• PKMKII [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    So the Ukranian family rents until they’ve paid off his mortgage. Then what? Is he just going to rent forever? At some point he’s either going to have to sell it, in which case we’re right back where we started, or it gets passed to an heir, in which case it’s going to someone that didn’t pay the mortgage while the Ukrainian family gets nadda.

    • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      If he sells it while the Ukrainian family was renting it he will have exploited them. He gets the whole value of the sale for free.

    • underisk@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      No you don’t understand! The private equity companies made the best offer so you have to sell it to them, it’s the law!!!

      • goferking (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
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        3 days ago

        It’s not even that its

        if I sold it to them or another family what if they just immediately sell it for more to the investors? They’d all the money instead of me!

  • they pay my mortage (principal, interest, taxes, and insurance) and grow my equity in the house (net worth) while i do nothing, but im not a leech steadily growing heavier from sucking their blood.

    i can accept that some people are simply too dense to not understand the distinction between increasing wealth (building equity) and monthly positive cash flow (putting cash in my account), but holy shit… this is literally the most obvious example.

      • SacredExcrement [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        3 days ago

        I’m sure that probably is it, but they still aren’t making the critical connection there; which is that they ultimately are still landlords using the money of others to prop up their own investment.

        As liberals are wont to do, you can launder the sentiment, dress it differently, and call it by a different name, but it doesn’t change the nature of the thing.

    • ClimateStalin [they/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      I do actually think there’s an ethical amount to charge as a landlord, but that amount is significantly less than a mortgage.

      Most ethical landlord example: You own a house that you plan to live in later but for some reason can’t currently. You want to rent it out, as un-lived in homes fall apart quickly. You rent it out for a couple hundred dollars a month, enough to cover upkeep and maybe taxes. If you have a mortgage on it, you pay that yourself with your money from working an actual job.

      • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 days ago

        IMO the fair amount doesn’t cover taxes. Property taxes in the US are mostly a measure to cool down the rate at which landowners accumulate wealth from land value rising. Since the renter isn’t getting equity in your scenario, if the renter is paying the property taxes then the landlord is profiting from the system where every other landlord hoards housing to increase its price.

        Another way to look at it is that if the property tax didn’t exist at all in this scenario, the landlord would still be accumulating wealth without working at the expense of the people who have to buy the house later, i.e. they’re exploiting them (or, more likely, the future tenants who will pay off the future landlord’s mortgage). Even with the property tax existing the house is going to gain more value than what the owner loses to property tax, but that’s somewhat outweighed by inflation.

  • i overheard a convo between a couple of genX homeowners the other week.

    they were lamenting how high property taxes were and their strategy for dealing with it was selling and renting.

    i didn’t say anything, because i thought i was having a stroke.

  • ZeroHora@lemmy.ml
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    3 days ago

    Oh god one of those post that refill my hatred for the western world.

    I’m only exploiting refugees, they are not human people, I’m so generous.

    • ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 days ago

      I heard Trump made an EO to prevent a lot of corpo residential purchases. I’m sure it has a hidden caveat that it only applies in red states or some perverse nonsense.

      If he actually pulls it off it will be the second thing I’ve ever seen him do that was useful. I’m sure the other thing inadvertently hurt someone he hated.

  • Commiechameleon [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 days ago

    Could just do a rent to own type deal. Otherwise if you want to participate within capitalism and accrue passive income to fund a communist underground, become a landlord with maoist characteristics, basically charge 33% of income. Might only work if you have a whole complex, buuut you’d be more ethical than 90% of current landlords, so long as you actually do maintenance and prevention, WITHOUT having to be prompted. Imo anyway. Not anywhere close to doing any of this.

    • Johnny_Arson [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      We been working for a decade trying to push that here where I live. They just keep demolishing slums that we’re at least affordable and building apartment complexes with x% “affordable” units that are no bigger than the flats they replace and cost 3-4x what they replace even though the lot not has like 1000% more sq footage because single story old motels are being replaced with these god awfully ugly 5 story buildings. Density is cool and all but it just feels like a subsidized realty scam.

      Anyway cool-zone

  • bigfish@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 days ago

    Imo they’re actually right. Landlords who charge above costs are leeches. But if the rent is costs (mortgage and HOA in this case), then it’s as fair a deal as possible. Owner gets the property and its risks (damage, depreciation, default) in exchange for their initial capital outlay. Renter gets a place to stay in exchange for (what I’d assume to be) a relatively stable reasonable rent.

    • vovchik_ilich [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      3 days ago

      I’ll be polite because I know most hexbears here won’t be (please comrades don’t dunk much on this person, I mean it).

      As fair deal as possible would be rent at production + maintenance costs, anything above this goes in the form of assets to the homeowner, which implies a wealth extraction from literal war refugees to a local with a house. There are no risks of depreciation in social housing for example because there’s no “market value”, only production + maintenance, which are fairly constant, and default + damage should be socialized costs as much as falling to the ground and breaking your arm on the street, even if you’re drunk, should be paid for by society.

      • bigfish@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 days ago

        Appreciate the restraint and fully agree with you on what should be. My struggle is just to thread the needle between what should be and what’s possible with the systems we have in place.

        • Le_Wokisme [they/them, undecided]@hexbear.net
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          3 days ago

          instead of rent you sell non-voting shares in a company that owns the property and anyone who was ever a “renter” is entitled to a dividend if you ever sell proportional to their contribution to the mortgage and maintenance, or a discount if you sell to them.

            • Le_Wokisme [they/them, undecided]@hexbear.net
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              3 days ago

              uhhhh contact your state’s bar association i guess? i don’t remember what specialty of lawyer you need for it. I haven’t seen a template around, just general ideas for ways to entitle renters to a fair-ish share of the equity that’s built.

              an S-corp would be sufficient but there might be more purposeful arrangements. maybe steal some bylaw phrasing from co-ops.

        • vovchik_ilich [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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          3 days ago

          Well, yes, the question is also about what’s possible with the systems in place. When examining the housing and rent market all over the western capitalist world, a plurality of political ideologices, parties and ethnicities has led to essentially the same problems taking place everywhere. If all politicians of all signs can’t formulate meaningful response, and no liberal democracy can solve the issue of housing, maybe the problem is more systemic than it is about policy.

          In contrast, China has 95+% of home ownership rate, Cuban university students get free housing, and the Soviet Union had universal housing at an average rent of 3% of the monthly income.

          My point is that it’s not that we need to innovate in policy and formulate new ideas, what we need is systemic change and immense pressure on the owning class, both of which can only be achieved through worker organizing in unions and in socialist/communist parties.

    • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      Ah yes, the ‘risks’ of property ownership, which is why housing is a hoarded asset in capitalist countries. You’d think if it was so ‘risky’ you wouldn’t see capitalists buy up entire swaths of housing stock, but what do I know?

    • oscardejarjayes [comrade/them]@hexbear.netM
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      3 days ago

      When you pay rent, your net worth goes down. When you pay mortgage, your net worth goes up.

      Those risks are negligible.

      The only way for a landlord not to be a leech is for it to be socialized housing owned by the government. With council housing in the UK, the rent was very reasonable, and that money went into building more houses. Or if you’re an individual landlord, rent to own, so their net worth goes up with payments as well.

      • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 days ago

        It’s also presumably possible to set up some sort of profit-sharing scheme whereby the tenant is entitled to some share of the increase in equity, though I’ve never heard of such a thing being done.

    • FuckyWucky [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      When landlord pays mortgage from the rent they receive their liability goes down (Mortgage Account), net worth goes up.

      When tenant pays rent, it’s simply expensed, their net worth goes down from before payment assuming other things are same.

    • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      Okay, so I’m the owner. I buy the house at price X in 2026. My 30 year mortgage payment A = (X + interest - down payment)/n, where n is the number of paying periods in 30 years.

      Let’s say A is equal to the rent that I set on the tenant(s). Over 30 years, the tenant(s) have paid X + interest, correct? Since they’re been paying an amount equal to the mortgage payment. That amount encapsulates the risks because it includes the interest. In total, by 2056, I will have paid off the mortgage

      So if in 2056 I sell the house for exactly X (imagine the property hasn’t gained value at all) I’ll have profited X - down payment dollars. If I was savvier, I would’ve held on for a bit longer to pay off the down payment, too, or set the rent higher. At no point did I do any work, the tenant(s) paid off my investment and the risk was always on them. This argument holds even if I don’t wait until 2056 and sell the house before then with the equity that I have built off of my tenants’ payments.

      Ergo, landlords are leeches that provide absolutely 0 value and do nothing but hoard and drive up the cost of housing. The only way for this to be fair is if the tenants get equity instead of the landlord while they’re renting, but that’d mean landlords wouldn’t stand to gain anything (which makes sense because they provide nothing anyway)