Renting a property can be stressful for everyone involved. Both landlords and tenants have plenty of terrible stories about one another. But the one we chose to show to you today is personal. It cuts straight to the core of this complex relationship. Greed.

Reddit user RockyMoose made a post on r/ProRevenge about the way he got back at the man who raised his rent by 50% just because he learned that RockyMoose was earning a decent living. However, given the name of the subreddit it appeared on, you can probably guess that it’s not the end of it. Years later, due to a random encounter, the two met yet again. Only this time, it was the landlord who paid the price. And quite a big one.

This landlord probably never expected that his greed would come back to bite him in the crotch

Image credits: RODNAE Productions (not the actual photo)

But years later, he paid a huge price for treating his tenants like trash

At first glance, a landlord’s decisions affect only their tenants, so why should we care? But in reality, their actions are also influencing the housing stability of the broader community. And this has become really evident in the face of Covid.

The pandemic has resulted in profound economic hardship for US renters; a Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey found that nearly 8 million renters were behind on rent. Luckily, not all property owners have lost their humanity. In fact, only 23 percent of landlords reported pursuing eviction of delinquent tenants in 2020. However, shares were higher in lower-income neighborhoods and areas where the majority of residents were people of color—where landlords were also less likely to offer tenants concessions—signaling the disparate impact of the pandemic on these tenants and communities.

Most of the people in the comment section called it justice

What often makes fighting terrible landlords so hard is the lease. In a paper published last year, the professors David A. Hoffman and Anton Strezhnev illuminate the conflict between landlords and tenants by analyzing 171,306 leases from almost two decades of eviction filings in Philadelphia.

They found that most of them were not good for tenants, and the situation is getting worse. Hoffman, who teaches contracts at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, said Philly’s bad leases are part of a larger trend. “All we do is talk about how contracts have been transformed by technology,” he told Slate. “More contracts, over more terms, in more fields. Go shopping, get in a cab, make a reservation at a restaurant, go to a hotel—there are contracts everywhere and they all contain worse terms for you than if you didn’t have a contract at all. The contracts we sign are just bonkers.”

In the case of Philadelphia, Hoffman and Strezhnev discovered that what they call “unenforceable and oppressive terms” are actually very common. Those include sections that let the landlord off the hook for negligence, that waive existing rules about housing conditions, or that allow evictions to begin faster than state law dictates.

Many of the leases that Hoffman and Strezhnev analyzed are the so-called shared leases, cookie-cutter forms that are spreading as landlords increasingly use free PDFs they find online.

So if you want to protect yourself from predatory landlords, start from the contract!

But some thought the guy was way out of line

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