"... along with absurdly long street parking signs or frigid days at the beach in June.... California law does not require refrigerators to be included in rental units, instead classifying them as 'amenities' that aren’t necessary to meet habitability standards. 'It’s like a hot tub'....
Buying and maintaining a refrigerator became an extra expense that landlords just didn’t want.... When they broke... tenants would complain that they had just gone to the grocery store and demand reimbursement. 'It was always the liability of food....'...
But legal reasons alone do not explain Southern California’s relative dearth of refrigerators. Other large states like Florida and Texas do not require fridges either, but they come standard with apartments... Ingrid Gould Ellen, faculty director at the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, posited that the economic concept of 'multiple equilibria' might be at play.
Basically, the idea is that small things that happen in the early creation of a market proliferate and become entrenched: In the 1950s, say, a few big L.A. landlords don’t provide Frigidaires as the appliances are becoming essential, others follow suit and a trend is born. 'No one is going to want to rent a home without a refrigerator if all other homes have them,' Ellen said. 'But if the norm is that rentals don’t offer refrigerators, then a separate market will develop.'"
From "Why do so many L.A. apartments come without fridges? Inside the chilling mystery" (L.A. Times).
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Renewables.. Intermittents.. Unreliables? Go Green.
There's a Seinfeld episode, more than one, where it is fresh only, until the food pangs progress. A tale of California, perhaps, reliable energy, supply distribution, high density population demands.
Third World, anyone?
The government restricts property development while encouraging people to move (legally and illegally) into the area. Yes, it's mysterious how things are weighted in favor of the landlords.
Not a mystery after all: "When they broke, Eberly said, tenants would complain that they had just gone to the grocery store and demand reimbursement. “It was always the liability of food [spoilage]”
So, the root cause is lawyers demanding compensation for tenants' spoiled food.
The solution would appear to be tenant law explicitly stating that if/when a landlord supplies a refrigerator (or other appliance?) the landlord's liability if/when the appliance fails is limited to replacing the appliance with one of like kind/age/etc. within a reasonable time after being notified of the failure?
Alright, then a refrigerator is mandatory in a rental with a $50 compensation to a tenant if a refrigerator failure leads to lost food, compensation as a credit to the rent.
Moving on...
It is funny watching a reporter talk about things they know nothing about as it they are experts.
Refrigerators are twitchy and the core component is the compressor. They turn on and off a lot. If the compressor goes they are not worth fixing.
In a house that is renting for 3k a month you can afford to replace a fridge.
In a house renting for 700$ a month you cannot afford to replace a fridge.
Over the years state and local governments have made life pretty much impossible for smaller landlords.
So all of the rental houses and apartments are increasingly owned by large businesses.
And rental prices are now much higher nation wide.
I know these results of these policies are shocking.
Well, they are shocking to stupid people anyways.
'In the 1950s, say, a few big L.A. landlords don’t provide Frigidaires...'
Did they provide Davenports?
Stupid nonsense. What tenant is going to rent without a fridge? Most fridges are pretty reliable, last for years and if as a landlord you provide one without a chilled water dispenser the thing rarely goes wrong unless there is a power surge that burns out the electronic board. As a landlord I get a service company to repair and service the appliances. You built it into the rent. For what it's worth have a reputable realtor screen the tenants for you, do the leases with the clauses you want and charge a little below market in order to get headache free tenants.
"Yes, it's mysterious how things are weighted in favor of the landlords."
During the recent pandemic, renters were excused from paying rent. Landlords and their mortgage payments? Not so much.
Just sayin'.
Refrigerators used to to last forever. We still have a 1990 refrigerator (a Whirlpool) and plan to keep it forever. Buying new appliances now requires waiting 6-months now. The compressors are sized exactly for the expect load and only last about 10 years. Heaven help a landlord trying to replace a refrigerator and having to wait 6 months.
It's quite easy to see what is at play here. Refrigerators, like washer and dryers, will become items the landlords rent separately. I think they only condition would be that they'd have to permit tenants to purchase and use their own during their lease. So the apartment rent stays the same, but now with an additional $50 a month refrigerator rental.
Why don't they do this with stoves, because, many people don't need or use the stove. They can use air fryers, induction hotplates, toaster ovens, microwaves that are all cheap and fit on the counter top.
“ The compressors are sized exactly for the expect load and only last about 10 years. “
At best apparently. We are now on our third kitchen fridge in two years while our ancient garage fridge soldiers on without a hiccup. Appliance reliability has gone to shit.
Thank God for YouTube. Over the years I’ve learned to fix the dryer, washing machine, and dishwasher. All of which are surprisingly simple machines and usually malfunction due to some little piece of shitty engineering that common sense can put right. Why the little piece of shitty engineering was allowed in the first place continues to baffle me.
Send Dan Aykroyd and his plumber crack over to fix the Norge.
I rented in SoCal and Sacramento for about a dozen years, in about 5 different places, and some had fridges and some didn't. Honestly I didn't mind the ones that didn't. One, because the fridges that rentals come with tend to be like a lot of the appliances, low end and well used from previous tenants.
Two, because buying a fridge isn't that big of a deal and like a washer/dryer, once you have it, you can bring it wherever you go and get the one with really good reviews and features that you want but not those you don't need and can cause problems.
We actually left our decent fridge at our very last rental because the house we bought had a much nicer Samsung model come with the house. Turned out we had to buy a new fridge because the really expensive Samsung was no end of problems and finally just broke on us after the warranty expired.
As a previous landlord who once had to replace a refrigerator, the correct response and solution to the 'spoiled food' problem is "You signed a lease that requires you to carry renter's insurance, I advise that you file a claim with your insurance provider."
From a landlord’s point of view, refrigerators aren’t really that bad. If you have a bunch of units, you are pretty much in a steady state situation - we replace maybe 25-30 a year. The biggest pain for us is that the IRS requires that they be depreciated, and not expensed. Which is patently absurd, when you replace 25 or so a year, decade in, and decade out. Ovens are no different. And you are supposed to track them individually.
The landlord is not responsible for spoiled food unless he's negligent. But it's not just food. Some of my tenants store their super expensive drugs in their fridges.
"It's quite easy to see what is at play here. Refrigerators, like washer and dryers, will become items the landlords rent separately. I think they only condition would be that they'd have to permit tenants to purchase and use their own during their lease. So the apartment rent stays the same, but now with an additional $50 a month refrigerator rental."
That's the way it was in 1974 when I got my first apartment.
"Why don't they do this with stoves, because, many people don't need or use the stove."
Probably because you can just plug a refrigerator in. Having people fool around with gas lines could be a more serious issue.
Interesting here in Australia no landlord would provide a fridge or a water.Judt no expectation
That used to be true for a lot of apartments in the Greater Boston rental market too, and maybe still is. I rented the third floor of a three-decker in Cambridge in the 1990s that came with a bare kitchen - just a stove and a sink, no fridge, no cabinets, no nothing. I did buy the fridge from the previous tenants, and they left the small cabinet between the stove and the fridge. The landlady was a widow in her 80s. I took care never to ask her for anything, and she didn’t raise the rent very much while I was there, even when rent control was repealed.
If you needed something to furnish your apartment, there were a lot of second hand furniture stores, and a great institution called Allston Christmas. Many leases turn over on September 1 and a lot of departing tenants leave furniture on the sidewalk for the taking.
Here in South Africa, it’s very much a case of supply your own fridge/stove etc. And then there’s Germany, where it’s common to take the entire kitchen with you when you leave a long-term rental.
Why aren’t there kitchens in German apartments?.
We've rented places in Germany where we had to provide our own kitchen counters and "schranks" for closet space. Not cheap places, either.
@ Left Bank of the Charles: I never knew that scoring home items after the students moved out was called "Allston Christmas". I lived on Beacon Hill for ten years in the late 80s/early 90s and furnished a couple of apartments with primo items left on the street. It got to be humorous towards the end as so much stuff was seriously high end that the competition got to be crazy. I moved to the burbs and got married which put an end to my urban bin diving.
Fridge buying tips: It used to be that appliance makers built them to last, and bragged about their brands' reliability. But now price is king, and buyers will eagerly grab a lower-priced unit over a solid one that costs 15 percent more. Home Depot and Lowes now tell manufacturers that they want a unit of capacity X with feature list Y and it must sell for price Z. It's up to the manufacturer to make that formula work. If they have to make the compressor out of aluminum and plastic rather than steel, that's how it's done.
Look at the warranty. Sometimes the fridge is five years but the compressor one year. But you can get models with seven-year compressors. That's what you want. I know an appliance store owner in Madison SD who makes a great living servicing HD & Lowes fridges under warranty. She will sell you a great one if you ask, at a decent price, but she'll happily have one of her techs drive out to your place to fix the big box unit, too.
Apartment fridges are built specifically for that market. They are not designed to last more than five years because tenants knock off the door handles and break the shelves.
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