• aceshigh@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    One of my neighbors lived in a large 1 bedroom apartment. It was in the family since the 60s. It’s rent stabilized and in a popular area. A decade ago she was paying $850, market value at the time was $2k+. She renovated her kitchen when I lived there…. The downside was that her new upstairs neighbor was a musician and had a full sized piano that he’d practice on daily for hours at a time…

    • WhipTheLlama@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      If you know you can’t be evicted unless you stop paying rent and the rent is cheap enough, it’s not a bad idea to renovate it a bit. I told my friend he should quietly renovate his rental apartment because he hated the kitchen and all the flooring. He was paying $2k under market price, had rent control, and because it’s a corporate landlord, they can’t evict him unless he misses rent a lot or harasses other tenants.

      My friend opted to buy a condo instead, so while his mortgage is more than his rent was, at least he’s earning equity and a rising housing market.

      • dingus@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        How does one end up in an apartment with rent stabilization? I’ve wondered this.

        • dan@upvote.au
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          1 year ago

          It’s very uncommon to find available rent controlled apartments. Some of the leases allow you to pass the apartment and its current pricing to a child, so there’s a lot of them where the same family has lived there for 20+ years and just passed the lease down the family.

          In my area, there’s some newer rent controlled ones, but they’re only available to low-income families (which makes sense to me). There’s also California-wide rent control for most properties which mandates a maximum increase of CPI + 5% per year, capped at 10%. It’s not really rent control though, since the rent still rises higher than inflation (eg if inflation is 3%, the rent can still go up as much as 8%).

      • aceshigh@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        yeah, you have to do the math to calculate the total expenses since maintenance fees can be very expensive in condos, much higher than paying for a rent control or stabilized apt.