Fwiw the mom and pop landlord I had for several years was responsive. It was a brother and sister duo. She lived out on Long Island and handled the business, he lived in the apartment above us and handled the building. He was a bit odd, but I liked him. There was The Incident, though.
I think the difference maker is if they live on the premises too. Our last landlords were a married couple who live on the bottom floor with their three teenage boys. Things are gonna be kept in much nicer shape if their kids have to live there.
I can back this up. My last apartment was in good shape and the landlord was responsive. He lived downstairs.
I don’t think it would be unreasonable to add some kind of residency requirement to any kind of governmental support for “mom and pop” landlords
I lived above a vacuum repair shop and my landlord owned the building and ran the shop. He was there 40 hours a week but never in an intrusive way.
How was the noise?
It's an inverse bell curve of quality: the best landlords are either very small and live on the premises (and thus have incentives to maintain their property) or very large and thus maintenance costs and rent income for one apartment are a smaller dealer than regulatory compliance.
my experience with the mom and pop live-in landlords is that either they care because they live there or they can be extremely cheap on needed repairs or services, they've "got a guy" who can get access to good roach spray when you have an actual roach problem and you need an actual exterminator
I live in a large building run by a management company now, and the guy who fixed our dishwasher a few weeks ago and the “electrician” I asked for to put GFCI outlets in the kitchen were the same all purpose handyman (he did get both jobs done)
The worst are landlords who are too small to be actually professionalized or have staff to deal with issues, but large enough to be actual capitalists (and imagine themselves as such).
That one asshole with like 30 properties who got the sad sack treatment in Tablet mag a few years ago
I feel like my landlord is sort of the perfect balance. He has 2 large buildings, so a big enough operation that we have a full time super and porter, but he also lives in the building part time and actually gives a shit that its clean and pleasant and pest-free, etc.
Best landlords I've ever had were the ones who lived in the other unit of the duplex we lived in. Things get fixed extremely quickly when Our Problems are in close enough physical proximity that they become Their Problems without too much effort or time lag.
Even if you life offsite and are generally conscientious, you’re just not gonna notice things as much when you’re not there literally all the time.
Do tell…
With even the very best Mom & Pop landlords, there is always The Incident. Really, the severity of The Incident is mostly how we rate Mom & Pop landlords as good or bad.
Yeah the Trinidadian matriarch who rented to me in Brooklyn was kind but our Incident was coming home from a two week vacation to finding her dishwasher had been leaking into my kitchen/dining area for probably a week. They were good about responding and fixing it though (handyman was her son ofc).
Never ending series of Incidents with an individual landlord in Somerville, like him not paying for heater repairs in January because he had gotten in a fist fight with his taxi driver and needed the money for bail, my roommate walking in on the landlord trying to have a threesome in *my* bedroom…
He was working on the door one day because the lock was sticking. I lived with my sister and we went out for a drink in the evening and came home early because I had to go to on a trip. We got home and there were keys in the door to our apartment, along with the tin we knew he kept the spares in.
This was odd, but fine. We just assumed he was checking the locks and had to take care of something because we trusted him. I went inside and went to use the bathroom. We didn’t usually keep the bathroom door closed, but we left in a rush. Then I opened it and felt a blast of humidity.
Oh dear
uh oh
I said “what!”, and then I heard his voice come out of the dark bathroom. “Sorry, sorry”. My sister screamed. I yelled “what are you doing in there?” clearly surprised. He responded. “I had an accident”. I closed the door and sat facing the bathroom in the living room.
He was in there for a few minutes and then made a beeline for the door. I stopped him and asked what the accident was, and he stammered out “a loss of bowel control”. That’s right, he shit his pants and used our shower instead of his.
dying at the cop-speak for shitting pants
"a me-involved loss of bowel control" defund the poolice
BRUH
To his credit, he didn’t use our towels, and his sister gave us each $50 off our rent for the next year. Still, not a great way to figure out that if you paid me $600 you could surprise me with something like shitting your pants and using my shower without telling me.
A corporate landlord would have probably made you submit a rebate.
I didn’t scream! I just immediately left the room and made it your problem.
Yeah I feel like the bigger issue with mom and pop landlords is a complete lack of boundaries. A friends’s landlord’s adult son will appear in the hallway in his underwear, another’s called his mom up when he moved in, another’s will leave irate notes when her gf stays over too often.
You should probably read the rest of the thread
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