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I don’t think private landlords are really that bad. Renting out your dead nan’s house or buying a duplex to letting the other half is fine as long as you charge appropriate rent and treat your tenants well. In an ideal world, houses would not be investments but rather something that everyone can own and live in, but we’re not going to get that by going cold turkey as some people are suggesting. Reform is slow and boring but usually works out better than trying to tear everything down at once.
The real problem is companies buying up an absurd number of units and hoarding the available housing stock while squeezing tenants and generally just being miserable landlords.
establish 👏 tenant 👏 owned 👏 cooperatives 👏
So condominiums essentially?
The idea is sound but for most places I’ve heard of (ie in my city), condos just pay a management company to do all the landlord stuff, so even as an owner, I still have to call some crabby woman when the roofers drilled a hole in my A/C and fight with her – and then also fight with the roofers – to get it fixed
There are self managed condo associations, in fact mine is discussing it because we hate our management company. The problem is the stuff the management company was doing now falls on us. Someone has to volunteer to handle repairs, maintenance, document management, bills, etc. some of this stuff amounts to a full time job and you’re doing it for free. If youre the guy who handles critical stuff like leaks or heat, now you’re on call 24/7 in addition to your actual job that pays the bills.
Or you could own a regular single family home, have no management, AND have nobody to split the responsibilities with! It’s great! I’m not bitter at all!
Every time I consider buying a house I’m like nah fuck shovelling my own snow
That’s what paying some neighbor on Nextdoor to bully their kid into doing it is for
That and racist dogwhistles, going by my neighborhood
In a coop setting you would agree on collective individual responsibilities so everyone has to contribute and spread the burden in a way that doesn’t silo people into unequal jobs.
As someone who lived in a condo - the main issues were that because people individually own their flats - I feel there’s a distinct line between private and shared ownership, making it easy to disregard communal duties.
Furthermore, because existing residents have little say in who gets to live in their building - you can end up in situations where someone can repeatedly break rules and norms (ie had a person smoke in the elevator for years despite being told not to) and nothing can really be done apart from trying to sue them which isn’t an effective way of dealing with problems.
In a coop setting people can democratically discuss and as a last resort even decide to part ways with individuals who won’t contribute (from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs obv) since on a hyper-local level everyone is immediately involved with the living conditions of everyone else around them.
IF yOu ArE ANtICAPiTaLIST Why dO yOU HavE A JOb? energy I’m getting from this post.
No, I don’t think renting out your first home is a grave issue, but it’s a snow flake in the avalanche for why housing is unaffordable. Housing is either a necessity that should be affordable, or an investment that grows and grows in value. Society has to pick one. And it would be obviously ruinuos for the status quo of housing to outpace inflation to continue.
No single drop of rain believes it is responsible for the flood.
Perhaps the OP intended this, but I have seen the snowflake version of this much more commonly than yours:
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
I prefer the rain one better tbh
No cat thinks it’s responsible for the cats and dogs rain.
Just put a limit on the prices. I still get value from the house i lived in before i moved(especially because maintaining a house costs a lot of money) and stupid landlords cant hike prices up.
There are situations where it does make sense to rent or put a property up for rent. For example, if you are relocating temporary for a job or education, it would make a lot of sense to get a short term lease, rather than buy or stay in a hotel (depending on price, of course). An individual who know that a property of theirs won’t be used for some time can then lease it out to this person. It’s a win-win, as tenants don’t deal with the process of closing or the responsibility of ownership, and the landlord makes some extra cash on the underutilized property.
However, the problem really comes down to when it becomes a business. Companies buy up large quantities of land and property and rent them out, allowing them to shift the costs of mortgage and taxes to the tenant while reaping the benefits of increasing equity. Furthermore, the amount of property for sale decreases, artificially lowering supply for housing to own. This drives up costs. As the company buys up more and more property, they also get to jack up the prices because of their local monopoly. In the individual landlords case, this wouldn’t happen because they have to compete with the rest of the diverse market. So overall, prices go up for housing everywhere.
I see a few paths to a solution.
- Limit the number of properties a corporation/individual can lease and/or increase taxes exponentially. This prevents the ability to lease out tons of property, while still allowing businesses to own multiple properties as needed for actual work.
- Remove restrictions on single family only housing and residential zoning. This is mainly a US issue, but it would allow for denser housing options, increasing supply in places where that is currently impossible. It would also create more opportunities for economic growth, as placing residencies in areas with businesses reduces demand on cars and makes it easier to network with people.
Robespierre: “You get the guillotine! You get the guillotine! You ALL get the guillotine!”
Wasn’t that the same guy who revolted against the french government, got they’re heads cut off, and then got his head cut off?
He might have gotten a little guillotine happy, but, honestly, once you’ve beheaded one royal you’ll always be chasing that high so who can really judge?
You just made me spit tea on my keyboard
I think its a weird argument to say all landlords are evil because even if they were forced to sell their real estate properties, they would just put their wealth elsewhere. They would instead become shareholders or creditors.
The problem is more so in general with people that have a lot of wealth, regardless of how they choose to hold it.
And furthermore, the problem isn’t even with people that have a bit of wealth, it’s with billionaires. If we taxed those assholes properly then governments could just afford to build high rises which would drive real estate prices down.
Landlords are unique in that they are entirely rent-seeking, ie they create no new value at all and seek to eternally gain income without losing any amount of ownership.
Billionaires are certainly the most excessive, but all Capitalists work against the Proletariat.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent
I really want more people to engage with the idea that the utter worst thing a person can do in a economic sense is “rent-seek”. The IDEA of turn key businesses, investment properties, money for nothing means you are taking from someone else.
They’ve attempted to expand this downward into welfare, but that’s a ridiculous canard that doesn’t examine just how much money is being siphoned from the working class by people who leverage capital against them.
Thanks for the links. I understand these concepts better now.
By that definition shareholders are rent seekers too. They extract way more value from the company than they add to it. Except instead of making money through leasing, it’s through dividend collection, capital gains and share buybacks.
As for loan givers, you could argue their existence provides value because it gives people access to funds they wouldn’t otherwise have had, allowing them to purchase goods they wouldn’t have been able to. However, when the whole system is set up such that going into debt is a requirement then the service offered by the loan giver doesn’t really add that much value to society.
In fact, if loans weren’t so tolerated, the market or government would have been forced, at an earlier point in time, to do something to reduce the costs of things we purchase with loans like real estate, cars and education (in places where it isn’t free/cheap).
Instead, loans artificially increase the cost of things to the point where buying them without getting a loan becomes impossible. For instance, by increasing the amortization period of mortgages from 10 years to 20 years to 30 years, the price of a home increased such that now it is completely out of reach to people looking to buy property without a loan.
Wealth inequality is definitely a huge problem, but the issue with landlords is that they are artificially restricting the supply of, and price gouging an already incredibly limited resource that scene needs to survive. At least with food, someone else can always make more and sell it for cheaper, or you can decide to eat something else. But with how housing is now, it’s not uncommon for just a few companies to snatch up nearly all available houses in an area, and there’s only so much “I’ll just move a little farther out” before you are an unsustainable distance from your workplace. That isn’t true of hardly any other market.
Yeah, buying vegetables gives you the seeds to your own solution to hunger (to a minor degree and with caveats) but renting does nothing to give you the seeds to a house, especially if the rent is so high there is no practical way to save money.
Agreed, in fact renting actively takes AWAY the solution to housing, because you can’t save AND the money you pay in just enables landlords to buy up more property, thus making it all more valuable.
That’s true but what I mean is that the other options for wealthy people are just as exploitative.
Shareholders exploit workers and add nothing to society.
Creditors harass people and exploit the fucked up loan system that regular people are forced to rely on, also adding no benefit to society.
Are there though? Beyond food, water, and shelter— stuff gets a lot more… easy to avoid. Food is something easy enough to shop elsewhere, and it’s possible for competitors to come in and undercut existing brands. Water is (for most of the US) relatively easy to acquire cheaply, or even free. But shelter is something that is pretty much impossible to compete with. Every area has a finite amount of space, and once it’s owned, it’s owned. Sure one landlord might lower their rent to attract new tenants, but it’s effectively guaranteed to never have more than a few competitors before you start moving a significant distance away. It’s one of the few things that’s impossible to avoid. You HAVE to exist somewhere, you can’t choose not to, and you can’t shop around endlessly like you can with other things.
You need to work to get the funds to pay for food, water and shelter. Or you go into debt to afford those things, which is probably worst.
By working you are serving the shareholders that will do their best to exploit you. Their greed will funnel it’s way to you in the workplace through shitty policies or a strict boss or low wages or whatever self serving bullshit they come up with.
I guess being exploited by a shareholder feels less direct than by a landlord. However, if all landlords became shareholders, the injection of of capital into company shares would make upper management have to serve the shareholder’s interests even more, ultimately resulting in an increase in the amount of exploitation we experience in the workplace.
I see where you are coming from with the inherent lack of housing supply, but we are nowhere close to running out of finite space. Especially when we are able to create way more homes by building vertically.
And I’m not saying landlords aren’t exploitative. I’m saying that other forms of ownership as just as exploitative.
Homelessness is worse than debt, just to be clear. You can survive with debt, there is no risk of death. Homelessness can, and often is deadly. This is just a fact.
We are at, and even past running out of space that is in commute proximity to an economic zone capable of supporting a non-impoverished lifestyle for the VAST majority of citizens. There’s tons of space in the middle of no where, but that space isn’t useful to anyone because no one can support themselves there. I don’t mean “find work” support yourself (though that too), I mean “have a grocery store within an hour drive one way from your house” support yourself.
As for working under capitalism, you’re right, it still sucks, but you can choose where you work, and there are choices to be had pretty much everywhere. The same is not true of housing, especially with the rise of suburban sprawl. You can choose to work remotely for any business you want, but you can’t choose to “exist” remotely. You have to take up space somewhere. Sure there’s space in the middle of nowhere, but how will you buy gas for your car with no gas station, food to feed yourself with no grocery store. Most of the country is like this. That is the whole problem, you simply can’t survive outside of an economic zone of a certain size, and all the housing in that area is being hoarded. I’m not arguing against the evils of capitalism, but to claim that not being allowed to exist anywhere isn’t a bigger problem then “I’m not being paid what I’m worth” is just a misunderstanding of the problem.
i think the “who is getting the guillotine?” is malicious framing. i assume u just worded it that way because it sounds funny but it still has effect of making ppl more reluctant to voice criticism.
no landlords should be killed. their private property should be transfered to a public ownership model and portions of their financial wealth should potentially be seized. ideally all housing would be made public but as a transitionary step, at least private housing should be.
for your examples, since we currently dont have good options for simply making those houses into public property, with the peopl who previosly owned them getting dibs on living there, its fair for them to keep the houses as private property for a while, without living there. letting other people live there for the meantime is also a good idea. just let them live there for free, under the condition of keeping the house livable and paying for upcomming costs. maybe offer yourself as a hireable manager for the house, if you want to get moeny out of it. why should people have to pay you for using something you dont need, if thats not reducing the value?
and yes, i am aware that being ethical with ones private property is hard, because its discouraged by current policies and public mentalities, but that doesnt mean its something we shouldnt strive for, on an individual and grander social level.
I have literally seen multiple people here within the past few days making jokes about killing all landlords.
Jokes != policy.
oki, thats either really messed up or just ppl joking because they are mad, without actually believing it.
like when ppl say eat the rich they dont actually think rich ppl should be eaten
I really hope that’s all it is.
Except that it isn’t malicious framing to some on Lemmy.
How about buying a cheap house that needs a lot of work and renting out rooms to your friends so that all of you can have an affordable place to live?
Renting isnt the problem. If tou own two houses and an apartment and rent out them except the one youre living in that isnt really the problem. When a single person owns a whole city thats the problem. Most people rent out houses/apartments as a small passive income. If its your only form of income that means youre not really contributing to society. Youre getting money for an asset that already exists.
I feel like corporation or rich person who owns a shit ton of properties for the specific use of renting as their only means of income is much more evil than working class guy who invested in a second property because that’s what he was told he was supposed to do as a “smart investment.”
But the whole privately owned land where rent can be collected thing is a garbage system that creates serfdom and serves the rich while damaging society as a whole.
