Bad Landlord Quotes

What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused, or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, and rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to bodyguards, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.

This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business.

Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It's my job to put them out of business.

American circumstances and Chiese character. How could I know these two things do not mix? I taught her how American circumstances work. If you are born poor here, it's no lasting shame. You are first in line for a scholarship. If the roof crashes on your head, no need to cry over this bad luck. You can sue anybody, make the landlord fix it. You do not have to sit like a Buddha under a tree letting pigeons drop their dirty business on your head. You can buy an umbrella. Or go inside a Catholic church. In America, nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you. She learned thse things, but I couldn't teach her Chinses character. How to obey parents and listen to your mother's mind. How not to show your own thoughts, to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantage of hidden opportunities. Why easy things are not worth pursuing. How to know your own worth and polish it, never flashing it around like a cheap ring. Why Chinese thinking is best.

Mom became even more concerned about my values when my editor offered me a job writing a weekly column about what he called the behind-the-scenes doings of the movers and shakers. Mom thought I should be writing exposes about oppressive landlords, social injustice, and the class struggle on the Lower East Side. But I leaped at the job, because it meant I would become one of those people who knew what was really going on. Also, most people in Welch had a pretty good idea how bad off the Walls family was, but the truth was, they all had their problems, too--they were just better than we were at covering them up. I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.

I taught her how American circumstances work. If you are born poor here, it’s no lasting shame. You are first in line for a scholarship. If the roof crashes on your head, no need to cry over this bad luck. You can sue anybody, make the landlord fix it. You do not have to sit like a Buddha under a tree letting pigeons drop their dirty business on your head. You can buy an umbrella. Or go inside a Catholic church. In America, nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you. She learned these things, but I couldn’t teach her about Chinese character. How to obey your parents and listen to your mother’s mind. How not to show your own thoughts, to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantage of hidden opportunities. Why easy things are not worth pursuing. How to know your own worth and polish it, never flashing it around like a cheap ring. Why Chinese thinking is best.

There was one, a Mr. Omuro, who had bought control of a great area of rental property in downtown San Francisco, and who for a time had been Frank’s landlord. There was a bad apple, he thought. A shark who had never made repairs, had partitioned rooms smaller and smaller, raised rents

And below them, Toll-by-Night set about folding itself away, like a stilt-legged monster into a closet. Its inhabitants crept back into the unwanted places, the crannies and cellars and forgotten attics, and locked themselves in. A bugle blew. A silver jingling swept through the town, sealing away all bad reputations and bitter-tasting names. Another bugle sounded. And day swept in like a landlord, not knowing that it was only a guest in night's town.

Dear Stanley, It was wonderful to hear from you Your letter made me feel like one of the other moms who can afford to send their kids to summer camp. I know it’s not the same, but I am very proud of you for trying to make the best of a bad situation. Who knows? Maybe something good will come of this. Your father thinks he is real close to a breakthrough on his sneaker project. I hope so. The landlord is threatening to evict us because of the odor. I feel sorry for the little old lady who lived in a shoe. It must have smelled awful!

CHAPTER ONE A Boy at the Window FOR A LONG TIME AFTER THAT SUMMER, the four Penderwick sisters still talked of Arundel. Fate drove us there, Jane would say. No, it was the greedy landlord who sold our vacation house on Cape Cod, someone else would say, probably Skye. Who knew which was right? But it was true that the beach house they usually rented had been sold at the last minute, and the Penderwicks were suddenly without summer plans. Mr. Penderwick called everywhere, but Cape Cod was booked solid, and his daughters were starting to think they would be spending their whole vacation at home in Cameron, Massachusetts. Not that they didn’t love Cameron, but what is summer without a trip to somewhere special? Then, out of the blue, Mr. Penderwick heard through a friend of a friend about a cottage in the Berkshire Mountains. It had plenty of bedrooms and a big fenced-in pen for a dog—perfect for big, black, clumsy, lovable Hound Penderwick—and it was available to be rented for three weeks in August. Mr. Penderwick snatched it up, sight unseen. He didn’t know what he was getting us into, Batty would say. Rosalind always said, It’s too bad Mommy never saw Arundel—she would have loved the gardens. And Jane would say, There are much better gardens in heaven. And Mommy will never have to bump into Mrs. Tifton in heaven, Skye added to make her sisters laugh. And laugh they would, and the talk would move on to other things, until the next time someone remembered Arundel.

And the others, who have avoided all of these deaths, get up in the morning and go downtown to meet “the man.” They work in the white man’s world all day and come home in the evening to this fetid block. They struggle to instill in their children some private sense of honor or dignity which will help the child to survive. This means, of course, that they must struggle, stolidly, incessantly, to keep this sense alive in themselves, in spite of the insults, the indifference, and the cruelty they are certain to encounter in their working day. They patiently browbeat the landlord into fixing the heat, the plaster, the plumbing; this demands prodigious patience; nor is patience usually enough. In trying to make their hovels habitable, they are perpetually throwing good money after bad. Such frustration, so long endured, is driving many strong, admirable men and women whose only crime is color to the very gates of paranoia.

He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people?

I'm all strung-out, my money's spent Can't really tell ya' where last year went But I've given up paying my bills for Lent My landlord, he says he wants his rent Fuck 'em! Hey, now, the women they come, the women they go The hens start to cackle when the cock starts to crow Hell, I take 'em in when the warm winds blow But I boot 'em in the ass once it starts to snow 'Cause fuck them! Yeah, got a letter from my folks, and they say they're in debt They say that things are as bad as they can possibly get You know, I haven't answered that letter yet I might use it to light my cigarette 'Cause fuck them! What'd they ever do for me anyway? Threw me outta the house when I was twenty-nine years old and cut off my allowance Fuck 'em! Hey, a woman come around and handed me a line About a lot of little orphan kids sufferin' and dyin' Shit, I give her a quarter, cause one of 'em might be mine The rest of those bastards can keep right on cryin' I mean, fuck kids! Throw up on your shoulder, piss in your lap, Never give you nothing Fuck 'em! You might also like Think U The Shit (Fart) Ice Spice Anuv Jain - Husn (Romanized) Genius Romanizations ​yes, and? Ariana Grande I had a fight last night with a big lumberjack I spent most of the fight laying flat on my back You know he beat me up fair, and that's a fact But I busted his head as soon as he turned his back 'Cause fuck fair fighting! Yeah You know, my junkie buddy got the shakes again He give me five bucks and sent me out in the rain I'm supposed to bring back something to kill his pain, oh Shit, I took the bread and I jumped on a train Cause fuck junkies!

Hope, though; now there’s a real pest. Hope doesn’t just nibble your cheese and chew holes in your skirting boards. Hope keeps you plodding on when it really is time to call it quits. Hope drags you to sixteen auditions in a single day, when there’s a nice job in your brother-in-law’s tannery just waiting for you. Hope keeps you going in Old Stairs or Paradise, even though there’s no money and nothing to eat and the landlord just took your chair and your chamber pot. Personally, I can see no great merit in simply being alive if you’re miserable and in pain, but Hope won’t let you go. She’s a tease, like bad children teasing a dumb animal, and I’ve made a point of avoiding her whenever I can. Still, sometimes she runs you down and there’s nowhere left for you to go. You can turn and fight her and lose, or let her scoop you up and turn your brain to mush. Hope against hope. We had human chains shifting those blocks with levers and rollers, through the narrow alleys where carts couldn’t go. We had shifts digging the ditch by lamplight, in the rain. And in every working party there was at least one man who cheerfully announced that it wasn’t going to work, the whole idea was stupid, the enemy’ll find a way round this in two shakes, just you see; and even he didn’t really believe it, because of Hope. Hope turns a hundred men and women ripping the skin off their hands on a coarse hemp rope into a street party. Someone tells a joke, or clowns around, or starts singing a favourite song from one of the shows, and Hope bursts through, like sappers, and next thing you know she’s everywhere, like smoke, or floodwater, or rats. We’re going to beat Ogus, she whispers in every ear, and this time it’ll be different.

I’m talking to God here, be with ye as soon as we’re done,— Is Mason going to get angry and into a fight? Will he stand and announce, “This is none of God’s judgment,— to be offended as gravely by Calendar Reform as by Mortal Sin, requires a meanness of spirit quite out of the reach of any known Deity,— tho’ well within the resources of Stroud, it seems.” And walk out thro’ their stunn’d ranks to the Embrace of the Night, and never enter the place again? No.— He buys ev’ryone another Pint, instead, and resigns himself to seeking out his Family tomorrow,— tho’ sure Agents of Melancholy, they sooner or later feel regretful for it, whilst Regret is just the sort of Sentiment that regular life at The George depends on having no part of. The Landlord is kind and forthright, the Ale as good as any in Britain, the Defenestration of the Clothiers in ’56 has inscrib’d the place forever in Legend, and Good Eggs far outnumber Bad Hats,— yet so dismal have these late Hours in it been for Mason, as to make him actually look forward to meeting his Relations again.

Life became harsh for Marius. To eat his coats and watch was nothing. He chewed the inexpressible cud of bitterness–a horrible thing, which includes days without bread, sleepless nights, evenings without a candle, a hearth without a fire, weeks without labor, a future without hope, a coat out at the elbows, an old hat that makes young girls laugh, the door found shut in your face at night because you have not paid your rent, the insolence of the porter and the landlord, the jibes of neighbors, humiliations, outraged self-respect, any drudgery acceptable, disgust, bitterness, prostration–Marius learned how one swallows all these things and how they are often the only things one has to swallow. At that time of life, when man has need of pride, because he has need of love, he felt mocked because he was badly dressed and ridiculed because he was poor. At the age when youth swells the heart with an imperial pride, he more than once dropped his eyes to his worn out boots, and experienced the undeserved shame and poignant blushes of poverty. Wonderful and terrible trial, from which the feeble come out infamous, from which the strong come out sublime. Crucible into which destiny casts a man whenever she desires a scoundrel or a demigod.

It’s a long, slow process. And it has a couple of component pieces. The core attitude that the Christian tradition works with is the piece called ‘surrender’ or ‘kenosis’. Kenosis is the word in Greek which Saint Paul used to depict ‘putting on the mind of Christ’. And it, basically, is pretty close to what the Buddhists mean by non-clinging. Doesn’t hang on, doesn’t insist, doesn’t assert, doesn’t grab, doesn’t brace, doesn’t defend, you know. It’s the mind that [she sighs and relaxes outwards]. We try to put that mind on. In one of those ancient early Christian writings, the Gospel of Thomas, the students asked Jesus, “What are your students like, how would you describe them?” and He said, “They are like small children, playing in a field not their own. When the landlords come and demand, “Give us back our field!” the children return it by stripping themselves and standing naked before them.” So that’s the description from Jesus of this process. So it’s the lifelong practice, the core practice, of learning to recognise when you’ve gotten into one of these postures: tightened, urgent, angry, self-important, and in that moment… Open to Him. So that’s the hang of it, that’s the heart of it combined with a couple of complementary practices which come from the mindfulness sector. The one being – the piece that I learned from the Gurdjieff Work – is to learn how to even notice when you’re getting into these states of constriction, and smaller-self urgency, and automaticity, because we don’t notice that automatically. It’s like you don’t notice the moment you fall asleep at night. So you sink into these lower, unfree, ugly states of being automatically. So you have to learn to even notice when that happens. And the second – Interviewer: There is this point… where you see you could go both ways, you could serve the ego or you can surrender. And you can decide. Cynthia: Yeah. There is definitely that point. What makes it difficult though is that for a long, long time in the practice you can see that point. You can see yourself going over the waterfall, but you don’t have the power to swim away yet. So what you have to do is live in the gap and say, “Oh my God, look at what’s happening to me, I can see that I’m sinking but I don’t have the force to stop.” And it takes a long time until we have the force. And to be able to see that you’re falling into a bad state doesn’t, for a long time, mean you can do anything about it. I think that’s a truism that disappoints many people, so the even more painful penance is you just have to sit there and watch it. Your only real choice is can you just see it, and the horror and remorse and helplessness, or do you just pretend, “Oh well, I’m really right! I’m going to fight for this for all…” Can you just go with the lower state or can you wait in the gap? So for me that’s brought a whole new meaning to that whole British cliché ‘mind the gap’!

And indeed at the hotel where I was to meet Saint-Loup and his friends the beginning of the festive season was attracting a great many people from near and far; as I hastened across the courtyard with its glimpses of glowing kitchens in which chickens were turning on spits, pigs were roasting, and lobsters were being flung alive into what the landlord called the ‘everlasting fire’, I discovered an influx of new arrivals (worthy of some Census of the People at Bethlehem such as the Old Flemish Masters painted), gathering there in groups, asking the landlord or one of his staff (who, if they did not like the look of them; would recommend accommodation elsewhere in the town) for board and lodging, while a kitchen-boy passed by holding a struggling fowl by its neck. Similarly, in the big dining-room, which I had passed through on my first day here on my way to the small room where my friend awaited me, one was again reminded of some Biblical feast, portrayed with the naïvety of former times and with Flemish exaggeration, because of the quantity of fish, chickens, grouse, woodcock, pigeons, brought in garnished and piping hot by breathless waiters who slid along the floor in their haste to set them down on the huge sideboard where they were carved immediately, but where – for many of the diners were finishing their meal as I arrived – they piled up untouched; it was as if their profusion and the haste of those who carried them in were prompted far less by the demands of those eating than by respect for the sacred text, scrupulously followed to the letter but naïvely illustrated by real details taken from local custom, and by a concern, both aesthetic and devotional, to make visible the splendour of the feast through the profusion of its victuals and the bustling attentiveness of those who served it. One of them stood lost in thought by a sideboard at the end of the room; and in order to find out from him, who alone appeared calm enough to give me an answer, where our table had been laid, I made my way forward through the various chafing-dishes that had been lit to keep warm the plates of latecomers (which did not prevent the desserts, in the centre of the room, from being displayed in the hands of a huge mannikin, sometimes supported on the wings of a duck, apparently made of crystal but actually of ice, carved each day with a hot iron by a sculptor-cook, in a truly Flemish manner), and, at the risk of being knocked down by the other waiters, went straight towards the calm one in whom I seemed to recognize a character traditionally present in these sacred subjects, since he reproduced with scrupulous accuracy the snub-nosed features, simple and badly drawn, and the dreamy expression of such a figure, already dimly aware of the miracle of a divine presence which the others have not yet begun to suspect. In addition, and doubtless in view of the approaching festive season, the tableau was reinforced by a celestial element recruited entirely from a personnel of cherubim and seraphim. A young angel musician, his fair hair framing a fourteen-year-old face, was not playing any instrument, it is true, but stood dreaming in front of a gong or a stack of plates, while less infantile angels were dancing attendance through the boundless expanse of the room, beating the air with the ceaseless flutter of the napkins, which hung from their bodies like the wings in primitive paintings, with pointed ends. Taking flight from these ill-defined regions, screened by a curtain of palms, from which the angelic waiters looked, from a distance, as if they had descended from the empyrean, I squeezed my way through to the small dining-room and to Saint-Loup’s table.

judge flipped open the file, lifted his pen, and announced, “Court rules in favor of the plaintiff.” My jaw dropped. How could he? I could feel my temper flushing a shade of pink up my neck. How could I have lost this? I had clawed through law school on the belief that my gut instincts were generally right. Growing up poor in small Mississippi towns, I had learned at an early age to anticipate other people’s reactions. And when my gut failed me, I had my fists. Too bad I couldn’t throw a punch at the county judge. Darla Lamar was at my elbow, tugging on my secondhand jacket. I gingerly pulled away, afraid the fabric would pop a seam. “What does he mean?” Darla asked in a frightened whisper. Keeping my voice low, I said, “Darla, we lost. The judge found in favor of your landlord.” Darla’s face contorted. “Where does that leave me? And my kids? You said we was going to win.” Oh, no, I had not said that. My trial practice prof had beat

Always require that the security deposit be paid in full along with the rent prior to the tenant obtaining occupancy. Allowing a tenant to pay their security deposit in installments after they have gained occupancy is never a good idea for a few reasons: 1.  Any financially responsible person should be able to afford the move-in amount required for the property. If they can’t afford the security deposit, you may want to reconsider your screening criteria. 2.  It sets a bad precedent from the very beginning that you are the type of landlord who is wishy-washy and will negotiate on important matters. Don’t negotiate on important matters!

As a group which believed in civic responsibility and the salutary effect of applied social science, it was natural that the WASP elite would take an interest in housing. In cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Boston, the panels of experts in the housing field invariably had a definite ethnic cast. They became certified as experts either by going to the already mentioned Ivy League universities or by getting appointed to boards of the various cities’ planning commissions, which were often descendants of local ruling class initiatives that began with the city-beautiful movement or the settlement house movement around the time of World War I. The Philadelphia Housing Association was one such group. It started off as a blueblood organization complaining about backyard privies and piggeries in South Philadelphia and recommending common-sense measures for local improvement of the housing situation, things like liens against absentee landlords to pay for repairs. All of that changed in 1937 with the New Deal housing act of that year, which established local housing authorities across the country with federal money and government authority. The various housing authorities were charged with creating master plans by staffs of “experts” of a certain ethnic (i.c., WASP) cast which was invariably not the ethnic cast of the neighborhoods which were targeted for destruction. Urban renewal as practiced in the case of Berman v. Parker meant that certain people were empowered to come up with a master plan for the cities, one that would now have the power of law, specifically eminent domain, behind it along with enormous amounts of federal money, which was made available to tear down neighborhoods where people from other ethnic groups lived. The experts could do this according to their own purportedly scientific but ultimately ethnocentric criteria of things like blight, hygiene, decay, etc. Taken together the WASP penchant for meddling in housing along with residual WASP anti-Catholicism meant bad news for places like Bridesburg and Poletown, especially when this group was empowered to act on its ethnic prejudices by federal money and a Supreme Court that was willing to abridge property rights in the interest of increased social engineering.

An eighteen-year-old must be able to talk to strangers—faculty, deans, advisers, landlords, store clerks, human resource managers, coworkers, bank tellers, health care providers, bus drivers, mechanics—in the real world. The crutch: We teach kids not to talk to strangers instead of teaching the more nuanced skill of how to discern the few bad strangers from the mostly good ones. Thus, kids end up not knowing how to approach strangers—respectfully and with eye contact—for the help, guidance, and direction they will need out in the world.

God in the Hebrew Bible, as it emerged from its editing process, is almighty; he creates heaven and earth with a word, and he is above all other gods-but he creates a serpent who undoes all his creative work. Often he acts like a large and powerful and somewhat bad-tempered human being. Like any landlord, he walks in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day. He gets angry. He bargains with his people. He changes his mind. He falls into vindictive rages, as in the case of Noah's flood or the Tower of Babel or the unfortunate cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and he plays atrocious games, as in the case of his command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. He has a somewhat bizarre preoccupation with the length of Samson's hair. He performs prodigious wonders, such as slaughtering the first-born sons of Egypt and leading the Israelites to safety through the parted waters of the Red Sea-only to discover that those who have witnessed those stupendous miracles quickly forget them and turn to complaint and the worship of other gods. Like all of us, the God of the Hebrew Bible is a mess of contradictions.

All your decisions discount the Persians themselves, and that is the mistake of your ignorance and your plotting. To you the Persian is a stupid peasant who can't decide his own affairs; an uncultured wretch who will take all manner of deceit and oppression and diplomatic twisting. If you do see any signs, any glimmer of revolt, you blame the Russians and take it to the Security Council. But it isn't the Russians. It's the peasant himself who is revolting. If any of you understood Iran you would know that. Dirty and wretched they may be, opium-ridden and backward and dull, but they are really the people you should fear, not the Russians. It may take time and there may be set-backs, but sooner or later the Persians are going to throw us out and throw out all our corrupt and friendly governments. They don't need any complicated political excuse to revolt, however much you cry Communism. There isn't a simple man, woman or child in Iran who isn't landlord-ridden,m who isn't a slave by the way in which he works, who isn't preyed upon by corrupt officials, who isn't beaten and insulted and robbed by the police and the army. The peasants are impoverished by the tithes they must pay the Khans, and the mechanics are underpaid and underfed and overworked. There isn't an adult in Iran who isn't ridden with some chronic disease, there isn't a child who survives all the ravages of poverty and dirt and sickness. The whole government structure is rotten with bribery and extortion and petty cruelties, and there isn't a modicum of justice in the land. There are no real courts, no political rights, no representative government, no wage laws, no right to organize, no means of adjusting the bad conditions of life except by revolting as the Azerbaijanians and the Kurds are revolting. Thank heavens the Russians have given them a chance to revolt; and damn us for preventing it wherever we can. We will fail anyway, whatever the Security Council decides in New York. You can get the Russians out of Azerbaijan and you can give it back to your merchants and wazirs of Teheran, but after a little while it will all begin again because you cannot stop the Persian from deciding his own affairs. He is not ignorant and stupid to his political situation. He is not so wretched and afraid of revolt. He is not even uncultured: in the language he speaks and the use he makes of it there is more natural culture among the peasants of Iran than you can find among the world's diplomats a the Savoy Hotel. He is backward and poor and dirty, but that is largely due to the influence we have had on Iran for a hundred years or more. Now it is too late for us. These people have reached the breaking point and they don't care about the wise men of the House of Commons and the clever men of the Security Council. These people are desperate, and for our reckless methods of holding our power and our oil it ought to be a warning. It will all go. The oil, the power, and the last drop of influence. Rather than let us have any of it the Persian will wreck Abadan and the wells and every other sign of our presence and our strength there. They are beginning to hate us and that is beginning a battle which we can't stop, which you can't stop in the Security Council. Unless we are determined to kill every man in the country we will lose. We cannot help but lose.

MacGregor shrugged. 'More than the population are opium addicts,' he said. 'Don't dismiss it like that,' she told him impatiently. 'I'm not dismissing it,' he said softly. 'I'm trying to show you what it really means.' 'But are they all like that?' 'Not that bad.' 'But why....' He lifted his hands. 'To forget the difficulty of keeping alive. To keep out the cold, to forget their hunger and their misery.' 'They ought to prevent it,' she said. 'Who ought to prevent it?' he asked slowly. 'I don't know. Who allows it? Who is responsible?' 'The gentlemen in Teheran to whom we give our unqualified support. Opium helps to keep the population too stupefied and too broken to do anything about their miserable conditions. We support men here, knowing that opium is part of their means of maintaining position and authority. If you really want to know who is responsible, I suppose we are. Some of our most influential friends in the Government are landlords of large opium growing areas.

Whatever it is.. and whoever you are, you needn't be ashamed. It wouldn't take much to bring anyone to where you've been. A bad landlord, say. A leg that broke and wouldn't set, too much trust in bad advice, a mortgage unattainable by half a per cent, and there we are: there I might be. (Thomas in fact did not quite believe this, but wanted to be kind.)

Have had a bad experience with a previous landlord •  Fear they will be charged for the damages •  May not like having people in their home •  May not want the landlord to see the condition in which they keep the rental •  May fear that reporting a problem would “rock the boat” and trigger a rent-raise letter

please remember one of the big three fatal mistakes of investors is getting “Bad Advice.

Example of GOOD Bad Credit All kinds of medical tragedies and collections associated with the medical tragedy. This is an example of “GOOD bad credit.

You can always put a bad tenant in an “A” quality rental. It is almost impossible to put an “A” quality tenant into a Dumpster.

Question: “Do you accept the XYZ government assistance program?” Answer (if you don’t want to accept that program): “One of our screening standards requires a minimum monthly income of three times the rent.” Question: “I was evicted three years ago. Is that a problem?” Answer: “One of our screening standards requires good references from all previous landlords for the last five years.” Question: “Do you rent to people with bad credit?” Answer: “One of our screening standards requires a credit score of at least 600.

Let’s go, I’ll walk you down and get you cleaned up.” “You will?” He slanted me a look before picking up his trekking poles and backpack, slipping the straps on, then maneuvering the two sticks through crisscrossing cords on his back, leaving his arms free. Finally aiming his body back up the trail toward me, he held out his hand. I hesitated but set my forearm into his open palm, and I watched as some emotion I didn’t initially recognize slid over his face. “I meant your backpack, angel. I’ll take it for you. The trail’s not wide enough for both of us to go down at the same time,” he said, his voice sounding oddly hoarse. Maybe if I hadn’t been in so much pain, and been so damn cranky, I would’ve been embarrassed. But I wasn’t, so I nodded, shrugged, and gingerly tried to take my backpack off. Luckily, I just started to shimmy a strap off when I felt the weight leave my shoulders as he tugged it away. “Are you sure?” “Positive” was all he replied with. “Come on. We’ve got half an hour to get back to the trailhead.” My whole body slumped. “Half an hour?” I’d thought I had… ten minutes max. My landlord pressed his lips together and nodded. Was he trying not to laugh? I wasn’t sure because he turned around and started heading down the path ahead of me. But I was pretty sure I saw his shoulders shaking a little. “Let me know when you want water” was one of the only two things he said on the way down. The other being, “Are you humming what I think you’re humming?” And me replying with “Yes.” “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” I had no shame. I tripped twice, and he turned around both times, but I gave him a tight smile and acted like nothing had happened. Like he predicted, thirty minutes later, when I was basically wheezing and he was acting like this was a stroll down a paved path, I spotted the parking lot and almost cried. We’d made it. I’d made it. And my hands hurt even worse from how dry the cuts were, and my elbows felt the same way, and I was sure my knees would too, but their joints were so bad, they didn’t have room to wonder about any other pain. But just as I started heading toward my car, Rhodes slipped his fingers around my biceps and steered me toward his work truck. He didn’t say another word as he unlocked it and dropped the tailgate, shooting me a look over his shoulder as he patted it briefly before heading around to the passenger door. I went straight for the tailgate and eyed it, trying to figure out how to sit on it without using my hands to boost myself up. That was how he found me: staring at it and trying to decide if I went face-first and shimmied up on my stomach, I could wiggle around and sit up on my butt eventually. “I’m trying to figure out how to—okay.” He scooped me up, one arm under the backs of my knees, the other around my lower back, and planted me on the truck. In a sitting position. Like it was no big deal. I smiled at him. “Thanks.” I would’ve figured it out, but it was the thought that counted.

How many evictions have been filed upon you?”: We used to ask, “Have you ever been evicted?” until we read about this little gem in Mike Butler’s book Landlording on Autopilot. In his book, Butler explains that landlords should phrase the question like this: “How many evictions have been filed upon you?” Such wording will require the tenant to think and not write an automatic “no.” Yes and no questions are much too easy to falsify, and tenants are used to questions being phrased that way. Also, an eviction filing identifies an irresponsible tenant as much as an eviction that proceeded to the point of the sheriff escorting them out the door. Both are consequences of bad behavior that you don’t need to deal with. Having them write an actual number also takes away their ability to claim they misunderstood the question. •

their current landlord – because many landlords will lie or embellish the truth in an effort to get rid of bad tenants. Instead, call all the previous landlords for at least the previous five years.

The latest, Jude Kennedy—my landlord—has failed to produce an heir to the gallery throne, and the future of the business keeps him awake at night. I know, because that’s often when he comes to visit me. Jude is a well-polished individual in

You will, however, almost certainly have to evict a tenant at some time during your career as a landlord. This doesn’t mean you are a bad landlord or even that you had a bad tenant. Even good people lose their jobs or fall on bad times and have to be evicted. But the truth is, eventually you will have to evict someone—and the lease is what the judge will look at every single time to see if you are justified in your eviction.

Dear Frodo, Bad news has reached me here. I must go off at once. You had better leave Bag End soon, and get out of the Shire before the end of July at latest. I will return as soon as I can; and I will follow you, if I find that you are gone. Leave a message for me here, if you pass through Bree. You can trust the landlord (Butterbur). You may meet a friend of mine on the Road: a Man, lean, dark, tall, by some called Strider. He knows our business and will help you. Make for Rivendell. There I hope we may meet again. If I do not come, Elrond will advise you. Yours in haste GANDALF. PS. Do NOT use It again, not for any reason whatever! Do not travel by night! PPS. Make sure that it is the real Strider. There are many strange men on the roads. His true name is Aragorn. All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king. PPPS. I hope Butterbur sends this promptly. A worthy man, but his memory is like a lumber-room: thing wanted always buried. If he forgets, I shall roast him. Fare Well!

Under despotic and corrupt governments, which oppress the people with taxes, to support extravagant misrule and unnecessary war--which debauch them by evil example of those in high places, and discourage education or render it impossible--the condition of the poor and nominally free becomes truly deplorable. But it is not Freedom which is their undoing--it is rather the lack of it. It is their subjection, through ignorance, to bad rulers, which keeps them in poverty. We know that the claim laid by capital to the lion's share of profits is itself, under any circumstances, a great obstruction to the progress of the masses; but we believe that even that obstacle will one day be removed--that problem in political science be solved by civilization and Christianity. We believe that the human intellect will never, with the light of the Gospel to guide and inspire its efforts, surrender to the cold and heartless reign of capital over labor. But, at any rate, one thing is certain, under the worst form of government, or the best, namely: when Freedom becomes a burden and a curse to the poor, Slavery--that is to say, the enslavement of the mass of laborers, with responsibility on the part of the master for their support--is no longer possible. When freemen are unable to support, themselves, among all the diversified employments of free societies, it would be impossible for them to find masters willing to take the responsibility. The masses in Europe, in fact, owe their liberty to the excessive supply of slave labor, which, when it becomes a burden to the land, was cast aside as worthless. Who believes that Irish landlords would take the responsibility of supporting the peasantry, on the condition of their becoming slaves? In fact, is it not notorious that they help them to emigrate to America, and often pull down their cabins and huts, in order to drive them off?

The big landlords owned the place, the prosperous tenant farmers did well out of the arrangement. Inevitably, there was more thieving in this type of economy than there was in England, so Irish crime figures for the period are always higher than English. To English contemporaries this proved that the Irish were feckless, dishonest, potentially violent. The reality is that if you started from scratch and invented a society such as that controlled by the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, in which the bottom 4 (out of 8+) million were given no educational or economic advantages or incentives, they would end up, very much as the Irish peasantry did end up, cultivating very small patches of land and doing little else besides. It was simply appalling bad luck that this very deprived and numerous group of people subsisted on one tuber alone which, since its introduction in the seventeenth century, had given no sign or indication that it would fail. It was the reliability of the spud, as well as the ease of growing it, which made it the favoured peasant food. Two million acres of Ireland were given over to potatoes. Three million people ate nothing else. Nothing. (Adult males consumed between twelve and fourteen pounds daily.)

Innumerable patriotic societies had sprung up each with its executive secretary, and executive secretaries must live, and therefore must conjure up new and ever greater menaces,” wrote the journalist and historian Frederick Lewis Allen. “Innumerable other gentlemen now discovered that they could defeat whatever they wanted to defeat by tarring it conspicuously with the Bolshevist brush. Big-navy men, believers in compulsory military service, drys, anti-cigarette campaigners, anti-evolution Fundamentalists, defenders of the moral order, book censors, Jew-haters, Negro-haters, landlords, manufacturers, utility executives, upholders of every sort of cause, good, bad, and indifferent, all wrapped themselves in Old Glory and the mantle of the Founding Fathers and allied their opponents with Lenin.

The form that this bargain took was the adoption of what anthropologists and social historians describe as the “closed village.” Almost every peasant society in premodern times had, as its main form of economic organization, the “closed village.” Unlike more modern forms of economic organization, in which individuals tend to deal with many buyers and sellers in an open market, the households of the closed village joined together to operate like an informal corporation, or a large family, not in an open marketplace but in a closed system where all the economic transactions of the village tended to be struck with a single monopolist—the local landlord, or his agents among the village chiefs. The village as a whole would contract with the landlord, usually for payment in kind, for a high proportion of the crop, rather than a fixed rent. The proportional rent meant that the landlord absorbed part of the downside risk of a bad harvest. Of course, the landlord also took the greater part of the potential profit. Landlords also typically provided seed.

A bad reference from a past landlord is a huge red flag.

whereas a current landlord may not want to lose a good tenant or may be overly excited to get rid of a bad one.

This falls under the same category as requiring good references from past landlords. Obviously, an eviction equals a bad reference. A very bad reference. An eviction on a tenant’s record is the equivalent to committing murder in a landlord’s eyes.

For the past few years people had been talking about how Chinatown was going to be torn down to make way for a big train terminal. With that possibility, conditions had declined. Landlords refused to do repairs, and tenants were too scared to ask. Any mention of Chinatown to white society only brought a sigh, a shrug of the shoulders, and a breezy, “Yes, conditions are bad, but they are Chinese!” So broken windows were boarded up, keeping out rain and cold winds in winter, flies and dust in summer, and light and fresh air all year. If a sink or a toilet became disconnected, then whatever went down the drain ran out on kitchen floors or under houses. In many buildings, standing water and rubbish filled cellars.