Reason I’m asking is because I have an aunt that owns like maybe 3 - 5 (not sure the exact amount) small townhouses around the city (well, when I say “city” think of like the areas around a city where theres no tall buildings, but only small 2-3 stories single family homes in the neighborhood) and have these houses up for rent, and honestly, my aunt and her husband doesn’t seem like a terrible people. They still work a normal job, and have to pay taxes like everyone else have to. They still have their own debts to pay. I’m not sure exactly how, but my parents say they did a combination of saving up money and taking loans from banks to be able to buy these properties, fix them, then put them up for rent. They don’t overcharge, and usually charge slightly below the market to retain tenants, and fix things (or hire people to fix things) when their tenants request them.
I mean, they are just trying to survive in this capitalistic world. They wanna save up for retirement, and fund their kids to college, and leave something for their kids, so they have less of stress in life. I don’t see them as bad people. I mean, its not like they own multiple apartment buildings, or doing excessive wealth hoarding.
Do leftists mean people like my aunt too? Or are they an exception to the “landlords are bad” sentinment?
Owning your place to live should be a right. Anyone who holds more housing stock than they personally need and who will only let it out if there’s profit on their investment (because if it’s an investment, then there is an expectation that the line must always go up, which is also very inflationary), tightens the market and makes it harder for other people to become a home owner.
The big difference between renting and paying of a mortgage, is that by paying off the mortgage, the home owner has build up equity and secured a financially more secure future. But if someone is too poor to get a mortgage to afford the inflated house prices (inflated because other people treat it like an investment), then in the current system they pay rent to pay off the mortgage/debt of their landlord and after the renter has paid off their landlord’s mortgage, they’ll still be poor and without any equity themselves.
It’s a very antisocial system. And with landlords building up more and more equity on the backs of people who are unable to build up equity themselves, there’s a good reason why landlords are often said to be parasitic.
You assume that everybody wants to own and that just isn’t the case.
I assume that everyone who wants to own a home wants to own a home and many of those aren’t able to. That’s the current reality.
Edit: I reread what I said and I distinctly said that it should be “a right”. Having a right to do something is not the same as having an obligation to do something. Imo home ownership should be a right for everyone, but that doesn’t make it an obligation.
and I distinctly said that it should be “a right”
Yes, you did, but you said it as part of an answer to the question “why are landlords considered parasites?”, and you explained that those who own more homes than they can live in are parasites. The logical conclusion (would be that it should be outlawed to be a landlord.
So, how am I to understand that? Should there be a quota, an acceptable amount of parasites so to speak?
Heavily tax buying and owning homes as investments. Also heavily tax vacant homes in regions with a housing shortage.
Basically regulate it so that prospective buyers who are buying a place to live in are significantly advantaged when trying to do so, while at the same time discouraging others from buying up those homes as investments.
I’m 40 and have friends my age who rent because they don’t want to own even though they can afford to. I’m not sure what percentage of renters are like them.
We can worry about that when there’s a lack of places to rent and homelessness is down.
People will always have a chance to rent since apartments exist, but people do not have a chance to buy houses
People own apartments too. If you can’t own more than one home, surely apartments would also be covered by that?
I think if you rent out your attic, whatever, i don’t think anybody cares. If you have a spare airbnb property or an investment property or you own an apartment complex, then yes, they’re part of the problem.
Houses aren’t investments, so yes.
In an ideal world maybe renting homes would be something that isn’t parasitic. But the world isn’t ideal, and you end up with housing as investment, which means housing shortages, housing inflation, and housing restrictions.
Yeah, the big landlords are worse, but even the small ones are almost always going to be sucking the blood of their tenants beside because it’s a losing proposition from the get-go. Think about it for a second. If your relatives bought those houses as an investment, no matter how nice they are about it, no matter how “fair” their rents, they’re part of a bad and broken system, they’re profiting off of other people’s need for a basic, fundamental thing that can’t be escaped.
It isn’t like someone that has a big house and rents out a room, which is still kinda parasitic on the far left scale of things because it means they don’t need that house in the first place, but let’s be fucking real and admit that nobody should be forced to move just because their kids left for college or whatever, and now there’s a spare room. The further left you go, the crazier that kind of asinine thing gets, but extremes are gonna extreme, ya dig?
But once you’re consolidating property for the sole purpose of charging other people to live there? Yeah, landlords, no matter how nice they may be, are fucking over everyone.
It’s like ACAB. Yeah, we all know that some individual police officers are probably not actively fucking people over and such, but they’re part of the system, and if they aren’t actively working against that system, they’re part of the problem too.
Your relatives probably are decent folks that are just trying to get ahead in a capitalist world where that kind of investment is stable and effective. And I can’t hate, nor abide hate towards, people that are really just doing the best they can. But they’re still parasitic. A medical leech is no less a parasite because it happens to pull a clot out. A mosquito is no less a parasite because it’s just trying to make babies. The comparison isn’t exactly 1:1 there, but you get me, right?
I don’t waste my hate on people like your relatives, I save it for predatory companies until and unless the small fry are assholes alongside being parasites.
But you can’t genuinely believe in the more common "left"ideologies without recognizing the flaws of capitalism. When you look at those flaws, you begin to realize that it really doesn’t matter what scale things start at, it always gets worse.
Along those lines, let’s say your relatives are fucking saints. They do everything right by their tenants, only making enough profit to ensure their older days are safe.
Then they die, as we all will.
Someone inherits those houses. Again, even if they’re saints, they didn’t do a damn thing to build those homes, they took no risks, did none of the work. So, even if they sell them and abandon being a landlord, they’re profiting off of all those years of rent payed in. And if they don’t? Do they just run those few places as a landlord? Just continuing to profit off of others, they aren’t worse than what came before, but they aren’t better
But, at some point, you’ve got these homes owned by some great-great-great-whatever, and why? At what point is that not parasitic, even when everyone along the line does nothing other than be landlords? And what happens when you run into someone inheriting that isn’t a saint. They either expand the empire, or go slum lord, or start abrogating their responsibilities. And you end up with the same kind of situation as the worst landlords.
I’m not saying there aren’t benefits to renting as a renter, there are. But when the housing is an investment, rinse benefits start disappearing fast because that’s how it works. At some point, to realize that investment, either rent goes up, or the place gets sold at a profit, which sends rent up. Housing as investment is inherently parasitic, no matter how good the parasites are to their host
“Landlords provide housing like scalpers provide concert tickets.”
https://lifehacker.com/why-everyone-hates-landlords-now-1849100799
That said, I do think there need to be ways to rent housing rather than buy it, since many people need that flexibility. Looks like the answer to that might be community land trusts?
Or public housing
What a magnificent comparison!
Don’t take it personally, but landlordism is fundamentally parasitism. It’s a matter of fact that private property, whether it’s a townhouse or a factory, enables its owners to extract value from working people. If people personally resent landlords like your aunt, it’s probably not so much because that’s where the theory guides them as it is that almost everyone has had a bad experience with a landlord or knows someone who did. Landlords have earned a bad reputation.
For most of my life I was not interested in owning a home. Owning meant I couldn’t pick up and move or travel when I got the urge, which I did several times. One time while in a foreign country for a stay of undetermined length, I was able to contact an old landlord and secure a place to stay when I learned my return date. How would I have had a place to stay if landlords did not exist?
“Land contract”.
A land contract starts out similar to a rental agreement. You make fixed monthly payments. If you stay in the home for 3 years, it automatically converts to a private mortgage, and the first three years of “rent” becomes your down payment. If you leave before a year, you forfeit your “security deposit”, just like renting. If you leave before 3 years, you gain no equity; again, just like renting.
If you ever do decide to settle down in one spot, you’re already well on your way to ownership.
I would solve the rental problem by creating a massive, punitively high tax rate on all residential properties, and issuing an equivalent tax exemption to owner-occupants. A land contract is recorded with the county, much like a deed or a lien, and the buyer/tenant would be considered the “owner” for tax purposes.
Is this actually a thing or are you saying it should be?
Land contracts are an actual “thing”. They are legal agreements, recorded in the county register like a deed or a lien. You can buy or sell a home through a land contract right now, if you want. Currently, they aren’t particularly common, but they aren’t unknown either.
I mentioned how I would like to eliminate rent entirely, by establishing exorbitant tax penalties for people who own multiple residential properties. Land Contracts are how I would meet the needs of people who need the flexibility of a rental arrangement, rather than just buying with a private mortgage.
There is an interesting method of “rent” in use in South Korea that is far less parasitical. I don’t know of it being used in the US, but we could adopt it if we wanted. "Jeonse or “Key Money” is where the tenant makes zero monthly payments. Instead, they put down a large deposit. The landlord invests their deposit (there are limitations on what they can invest in), and keeps any interest. At the end of the rental period (usually 2 years) the landlord returns the entire deposit to the tenant. The tenant is protected by taking out a lien against the property. If the landlord cannot or will not return the deposit, the tenant takes ownership of the property.
The Jeonse deposit is typically 50% to 80% of the purchase price of the house, but it can be externally financed if necessary.
That’s nice that you found a place to stay after traveling the world, that you found some personal benefit from a system that leaves more than half a million people without proper housing (at least in the US). What does that have to do with anything that I wrote?
Presumably because he/she is a person who wants to live somewhere without the hassle of having to own a house and that is impossible without landlords. And they are not the only one like that.
So your idea that all of it is parasitism has met someone, arguably you mean to help, who likes landlords. Because despite what some people think, a lot don’t want to sign on the immense debt for a house nor maintain it. Landlords provide a service in that case and why is it your right to deny renters and landlords that service?
That doesn’t mean there aren’t parasitic landlords because there very much are. But a blanket statement that it’s all bad seems foolish. Perhaps nuance is very much lost on people nowadays.
and that is impossible without landlords
I reject this premise. It certainly is possible to establish a system that allows for what you describe, without undue burden on people who choose to “settle down”.
“Land Contracts” could replace “rental agreements”. In the short term (<1 year) they function identically to a typical, annual rental agreement: you agree to a fixed, monthly payment. If you break the contract and leave early, you pay a penalty.
In the medium term (1-3 years), the only difference is that your payment doesn’t change (or changes only per the terms established in the initial agreement). You don’t face a sudden, unexpected increase in your monthly payment. You do not owe a penalty if you break the agreement before three years.
The real difference between rent and a land contract is that after three years, the land contract converts to a private mortgage, in which your first three years of payments are considered the down payment. You continue to make monthly payments, but now, you have equity in the home: you are the owner; you are free to sell the home on your terms, you merely owe the outstanding balance on the loan.
Because equity (eventually) transfers to the tenant/buyer/borrower, this agreement is fundamentally less parasitical.
How do we switch to this model? Well, first you need to understand that the tenant/buyer/borrower is the “owner” of the home; the landlord/seller/lender is not the owner; they are a “lienholder”. The “owner” - not the lienholder - is responsible for the property taxes.
So, what we do is massively increase the property taxes on all residential properties, while allowing exemptions to owner-occupants. If you reside in the property, you qualify for the exemption. If you do not reside in the property, you owe the whole tax.
With that change, “rent” basically stops existing. Typical landlords will switch over to land contracts instead of rental agreements to avoid being hit with the exorbitant property tax. The only properties that will continue as actual rentals are those where the landlord lives on-site, (duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes) making them eligible for the owner-occupant credit.
This owner-occupancy exemption also affects commercial lenders: if they attempt to foreclose on a traditional borrower, they owe the higher tax from the time they evict, until they re-sell the property. This gives them an incentive to negotiate with the borrower, and greatly reduce foreclosure rates.
Landlordism is parasitism. That doesn’t mean that the only alternative is a system in which people can only acquire housing by way of long term mortgages.
You can only say that landlords extract value from working people if they take money without giving anything in return. But landlords provide housing, which is certainly of great value.
Emotional reasoning tells us this is parasitism in the following ways:
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we believe housing is a human right therefore no one can claim they provide it as a value - it’s something we are all entitled to.
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once a house exists it seems like the landlord doesn’t “do” anything in order to provide the housing, except sit there and own it. So this must be theft because they are getting something for nothing.
#1 I understand and if you feel this then work to have it enacted as law in your homeland, because until it is enshrined in the system, you can’t expect anyone to just give away housing.
#2 is somewhat naive, because owning a house has costs including (minimally) taxes, insurance, and maintenance. Owning housing always carries a large risk too - you could incur major damage from a flood, hurricane, earthquake. And those are incredibly expensive to recover from. Not for renters, though - they just move.
The most important question of all is: how does housing come into being? If we make housing something that cannot be offered as a value, who will build? The up front cost to build housing is enormous and it may take decades of “sitting there doing nothing” to collect enough rent to recoup that.
People make all the same arguments about lending money. It’s predatory and extracts value from the people. But without the ability to borrow money, no one could build or buy a home, or start a business.
Much could be done to improve how lending and landlording work, to make them more fair and less exploitative, but when people say that in their very essence they are evil I think they are just naive children seeing mustache twirling villains everywhere.
how does housing come into being?
Well one “simple” way is for all the builders to be rolled up into the civil service: the government pays them to do their job, i.e. build houses, which the government then owns and allows people to live in. This must necessarily be rent-free, otherwise the government becomes one massive landlord therefore not solving the problem, and also takes the bottom out of the mortgage market because why would anyone buy when they can just move into government-provided housing without a 25-year millstone tied round their necks. It also creates a ton of job security because it means you can just walk away from a shitty employer without fear of becoming homeless.
It also drops anyone with a mortgage into the worst possible negative equity problem, which will be a massive problem for a massive number of people, therefore has zero chance of ever being voted in. So for this to work there has to be a solution to the mortgage problem, e.g. the government buys all that housing stock for the current outstanding mortgage amount, but that’s a massive investment into something that now necessarily has zero value, which would likely crash the economy. IANAE so it’d be interesting to get a real economist’s view on how this might all work in practice.
Yeah as your air quotes indicate, it’s simple to say but extremely problematic to do. Still, there are incremental approaches to this. Public housing does exist, it’s just extremely small so it doesn’t have any of those systemic effects. We should dial it up. But until it’s universal, it will always face the good old American problem of “my taxes shouldn’t but you free stuff.” It’s things to like this that make UBI look simple.
It’s not emotional reasoning. The rental income that a landlord collects is not a wage based on any labor that they do. It is a dividend on a real estate investment. The crucial mechanism to a rental property investment is the license to withhold or take away housing from people. That’s what makes landlordism extractive and parasitic. Landlords simply do not provide housing. They capture it and extort people for temporary permission to live in it.
If you want some emotional reasoning as to why people resent landlords, here’s a short list I wrote from a similar thread:
- Almost everyone has had or knows someone who’s had to deal with an especially neglectful or difficult landlord;
- landlords have been engaging in notoriously greedy and abusive behavior since the industrial revolution;
- landlords aren’t doing themselves any favors they way some of them publicly brag and whine about being landlords;
- and there’s just something that isn’t right about owning someone else’s home and probably everyone has some faint sense of that.
You skipped the most important question, as all anti-landlord idealists do.
“How is house made?” You think landlords are necessary or helpful to housing production? How can that be if they are fundamentally parasitic?
Now you’re making faces and trying to discredit the most important question so you can avoid answering it. It won’t work.
The answer, which should be obvious, is that workers produce housing. How do you insert landlords into that process in a way that isn’t parasitic?
Who pays the workers and buys the materials? Whose land does this happen on?
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I don’t disagree that landlords are for the most part acting parasitically. However I would argue that in order for society to function “parasitism” is a requirement. I want to be clear and state that THIS form isn’t required, but some form is.
Let me explain my thinking. Nearly half of the population doesn’t work. The population of non workers can almost entirely fall within these categories: children, attending school, disabled (mentally or physically), or retired.
These populations need money even though they are not producing any. I would guess that most of the extracted profit that comes out of “mom and pop” rentals goes to providing for non-worker expenses.
Now I believe these expenses should be covered by taxations and redistribution of the factor income, but since we have a pathetic system of this in the US it’s hard for me to fault someone for using investment property to hedge against child care and/or retirement
What you’re talking about, I wouldn’t call parasitism.
The owner of a home has “freedom”. When you buy a home, you are free to do with it what you want. What makes landlords parasites is that the tenant is paying for that landlord’s “freedom”, but they are not receiving it themselves.
But my point is that there are certain categories of people who need access to income that they themselves do not produce. An able bodied capitalist is not one of these people, but a worker who is using real estate as a retirement vehicle is.
I am not as well read as I would like, but I don’t think Marxist theory really faults anyone for acting in their apparent self-interest. The point is to become aware that you belong to a class with common interests, likely the working class, and that you can team up with your fellow workers and tenants to build leverage and get a better deal. Eventually, you can stop surrendering the wealth you and your class create to the minority bourgeoisie class.
To your point, a landlord who also has to hold down a regular job is still part of the working class. However, they might fall into the subcategories of labor aristocracy or petit bourgeoisie. Because they have it a little better, they’re less reliable or even traitorous in the class struggle compared to regular workers, even though they rarely have the juice to make it into the bourgeoisie.
I’d say even your aunt is included in that. Don’t worry though, my mom is on the same list. They’re extracting wealth from someone else’s labor.
I honestly feel like when this issue comes up, everyone saying stuff like this is an alien. Do you seriously not know how much work maintaining property is? You say it’s exploiting someone else’s labor as though the several times a year every household needs work is, what, either worthless, unmentionable, or something people are owed by divine right? My parents owned some apartments and sound similar to OPs aunt. If anything, they were exploited by the people they bought them from (that aspect is a long story).
They charged people under market rate, went out of their way all the time to be kind to people by doing things like driving half an hour to personally come pick up rent payments, letting people stay for a year without paying rent since they felt bad for them, went out to fix maintenance issues in the middle of the night, and the list goes on and on. They treated people better than any other landlord and worked their absolute asses off to make a profit (some years they took losses). It was only after a 20 year struggle, full of manual labor and dealing with difficult tenants, that they were able to sell the apartments and be free from the stress and be free of all of that manual labor. They basically cleaned toilets and replaced filthy carpet for people who would spit in their face for evicting them after a year of non payment.
According to you and this thread, the people doing the spitting weren’t morally bad or the lazy ones. Nope, it was my parents.
My grandfather was a landlord back in the 80s-90s. He owned several small homes and duplexes in a big city, and he did all the maintenance and upkeep on them himself. I saw him work his ass off, how would his tenants paying him rent not be compensating him for his labor?
It’s not a coherent argument, people just don’t like paying rent so they lash out in frustration. If you can’t own you have to rent, if you have to rent you have to rent from someone. It’s just a fact of life. Just like food is also a requirement to live and you need to pay someone for that too if you’re not self sufficient. There’s good people selling food and bad people selling food. It would be dumb to consider all food merchants evil in principle just as it’s dumb to consider all landlords evil in principle.
I dunno about pricing back then but the issue is the amount of wealth that can be generated from a situation like that.
Like, hypothetically, let’s split your grandfather into two people. A landlord, and a maintenance guy hired to maintain those properties, getting paid a fair wage.
Would the landlord make money, after paying a mortgage and his maintenance man?
If the answer is no, then becoming a landlord isn’t financially beneficial, and your grandfather could’ve just been a handyman, and made a steadier income, his money not directly dependent on whether or not someone paid rent.
If the answer is yes, then your grandfather made more money than his labor was worth. While he earned money doing labor, the real issue is the money he earned by doing nothing. It’s likely your grandfather made quite a bit more money than his labor was worth, given the fact that property management companies live entirely off of the price difference from labor put into housing and the price they can charge.
Landlords are middlemen. They’re used car salesman for houses. Are there landlords that aren’t shitty? Yeah. My last landlord was awesome, he actually sold me the house I was renting, when I told him I was gonna buy a house and start my family. He was nice, reasonable, all those things. The total rent at the time (pre-covid, so a lot better than now, and split among 6 people) was 2250$, and my mortgage worked out to be 900$.
Did your grandfather put effort in? Yes. Did he make money doing nothing? Also yes, the difference between what his labor was worth and what he got paid.
That margin didn’t come from his labor or his smart investments, it came from other people trying to live, and potentially created hardships. If his tenants could’ve paid for the actual cost of housing instead of whatever your grandfather charged, that might mean another kid got to go to college, a father getting to retire earlier, a family that could’ve worked 1 job instead of 2.
Your grandfather is probably fine, he likely understood hardships and acted like a human being, but he still belonged to a class of people that are better off if they find ways to minimize the amount of money other people have. Some people judge others for taking what they don’t need.
I appreciate you breaking it down this way. It helps me understand the stance so many hold on landlords.
However, I think you’re missing a lot in your distillation that everything above mortgage + handyman salary is making money for nothing.
Owner also pays property taxes, insurance, all maintenance costs, all upgrades, and possibly utilities or yard care. The benefits for the renters include having a maintenance person on-call all the time, not needing to vet each tradesperson, not needing to get quotes, no expenses when an appliance breaks, no liability in case of a disaster, and more.
If I didn’t have a handy partner and the market was reasonable, I’d love to rent. I don’t want to deal with maintenance and I like having a consistent monthly fee rather than suddenly having to spend $2k on a new water heater like I did last month, or being afraid that our heat might die suddenly this winter because we weren’t ready to spend >$20k this summer to replace the air handler when it went out and needed a new part. Plus my partner took 3 half days off work to get 3 quotes for it. They each told us significantly different things that we needed to do, so we couldn’t decide if we were comfortable doing business with any of them. That shit is stressful! Having the assurance that I can call just one person and someone else will take care of it is worth a good price.
So the cost of owning some units is more than just the mortgage, and the benefits of renting are more than just a maintenance person’s salary. Distilling it to just those two things is an unjust comparison.
Should a person get stupidly rich off of being a landlord? No. That’s exploitative. The cost of renting should match the cost of the property and maintenance (as averaged out over time) plus the cost/savings of the additional benefits of renting. That’s all. But that’s a lot more than just mortgage + handyman salary divided out over however many units the landlord owns.
(Also this assumes the person is actually a good landlord, and we know there are many landlords out there who aren’t.)
Thank you for putting this so eloquently. Most reasonable line of thinking I’ve seen ITT
In order for there to be any rental property at all, someone has to own it and be the landlord. Unless they think it should be the state. Or unless they think that everyone should always own the property where they live.
I didn’t think there is much of a logical argument for having no landlords whatsoever.
Who owns a hotel? Isn’t that just another type of landlord?
In order for there to be any rental property at all, someone has to own it and be the landlord.
I mean yes, but all that means is there shouldn’t be rental properties
Unless they think it should be the state.
You mean ppl think that housing is a human right that should be provided for and administer by “We the People” for “We the People”.
I didn’t think there is much of a logical argument for having no landlords whatsoever.
What other kind of Lords do you think there isn’t a logical argument against?
Who owns a hotel? Isn’t that just another type of landlord?
Surely you understand the difference between a hotel and a home. They are prima facie not the same thing. Also, we call the owners of hotels…owners. The same thing we call owners of homes. Landlords are not the same thing.
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Housing being a human right has nothing to do with getting rid of rental properties. If anything, having to buy a house is a lot bigger barrier to housing than rent.
What we need is rent to be affordable, and landlords to do their job, i.e. maintain and fix the apartments. There are many ways to achieve this: government owned housing, legal regulation, tenant unions etc. Everybody buing a house or an apartment is not one of them.
I have read your comment more than a few times, trying to respond in good faith, but I am uncertain so I am going to ask before responding:
Are you arguing from a position that housing IS a human right but not related at all to property rights, and the government needs to make housing affordable enough to everyone.
-OR-
Are you arguing from a position that housing is NOT a human right, BUT “the rent is too damn high” and the government needs to fix it?
There is a lot of what you have to say that I think I agree with, but I keep reading your comment and I am not sure.
I think housing is a human right but homeownership has nothing to do with it. Governmental intervention or renters organizing or both is required to secure the right.
difference between a hotel and a home. They are prima facie not the same thing
Hey, not so fast. It’s easy to say that glibly, but the lines get kinda blurry when you consider long-term hotel stays and short-term rentals. What’s really the key difference between the apartment and the hotel when you’re staying at the former for a week at a time or the latter for a 3-month stint?
I’m not saying the Venn diagram is a circle, mind you, just that there’s definitely some overlap.
I do see what you mean, but I am not sure arguing all the edge cases does anything but muddy the water. I mean I would argue that a hotel (even long term) is a hotel. Honestly, I would argue that the way housing is working right now, landlords who do short-term rentals are even worse than your standard landlord. Some cities are outlawing or heavily regulating them because they are so much more damaging (to society) than the more normal longterm landlord.
I am not sure arguing all the edge cases does anything but muddy the water.
Eh, fair. Still, I was curious what you’d say about some of those edge cases.
I would argue that the way housing is working right now
Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Housing isn’t working right now for way too many people. :(
Personally, I have very different opinions on “in an ideal world, here’s a sketch of how humane housing might look” and “in today’s dystopian hellscape, these are the worst of the worst”
My dad was a ‘landlord’ renting out the other three rooms of the house to people. He kept the rent a few hundred bwlow the market because all the rent money was icing on his cake, and he knew housing was hard to come by. Most renters liked him, but he was a poor judge of character and would often give the room to the first person that showed up, leading to drama, but mostly a good experience.
My biggest gripe is the system. I am deemed not financially able to own a mortgage but I am deemed able to pay nearly double to pay off someone else’s mortgage.
Yes I am bitter and I don’t see why someone should be able to make money off me like this.
They mean anyone with more stuff than they have.
I would say your aunt sounds like she found a way to try and make a living. You can certainly take issue with the system but she didn’t make it. She sounds decent and not unlike my parents who bought some apartments in the early 2000s. What apparently people somehow don’t realize, is that when you’re not a corporation or running rental property like a huge dickhead, it’s actually a lot of work to either pay others to do or to do yourself. The situation my parents were in was the bluest of collar jobs.
My mom cleaning toilets and filthy refrigerators, my dad dropping everything or getting out of bed to go fix someone’s heat. This image that apparently 80% of commenters here have that they’re just laying back collecting easy money couldn’t have been further from the truth. They were working their ass off to make any money because they couldn’t afford to hire most tasks.
They rented to people for under the market rate, they let old people stay over a year without paying. They drove significant drives to pick up rent checks from weirdos who couldn’t handle mailing payments for some reason. The horror stories of how people abused their kindness and trashed their apartments are endless. SO many difficult tenants, and hundreds of thousands of back breaking hours later, they sold the apartments and made a little money. I will easily retire with more money than they made by writing software from the comfort of my home. Next to my parents’ struggle with this, my life is incredibly easy.
But somehow, to a lot of lemmings, my work is honest and my parents are exploitative leeches who are morally bankrupt for their choice to take all that shit on (btw we have said nothing about the risk of enormous unexpected expenses or things like being sued by a tenant faking an injury and arguing in court it was your fault).
Is your aunt a parasite? sounds like she absolutely isn’t. I’d say anyone willing to read what you wrote here and say she is, is probably an out of touch asshole whose opinion shouldn’t be valued. But that may just be because I have the 20 years of watching my parents struggle to do that job and it wasn’t easy for them except those few elusive weeks a year that somehow no apartments had anything break and no one moved. That entire 20 years they were afraid to even go on vacation because someone might have a water heater stop working or something.
Of course many would say “why wouldn’t they just hire those maintenance items taken care of?!” I mean yeah of course, and I wasn’t privy to their financial details all those years but it always sounded like they were only able to make money because they did most everything themselves. My parents were the ones exploited. By tenants being shitty and taking advantage sometimes, by the sellers, but most of all, by capitalism. They had to trade their lives for money, and nothing about it was easy. Anyone looking at the situation and unable to see that it was hard just honestly has no empathy at all.
This thread was a disappointing read. I have seen the spectrum, and corporate fuckhead landlords are complete scum. Honest, hardworking people who treat their tenants well are NOT, and anyone who tries to erase that nuance just wants to feel superior and probably should seek therapy (even more so than your average person – we all need it).
It sounds like your parents were less of landlords and more of providing. A normal landlord is absolutely charging enough to cover calling someone out and evicting people who cannot or will not pay.
Yes, and I would agree that even most landlords are unsavory at best. What I’m taking issue with are absolutist views that say 'no, without exception, x is true '. It’s just thought-terminating mental laziness and it’s not helpful.
The problem is systemic though. That’s why it’s a general statement. Just like super philanthropic billionaires exist, but we still say there should be no billionaires. You don’t make a movement by adding asterisks.
Take a step back and realize that you just read that story and then compared my parents to billionaires. I could read that very charitably and say you only meant that generalizations are “helpful” for inspiring change, but even that doesn’t sit right…
I’m trying to tell you that I don’t think literally saying “ALL landlords are scum” is helpful. Take or leave but I don’t think there’s an honest way to deny that.
I could compare them to cops if that would make you feel better. Or the outdated western US water rights system. Landlords shouldn’t exist in the form they do now. That somewhere, someone is doing it in the hardest way possible doesn’t somehow make the system better.
Whatever you say. In every way that matters I myself am closer to a billionaire than my parents. And I’m not close. But don’t let that stop your mentally lazy infighting with your own class, assuming you aren’t a billionaire yourself
What you’re not getting is that I don’t care about your parents. They are neither good or evil to me. I care about the 99 percent of landlords exploiting people. The existence of one good person in a bad system does not make the system any less parasitical.
They didn’t compare your parents to billionaires though? Are you unfamiliar with how analogies work…?
Their point was that my parents belong to a class of evil people, which I thoroughly demonstrated was false. And even if you ignore that, you can’t pretend that chosen example was meaningless
If they are not charging rent for a year because they are letting an old widow live there, thrn thry are running a charity, they are not acting as a land lord.
Not sure what you want me to say about that. They certainly made a modest profit overall. Like I said, they had cheap rent. People are more complicated than just a label though.
Here lets try this. How do we talk about groups? I can say the Catholic church is against capital punishment, and that is true, but i also personally know many Catholics that are for capital punishment.
Can i not honestly say Catholics are against capital punishment?
If I say officially the church is against capital punishment am I reducing the complexity of of the Catholics that are for it?
How can i talk about landlords?
This post presents a specific question. I bore with you people on this. Read the post and my comment and move on. I’m not going to rehash everything 100 times for mental sloths
This sort of landlord apologia isn’t necessary and is actually harmful to the reputation of landlords like your parents, the OP’s aunt, and their beneficiaries. You even managed to sneak some resentment towards tenants in there. Maybe after expenses the rental income was disappointing to them sometimes, but at the end of the day your parents owned other people’s homes. Just be conscious of your station and have some quiet dignity about it.
This post is about the topic. I gave my opinion on it and why. I’ve done nothing to harm anyone, and I spoke about specific extremely shitty tenants.
I guess this is one of those cases where you decided a stranger is randomly lying and you know the real story. Have fun with that
Where did I say that you were lying?
You even managed to sneak some resentment towards tenants in there.
This seems to imply that the tenants did nothing wrong, but we were mad we couldn’t exploit them further. Which isn’t true at all. I only mentioned the tenants behavior because I know that my parents gave them empathy and leeway and though there may have been some legit complaints against them (trust me my parents aren’t perfect), I heard several crazy stories that for a small business owner who is being understanding and doing right by people, it comes off especially personal when those same people trash the apartment and then also don’t pay thousands of dollars which they owed.
Tldr; some people are selfish and really suck to deal with and those people also end up renting apartments
I didn’t imply that all tenants are perfectly well behaved. I implied that you a repeating the misconception that landlords provide housing, that they undertake a remarkable burden that makes them deserving of every cent of rental income they collect. It’s a trope that elides the simple fact that renting housing is predicated not on any sort of actual work a landlord does, but rather the ability to withhold or take away housing from people. Stop pretending otherwise. Your parents are or were landlords. You dishonor them to try and sugarcoat it.
If I didn’t think you were intentionally ignoring the point I would say you don’t seem like a strong reader. I guess really what you’re saying is that you’re the horrible deadbeat tenant, needlessly destroying property and refusing to pay money you agreed to pay, and you’re here trying to dress up being a shitty person in a pseudo intellectual argument. Otherwise it wouldn’t really make sense for you to come along and strongly defend people that you literally only know are pieces of shit. Stellar priorities.
What kind of an idiot reads a story about blue collar workers getting people’s home issues fixed at 1am and immediately responds LaNdLoRdS dO nO wOrK. Fucking pathetic brainrot bullshit. You are absolutely someone who would trash an apartment and fuck real people who you have pretended to be nice to out of $5000 and pretend you’re morally justified.
Blocked.
I never said landlords do no work.
removed by mod
Those buying up properties which prevent people from getting on the property ladder, not owning a couple. I’m left-wing; I bought land, built a small house (small as in the size of a one-bed apartment), current rent it out which pays for my rent in another place. The landlords I’ve had over the past few years have been great, they are also living in the same place they rent out, those people are good.
It would vary depending on who’s saying it.
There is no exception to stealing housing from other people.
If you rent to house mates, is that stealing? Do you need to have joint ownership with everyone?
If you’re not charging them above what is required to cover their share of the mortgage, then that’s not immoral at all.
But you would be the one getting ownership from the mortgage, so I’d think charging less than the share of the mortgage would be fair. But that ratio depends on your and their particular time value of money, which is hard to pin down. And once you paid off the house, the rent should go to zero?
I agree, that sounds fair.
I suppose after the house is paid off, they could switch to pay the equivalent percentage they were paying for the mortgage, toward property taxes and utilities instead.
My two cents—which is worthless (thanks inflation!):
Not unless you are taking advantage of them. It really is going to depend on the specific situation. But if you are renting to housemates you’re not really the landlord class most people are talking about.
But what is taking advantage of them? If someone owns a house outright, isn’t charging any rent charging more than you need to? At that point, they’re not contributing anything. I agree that’s not what most people are talking about, but I don’t see how it’s categorically different.
Most people who are arguing that being a landlord (as a class) are arguing that using property (ownership) as an investment (extracting value) is evil by it’s nature. By owning the home and living there, there is already a categorical difference. Most (although not all) people arguing against rentier behavior have no issues with a person owning personal property.
I do see your what you are trying to say, it’s akin to “slippery slope” falacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
If landlords are wrong, then logically wouldn’t this other more reasonable and less exploitative thing be wrong too? (renting a room in a house you own and are living in) and no, not necessarily. Because it isn’t the same thing.
Or maybe not. Maybe renting out a room in a house you live in is wrong too. Frankly, it would be simpler to do away with all private property rights, and live in a star trek style egalitarian utopia. I would vote for that.
As long as I get to smuggle in some Romulan Ale.
I don’t think rentals should exist. You could literally put a house anywhere a couple hundred years ago, and all you needed to do was build it. Now we have artificially stunted the supply of housing to make good little worker bees our of everyone. The threat of homelessness and starvation is a fantastic motivator to not rock the boat in society.
You could literally put a house anywhere a couple hundred years ago, and all you needed to do was build it.
I think you have to go back way more than a few hundred years for that.
In the US there were programs that kinda sounded like that but it was just the US government trying to get working class white people to displace native people.
In Europe wasn’t everything owned by nobles snd royals who demanded a cut of your labor? Could people just build a random house anywhere in ancient Rome or Greece?
Well, not quite. You’d have to have rights to the land to do that. Else someone could ride up and just take it from you.
