Ok, so you voted for this criminal manbaby (who is also by the looks of it likely suffering from advanced clinical mental illness) and made him President of the United States. He promised you he’d close the border with Mexico, he’d lower the prices and cut your taxes, he’d deport violent immigrants, he’d cut welfare abuse, he promised you no foreign entanglements and regime changes and he promised you won’t get passed for promotion to some unqualified black DEI hire plus he’d stop the Russian war against Ukraine the first day and release the full Epstein files…
What did he deliver after one year? He did not lower the prices, in fact he increased them due to his illegal and capricious tariffs and volatile behavior, the border is closed because you wanted so badly to pick strawberries and peppers yourself at 110F, taxes were cut (not to you but to the rich but, ok, they were cut), the Army, ICE, Border Patrol and the National Guard masked like Russian KGB agents were sent into American cities to snatch brown shoppers at Home Depot and before you say anything, NO, there is no smalldickenergy and nothing unmanly about grown-ass men hiding behind masks, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion concept was cancelled and the two trans kids on girls teams in your state were put back where they belong – in the locker ’cause there is nothing more important in America than sports, right? And the “peace president” told you directly from the White House podium that it’s OK to attack other countries for natural resources like oil or rare earth minerals even if they are members of NATO, that it’s OK to kidnap heads of state if you consider them “illegitimate” as Putin considers Zelensky, that there is “no such thing” as International Law and that Might Makes Right. That’s exactly what Putin wants to hear and has been saying and doing all along trying to Make Russia Great Again.
So you voted for this criminal who is bent on Making Russia Great Again, you scratched that itch and it only cost you your democracy, your farms, your freedom, your cancer funding, your rule of law, your unbiased and free media, your science, your elections and the respect and faith of the rest of the world that America is a force for good, a country to visit as a tourist and the dollar is a currency worth keeping. Every year I fly to Europe and we’d be lucky to find tickets for $950 a person. This year they are half that. They have never been this low for as long as I can remember going back for a decade or two. I don’t know for a fact but I suspect it’s because Europeans lost interest to fly to America as tourists.
But I am not here to tell you that you are useful idiots.
This site is called Massachusetts Landlords and I am here to talk about MA politics and policies.
We all know that MA Democrats are Communists and Marxists and they hate us and disrespect our property rights, right?
Here are two facts:
Fact 1: A woman has 4 cars which she parks on her driveway. Occasionally one half of one car (in other words, one front and one back tire) is not over the cement driveway but over her grass (please note it was her grass, not the neighbor’s or the city’s grass but her grass). The city told her that she cannot have any portion of her car on her grass, it has to be on her driveway and fined her $250/day until fixed. It also fined her $100/day and $75/day because her driveway and fence were damaged after a storm and needed to be fixed. I am sure this had nothing to do with her last name being Martinez. She fixed all of the “violations” and called the inspector to come back, approve and stop the fines. The inspector never showed up. She forgot about the whole nonsense and moved on. But it turns out the fines were accumulating anyway and several years later she was told she owed the city $165,000 and they are putting a lien on her house which is worth about the same amount. She sued for excessive and unconstitutional fines. The judge sided with the city saying the fines were not excessive and she should have appealed with the city when she had the chance, now it’s too late. The appeals court also agreed with the Lower Court Judge and the City. The State Supreme court refused to take the case which left the Appeals Court decision intact. The woman’s house was basically stolen by the City because she parked half of her car on her grass instead of on her driveway!*
Fact 2: You install solar panels on your roof but you are not home during the summers when most of your solar produced kWhs accumulate and you plan to roll them over into the next year because you need them to cover your winter bills. However, the legislature has passed a law allowing the utility company to pay cents on the dollar as a symbolic price and basically steal your private property against your will at the end of each year and NOT allow you to roll it over to the next year.
There is only one little tiny problem with these two facts though. These two facts come NOT from MA but from FL – a Republican State where all 5 commissioners regulating the utilities companies, 10 out of the 11 judges on the Appeals Court and all 7 Supreme Court Justices were appointed by a Republican Governor and where FL currently has a Republican Governor and about 70% of the current FL Legislature is Republican.
*Martinez v City of Lantana – District Court
Martinez v City of Lantana – Appeals Court
I am pointing this out to underline the hypocrisy of the Republicans. When during election campaigns they are for preserving property rights, they are lying!
As far as the MA democrats while I don’t think they are true socialists and communists (…yet) in the Russian sense of the words and tradition, it’s true that they also do not respect property rights.
For example they want to cap the price of rents.
That’s private property that they want to transfer from the landlords to the tenants and taxpayers. When you do that, landlords lose incentive and money to maintain existing and build new units so supply goes down instead of up. Also neighborhoods become dilapidated and valuations fall. That’s a fact. We’ve been there, done that. But it’s funny how they want to do “rent control” on the price of rents but I never hear talk about health insurance premiums or property taxes “control”. What about capping those to never rise more than “5% a year or the inflation whichever is lower”?
On all of my buildings the actual real estate taxes I have to pay for 2026 are going to be on average 9% higher than 2025, I just received the new bills. In 2025 they increased 7.8% from 2024, in 2024 the increase was 1.73%, in 2023 23.9%, in 2022 15.9%, in 2021 12%, in 2020 6.36%. That’s an annualized increase of 10.96%.
According to the ChatGPT AI the MA Connector unsubsidized Health Insurance Premiums for self-employed annualized increase over the past 10 years was 8.7% and this year it’s approved/projected to be 11.7%.
But rents can never go higher than 5%?
I increased my rents in 2021 over 2020 with 3.58%, in 2022 with 3.46%, in 2023 with 2.77%, in 2024 with 1.26% and in 2025 with 0.9% which is an annualized increase of rents over the last 5 yrs of 2.39%. The 5 years before that had similar increases. I am able to absorb these higher costs without increasing my revenues because I bought my buildings cheap during the Great Recession of 2008-2013 but most landlords cannot absorb the increased expenses like me. And it’s not just the real estate tax and the health insurance premiums increases in cost. It’s also materials to repair, plumbers, roofers, electricians costs, handymen, utilities, insurance, legal, loans, not to mention living expenses like groceries, etc.
For example my property insurance over the past 5 years had an annualized increase of 6.64% and that’s only because I shop each year for the best rates.
SO, TELL ME, WHERE THE FUCK DO YOU GET THE NERVE TO LEGISLATE OR TO PROPOSE A BALLOT THAT MOST OF OUR EXPENSES CAN RISE MORE THAN 5% A YEAR BUT OUR REVENUES CAN’T – THEY CAN ONLY RISE AS MUCH AS THE INFLATION OR 5% WHICHEVER IS LOWER? NOT EVEN WHICHEVER IS HIGHER BUT WHICHEVER IS LOWER!!!
By the way, talking about property taxes, when buildings become dilapidated because of rent control and they lose value, initially I thought that property taxes will fall too. That’s how a fair system should work. But no, don’t worry about them. What these wonderful people do when the value of real estate drops is they just raise “the tax rate” per $1000 and they still collect the same or higher amounts. They tinker and change that “tax” rate every year! The real estate taxes system is rigged. On the other hand, when landlords’ revenues get artificially capped or go down the state taxes will go down as well because it’s not as easy to change the state tax rate. By the way, why are cities and towns allowed to get away with changing their tax rate every year?
Everybody is wondering why the rents increased so drastically after Covid? Well, it’s not a mystery to me. I own 45 apartments and I can tell you why. In addition to low inventory of units, unfriendly zoning and too much red tape, the fact is that after the Housing Court was shut down during Covid for 6 months no evictions were possible and then after Covid the legislature extended those provisions to make evictions almost impossible. That and also the fact that MA Democrats passed laws to blindfold us from seeing the full criminal, eviction and credit history dramatically increased the risk to rent to the wrong tenant which contributed to rents going up to compensate for that increased risk.
There are solutions to this – full and easy access to credit, eviction and criminal history, easy evictions with a safety net for the evicted tenant being placed for 6 months in a hotel paid by a tax on the landlords, fund Section8 instead of defunding it, pay the rent of people about to be evicted for non-payment as long as they can prove financial adversity beyond their control, make it easier for developers to build, change the zoning laws to allow multi-families by right everywhere in MA, etc but Democrats’ first instinct is just disrespecting property rights because that’s the easiest thing to pander. And how deplorable is this proposal of 5% yearly rent increase or the Consumer Price Index whichever is lower. Well, what if The Consumer Price Index (inflation) is 18% like during Reagan or 9% like during Covid? We can still only increase by 5%. We can’t even compensate for inflation. It’s just deplorable. It reminds me when MA “fixed” the lead paint problem by transferring of private property from the landlords to the taxpayers by allowing landlords to get only $1500 (not even pegged to inflation) tax credit per apartment even when their costs to delead were many times more than that. This was a public health issue like Global Warming is now and should have been a public burden to fix not the burden of individual property owners. And that transfer of property continued for many decades. Recently they finally raised the amount after buildings were too slow to be deleaded and children were still getting poisoned (all predictable and avoidable consequences if the policy was set right in the first place) and again it’s not pegged to inflation.
By the way there was a recent study on rent control done on Montgomery County, Maryland which saw the number of permits for multifamily houses drop 97% after rent control took effect in 2024, even with a generous 23-year exemption for new construction. The difference means thousands of housing units that might otherwise have been constructed won’t be available.
Both parties are deplorable when it comes to disrespecting Property Rights of the Middle Class. The difference is that the Republican Party not only disrespects the property rights (except if you are billionaire) but also disrespects the Rule of Law, The Environment, The Press, Science, History and Democracy itself. But on the other hand, they do see the absurdity of rent and price “control” while Democrats just don’t. And even though the Republican Party is much worse on so many fundamental levels I can see why so many people are flocking to her bosoms. When Democrats refuse to re-read their college days Economics 101 on Supply and Demand and propose shit like “we’ll cap your revenues to 2.5%/yr but allow your expenses to grow by 6.64% to 11% and more a year” I feel ashamed to call myself a Democrat.
Democrats, how ignorant and uninformed can you be when it comes to this issue?