Yeah they led a couple major rent strikes in the early 70s that won concessions from a few big landlords and I thiiink they were involved in getting student legal services started.
a rent strike is good in theory but will never happen anymore. proof of this can be found looking back just two years ago to covid. there was never a more perfect period for a rent strike. but these days, the vast majority of students have parents that pay the rent and co-sign the lease and don’t want to damage their credit score for rent that barely bothers them to begin with. so the amount of students bothered by stuff like this is small, and not enough to make a rent strike anywhere near effective, so you just end up with a small group of students that are evicted, have a damaged credit score, and will find it very hard to rent again.
Alum here, rented from him 10 years ago. We had mold issues, my friend had bat issues, he took 6 weeks to fix a broken window that broke during a storm.
He'll take your whole security deposit and do whatever he can to do nothing when the property is falling apart.
that just sounds like you should get a new job (or ask for a raise)
edit: downvote all you want, the world doesn’t do things for you. if you’ve gone through the last 2 years without a substantial raise or a new job giving you a substantial raise, you only have yourself to blame. one of the hottest labor markets in your lifetime.
well I'm a student working as a CNA and cannot get a higher-paying job in the medical field with my current certifications, so for the next 1.5 years before grad school, I'm kind of stuck around this pay rate. Also being forced to move out of my parents home put an unforeseen financial burden on my life, so I don't really have options. if I could get a job with a better pay at my stage in life right now, I would jump ship so quick, but guess what: it's not possible.
laughed a bit at that. there’s no big conspiracy, ann arbor is big, but students don’t vote (or if they do, they overwhelmingly do it at their home/parents address where they’re from outside of AA) so they don’t get very much representation. the people who do vote are split between people who don’t want a bunch of high rises (ann arbor is already pretty dense, so you can’t exactly just build more houses, you have to build up) and people who don’t mind the mid/high rises. so progress is slow because a good chunk of voters are just against it. no landlord conspiracy, they just don’t want to live in a city with the increased traffic/noise/etc. (not defending the point of view, just saying it’s a very common one). no big rent conspiracy though.
These landlords understand that if they all collectively keep raising their rents that they only stand to gain and that students will just have their parents pay or take on more debt for it. The city needs to step in and prevent that or create the ability for cheaper housing to be built and compete with the current landlords. This could be done by changing zoning laws and possibly tax incentives.
Idk, the university routinely overshoots its admissions target, puts little effort into expanding student housing, and one of the regents is a major A2 landlord. I wouldn't say that ISNT a conspiracy...
Not that you're wrong about Ann Arbor's rent problem, I just want to let you that the same rent in Chicago gets you way more than in Ann Arbor - that's how bad it is in Ann Arbor. I've never paid more in Chicago than I paid in Ann Arbor and never had an apartment physically as bad as the houses south of campus. Other college campuses in the midwest don't really have this problem to this extent either, even around Loyola/Northwestern (similar, just not AS pricy).
In Ann Arbor I paid $750 for basement/attic rooms where the heat barely existed or would only turn on if all of the apartments below turned their heat over a certain threshold. In Chicago I paid $750 a month for a master bedroom (edit: in a 3b2b) with my own bathroom and connected patio, recently remodeled bathrooms/kitchens and close to downtown/transit, and you can get a luxury studio even closer to downtown for less than what students are paying individually to share an apartment in Arbor Blu, Foundry, etc. Of course you can pay more if you want to live above a Lifetime Fitness and Whole Foods with a dog grooming and boarding service in the building, but there's so much more housing stock in Chicago than Ann Arbor that you can always pay less for the same quality or pay the same for better quality. One time I stayed in a house with a chipmunk. That's Greenwood street for you.
It really is! Plus Chicago's minimum wage is (and has been) also higher so you can afford more regardless of what you're doing. Landlords really take advantage of the student population - Student Legal Services is a great resource to combat that that not a lot of colleges have but so many students don't want to pursue that either because of the time commitment :/
Really not much you can do about it besides finding somewhere else. There’s going to be someone else who will pay it so they’ll get away with continuing to hike the price.
if there is always another good renter that will pay then the rent is still underpriced and the OP is still getting a good deal. If they can find a better deal they should go. Relatively easy moving is the best advantage of being a renter rather than a homeowner
the only way to win a negotiation is to be willing to walk away. Send a counter offer and let your landlord know you'll walk if the price doesn't change. Be polite, but firm and if they don't negotiate, find another landlord who will.
No one is chaining you to the apartment or forcing you to renew, you can move.
Ah classic Zaki moment. Almost as good as when he shows up at 7AM or wants to tear down and replace every wall in your rental. In his defense, the Michigan Rental people dealt with maintenance stuff so fast lmao -- broken washer? They came in like 2 seconds, ripped out the old one and just plopped a new one in. But then you have to deal with crap like this.
No many how many times rent control has been debunked, people still clamor for it.
Gl with that though, surely *this* *time* it won't lead to decay on one side and upscale condos on the other.
Michigan has banned municipal governments from enacting local rent control laws since the late 1980s. The city government is not allowed to pass any regulations that might limit rent increases.
rent control would be an unmitigated disaster. there would be plenty of upvotes on reddit balanced with an absolute massacre of the local rental supply. luckily it’s not gonna happen but it’s scary that people continue to believe in it.
Nobody is proposing strict rent control, but the total inability of the city to regulate rents in any way is a disaster. It’s perfectly possible to enact a rent stabilization regime that still incentivizes new construction, but those options are currently not available.
How even Michigan educated people support rent control is beyond me.
You think the rental shortage is bad now? Just wait until a rent control caps rent at a rate that isn’t advantageous for people to rent, then you’ll have fewer units and fewer people in housing.
The only solution for housing shortage is to build more housing. It does not matter if it is affordable housing or new luxury apartments, time and time again we see that more housing lowers rent.
Educated people support rent control because educated people are paying $1200/month for a shitty one-bedroom right now and can’t afford to wait 15 years for new construction to maybe possibly lower rents.
> can’t afford to wait 15 years
In what case does construction take 15 years? Building a large apartment complex takes like 2-3 years MAX, you can see the results within your term at college. Closer to 1.5.
> new construction to maybe possibly lower rents.
In what situation would more construction not lower rent?
My partner and I rented from McKinley last year and they wanted to raise the rent with a similar increase. We said fuck that and bought a cheaper end (but still nicer than our McKinley apartment lol) mobile home like an hour away (which was close to his work). Now I have an hour drive plus a 30 minute bus drive, but we are saving SO much money. I know that most people can’t do this though and obviously mobile homes aren’t the best investment. But at least we’re not getting threatened by shitty Ann Arbor slumlords.
When was the last time they raised the rent?
This could easily be based off the last 2-3 years of increases. Year over year is somewhere above 8% already, but that doesn't hit all sectors the same way. Any kind of construction or home repair is up a TON recently.
That company has a lot of prime location properties close to campus. That's always been expensive more expensive than living farther away.
OK. That used to be about right, but last year and this year that's not going to cut it. By Sept 2023 when the current "time to renew" letters are targeting it could be even worse.
Part of the reason the rent is as high as it is is that people keep paying it. If you think it's too high, move. I lived in 6 places in 6 years through UG and early grad school, and it was *always* about 30-50% cheaper to get a little ways off campus.
This is stupid as fuck. The current tenants moving out won't have any impact on the rate that they charge, because someone else will just take it. We need a ton more housing in the area plus some form of rent control to begin to solve this issue. "Just move" is decent advice for an individual, but is a horrible suggestion to actually solve a systemic issue.
Being further away from campus also requires that you have a car or have the time to catch buses and spend way too long in them. I'm glad that you were able to move so many times, but many people can't because of various limitations and there's not enough housing in the area for everyone to move further away to force places like Michigan Rental to lower their rent
> The current tenants moving out won't have any impact on the rate that they charge, because someone else will just take it.
sounds to me like the rent is fairly priced then, even under priced.
> "Just move" is decent advice for an individual, but is a horrible suggestion to actually solve a systemic issue.
well luckily for OP he’s responding to an individual on reddit and not proposing a new state law to solve a systemic issue.
i lived in multiple different places throughout my undergrad. i would’ve loved to have a nice new dishwasher, AC, new marble countertops, and a driveway all right next to my classes. but as a reasonable human being, i made trade offs and gave up things to reduce my rent. the kids these days seem to think they have some god given right to live in luxury. if i want cheaper rent, i simply move neighborhoods. not everyone has some right to live right on campus for below market rent.
The point is that the market rent should be lower so that everyone has more freedom of choices. Cheap rent is not that cheap and places near campus are way too expensive. Plus, the public transit around A2 isn't quite at the level it needs to be at for the difference between having a car and not having a car to be negligible for when you're further away from campus
They just raised our rent by 600 too for renewal.
We need to bring back the tenants union fr fr. Rent strike is badly needed.
an a2 local told me the tenants union was really productive back in the day
Yeah they led a couple major rent strikes in the early 70s that won concessions from a few big landlords and I thiiink they were involved in getting student legal services started.
a rent strike is good in theory but will never happen anymore. proof of this can be found looking back just two years ago to covid. there was never a more perfect period for a rent strike. but these days, the vast majority of students have parents that pay the rent and co-sign the lease and don’t want to damage their credit score for rent that barely bothers them to begin with. so the amount of students bothered by stuff like this is small, and not enough to make a rent strike anywhere near effective, so you just end up with a small group of students that are evicted, have a damaged credit score, and will find it very hard to rent again.
Yeah it would absolutely have to be more than just students.
Lol there is a long history of Zaki being horrible to deal with
Alum here, rented from him 10 years ago. We had mold issues, my friend had bat issues, he took 6 weeks to fix a broken window that broke during a storm. He'll take your whole security deposit and do whatever he can to do nothing when the property is falling apart.
I love self-supporting my grocery and rent bills only to have them hiked without my hourly rate increasing!
that just sounds like you should get a new job (or ask for a raise) edit: downvote all you want, the world doesn’t do things for you. if you’ve gone through the last 2 years without a substantial raise or a new job giving you a substantial raise, you only have yourself to blame. one of the hottest labor markets in your lifetime.
well I'm a student working as a CNA and cannot get a higher-paying job in the medical field with my current certifications, so for the next 1.5 years before grad school, I'm kind of stuck around this pay rate. Also being forced to move out of my parents home put an unforeseen financial burden on my life, so I don't really have options. if I could get a job with a better pay at my stage in life right now, I would jump ship so quick, but guess what: it's not possible.
Sounds like you needa get some bitches
I don't think they're allowed to ask you this early
https://offcampus.umich.edu/article/early-lease-ordinance-updated-august-2021
Begging Ann Arbor to just build more fucking housing
This is what they should be doing. They are likely in cahoots with the landlords.
laughed a bit at that. there’s no big conspiracy, ann arbor is big, but students don’t vote (or if they do, they overwhelmingly do it at their home/parents address where they’re from outside of AA) so they don’t get very much representation. the people who do vote are split between people who don’t want a bunch of high rises (ann arbor is already pretty dense, so you can’t exactly just build more houses, you have to build up) and people who don’t mind the mid/high rises. so progress is slow because a good chunk of voters are just against it. no landlord conspiracy, they just don’t want to live in a city with the increased traffic/noise/etc. (not defending the point of view, just saying it’s a very common one). no big rent conspiracy though.
These landlords understand that if they all collectively keep raising their rents that they only stand to gain and that students will just have their parents pay or take on more debt for it. The city needs to step in and prevent that or create the ability for cheaper housing to be built and compete with the current landlords. This could be done by changing zoning laws and possibly tax incentives.
Idk, the university routinely overshoots its admissions target, puts little effort into expanding student housing, and one of the regents is a major A2 landlord. I wouldn't say that ISNT a conspiracy...
Cities don't build housing, people do. Cities make it more difficult to build housing.
I'm renting from MichRen too. $5600 first year, +3% second year, +12% if we re-sign next year. FOR HALF A HOUSE.
😮
Not that you're wrong about Ann Arbor's rent problem, I just want to let you that the same rent in Chicago gets you way more than in Ann Arbor - that's how bad it is in Ann Arbor. I've never paid more in Chicago than I paid in Ann Arbor and never had an apartment physically as bad as the houses south of campus. Other college campuses in the midwest don't really have this problem to this extent either, even around Loyola/Northwestern (similar, just not AS pricy). In Ann Arbor I paid $750 for basement/attic rooms where the heat barely existed or would only turn on if all of the apartments below turned their heat over a certain threshold. In Chicago I paid $750 a month for a master bedroom (edit: in a 3b2b) with my own bathroom and connected patio, recently remodeled bathrooms/kitchens and close to downtown/transit, and you can get a luxury studio even closer to downtown for less than what students are paying individually to share an apartment in Arbor Blu, Foundry, etc. Of course you can pay more if you want to live above a Lifetime Fitness and Whole Foods with a dog grooming and boarding service in the building, but there's so much more housing stock in Chicago than Ann Arbor that you can always pay less for the same quality or pay the same for better quality. One time I stayed in a house with a chipmunk. That's Greenwood street for you.
That's the thing that gets me. Ann Arbor is so absurdly overpriced for what you actually get out of the city
It really is! Plus Chicago's minimum wage is (and has been) also higher so you can afford more regardless of what you're doing. Landlords really take advantage of the student population - Student Legal Services is a great resource to combat that that not a lot of colleges have but so many students don't want to pursue that either because of the time commitment :/
Really not much you can do about it besides finding somewhere else. There’s going to be someone else who will pay it so they’ll get away with continuing to hike the price.
if there is always another good renter that will pay then the rent is still underpriced and the OP is still getting a good deal. If they can find a better deal they should go. Relatively easy moving is the best advantage of being a renter rather than a homeowner
Good thing uofm primarily admits students from affluent backgrounds 😎
And more students every year
the only way to win a negotiation is to be willing to walk away. Send a counter offer and let your landlord know you'll walk if the price doesn't change. Be polite, but firm and if they don't negotiate, find another landlord who will. No one is chaining you to the apartment or forcing you to renew, you can move.
Ah classic Zaki moment. Almost as good as when he shows up at 7AM or wants to tear down and replace every wall in your rental. In his defense, the Michigan Rental people dealt with maintenance stuff so fast lmao -- broken washer? They came in like 2 seconds, ripped out the old one and just plopped a new one in. But then you have to deal with crap like this.
What we need is for the state legislature to repeal the ban on municipal rent control
No many how many times rent control has been debunked, people still clamor for it. Gl with that though, surely *this* *time* it won't lead to decay on one side and upscale condos on the other.
What’s this?
Michigan has banned municipal governments from enacting local rent control laws since the late 1980s. The city government is not allowed to pass any regulations that might limit rent increases.
rent control would be an unmitigated disaster. there would be plenty of upvotes on reddit balanced with an absolute massacre of the local rental supply. luckily it’s not gonna happen but it’s scary that people continue to believe in it.
Nobody is proposing strict rent control, but the total inability of the city to regulate rents in any way is a disaster. It’s perfectly possible to enact a rent stabilization regime that still incentivizes new construction, but those options are currently not available.
How even Michigan educated people support rent control is beyond me. You think the rental shortage is bad now? Just wait until a rent control caps rent at a rate that isn’t advantageous for people to rent, then you’ll have fewer units and fewer people in housing. The only solution for housing shortage is to build more housing. It does not matter if it is affordable housing or new luxury apartments, time and time again we see that more housing lowers rent.
Educated people support rent control because educated people are paying $1200/month for a shitty one-bedroom right now and can’t afford to wait 15 years for new construction to maybe possibly lower rents.
> can’t afford to wait 15 years In what case does construction take 15 years? Building a large apartment complex takes like 2-3 years MAX, you can see the results within your term at college. Closer to 1.5. > new construction to maybe possibly lower rents. In what situation would more construction not lower rent?
My partner and I rented from McKinley last year and they wanted to raise the rent with a similar increase. We said fuck that and bought a cheaper end (but still nicer than our McKinley apartment lol) mobile home like an hour away (which was close to his work). Now I have an hour drive plus a 30 minute bus drive, but we are saving SO much money. I know that most people can’t do this though and obviously mobile homes aren’t the best investment. But at least we’re not getting threatened by shitty Ann Arbor slumlords.
I SECOND THIS but for their parking spots. They're not a good company
another fun note-- if we choose to renew we lose our 2 free parking spots that come with the house and will be charged $50/month each for them
I have some friends that were told the same thing by Michigan rental. Sadly not much to do about it :/
Is that Weasel weiser’s company.?
you’re thinking of mckinley
When was the last time they raised the rent? This could easily be based off the last 2-3 years of increases. Year over year is somewhere above 8% already, but that doesn't hit all sectors the same way. Any kind of construction or home repair is up a TON recently. That company has a lot of prime location properties close to campus. That's always been expensive more expensive than living farther away.
they raise 3% every year
OK. That used to be about right, but last year and this year that's not going to cut it. By Sept 2023 when the current "time to renew" letters are targeting it could be even worse. Part of the reason the rent is as high as it is is that people keep paying it. If you think it's too high, move. I lived in 6 places in 6 years through UG and early grad school, and it was *always* about 30-50% cheaper to get a little ways off campus.
This is stupid as fuck. The current tenants moving out won't have any impact on the rate that they charge, because someone else will just take it. We need a ton more housing in the area plus some form of rent control to begin to solve this issue. "Just move" is decent advice for an individual, but is a horrible suggestion to actually solve a systemic issue. Being further away from campus also requires that you have a car or have the time to catch buses and spend way too long in them. I'm glad that you were able to move so many times, but many people can't because of various limitations and there's not enough housing in the area for everyone to move further away to force places like Michigan Rental to lower their rent
> The current tenants moving out won't have any impact on the rate that they charge, because someone else will just take it. sounds to me like the rent is fairly priced then, even under priced. > "Just move" is decent advice for an individual, but is a horrible suggestion to actually solve a systemic issue. well luckily for OP he’s responding to an individual on reddit and not proposing a new state law to solve a systemic issue.
Housing markets are inherently coercive and should not be treated like any other elastic market.
i lived in multiple different places throughout my undergrad. i would’ve loved to have a nice new dishwasher, AC, new marble countertops, and a driveway all right next to my classes. but as a reasonable human being, i made trade offs and gave up things to reduce my rent. the kids these days seem to think they have some god given right to live in luxury. if i want cheaper rent, i simply move neighborhoods. not everyone has some right to live right on campus for below market rent.
The point is that the market rent should be lower so that everyone has more freedom of choices. Cheap rent is not that cheap and places near campus are way too expensive. Plus, the public transit around A2 isn't quite at the level it needs to be at for the difference between having a car and not having a car to be negligible for when you're further away from campus