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Hannibal Buress Fritters Away Years of Goodwill With a Single Tweet

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | October 30, 2019 |

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | October 30, 2019 |


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In law school, I spent a summer working on behalf of tenants in landlord/tenant disputes, and while you’d think that it would harden my anti-landlord feelings, in some cases, it actually managed to do the opposite.

Granted, most landlords — particularly landlords of the low-income clients we dealt with — were asshole slumlords, but Massachusetts is also the most tenant-friendly state in the country, and there were some instances where I developed sympathies for the landlord. For instance, when an elderly man — who was also a massive hoarder — was evicted for creating a fire hazard in a facility for old folks, we managed to keep him in his unit. A few weeks later, he burned down his room. There are also a lot instances in Massachusetts where “landlords” are just multi-family unit homeowners trying to evict tenants who live on the top floor above them who haven’t paid their rent in six months. We were very good at our jobs, however, and we could get an eviction notice kicked for a single typo, allowing tenants to essentially live rent-free in owner-occupied housing for six months to a year.

There was a landlord who actually came to us once asking for legal assistance, because he was elderly and he wanted to move to the bottom floor of his own house, where the tenants had not only refused to leave after their lease ran out but also refused to pay, and I had to turn him away even though he, too, qualified for legal assistance for low-income folks.

Some landlords get a bad rap. Most landlords are shitlords who put profits over people. I have a feeling that comedian Hannibal Buress fits into that latter category, given his opposition to rent control.

He also wants his followers to donate to the Illinois Rental Property Owners Association. In other words, to help out … landlords.

Hannibal — who apparently owns a building in Chicago’s Wicker Park — stepped in it, and Twitter let him know.


He’s not helping himself here, either.

Or here:



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