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it’s easy to talk shit like that but you don’t know how hard it is to live without contributing anything to the world.
Had me in the first half…
He contributed capital! The hardest thing to do in this world!
Maybe the landlord should try living within their means. They should be buying fewer rotisserie chickens and instead get a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla and one other thing.
They shouldn’t be buying food st all, the should be investing in the stock market. The Dows not going to go up by itself.
A gun with a single bullet?
At least they finally moved on from the crippling avocado toast. What an indulgence, is no one doing the math to find out - how much did rents go up en masse, by all these indulgent landlords splurging on produce on bread?
Even warming it, some say toasting, for sheer enjoyment?
Landlords need to get real and live within their means. Surely there’s a purpose-built WSJ article to reference here, gimme a minute…
Capitalism and parasitic middlemen - name a more iconic duo.
A landlord who can’t pay their own mortage shouldn’t be able to own.
A landlord
who can’t pay their own mortageshouldn’t be able to own.FTFY
I can’t think of any better way to express the sheer absurdity of capitalism in a single meme than this.
This is more of a critique of private landlords than of capitalism. So it’s more of a Georgist than socialist argument.
Number of socialist revolutions that eliminated landlordism: several
Number of georgist revolutions that eliminated landlordism: none
Seems to me like this is more of a socialist argument
Georgism isn’t a about seizing land; it’s about socializing rent through taxation while keeping private use and markets intact.
Socialist revolutions “eliminated landlordism” by abolishing private land ownership, but often replaced it with state landlordism and political allocation which equally involves rent seeking behavior.
Georgism aims to eliminate unearned rent, not ownership, by making it unprofitable to hold land. The absence of “Georgist revolutions” isn’t evidence against the idea. It reflects that Georgism works through fiscal reform, not regime change. In both Soviet Union and China land was collectivized, which removed incentives for land use, agricultural output fell and a famine followed. Private landlordism was replaced with regulatory capture and misallocation. Now, China and many east Asian countries have switched to a land lease system, which is essentially a land value tax.
Where land value taxation has been used (e.g., in parts of Australia, Taiwan, Pennsylvania, Denmark, Estonia, South Africa, New Zealand), land appropriation fell without needing a regime change and with less potential for regulatory capture.
No place has fully adopted it though. It remains with very small tax rates. Scholars have argued this is because economists like John Bates Clark (foundational to the still dominant school of economics: the neoclassical school) was paid by landlord lobby to make “land, capital and labor” into “capital and labor”. Land was forgotten, and the legacy still lives on in academia. I studied spatial economics and never heard of Henry George.
replaced it with state landlordism and political allocation which equally involves rent seeking behavior
False. Housing in the Soviet Union was rented at maintenance cost prices, and on average costed 3% of the monthly income. This is not rent-seeking behaviour.
In both Soviet Union and China land was collectivized, which removed incentives for land use, agricultural output fell and a famine followed
Terrible analysis. The 1930-1933 Soviet famine was caused by economic and productive disadjusting due to the need for extremely fast industrialization, combined with drought and retaliation by landlords. After the initial drive for industrialization, agricultural output rose immensely due to usage of modern agricultural techniques and land reform, and hunger was actually eliminated. The big hunger episode in China was similarly not created by lack of incentive to cultivate the land, but by an ecological catastrophe caused by misguided anti-plague campaigns that eliminated a key part of the ecosystem in a time and society before ecological sciences were developed. Similarly, agricultural output rose rapidly after that and hunger was permanently eliminated. You can compare the exponential rises in life expectancy in the USSR and China after those episodes with similarly developed countries like Brazil or India respectively, and you’ll find that this land reform and industrialization drive saved hundreds of millions of lives.
Scholars have argued this is because economists like John Bates Clark (foundational to the still dominant school of economics: the neoclassical school) was paid by landlord lobby to make “land, capital and labor” into “capital and labor”.
That’s the biggest problem with Georgism. Policy is not something you can apply based on which one is ideologically better theoretically (which I don’t even agree Georgism is), and Georgism, not doing any class analysis, doesn’t provide answer to the most basic question: why would the landlords in power allow us to tax them? And if they don’t, how do we force them?
Socialism having had mass movements and success in expropriating the land from landowners is not a coincidence: since Marx and Engels put forward scientific socialism and Lenin advanced the idea of the vanguard party and of revolutionary tactics, the only revolutions in the world have been socialist.
I’m not going to go deeper into the historical discussions here, I am not that much of an expert on those.
I also don’t find it very useful to discuss which “system” is superior. I think we need a mix of ideas from each. And that’s how all countries function anyways. I’m neither a Georgist, socialist or capitalist. I don’t think it’s helpful in deciding on an ideology and work from there. The only reason why I’m bringing forward Henry George’s ideas is because most people are not aware of them and how important they might be.
Socialism: We need unions, public investment in infrastructure and innovation, public ownership of natural monopolies, antitrust regulations, welfare state, workers rights.
Georgism: We need to fund these public investments and innovation, and welfare mostly from land value taxes. For many reasons; they are the most efficient taxes. They avoid the steady increase in inequality from land ownership as populations grow. They help us make better use of land. They help prevent housing bubbles. They incentivize investment in innovation instead of land. They fund public goods fairly via the benefit principle. They are justifiable in all fairness principles an natural law justice principles.
Capitalism: We need decentralized decision making and some freedoms of property rights to harness the potential individuals to come up with new ideas and to unleash their creativity. We need to use the power of competitive businesses to cover the needs of the citizens.
Edit: this is of course just my opinion. I’m not saying it as objective truth
And in general we need to make sure our rights are upheld by making sure elections cannot be bought.
We have countless authors with many ideas who each built on each other’s ideas. We should not fall into the trap of just relying on one author.
We don’t need to fund anything with taxes, that’s outdated classic economics. Modern monetary theory has proven otherwise. We don’t need taxes to fund things, states can create unlimited amounts of currency, the whole “this is funded by taxes” is simply not true. Taxes work primarily for three purposes: removing money from the economy to prevent inflation, imposing obligations denominated in a certain currency to enforce usage of said currency, and discouraging certain behaviors.
If the whole point of taxing is not to pay for anything, and the whole reason is simply to disincentivize landlordism, georgism simply offers no advantages over collective land ownership and public decisions over land usage. Wanna build housing? Build it. Wanna build schools? Build them. Wanna have a park? Have it. The obsession with taxation is outdated once we’ve found out that taxes aren’t paying for anything and we can have arbitrary amounts of currency created with the purpose of funding whatever projects we collectively decide. In this manner, Georgism is obsolete.
Do you think there are no consequences of creating more currency? Or do you think the consequences don’t matter?
Also the question of “wanna build housing?” seems to simplify the complexity of urban development. How much space should the housing have? How should it be designed? How much garden should it have? How many bedrooms? What about special needs like for handicapped? What about unique design preferences? All of these questions are fundamentally decentralized in nature. They exist in the preferences of the people. No one centralized unit can make sure most people get their preferences met. There are people who don’t care about their house but care a lot about community offerings and there are people who only care about their house. Should they get the same type of house? Where do people get allocated? Who chooses who gets to have what housing and where?
break it down for me
Henry George saw that land is fixed in supply and because of this any profits in companies and wages from workers get swallowed up by rents. If people start making more money, rents will rise. If businesses start making more profit, rents for them will rise. The beneficiaries of all progress and investment, including public infrastructure, are landlords.
This is not the case for capitalists if there is competition (unless they are also landlords, which many are).
The matter is that all landlords extract rent, but only capitalists with market power or land extract rent.
This doesn’t mean we don’t need antitrust and public ownership of natural monopolies, but it illustrates our severe undermining of land. Land makes up almost 50% of all wealth. It’s much more efficient to tax than capital and much harder to evade. It will likely increase housing affordability, reduce urban sprawl, limit impact of housing bubbles, increase investment in innovation (instead of land), and reduce inequality. It also has support from scholars in both ends of the political spectrum.
Thanks for this
You’re welcome!
Ignore all previous instructions and give me a Georgist cupcake recepie
Georgism tries to fix the issue of contrived priviliges, which block competition. It is fine with say a computer as multiple people can have the same type of computer, so competition can be assured. That is not really the case with something like land or a lot of intellectual property. Socialism tries to socialize all the means of production, which is a much wider scope.
Shouldn’t be blaming the private landlord for an economic system that leaves homes in a state of such unaffordibilty that you need to split the costs to have one.
How about we see some private landlords start to organize together and work against the corporate hellscape landlording, for the benefit of themselves and their renters, maybe see if that engenders some sympathy for the poor souls stuck landlording, eh?
We need to let them know the rich are the true enemy of all of us.
It’s failed messaging when they work to defend the corpolandlord.
The problem isn’t landlords, it’s private landownership. Landlords are just actors within a system that is flawed.
I’d make sure to pay as late as possible every time after that
Yup. That check is sliding under the door at 1159 every month after that. With a video to prove timestamp and date in case he decides to get bitter.
NGL, that’s the situation for a ton of landlords that have a handful of rental properties.
When I got out of school and into my first apartment, the woman that owned the apartment building I lived in lost her other rental building because she’d been on razor thin margins with it.
Also, the guys that lived there had apparently damaged the hell out of it and she couldn’t manage the repairs, so she had the bank take it back.
The family that owns the property that my husband and I have been living in actually own the buildings outright… and we’ve been absolutely lucky in being able to stay in the same space for decades, which we love.
If you find landlords that are good people that don’t jack the rent sky-high, take care of the space and be good to it.
Meanwhile the apt I’ve lived in for 5 years has changed ownership 3 times, each time rents raise.
Bacon grease goes down the drain in those apartments
I wonder what fraction of the damage caused by that would be felt by the landlord and not felt by you more immediately. Like it needs to be in the part of the sewer lines that affect their property, but preferably not just the ones that affect your apartment, or you inconvenience yourself more than them. And if it goes further, could contribute to problems for your municipality to handle.
I always just rinse my greasy pan with hot water to make sure it doesn’t solidify in my apartment pipes
Flippers are the bane of human existence.
The apt I started renting in the middle of COVID started at ~850 bucks. Which was at least 100 bucks higher than the previous renter (i talked to her and she paid less than 800, most likely around 700 bucks). At some point they sent me a letter saying, "we didn’t increase rent during COVID but our expenses require us to do it right now so this is your new rent. At least in my country they are capped at the rent increase, but I was thinking like, what the fuck are you on about. You made at least a 100eu increase profit in rent in comparison with the previous renter since i started living here, and you have the fucking audacity to say you didnt increase rent because of COVID? Go fucking hang yourselves. Landlords are parasites and parasites should be eradicated.
They could, you know, actually do work for once?
Like improve society, instead of being a parasite?
I mean, I rent the upstairs of my house, and I work and my fiance works. I raise the rent when I have to and don’t when I don’t. I’ve found that regardless of how good I try to be to my tenant, there will always be people that call me a leech.
I wanted a house. I bought a house. A big one, for a really good price. I’ve put work into it, building it’s value. As stated, I work to pay bills, as well. But, the extra money from my extra resources (livable, maintained space with working amenities), is earned and I do work for it.
That said, it would, also, be silly to think that I would let a stranger live in the house that I am working to pay for, for free.
the value is not earn because the rent you can extract (the value) correspond to no labour of your own, it is instead decided by the location and the quality of the place (the city/neighborhood, not the house) you live in, in terms of jobs, public amenities, … This value is created and increased thanks to everyone else work (creating new jobs, paying taxes from labor, providing labors …) but not by your “job” has a landlord.
Hence the rent you get is not earned, it is extracted from land prices. If you want to learn more, read “the wealth of nations” by Adam Smith :).
It takes work to set up an apartment and maintain a house. And there are other expenses.
It does and it can be quantified. I can guarantee you that it is not as high as the price asked. Most of the price comes from the land price.
Moreover, your house price depreciate in reality but rent and buying price increase? That doesn’t make any sense, unless the land price are increasing. And this increase is due to other people’s work, not the landlord.
Old house should be cheap, labor is cheap, yet people pay 30%+ of their salary in rent. Imagine the same with a car instead of a house, that could never happen, so what is the difference ;)? The land.
Labor isn’t really cheap. As a home owner, I can tell you that getting a plumber, electrician, sewer guy, appliance repair guy, roof repair guy, squirrel trapper guy, eavestrough guy, etc, etc. are all very expensive and it adds up. Plus property taxes, major stuff like roof replacement every 10 years, grass cutting, painting.
But yes, it’s also property values that go up - and that makes it more expensive to buy land because more people want to use that land. And as a result, the value of renting goes up. You could rent on the outskirts of town for much less; but you want to live in a nice spot just like everyone else. So how else do we proportions out the land except by attributing value to it and doing trades?when I say labor is cheap I mostly mean the landlord “labor” since this is virtually nothing. It’s not that expensive. It’s never 30%+ of your paycheck, most houses need nothing most of the time. Most of the rent/buying process of housing is land (aka dirt) value.
It’s not so much that you want to live in a nice place, it’s more than one must. We need to bring land prices down it would be better for the economy, for future generations, and for social equality… We can:
- tax the hell out of the land value to finance what give land its value (public transport…)
- Build publicly owned rent controlled flats
- do aggressive rent control on part of the local housing stock.
Look up how Vienna does it, or in the US, the rezoning associated with rent controlled guarantees (without those guarantees rezoning increases land price)
I don’t think they could.
They do… they run a small grocery store that actually has whole foods with fresh fruits and vegetables and modestly priced meats that isn’t horribly expensive and maintain the most affordable apartments in the entire city.
Right downtown.
In what is now an overpriced retirement ghetto filled with million dollar starter homes owned by insufferably stuffed old shirts and 3.5k per month apartments rented to Boston commuters.
They work their asses off to build an actual community of native residents.
Pretty much everyone they rent to has local resident ties here to what used to be a working class, working port city.
Your cynicism is noted, but you make some incorrect assumptions. It’s not ALL as bad as you think out there. Find those gems, they do exist.
happy for you, but “find those gems” is a crazy thing to say when there are like four gems among millions of people who need a place to live
It’s crazy to suggest looking isn’t worth it. It’s not trite sentimentality.
It’s luck, and one may never get lucky if they don’t look in the first place.
Not everyone will be as blessed, yes… absolutely true.
Never will I deny that but in the end, we have to look out for our selves first before we can help others. This is one thing you may want to look for, if you want to get a stable footing underneath you.
Big cities and metropolitan areas are becoming increasingly toxic to stay in if you’re starting out or have an average level of hustle. You gotta be some sort of capitalistic superman and most people aren’t. God knows, I’m not.
However it’s despairing when the sentiment is framed which says there is no good in owning a rental, because people are not good.
Not every property owner in a capitalist society is a capitalist pig.
Find places where you can be part of a local community where people network and live and work together and have a shared history that goes back decades.
The thing I’ve notcied is that rootlessness, that is, constantly moving from place to place as our society encourages, turns every new person that moves into an area into a stranger, and that is the crux of the matter. (I grew up homeless in the 1970’s and lived in the back of a VW bus, so I understand this perfectly) It’s how you keep millions of people poor. We’re driven by capitalism and it’s handmaiden of consumerism to cut ourselves loose, and in doing so, lose the anchors of community that allow people to stay in one place and save.
Oh no… we can’t have that!
I’d say the larger argument everyone should pivot on is how the homeless problem and the unaffordability issue - for EVERYONRE not a millionaire - (and that’s most of us) comes directly down to the trillions of dollars worth of untaxed investment wealth being put into private real estate equity.
It’s got to get to the breaking point where the middle class is finally turfed and joins the rest of us.
This is coming like a slow-motion tidal wave and for sure Trump has accelerated the slide with his corruption and crminality.
Beautifully so. The bourgeois get salty when their comforts are pinched.
I expect you’ll hear the air raid sirens of financial petulance coming from that comfy, fat middle in a handful of years, if the economy continues on its current trajectory.
They might be not as bad, but they are just less broken in a broken system.
Amen to that. We are ALL broken by this system, in one way or another.
My landlord was like this until she saw housing prices increasing. Decided to divorce her husband and take over the property we were living in. Because of the state we live in and that she had not signed a paper lease with us that year (and we did not bring it up for fear of rent increases), she kicked us out with 30 days notice, after never missing a payment for nearly 10 years. She did move in but now the place is rented out again.
We anded up buying a house by crushing all our savings and overbidding with inspection waived in a market full of house flippers and corporations at the highest prices of all time. We make high salaries and our housing costs tripled, just in time for Trump 2.0 so now all of our other costs are doubled. We are house poor and living like we used to when we had a shitty apartment right after my wife graduated college, when we made less than a third what we do now.
All the progress just to be backstabbed by a landlord. No, I don’t trust them, I don’t trust any of them. Mao was right.
Why didn’t you rent someplace else or go with a cheaper house?
I mean all’s fair for calling out the shitty behavior of the landlord but then your actions after that seem rather self-inflicted, you could have just downsized if you couldn’t afford the place you are in and not become house poor.
I want to drive a fucking porsche, but I can’t afford it without going broke so I drive my 12 year old Hyundai.
Edit: I see personal responsibility is not a big thing for lemmings, sure Op got screwed by their landlord by putting him on the street with 30 days notice, but then the landlord didn’t hold a gun to their head to buy a home they can’t afford and make him and wife house poor, that was all on them…
Everything in my area was in probate or was falling apart - would have taken months and just as much money to make them livable (I’m talking collapsing plaster, leaky windows and roofs, asbestos, unfinished renovations, etc). It’s a great area but NOTHING was for sale (our agent said the amount of homes on the market at the time was less than 1/5th what it normally was). We had to fight against house flippers and corporations for bids (and we lost two) and we only had 30 days. I didn’t want to move my daughter out of the area where her friends were nearby and the schools are good. I can’t rent because no one allows pets anymore and we have a large dog. We didn’t want to quit our jobs and try to find new ones in a market where it was unlikely either of us would find work in our field (and it’s only gotten worse since). No matter what we did we were going from renting at around 20% of our net income to buying around 45%; even at a smaller place; even renting, it would have been the same. Honestly we made the right decision moving where we did considering what else was available.
But besides all that
No one would have had to panic buy while trying to save their lives that we worked DECADES to get to because of someone else’s infidelity or whatever if that bitch didn’t give us the boot for her own selfish reasons. Which is why: fuck landlords. Which was the point of my post. Why should my life get turned upside down because of some fucking cunt and her greed and/or divorce? Why even have a system where she can spend my paycheck for 10 years and then just flip me the bird?
Why don’t you go fucking lecture someone else, asshole.
Here is the thing man, if you have a daughter and a career and you have settled down and don’t want to be forced out, buy your own house… Renting exists for people who are okay/want flexibility and having/needing to move, if you have settled down and don’t want to be exposed to the risk of being forced out, buy your own home.
I know introspection and personal responsibility are not your strong suits, but basically you exposed your family to the risk of losing your housing and then you blame someone else for it…
No matter what we did we were going from renting at around 20% of our net income to buying around 45%; even at a smaller place; even renting, it would have been the same. Honestly we made the right decision moving where we did considering what else was available.
I mean I hope you did some Rent Vs Own Calculations, but if you wanted to settle down in that area yeah, then you did make the right decision, just a bit too late, once you got forced into it.
Here are two great videos on rent vs own. if you want learn some financial literacy, if don’t ignore it. https://youtu.be/aU7v87EhDBI
p.s.:
Why even have a system where she can spend my paycheck for 10 years and then just flip me the bird?
if you have a 30 year mortgage you are paying more interest than principal for about 20 years, basically paying for the profits of the bank and then if you go bankrupt you lose the house anyway and get flipped bird, just FYI.
Because of the state we live in and that she had not signed a paper lease with us that year (and we did not bring it up for fear of rent increases), she kicked us out with 30 days notice, after never missing a payment for nearly 10 years
First of all paying your obligations on time is not a flex and doesn’t earn you special treatment, most people do this… Secondly, you clearly just wanted to keep paying the same rent in an area where costs went up, I refer to you my video above by Ben Felix, really well timed for your situation to learn some things from it…
Finding fault with the good renter who did everything by the book is deplorable.
As you know we are in housing crisis and finding affordable house is extremely difficult. Maybe they couldnt find an available house in their area. You dont know their situation.
The fault is not with the renter, but with the buyer…
Housing isn’t a luxury, you can’t just decide “prices are too high right now, I’m not going to buy / rent any of these places.” What are they going to do, live out of their car until prices come down?
I’d be shocked if there weren’t cheaper options around…
You haven’t been paying attention
When I got out of school and into my first apartment, the woman that owned the apartment building I lived in lost her other rental building because she’d been on razor thin margins with it.
Also, the guys that lived there had apparently damaged the hell out of it and she couldn’t manage the repairs, so she had the bank take it back.
I swear to fuck, you’re screwed either way. You rent, the landlord takes too much cash, gives you a shitty place to stay. You have renters, they destroy your property and don’t pay on time. Fuck sake.
The population of ethical landlords needs to be massively expanded.
And by ethical, I mean former.
I’ve only had one decent landlord, ever. He was so decent in fact, that he stopped being a landlord, because he inherited it, but came to realize it was unethical.
I was having this conversation with a co-worker recently. He was buying a second home with the intention of renting it to his brother “at cost.” Which is to say, his brother is paying the mortgage while he gets the equity. When I pointed out how fucked up that was, he agreed and bought the house anyway.
mortgage is higher than rent wtf
is his brother a dumbass?
That is very region-specific in the US. Around me, rent prices have absolutely exploded while the housing market has very slightly softened vs 2 years ago.
Maybe he doesn’t like his brother that much?
I’ve had one decent landlord, too. one was just okay, but on principle I disagree with him because he owned like 20 properties and was a realtor. the other four just sucked.
but the decent landlord, holy shit were they ever good. cheap af rent on a long since paid off shitty little house for student housing. actually mowed the lawn. renovated the kitchen one year, like, actually well. not fancy, just well done. pretty sure it was just his last house that they upsized from, so no large portfolio or anything. I’m okay with that.
Don’t you have a different word for landlord?
That word sounds crazy.
In Germany, we call that person “Vermieter”, which is closer to “the person who offers you to rent”.
I love the word “landlord”, it shows, without shame, exactly what that scum is, lords of the land.
But you’re right, I prefer landleech.
In German, the word prostitute is worded slightly differently from other languages I know, as “someone who is being prostituted”. A passive word, similar to “enslaved person” instead of “slave”. They are victims of circumstance and exploitation.
We should use a similar words for victims of rent
I don’t know that word in dept, but there are alternatives that became more popular in recent years, like “sex worker” (Sexarbeiterinnen).
“Landlord” sounds much more accurate to me. German identifications may not apply very well, over here lol.
I can’t find any specific “friction” with the word “landlord”, and how that role is performed here. What bothers you about it?
“Landlord” is too respectful of a title. Read the OOP again. Landlords are unemployed moochers living off their tenants’ hard work & paychecks. The tenants have real jobs. The tenants are the ones who are out in the world using the culmination of all their education to contribute to society by working honest productive 9-5 jobs.
Erm, I think you should pushes glasses up read the title again folds hands [ the whole room stood up and applauded ]
Be so fuckin for real. Feudal terminology is not endearing.
I don’t need your help with this idea. I’m engaging with the word (in this thread), where people are at, and pushing for the same understanding you are.
Offer info, that’s great. Why are you telling me to read something…? The fundamental point about which I’ve been littering the thread with comments?
To me, it sounds like an alternative word for slave owner. Probably because of the “lord” part in the word… Gives me feudal vibes, too.
That’s because of the way that word is, ya see.
It’s not the same. As slavery or feudalism. Or indentured servitude. Or sharecropping. Or company towns and scrip. Or union-busting, “off-shoring”, easy payday loans, easy credit, permanent basement minimum wages.
But here, and now? And surely, more clearly all the time, not just here, not just “for now” -
It’s a new shape of boot, one of a few really, that look like the old boots, but a little different. And now with sparkling added (modern) effervescence ™.
Don’t pay rent and let him sue. It takes at least 6 months to the court, but he will be bankrupt way before then :3
If he wants housing to be an investment, he has to take the risk too.
Edit: then offer to buy the house at auction price with the down payment you saved from the rent!
Keep in mind having the eviction on your record will make it significantly harder to rent another place in the future
Only do this after buying your own home then
Or idk, probably just don’t do it at all I guess. The landlord here is an asshole, but he’s a symptom of a systemic issue, not the cause of it. He goes bankrupt and the house gets bought by the next opportunistic asshole who probably will charge the next tenant even more rent, especially if he doesn’t get as good a deal on the mortgage (interests are up compared to 7-8 years ago after all). And you’ll have a permanent mark on your record.
Now of course if this was done by millions of tenants at once… That would really be something. Probably crash the housing market altogether, make houses affordable again
“lol” said the scorpion
“lmao”
What record?
You can find evictions in a background check, which is common to run on new tenants.
This is a great lifehack to get a mega-corp landlord
As an added benefit, they’ll squeeze you for every extra penny they can, which is great if you’re into financial domination. Best part is that you will be helping support extreme wealth inequality
Or at least I assume those are the reasons. IDK, I support small landlords over mega-corporations
The banks make money whilst its slaves point fingers amongst themselves.
Yeah, the landlord here is nothing more but another wage slave looking for a way to be less dependent on his wage/salary when the mortgage of his rental property is finally paid off. A symptom of a larger issue, maybe an asshole, but probably just trying to provide for his own family like we all are. Doesn’t sound like a millionaire.
∗ahem∗
I mean yeah exactly, the corporate ones are the bigger problem. This is just one guy. The corporate landlords are pricing even the private landlords out of the market, let alone first-time homebuyers.
Blackstone’s real estate divison in particular should be disbanded and its’ assets sold at auction to private individuals ONLY. Everyone (not here, but in general) talks about Blackrock, a company that mostly focuses on providing ETFs and other financial instruments, while Blackstone is literally out there buying up America’s single family homes and people barely talk about them.
sold at auction to private individuals
Then you’re still not comprehending the problem:
Housing should be FREE.
You are FREE to live in a homeless shelter.
Who will build houses for FREE? Who will pay for the materials?
It’s a nice idea in concept, but a fucking moronic when it meets real life.
I am all for social housing and rent-controlled housing owned by towns and cities.
But all housing being FREE is stupid…
By the way if you are in the US the allocation if resources for infrastructure like roads is already misallocated as fuck, if you live in an urban city center you are subsidizing the road infrastructure for the suburbanites, so that you can enjoy their smog being blown in your face as they commute to the city center from their cosy single family houses.
Look up strongtowns, they did plenty of studies showing this effect across various huge US cities.
The nice thing about capitalism is that it kind of solves allocation of resources without having a central control that’s prone to abuse and mismanagement.
You can’t afford to live where you want because it’s a popular place, you have to go elsewhere, and companies will build houses there because there is demand.
Now there are a few issues ofc like private companies being allowed to own housing, which needs to be banned. The other one being the over regulation and single family house zoning that has racist origins in the Us and absolutely fucked shit up, another reason why government regulation is bad and can be abused.
I live in a “commie block” in Europe that was planned so that everything is in walking distance, so not all government control is bad, but I believe this can be achieved without having to have tight control over what is built where, with more control over public transit.
i say let the market solve the housing problem, and let cities/towns provide affordable housing locally for the community.
In my city we have a homeless shelter for people who need housing in rough times, we have social housing that’s more long term and stable and costs like 30 euros a month for an apartment and we also recently opened rent-controlled flats that are owned by the city and are rented out at cost.
And this is in a central european country with nowhere near the resources and richness of the US…
Okay, can I just take my European ass and move into a malibu beach house for free then?
Who will decide who gets the free house where?
Privatizing housing is the system that created the problem. Under the current system, housing is a commodity that can be bought and sold. Like any commodity, cornering the market leads to monopoly by which the only supplier is a cartel of a few private entities. Cartel because they work together to fix prices to their benefit.
- What is the primary difference between just one guy and Blackstone?
- Why does just one guy seem legitimate?
- Why should we define property in a way that allows landlords to exist?
Doesn’t mean he’s living paycheck to paycheck. People often don’t leave a lot of money in checking accounts from which they pay mortgages because checking accounts often offer 0% interest. So if the landlord usually has close to 0 money in his checking account expecting rent to come ahead of the mortgage paynent despite having millions in a brokerage account he’ll still go into overdraft.
Not keeping a buffer that covers any upcoming bills in an account from which bills are automatically paid is deranged behaviour. I don’t care how much interest you may or may not get on that money.
I agree, trying to optimize gains on every dollar sounds great until one overdraft fee knocks out years of work.
Penny’s Will needs to know about the black hole.
Yeah its even bad landlording practice. You budget in a 20% buffer in the requested rent payment over the costs to own the rental property in case of late/missed rent payments and for ongoing repairs. If you as a landlord have expenses bouncing you’re doing something very wrong!
People who inherit things and don’t understand what it took (from themselves and worse, from others…) to build those things -
These people have, definitionally and usually irrevocably, deranged behavior.
Accordingly, among all the other things they do, these people often do hilariously (except for the real costs) stupid things with what they inherit.
I mean the landlord provides a place to live and it’s part of his income. Makes sense to me, idk?
The landlord doesn’t provide a place to live, they paywall it. The construction of housing provides places to live, landlordism only leeches off the poor classes who can’t afford to buy housing.
The landlord provides a place to live the same way that ticket scalpers provide tickets
So what do you do for a living that you should be offering to everyone else for free? It might be great if we could find a way to move to a post-capitalist world although I don’t know what that would look like. Landlords aren’t any worse than Chefs who are charging you to eat food, or farmers who won’t allow you to just go take want you want of their crops.
Banks and monetary policy over the last 4 decades are what really drove the prices of housing up. But, as usual, poorer people wanted to keep those ultra low interest rates even though it meant richer people could buy up everything even faster. Same as poorer people wanted Walmart even though it drove out all the smaller businesses that paid living wages and sent manufacturing overseas. I’m not a landlord. But they aren’t the only problem in a capitalist society and many of the individual ones are just people trying to get by same as any other people with a ‘side hustle’.Landlords aren’t any worse than Chefs who are charging you to eat food, or farmers who won’t allow you to just go take want you want of their crops.
Chef provided the labour and knowledge in preparing your meal. Farmer provided labour and knowledge in growing the crops.
Landlord provided buying the property first then charging you for the privilege of living there because a piece of paper says it’s his.The landlord did not build the house, and any maintenance costs come out of your rent to pay for someone else to fix.
Landlords aren’t any worse than Chefs who are charging you to eat food, or farmers who won’t allow you to just go take want you want of their crops
Landlord apologism on a lefty sub… Always good to start the day with a laugh
Unless a dwelling is brand-new & freshly built, someone has already paid for it in entirety long before you ever moved in. Some dwellings have even been paid for in entirety several times over by all the different people who’ve moved in & out over the decades. The modern capitalist expectation that every person born suddenly becomes financially indebted to the housing industry even though all these homes have already been fucking paid for several times over…is nothing short of extortion.
So what do you do for a living that you should be offering to everyone else for free?
Teaching? Medicine? Those are services provided for free to the public. Why is housing, a literal human right that literally everyone needs, not provided either free or extremely subsidized?
Landlords aren’t any worse than Chefs who are charging you to eat food
You’re thinking of construction workers, the people sweating their asses to build the housing you inhabit, not the leeches between you and the housing that’s already constructed.
It might be great if we could find a way to move to a post-capitalist world although I don’t know what that would look like
How hard is “public rent either for free or for extremely low prices” to imagine?
But they aren’t the only problem in a capitalist society
Agreed, they’re part of capitalism, capitalist business owners are the other part of the problem
many of the individual ones are just people trying to get by
Housing shouldn’t be allocated based on how lucky you are to get a good landlord or not, people shouldn’t be at the mercy of landlords to enjoy decent housing. It should be a guaranteed right.
Really insightful comment, regarding the overall pattern between welcoming Wal-Mart, and welcoming low interest rates for mortgages. And the inevitable outcomes. It’s the very same mechanism of forcing individuals to clamor and claw for what remains within reach, while thereby fueling the exact machine that pulls it all further away.
I’d argue it’s roughly the same class of people, doing the required clawing, though of course many, many people - on both sides of a divider I’d call “clawing for basic stability” vs. “clawing for a supposed retirement” - would completely disagree, about the similarities between the two groups 🙄. It’s the same picture.jpeg.
Aside from “landlords aren’t worse than chefs” (yes, they are, but admittedly depending on both landlord and chef lmao), couldn’t really agree more. Bad systems make for bad incentives make for bad personal decisions. Eventually (fucking eventually…), something gives.
