--she is upper middle class, and you would be offending her by suggesting to go the budget route.

These types of people have nothing to do with you or how you try to get by in life, and they make up a large part of the deadbeat population, no matter how many times you want to convince me or other people otherwise. You're not the norm; you are the exception, and we've seen this behavior more times than we can count to say with full confidence that most people who splurge on luxuries while muttering that they're behind on rent fall into this category. It's why landlords get angry and suspicious when someone suddenly buys a new HDTV or something while saying they can't make the rent. For everyone one of you, there are 10 deadbeats who live this way.

Instead of trying to convince landlords how wrong they are about how they feel, how about trying to educate deadbeats how to live within their means? Because it's deadbeats like that who cast aspersions on people like you. Bottom line, if you feel unfairly judged by landlords, you would go a lot further trying to teach them how to balance their budgets rather than trying to convince landlords that they're "wrong" about something that they've witnessed more times than they can count.

Yes. This is what ticks me off about the eviction ban. It doesn't make a difference between tenants who truly might have had issues and the ones who are just bums and leeches and refuse to pay. My parents' tenants have nothing to do with COVID. They were engaging in fraud and trying to make my disabled parents, me and my sister a party to it. When we had had enough, they were served in February and never left. They stopped paying rent out of spite (for not helping them defraud the government) and then exploited the eviction moratorium.

I have tried contacting various agencies, politicians, the media and nobody--like I said--cares. And they treat me condescendingly or dismissively or give me the runaround or don't respond to my calls. I even had a woman from the Department of Aging (to report Elder Abuse) suggest to me that I go seek counseling (because of how obviously agitated I was by what was going on), as in, "Aw, you poor little thing. You sound unreasonably angry and upset. You're obviously crazy."

Thank God the worst thing I am dealing with right now are non-paying tenants, but imagine if I were in a totally different scenario in which this crazy couple decided to set the place on fire out of rage for not helping the undocumented wife with her papers or allow the previous tenants to move back into our second apartment. What then? Too bad, so sad? 

It won't end until the damage is done--i.e., all of the real estate that is owned by small landlords/moms and pops is safely in the hands of the government, the banks and the real estate sharks.

And no, I'm not being snarky, either. I've been predicting since the Spring that these eviction moratoriums would keep getting extended over and over again. Unless there's some earth-shattering event that completely forces the hands of officials, I see this lasting all the way through to next year.

Thank you very much. But unfortunately, no one cares. I called the police several times over the summer. The last time I called, they told me that I had no proof that the tenants broke the locks, that the locks probably broke down from wear and tear, and that I had to "wait" to take them to court in August. And now here I am in September with the eviction ban.

I repeat: no one cares. Small landlords are being thrown under the bus by everyone for Big Real Estate, the city and the banks, and they all know it and are in on the scam, even so-called "progressives" like AOC, who keep repeating the same disinfo talking point that if we canceled rent, everyone will keep their homes and will live happily ever after. They have been told over and over and over again that their voter base would be kicked out into the streets anyway when their landlords go bankrupt or sell out but everyone just sticks their fingers in their ears and doubles down on the rhetoric.

My parents (one who is blind, the other who has dementia) are being forced to subsidized a middle age couple who've been squatting in their property since March. Neither of them have a lease and the wife is undocumented. They started damaging the property (including three doors), so now their guests are free to roam the premises. One of their "guests" are tenants that we got rid of in 2018, who've come to pry open a brand new mailbox we installed to replace the one that they broke open that same year.  

With all due respect, you have no idea what you're talking. I've been through what these posters are talking about more times than I can count, and I can vouch with real world examples that they're speaking the truth. The types of tenants they're talking about don't get cheap smartphones and HDTVs at Walmart. They get the most expensive items, spend themselves into a hole, and then play the "we're broke card" to get landlords to subsidize them. 

In some cases, they'll "rob Peter to pay Paul." For example, they'll exploit grace periods in order to make luxury purchases. For example, if they want to get a $1,000 smartphone, they will skip two month's rent and two month's gas or electric, then pay all three later when the landlord and utility threatens legal action.

A classic example: I had someone bum several hundred dollars off me last year, crying that she had no money for groceries or anything. (Which was true, BTW.) She lives in government housing. Several months later, after I gave her the money, she casually dropped that she had just bought a $2K Apple computer for her son and a $1K Galaxy phone. Why? Because she said she wanted her son to have the very best and that she couldn't have anything less than a Galaxy because it gave her everything she wanted. (Her words!) She also has a super expensive cable and smartphone package, too. Even I don't have that; the most we're spending is $115 a month for internet. We use OTA for television. Meanwhile, she is spending well over $220, all the while complaining about how she can't pay for rent or groceries.

Another classic example: a gainfully employed couple with a kid kept pleading poverty all the time, always behind in late payments. In 2018, they decided to stop paying rent to my parents (who were their landlords). Why? Because they had just dropped $4K on a catered event for their daughter. On top of that, they were spending lavishly on vacations, new cars, tons of pets (which are expensive), etc. They were spending so much that in spite of both working, being unionized with benefits and paying 50% less in rent than everyone else, they were unable to pay their rent, basic utilities, parking tickets or taxes. 

These are just two of many instances in which I've seen tenants pull this con over and over again. They form a class of tenant that--for lack of poor life and budgeting skills--always spends above their income level and then expects everyone to subsidize their lifestyle.

So, when you paint this picture of the tenants that people are talking about in this thread as being salt-of-the-earth types who are scrimping and saving for everything and choosing the cheapest packages and items, it's not even close to being true. They don't go to Walmart or Target to get super cheap phones and HDTVs. They don't get super cheap cable or cell phone service.