Agreed. I’m honestly a bit surprised they haven’t moved into the Canadian market. Heck, I heard that their international insurance ppl let you buy them in the USA, home of Google Fascists, but you still can’t buy them in Canada, a country that’s had a significant trend to decouple from US tech for over a year now.

Have you worked in the industry, or are you basing all this on bullshit and memes you’ve done “self research” on?

Cause I’ve been adjacent to the CU industry for decades, and your points are just irrelevant. Like your comment about wealthy members is baseless in my view, as the vast majority of CUs I’ve audited have policies that prohibit member wealth concentration – ie. they actually CAP how much money a person can have, and tell that person to take their money elsewhere if they go over that cap. This is done in part because the lending practice at CUs isn’t like that at Banks, they can’t easily leverage things like stock market share sales – it’s risk management at all CUs to have caps, enforced by most regulators. Put slightly differently: If you only have Peter Thiel and his buddies as customers at SVB, and they all pull their money at once, you’re fucked. CUs have been aware of that risk, and mitigating it, for decades. And because the ultra-wealthy can’t have that sort of leverage, they typically don’t tend to use CUs.

You may not like loans / credit. That doesn’t make the process of loans/credit inherently slaveholder/slave, and implying as such is just ridiculously childish. You aren’t going to convince any sane adult with that sort of semantic stupidity.

Again, the approach of this trope to villianize all landlords, is not that dissimilar to the sorts of things you see coming out of racist shops. Treating any demographic as a monolith is prejudice.

It’s pointing out situations where the trope/stereotype falls apart. And your response is basically a troll response, so I’ll offer this one reply and then ignore you.

I likely know more about how small credit unions operate than you do, I also likely have more familiarity with regular “mom and pop” type landlords than you do, given that I’ve worked in the Credit Union industry in the past, and have audited many of those loans. Typically, CU board of directors don’t get paid shit compared to banks, the CEOs typically don’t earn many multiples more than the rank and file employees (unlike banks), their profits generally go back to the membership, though those “profits” are not the target of most of those orgs, as the people they’d be profiting off of are their bosses (in that their Boards are elected from the membership – so you piss off members with fees, they just go on the board and direct you to remove / reduce those fees). So for example, in Canada, CU members generally enjoy no-ding ATM withdrawls from all Credit Union owned machines – there’s a whole campaign about ‘ding free’ banking with CUs. The board of most CUs are often just working class people, with a few specific ‘professional’ types required by regulators to ensure things like accounting oversight.

People often default to thinking banks are the only option for mortgages. They’re not. Credit Unions provide mortgages to large segments of the population, and they’re cooperative organisations in structure – which is in pretty good alignment with progressive ideals.

It’s not a bad faith argument to point out stereotyping in these sorts of threads. Just like it isn’t bad faith to point out when a racist post is made about a visible minority.

And if the person’s got their mortgage from a Credit Union… then its… all those evil working class credit union members profiting?

The trope that landlords are all evil, profiteering off of the poor, is an over-simplification / stupid stereo-type. Yes, there are shitty landlords. Yes, there are more corporations involved in renting places these days, and those corps are pretty exploitative. But there are lots of landlords who are just regular locals looking to try and gain some financial security.

Stereotyping an entire demographic of people based on some negative trait of a particular subset of that demographic is not helpful. It’s not helpful when it’s done to portray racial minorities in a broadly negative way, nor is it helpful when its done to portray landlords in a broadly negative way.

Lotta people chiming in on the profit rates for landlords – and while I admit that there are shitty landlords out there, I think it’s worth considering the ‘standard’ individual-owner landlord situation (which is historically the ‘norm’ for landlord situations). Ie. Someone who’s a bit older, has an ok amount of savings from working, and wants a second income stream from ‘somewhere’ to hedge against layoffs.

What they typically do, is take out an interest only mortgage with a 30-35 or higher year term. They add in the cost of tax on the property, and any maintenance/condo fees involved, to the cost of paying that interest only mortgage - and that generally sets the rent amount. They use that income to pay off the carrying costs of the property, and hold on to it for a few years assuming that housing prices will always go up – and after 5-10-15 or however many years, they can sell the property for its higher valuation. These deals are often done as Variable mortgages, as they offer lower interest rates, but also expose the landlord to greater risk with interest rate changes (which they pass on to renters).

And as properties in the area increase in cost, the cost of the above formula also increases, prompting the landlord to increase their profit from ‘carrying’ slightly over the years, assuming it can offset the increasing maintenance costs of the unit.

I’ve periodically looked at rent prices in my area, and done the above, and they seem pretty much in alignment. It’s one of the likely reasons you’ll often hear jokes/stories about landlords freaking out at tennants because a bank’ll yell at them if they’re late on payments – because yes, the rent is basically paying off the interest part of the mortgage on the unit. It’s also one of the reasons ‘new’ home owners (who are actually living in their homes) will typically initially pay ‘more’ than renters, but over time they pay less in terms of monthly carrying costs (not even looking at the principal pay down - just the fact that they get a rate that doesn’t get ‘readjusted up’ every year to align with increasing house prices).