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?
“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!
No raindrop thinks itself responsible for the flood.
Quit exhaling! We have a climate crisis!
But this is my regulated breathing minute!
I’ve never heard this phrase before and I love it.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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If you make a profit for allowing another person shelter (particularly if you don’t need that space for yourself and/or your own family), then you are a parasite.
Depends on the person. There are people that mean every landlord. Their reasoning isn’t as bad as you might think either. The main issues are that they still exert control over property, a form of private governance; they’re denying the same financial stability through housing equity to another family; and they can artificially raise the price of housing.
That happens at every level of being a landlord. Of course the systemic problems only get worse as the number of owned or managed units goes up.
Most people are thinking about the giant corporations holding thousands of units.
I lost my original comment I was typing as my device died so I’ll keep it short. Your aunt extracts money from people on the basis of owning private property (private property is property that is owned by an individual for non-personal use). She doesn’t earn the money through her own labour, she gets it by owning an asset that she herself has no use for and someone else needs and charges that person for using it. This is a parasitic relationship. Now to answer your question about if she is a bad person because of it, I would say not necessarily. The fact that landlords exist is a bad thing. We live in a system however where investment in private property (something inherently parasitic) is often the only way to retire. Every working Australian is required by law to invest a portion of their pay into an investment fund. This too is parasitic. That doesn’t however make every working Australian a bad person, they are just working within the system and doing what is required of them to live. Another thing to keep in mind is that for every house that is owned as an investment property, the price to buy a house goes up. By being a landlord, you make it harder for others to own a home.
it is not possible to have a property as an investment, without screwing someone else over. So yeah, her too.
The landlord charges enough in monthly rent to cover mortgage, house maintenance, and provide profit. So the argument about it being a service to tenants is BS as the tenant could afford this on their own.
Landlords rely on the credit system for denial and cost of entry into property ownership to exploit tenants.
I would argue that nobody should own a home they don’t actually live in. All renting out does is increase the housing cost overall because nobody would ever operate at a loss or to break even. This is the issue people have with say, Blackrock who buys hundreds of homes at a time and rents them out.
Your family aren’t bad people but the business they decided to take up is inherently bad by design. If the law changed tomorrow saying all multi homes must sell to non homeowners, everyone would watch prices drop and be able to afford it.
Using homes as an investment is at its basics, exploiting a need by interpreting it as a want or practical goods. Homes are for living in. The housing industry views homes like commodities as if people have a wide choice and selection when it’s really “Omg we can afford this one that popped up randomly, we have 12 hours to decide if we want to pay 50k more to beat others away” and then lose anyway after bidding to Blackrock who pays 100k over asking.
Homeowners also treat their home as an investment. Which also makes housing more expensive and inaccessible. Moving away from renting is not the solution, we need a more comprehensive change in the system.
The context here is quite different; in other words, you got an apples vs oranges issue here. A single home owner does not expect to profit from that investment; the increase in value is more of an insurance than anything (mortgages are taken out to cover emergencies, or the increase in value provides the means to move to a new home, etc). So, again, the context is extremely different.
Besides, if the expected inflation in value were the issue, shouldn’t I expect increased wages to make up the difference? I.e. no, that would not contribute to making the housing market too expensive for the average person to find accessible.
A single home owner does not expect to profit from that investment
What are you talking about? People definitely buy homes as an investment so that they can sell it and retire.
increase in value provides the means to move to a new home
What is this, if not profiting off an investment?
What are you talking about? People definitely buy homes as an investment so that they can sell it and retire.
That’s insurance. The “profit” goal is not to rent seek or enrich themselves. And in this market it’s a risky gamble, anyways.
If the so called profit is intended to be entirely consumed to take care of moving or retiring, it’s insurance to allow you to move or retire; it’s not profit you add to your income. It’s not even properly described as “profit” since it’s, by definition, unrealized gains.
These are not circumstances where you “cash out” and buy something fancy, or even pay your day to day bills. Context matters.
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.
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?
We can worry about that when there’s a lack of places to rent and homelessness is down.
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.
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
Lots of good answers here, so here’s a fact that might help you understand why people have these positions:
I love how the fact checker rules the original post false… because there are fewer homeless people and more homes than the original Facebook post? Meaning that the waste is even more egregious than claimed? 🤔
Right? 😂 Never fails to get a chuckle from me when I go to cite it.
A couple of a house as an investment is already a lot, and way more than the average person can afford. If you go from a leftist perspective, the fact that they make money without workings sucks. These people who own a couple of house for investment are also the one complaining about “public retirement system is too expensive, so we should cut-down retirement benefit for everyone”
More seriously, I understand that you want to play by the rule in today’s capitalist world. The problem is that in many places the rule are skewed. In some countries income from rent are less taxed than income from work, and the power-balance between tenant and landlord is favouring the landlord (and people see implementing stuff like rent-control and shorter notice for tenant as leftists policies). While it’s fun to say eat the rich including the landlord, you need to build a reasonable political program if you want to stand a chance.
Another big issue, is the lack of affordable rental properties managed by the government/municipality. It’s basically massively promoting either homelessness or bad housing
I don’t know if I’m leftist, but the US spectrum is well right of most of the world.
The question is multi-layered. Your aunt may or may not be a bad person, I don’t know her. Them renting out property may or may not be for good reason, even if they’re doing it to “survive” in the capitalistic economy.
The real issue is that capitalism itself is exploitative, and (depending on where you draw the line) participating may fall under being complicit.
My understanding of parasitism is extracting resources for their own benefit, with little to no benefit for the exploited/system.
The first hint of parasitism is amassing resources they aren’t using for living. Your aunt and husband made surplus money to be able to afford buying the properties. Unless they did that by extracting resources, refining them, working them and making provisions for them to be recycled and ecologically compensated - others will have had to pay the cost. Either by working harder than them, or suffering more than them, for example due to an imbalance of ecology. This is one form of parasitism.
Another perspective of parasitism is inserting themselves as a middle party. Your aunt almost certainly isn’t providing the housing at cost, where rent barely covers their labor and property upkeep. That means they are keeping someone from a home, unless they pay extra to your aunt. Just like a bully.
Now, this doesn’t mean that your aunt has any malicious intent. The point is that the system itself is evil, like a pyramid scheme of bullies, where each layer extracts something from each underlying layer. This is useful for making ventures, but at the cost of ever increasing exploitation and misery. Especially when capitalists are allowed to avoid paying for restoring the exploited, or incentivised to do it more. I’m sure you’ve heard of enshittification.
Now, example time!
I’m sure you’ve thought that air is important for you to survive. And maybe you’ve ever worried that traffic or other pollution might make your air less good for you?
Enter the capitalist! For a small premium we’ll offer your personalised air solution, a nifty little rebreather loaded with purified air you carry with you all day. The price is so reasonable as well, for only $1/day you can breathe your worries away!
Now, producing the apparatus means mining and logging upstream of your town, removing natural air filtering and permanently damaging your environment, but they only charge for the machines and labor. Restoration is Future You’s problem. Selling and refilling the apparatus happens to also produce pollution, making the air worse for everyone. But that makes the apparatus more valuable! Price rises to $2/day.
Competitors arrive, some more successful than others, all leaving ecological devastation and pollution that can’t be naturally filtered. Air gets worse. One brand rises to the top, air is more valuable and lack of competition makes it so that air is now $4/day.
Then an unethical capitalist figures that if we just make the air slightly worse, profits will go up! They don’t want to be evil, but cutting corners when upgrading the production facility means the pollution gets worse. Other adjacent capitalists see that they also can pollute more without consequences. Air gets worse and price increases to 6$/day.
Air is starting to get expensive, rebreather sharing services, one-use air bottles, and home purifyers crop up, increasing pollution and raising costs, air is now $8/day for most people.
People start dying from poor air, new regulations on apparatus safety and mandatory insurance come up, driving prices further to $10/day. You now also need a spare apparatus and maintain it in case your main one breaks down.
Etc.
The point of the example is that through a series of innocuous steps, all making perfect sense within capitalism, you are now paying $300/month more to live than before capitalism, with little real benefit to you, and no real choice to opt out.
Each and every step is parasiting on your life, by requiring you to work harder for that money, and/or suffer more due to pollution and ravaged environment.
The only solution to not work/suffer into an early grave is to have others work on your behalf, perpetuating the parasitic pyramid scheme. This is where your aunt is, is she evil? Probably not. Is her being an active part of an evil system bad? Yes, yes it is. Capitalism bad.
If landlords are so evil, would their tenants alternatively buy the apartment where they rent? People rent for many reasons - perhaps they can’t afford to buy , or perhaps they like paying a fixed amount so someone else can fix the house when things break.
Either way it isn’t the landlords fault that many cities have restrictive zoning laws and we are still reeling from missed housing development during the great recession. Demand for housing has well outdated supply and inflation has made the inputs more expensive, thus prices have gone up. More supply will help reduce the rate of increase, but real prices will not decline without another deep recession, and the impact of that would still be temporary.
If landlords are middleman, would you prefer everyone lives in government housing? Explain the alternative in your fantasy land related to housing, not some ridiculous anecdote about charging for air.
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I’m not a landlord. And you’re just incorrect. This is no stupid questions, but there are plenty of stupid answers. The great recession was caused by homeowners and banks making loans they shouldn’t have with adjustable rates and predatory practices (ever heard of a NINJA loan?) that greatly increased demand for housing, and then the banks created derivatives on derivatives that all went up in smoke when the underlying loans defaulted. This resulted in many people losing their homes, but more broadly financial markets tightened and housing starts plummeted, which is responsible for the housing shortage today. We had like 5-10 years of development well below replacement.
I would also point out that most local zoning laws make multi-use housing like apartments that we lust for in the 15 minute city difficult to build in favor of the single family home. I would argue that is actually the average homeowner’s fault more than a landlord.
“The alternative to landlords is not everything being government housing, but also that’s not an issue if you take away landlords and stop them from having any power…”
What the actual fuck does that mean? Do you hear yourself? The alternative is not the thing I said, but something else that still remains imaginary.
You know housing costs money to build right? So, for that to happen, someone has to invest. There are these institutions called banks, maybe they haven’t made it to lunatic Island where you live, but they charge interest so you can have money today to build or buy rather than waiting years to accumulate that money.
Now that housing is built, the person that built it wants to sell it. Someone buys it and then someone lives in it for a cost. Without government intervention, what is the alternative?
The problem is not OP’s Aunt or even most apartment management companies, but I will give you that Private Equity getting into single family housing is a problem. That should be addressed, and I seriously doubt it will.
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Do you know what’s so hilarious?
I am willing to bet with actual genuine monopoly money that 95% of the people here who are complaining about landlords will be totally on board with landlording once, later in life, they are in a position to do so.
Edit: Check back in 10 years. You’ll see.
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I am in a position to be a landlord and choose not to be.
IOW, you are in a position to not need the income. I.e. you could afford the usurious prices for real estate.
Yes, landlords are responsible for the demand for housing outstripping supply.
I’m curious how that makes sense to you. In theory and practice landlords want to landlord and thus rent out their property, not withhold it from the market.
That was over a decade ago. We absolutely could have covered the gap by now if we were serious about it.
And yes government housing is fine.
My point is, if you read “aunt” as “landlord”, my comment is not about the landlords as much as the system.
Without landlords, we’d not have a housing crisis. There would be enough housing for everyone, we have plenty of resources and land to build them. The US, not to mention the world, is still big enough for everyone to have their own plot of land and housing.
How did people live before Capitalism? I’ve read that housing existed before even banking was invented. Somehow there wasn’t a housing crisis back then, until/unless we had exploitation.
You’re not wrong in what you’re saying though. The basic difference of perspective between you and I, I believe, is that you’re viewing this from inside the capitalist system, where landlords do indeed provide a function. But if we’d not have capitalism, we’d still have housing, and with less value extraction/parasitism.
As for the obscure anecdote, let’s instead use the simile of marketing. They add no value to you as a consumer, and if there weren’t so many marketers finding what you need would be easier and cheaper (as there would be no marketing cost). For the capitalist they add value, for the rest of us they’re an ever increasing drain on resources - a parasite.
Without landlords, we’d not have a housing crisis.
Maybe. Or maybe it’s not so simple. Because:
There would be enough housing for everyone, we have plenty of resources and land to build them.
But would they be built? I’m in no way saying this is “right” but for them to be built builders have to know they are going to make a profit. The smaller that profit the more pressure to build fewer. Now maybe we get lucky and all this downward pressure on prices balances out. But I’d guess that far far fewer homes would be built and so the question ends up being is it still enough? Some say there are plenty of houses already and it would be, but that assumes those who paid the inflated prices are willing to accept less money now.
tl;dr we’re fucked.
Profit, price pressures, inflation are not necessarily meaningful terms in a different system.
Homes have been built for many thousands of years longer than we’ve had those as concepts.
Profit, price pressures, inflation are not necessarily meaningful terms in a different system.
What exactly do you mean by that?
Homes have been built for many thousands of years longer than we’ve had those as concepts.
If you include cedar bark as a major construction material then sure. Not knocking cedar bark here - it’s great. But not quite the same investment in time or durability.
Profit, price pressures, inflation are not necessarily meaningful terms in a different system.
What exactly do you mean by that?
In a circular or planned economy, those aren’t really significant measures, neither in a subsistence living context. Which are strategies that have housed all of humanity until the last few hundred years.
In a post-capitalist economy, we might be able to provide the human necessities without exploitation. I don’t know how, but I know it’s not through more capitalism.
Homes have been built for many thousands of years longer than we’ve had those as concepts.
If you include cedar bark as a major construction material then sure. Not knocking cedar bark here - it’s great. But not quite the same investment in time or durability.
As mentioned in the last reply, the Palace of Knossos, as well as the Petra were marvels of craftsmanship and engineering, staggering investments, and have stood for over 2000 years. Would probably have survived longer if maintained properly.
The pyramids, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassos, the Taj Mahal, all are landmark (literally) feats for the contemporary technology and societies.
You comparing them with modern construction methods necessitated by capitalism, and with modern technology seems an unfair comparison, as well as circular reasoning.
In a circular or planned economy, those aren’t really significant measures,
Ok, sure - you just said “different” and did not specify.
As mentioned in the last reply, the Palace of Knossos, as well as the Petra were marvels of craftsmanship and engineering, staggering investments,
That involved massive exploitation and slave labor. And let’s not forget significant taxation, looting, etc.
You comparing them with modern construction methods necessitated by capitalism
I’m comparing them because I’m making the point that profit, price pressures and inflation obviously arise when private entities make huge capital investments.
So now that you’ve actually specified “different” as meaning non-capitalist systems, it leads me to wonder if you thought King Minos sought out volunteers… or did he pay everyone fairly? Are you really using “public” works built under autocratic rule as positive examples we can replicate?
How did people live before Capitalism? I’ve read that housing existed before even banking was invented. Somehow there wasn’t a housing crisis back then, until/unless we had exploitation.
In self-built primitive mud shacks under a very low population density.
Agreed.
But also in groundbreakingly advanced multiresidential complexes, condos, and palaces for thousands of people.
The world will indeed be different if we have different priorities. Capitalism requires high density to sustain the economic engine, other systems might not.
Under capitalism, capitalisming harder is indeed the only solution. I don’t know how to get you to be able to imagine something without assuming capitalism, but humanity and society did indeed thrive even without it.
Dont forget how the secondary real estate market drove prices up and as been doing so since the 70s
My understanding of parasitism is extracting resources for their own benefit, with little to no benefit for the exploited/system.
This defines almost every transactional function in our society.
Your Aunt sounds like she is working with the system we have. Lemmys heart is in the right place but practically speaking most of the vitriol you read on here would need a genie in a magic lamp to come true. We need to squeeze the top the hardest, not squeeze everyone with more than us.
Once they abolish people buying properties and parking them empty just to make money on the property value increasing, then they abolish corporations owning hundreds or thousands of houses while colluding to fix the rental market, then they abolish people buying family dwellings and turning them into airbnbs, then the property developers churning out acre upon acre of McMansions with zero affordable housing, then the foreign investors, then maybe listen to their criticism of mom and pop investors owning a handful of properties and making what is probably the safest and most lucrative investment honest hard working people can make.
Yes. You shouldn’t be allowed to have a second house to rent out. The problem is limited supply in a given area, and if everyone buys a second, third, fourth house (or townhouse) then there is no supply left for people that want to actually buy to live in that house. Frankly I think it’s unethical. There are plenty of other ways to invest your money.
I also don’t think this position is limited to leftists, although yes the leftists here have a very dramatic take. I think anyone that thinks about this should see the problem.
Who is allowed to rent to the people who don’t want to buy?
Should the city own property just for that and run it as a non-profit?
Yes, that’s ideal. In Germany (where there is a culture much more oriented towards renting than owning) there are a lot of state run landlords and they are great to rent from, reasonable rents, reasonable to deal with (in the local context), etc. And of course they have good laws to protect tenants to back it up. Not necessarily a perfect system but definitely one the rest of the world can learn from. Unfortunately things are still heading in the wrong direction there too right now.
That’s not true in any big city. While the laws keep the landlord madness limited, real estate and rent prices are out of control because of speculation, and there are tons of horror stories to go around - and by experience, I would say they are even more common with individual landlords than with large companies, at least large companies don’t usually do anything obviously illegal and have less venues to make their tenants homeless.
Yes, I’m talking about the state owned companies versus both private companies and individual landlords, rents with the state owned ones are like 20% or more lower than the others and they are usually more responsive to fixing problems, don’t play too many games
But I totally agree rents are way out of control the last few years
Yes. The ability to have a place to live should be a basic human right and therefore be affordable.
If that means the government* subsidises it for the low income families (as in owns them and rents them at below market value), so be it.
We used to have “council houses” in the UK for exactly this purpose, but in the 70s, Thatcher came up with a “right to buy” (at a decent discount) and then made two mistakes - there were no restrictions after buying to stop you selling to anyone else, and there was no building of replacement stock after they were sold. So the result 50 years later is that there are nowhere near enough council houses any more, and a lot of the old ones are privately owned and being rented out at market rates, which are (depending on the area) very expensive.
*local or national, I don’t really care which
Those definitely weren’t mistakes.
Hah. I meant socially, not that it happened by accident!
I know, lol
If that means the government* subsidises it for the low income families (as in owns them and rents them at below market value), so be it.
Not everybody who doesn’t want to buy is low income. I’m too lazy / risk averse to maintain everything myself, so I happily pay my landlord a reasonable premium to bear the risk of shit burning down (or breaking in less dramatic ways) for me. I also like that I would be able to pack up and move without worrying about selling my old place. I might change my mind later on, but right now I’m good.
Why should governments subsidize the lifestyle choice I’m consciously making?
To be clear, I wasn’t trying to say ALL rental housing should be subsidised, just that there should be a healthy supply available for local councils to make available to people who need it based on whatever criteria they set for that.
Even when I was renting, I’d earn too much to qualify. People with young children would take priory over single people. That sort of thing.
It’s not a perfect system, but it’s better than companies gaming the system to maximise profits at the expense of the most vulnerable.
The community should have ownership of whatever rentals are necessary and it should be not for profit.
How is “the community” defined and how is this ownership managed?
Public housing is not a novel concept.
No sheet.
Ok, so you want all housing to be publicly owned? That would be interesting…
If you’re aware of public and social housing then why are you asking how community ownership and management works?
In any case, yes, of course all rental housing should be publicly owned. Vienna’s Gemeindebauten and Singapore’s HDB, among others, have proven that pretty definitively.
I’m not certain that all housing should be public, though. Privately owned primary residences are probably fine, in the grand scheme of things. But rental housing for profit should obviously be abolished.
First up, so it’s clear, I actually agree with you. But I also don’t think this is an easy thing.
If you’re aware of public and social housing then why are you asking how community ownership and management works?
Because there is a hiccup in your logic as far as I can discern it.
On the one hand you say: “of course all rental housing should be publicly owned.”
And on the other, “I’m not certain that all housing should be public”
So how does that work?
- How does the housing become public? That’s trillions of dollars worth of property. I actually got the figure of US$7 quadrillion but I don’t believe it. What’s more, 70% of the 19.3 million rental properties in the US are owned by individual investors, meaning you’d have to either confiscate or buy from millions of individuals. I mean, it wouldn’t make sense to just build all this housing if it’s already there. Maybe a combination? But where on earth does that money come from? And how do you convince people invested in a $1.4 trillion market to give up that income?
- So let’s say somehow #1 happens over some period of time. How then do you meet ongoing demand? I get what your saying - there are examples of this working (for some values of “work”) on a small scale but over the entire rental market?
- If the public via governments has paid for all this housing at current prices, how do we then ensure rents are low? Over time yes, we can forgo all but the bare minimum rent increases to match inflation, but initially we have to foot the bill somehow. Because presumably that money has to be borrowed and we have to pay interest on it on top of ongoing maintenance, etc - there are real costs involved.
Yes.
For houses? Essentially no one, houses should not be for rent. Apartments in my mind are fine to rent because you can build a fuckton of apartments on a small amount of land. But there can still be a problem if there aren’t enough apartments available to buy.
