Y’all are missing something imo. Landlords are artificial demand - they drive up the housing prices for everyone, including home owners.
The argument that it costs to maintain a home blah blah is BS - if it wasn’t profitable then the landlords sell it. They’re not being charitable. They make a profit and it comes out of poor people’s wages.
Kids back in my day you used to be able to rent a house for like $400. It was much cheaper than owning a house and had several advantages. Sometime after 2012 that all changed. Now it’s as you said. There’s a place for rent and land lords, it’s just not the current system
As Churchill put it…
Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains — all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is affected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of these improvements does the land monopolist contribute, and yet, by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived…The unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.
This has come to the forefront in America since Covid and has become the reason why a lot of American’s (younger Millenials and Gen Z) can’t buy homes, beyond Gen Z being unable to find gainful employment (1/3 in unemployed). I think stating holes in their argument like “there are good landlords out there” or “what about this specific instance” is literally arguing against a rule with exceptions. That’s not what this post is talking about. They are talking about the “corporations” who are just some rich older person or couple that are buying one, two, or three extra properties and renting them out. Frankly that’s the biggest reason why housing costs have skyrocketed.
The US Federal Reserve is trying to curb this by keeping the Prime Lending Rate (PLR) high, but Trump is putting pressure on him because lowering the PLR would look good for him on paper because it would look like he did something immediate to alleviate the economic pressure we’re feeling in America, directly because of him and his policies. BUT, that would be catastrophic to us “poor” (people making less that $240K/year; 90% of Americans), and I think you can see why. Yeah, if American’s with large savings accounts (years ago the figure was (0% of Americans have less than $1000 in savings, so just imagine how it is now) all of a sudden saw that the mortgage on a house dropped from . . . lets just take the average cost of a “starter home” @$210K . . . $1,762.34/month to where it was prior to the pandemic at (~3%) $1,347.87, the rich Americans that were already buying those extra houses would just buy more extra houses and charge YOU, a poor American, that ~$1500/month and still charge you for any maintenance they have to do (depending on how your state renter laws are set up).
But even with all that, we still have the issue of how much houses cost. And because of the aforementioned “extra houses,” we have seen a skyrocket in the cost of houses. I won’t do a deep dive on it, but I will sum it up and link to a podcast you can listen to: an average home “should” cost ~$120K in today’s money, but because of the MASSIVE bubble created, that home now costs ~$400K. Why? because of people buying extra homes, and those same people who don’t have jobs being able to make it to zoning meetings to tell the planners they only want “big” homes in their areas to increase the selling price of their own home. That then has a cascading effect: let’s say this happens somewhere in California like a suburb of San Fransico. That means that people no longer can afford to live there so they move to let’s say Dallas. Now Dallas has less supply and more demand and the sellers jack up their prices arbitrarily because they want more profit. Then the buyer rents it out and keeps increasing rent prices so they can keep making more money.
This is what the X Poster is complaining about. Not an immigrant charging reasonable rent prices or “good” landlords, because the truth is, those aren’t the type of people typically renting out houses to poor people who couldn’t afford to buy it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bajyEFHK0M&t=1198s Here’s another video that’s kinda related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc
Why do you think it’s been made so difficult to own a home? Long as you’re paying rent, you’re a cash cow. Also less likely to leave a crappy job.
I’m surprised so many people are running defence for landlords in the comments
A lot of these people are likely tech folks. A lot of tech folks get high paying jobs. They used that pay to buy rental property.
A lot of these guys are landlords and are trying to convince people that the rent they charge is fair, market rate, and a favour because they’re taking on “risk” while you pay for their mortgage.
a lot of tech folks don’t have great high paying jobs. only a small subset of them do, most of whom, were already rich before they got those jobs because they came from wealthy families.
i have rented out a room before of my condo. so have several of my friends until they had kids. are we all ‘evil’ landlords? or are we only evil if we buy units we don’t live in? was I evil when I charged 1200/mo for the bedroom, despite the market rent in my area being closer to 1500? or was I supposed to rent it out at $500 a month or something?
or how about when I had a shitty tenant who was late with the rent, damaged my floors/walls, threatened me and my dog, and I kicked them out and kept their deposit because it cost me like $800 to repair all the shit they did? and because of that experience I no longer rent out my spare bedroom, therefore reducing units and driving up rent further in my area, where today a bedroom is now almost 1800/mo?
I’m sure your specific instance is justified and in doing so, you don’t need a random internet stranger like myself to tell you it’s okay.
according to many other random people here, I should be murdered and killed because I own property that I live in, and they think that’s correct because of some theory they believe in and/or they feel like they ‘deserve’ it more because their efforts are heroic and good and my efforts were bad and evil.
what they really mean is ‘I wish I had the power to kill and murder people who had more than I do because I’m bitter and blame others for my failings and refuse to take responsibility for my inability to provide for myself. So I’ll just sit around and fantasize and wish violence on others in my head and be abusive on the internet.’
Sitting around and fantasizing about a prefect world in which your life will be a wonderful and happy is a lot easier… than actually making your life better though work.
1200/month FOR A BEDROOM?
1200 Robux? 1200 VBucks?
Truly I’m sorry but this is like double my rent and I have multiple rooms (really not trying to flex)
I hope your place gets cheaper because that must be eating your wallet.😕
my mortgage for a 2bedroom apartment is 3000/mo. i make over 8000 a month so it’s not a big deal. 5 year ago i was only making about 6000 a month so I needed rental income.
Look I’ll be honest, as a renter, I’ve not heard a realistic alternative that I like better. Do I think landlords should be better regulated? For sure. Do I think housing should be a right, and free, high quality housing should be available everywhere to anyone who wants it? Yes, please!
I like the option to rent a place that’s even better than what the baseline option would be. I like that I can move around as I need to. I like that I can get a bigger, better, or just different, place when I have the funds. I like that I never have to deal with broken appliances or roof repairs and get to pick the type of place I want to live in.
Do it 1970s style. You own a home but pay less than half of what you do now. The extra savings go toward home maintenance and lifestyle improvement. You gain equity over time and actually get something for what you paid instead of lining someone else’s pockets.
It really depends on how often he is really using that “I want to move” option.
Various fees associated with the purchase of a houae will blow away likely equity gains over a year or two. Over a short time period housing can actually go down, and you sell for less than you paid. Selling the house is a potential exposure that may leave you stuck for months with it, and if you needed to immediately move, you have to own two properties and the associated taxes, insurance, and likely loan payment. If you had to borrow and moved within a year. The interest owed probably outpaced your theoretical equity gains.
So if you are only staying in one place for say 4 years or less, renting may actually make sense. If you are planning longer than that, purchasing almost always makes more sense.
The time cost, too. Huge hassle to buy, move, sell. Inspections, agents, viewings… big pressure end to end.
purchasing almost always makes more sense.
I remember the San Francisco Bay Area threw this old truism off when purchasing became so expensive, it was just about a wash whether you wanted to rent or buy.
These tiny little homes starting at a million bucks or something…
You make a really good point, thank you.
Honest question because I just don’t know - would those same financial and temporal costs (mentioned in another comment) still be as high in a functional, fair system?
buying doesn’t make sense unless you live in a place for 5-10 years.
i am now 5-6 years into my place. it is just starting to ‘profit’ in terms of equity vs costs.
renting is cheaper and better and has far fewer opportunity costs. i had way more disposable income as a renter and a lot more free time. i see no ‘shame’ in being a renter, but there is a lot of dumbass cultural bias that ‘owning’ is always better than renting.
same is true for cars. but people love to flip out at you for how ‘stupid’ leases are. cars are deprecating assets… which makes it an even stupider argument. but leases can be really great if you know what you are doing and your circumstances. leasing worked out great for me and i ended up buying my car out and making a hefty profit off it. some leasing deals are actually far better than owning the car, too.
most people just look at upfront costs and end costs. they don’t see all the costs in the middle. hence why they buy a crappy car like a Jeep, when they should lease it… and end up boned from all the maintenance bills. a house is a lot more than the cost of buying it and the cost of selling it.
I will say that as an owner, I have a lot more disposable income and pretty much all the free time I had as a renter.
I paid of my mortgage early, so now that’s just on the ground.
House maintenance is a thing, but it’s not as scary as people sometimes act like it is. Cleaning is far more work than maintenance/repairs and I had to do that either way. I have had three relatively big repair bills that I had to pay for, but that’s over decades, and I could have paid a company some monthly fee if I wanted more predictability (though the home warranty companies tend to be scammy). I have a lawn to mow, but that’s more a function of detached housing rather than renting/owning, renters of detached housing have to mow their lawn too, and a friend who owns a townhouse doesn’t mow but has to pay big HOA fees that include landscaping services.
But absolutely, between closing costs and interest rates and risk of the housing market having a short-term dip, you aren’t going to reliably and meaningfully gain equity in under 5 or 4 years. One could make a persuasive argument that a different system wouldn’t have that much overhead to a purchase, but within the system we have, that’s the timeframe where owning doesn’t make any sense.
Of course, that said, there needs to be healthy choice in the market, so that people aren’t stuck renting when it doesn’t make sense for their situation.
It entirely depends on the house. Some people get bankrupted by their homes, some get really lucky and have very low maintenance costs. When I rented I had something like 60%+ disposable income.
Sounds like you are very economically well-off, and you can likely afford to outsource your labor and upkeep. I could not. I had more free money and time when I rented because I cannot afford to higher maids, landscapers, and etc. I do almost every minor repair myself, including plumbing and electrical and I absolutely dread the day I will have to replace a roof or do another very costly repair and it sucks to have to have a pile of money I have to keep aside for that, when I’d rather use it for something enjoyable. Owning a home has seriously impacted my ability to vacation and travel in both terms of money and time to the point I haven’t left the country in 5 years. I am ‘wealtheir’ on paper, but that wealth doesn’t do much for me in my day to day life. My 8 grand a month income does less for me than my 2 grand a month income did for me 10 years ago, because so much of it is sunk into my home.
I suppose the question is what upkeep people get hit with that a renter doesn’t. Housekeeping isn’t a renter amenity and landscaping is not an amenity when you rent a house.
Maybe the house is older or something… In my car the three things were a leaky water heater, a roof (which was big, but 15 years and insurance partially covered), and the central air conditioning falling. Day to day haven’t had plumbing or electrical problems. I suppose I’ve had to replace a few parts of my toilets, but just flappers which are like a 15 second job and a few dollars and fill valves, which take about 5 minutes and are maybe 15 dollars. Some folks seem to think that every weekend there’s another repair, but for me it can be months and months before even a minor thing like a light bulb or a toilet flapper needs attention.
Preach!
do you want all the negative externalizes of 1970s too? like leaded gasoline? a much more racist and sexist and hateful society? only 3 major tv stations and no internet?
What does that have to do with affordable housing?
Paying half if not more of your monthly salary for a shitty place to live is horse shit
I like the option to rent a place that’s even better than what the baseline option would be. I like that I can move around as I need to. I like that I can get a bigger, better, or just different, place when I have the funds. I like that I never have to deal with broken appliances or roof repairs and get to pick the type of place I want to live in.
You are describing either a “land contract” or a “condominium”. With either, you gain equity in the property.
Vienna social housing model is what we need. Nearly 60% lives in public housing there.
Why would you prefer a landlord to just you save that money yourself? Like at best its probably a third of your income if youre working class? At worst its probably 60% or more. If you’re on any kind of social assistance rent is probably almost all of your income. Hurray! No food for you mister, the poor landlord needs that pittance you receive.
You would have effectively 133%-180% of the income you do now. For me that’s an increase of over a thousand dollars a month. I could afford all the appliances and roof repairs in the world with that kind of money. I would still walk away with so much extra money its a joke. You have been entirely misled about how much rent takes out of your income. They will steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from you over your life time, maybe even more depending on what you pay.
Renting exists because renters cannot advocate for themselves. It exists because people who become land owners escape the renting class and pretty much immediately turn their backs on it. No longer their problem. Because propaganda has taught them to not have solidarity with their fellow workers. Homelessness is an entirely preventable issue and is inseparable from the problem of landlords.
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This comment illustrates very clearly that you are not a renter 😊 we do not have a choice! I cant just decide whether or not to own my own shelter. I am literally not given the choice. That is not how the system is designed. If youre disabled, youre screwed. If you cant afford a higher education, youre screwed. If you have debts, mental health issues, if youre a minority, youre absolutely screwed. You will rent for the rest of your life and it will almost entirely be spent paycheck to paycheck, certainly nowhere even close to daydreaming about owning any kind of home.
All the benefits youre ascribing to renting count for just owning the apartment or condo you live in. Bam. Done. Couldn’t give less of a fuck about grass. I can barely afford food! Think about how insane it is for you to complain about having to cut the grass when renters have to pick between fucking eating and having a place to sleep. Youre not a leftist, youre a bog standard liberal.
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I do not live in the USA. Housing is a human right and should be free everywhere. It should not be a market. No one should have to pay anything for housing. You have been fed a lifetime of propaganda to make you believe this is fair. It is not. It is one of the major things that contributes to lifelong stress and shortens lifespans. It is one of the major things that keeps people in poverty, having to pay half their income in rent that they never get back.
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life isn’t fair.
some people have to rent forever, yes. some people are ok with renting forever. If you want to not rent forever you need to make lifestyle or career changes such that you are on an economic path to doing so. That might involve some short term difficulty.
You had choices. You made them. I grew up in a poor town, with working class parents. I choose to go to college, by studying my ass off and getting scholarships and loans. Then I chose to pay back those loans as fast as I could once I got a job after graduating. By 30 I was debt-free. by 35 I was able to buy a modest place. I did not choose high-paying job either, I work in non-profit research where my salary is about half what it might be if i worked for a corporation.
Not everyone chose that. I have had many friends who choose otherwise, and are now 40+ with mountains of debt and will rent forever and are bitter about it. But they also used to tell me what a loser i was for not traveling partying and ‘living it up’. And they are still doing that. One person I know makes 40K a year working in a bicycle shop, and yet they spend 5-8K traveling each yeah, and they feel like someone should just give them an house and are super angry at the world. if you dare suggest maybe they stop working in a bike shop and get a better career, they tell you you are a hateful fascist.
and on the flip side I know people making 500K+ a year who also say they can’t afford to buy a house, because they have delusional expectations. and refuse to ‘lower’ themselves by buying something in their price range.
Man FUCK YOU as someone who does alright now but struggled you really just love the smell of your own shit and pulling up the ladder behind you. Fuck you how about you just shut the fuck up instead of posting this absolute drivel
In fact, I not only have an apartment I have an older house on a bigger lot and you know what? The idea that I become slave to my house and garden upkeep that I would have to cut grass during the weekends instead of having the freedom to do whatever I want frightens the fuck out of me.
You know what’s worse than “becoming a slave to [your] house”? Having to work as to not become homeless.
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It intrigues me now, how you would “fix” this and make it so that people don’t have to work to have housing?
First things first: there are already a bunch of people who don’t have to work for their housing. A big part of those may have to work for an income so that they can pay for upkeep. But get rich enough and that can get payed by dividends. Or they’re landlords who get enough income from rent. Those rich people don’t have to work at all for their housing.
we already have social housing in my country.
That’s cool for the people who get it. But I’d be surprised if your home country has no homeless people and vacant housing at the same time.
We have universal healthcare, we have a bunch of social programs for people in need and we have automatic unemployment paid from social insurance. People on disability don’t work, people’s pension is covered by the state.
Do those people on social programs actually have a comfortable life, though? Or is it rather “too little to live, too much to die”? I’m quite sure that landlords still make a lot of profit from rent in that country.
What measures should we add to make it so you don’t have to work for your home?
Introduce a usufruct model of owning, where the people who live in a home actually own it (either as a family home, or multiple homes owned by a coop). The important bit is that rent-seeking is abolished in housing. Then you might still need to work for upkeep, but that’s a diminishino part of what people need to pay for rent, nowadays.
and if the election goes my preferred parties way, it will be fixed in the next cycle.
If your country is capitalist, I highly doubt that they will implement this. Profits are still required by capitalist states.
However all these things are being paid for, concrete doesn’t pour itself, steel doesn’t manufacture itself, building don’t build themselves, so how do you propose we make it so that we don’t have to pay for our homes?
I said “work as to not go homeless”. You’re bringing “paying” into it. There’s already a lot of place to live. Ideally, I’d see a communist society where this kind of stuff is planned on the basis of needs, rather than being speculated on in markets for profit
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Housing is a human right. We already have gigantic amounts of housing that sits empty, new building projects are not the priority.
The government should be in charge of constructing new housing developments to meet the needs of the community. People can also pool resources together to build those things, in the absence of rent and mortgages people would have substantially higher incomes. Over time this would balance out, but would still be doable in the long term.
No one should be homeless. Even if you are able bodied and refuse to work. The amount of people who are able bodied and refuse to work is microscopic. You have been misled by conservative propaganda to believe that welfare recipients are lazy. Welfare recipients are people who for one reason or another are unable to work. This is almost exclusively people with disabilities.
But yes, I think even if you decide to do literally nothing just cause you dont want to, you should still have shelter. Shelter is a human right; housing is a human right. It is a crime against humanity to deny people housing. And if youre that contrarian, to literally be like har har I wanna make a point about how dumb free housing is so ill do literally nothing, you probably have some problems you should sort through in therapy.
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Almost everyone has to work to not become homeless.
That’s true. Let’s fix that.
And still: Do you pay 30 to 50% of your income in your own home for that?
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How to ‘fix’ that? Someone has to do the work to build and maintain housing? Should they do it for free?
dude, people like this don’t think those things exist, because they have never had to pay for them.
they also don’t understand what a payroll tax is. because if they don’t pay it, it must not exist and is just some made up thing!
You can pay people for maintenance and upkeep. Like everything what you have to be careful of scammy companies, but you also have to be wary of scammy landlords.
I think if you are staying for a long time in one residence, you really are better off owning it, and buying services for it. Hell you can hire the exact same maintenance service that a landlord uses, that they pay for out of your rent.
If you have temporary need though, renting is certainly the best option.
The renter system is fine in my opinion
It’s the result of the power imbalance that creates the problems. Specifically that property owners hold all the power and have structured society in such a way that housing is artificially scarce and more difficult to build than it should be, which has led to inflated prices
that’s what everyone wants.
that’s also why housing is so expensive. people are willing to pay a lot of money to live in high quality housing. you are too.
and people who can’t afford the high quality housing have to live in the places with broken/old appliances.
if you want those things, you have to get enough money to be able to afford them.
I’m not lol. .world is basically Reddit 2.0, warts and capitalists included 😆
You Tankies live outside of reality.
I’m an outspoken anarchist but go off king
Oh
Yeah, anarchists don’t like capitalism and rent-seeking behavior either. See this comment by another user quoting anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread (this is “the Bread Book”, and where “breadtube” gets its name from). (Kropotkin is not the first anarchist to come to the anti-property conclusion, and in fact it has been a staple of anarchist theory since Proudhon.)
I also make up things about people.
I heard about your coma and recent miraculous recovery after being kicked in the head while fucking a sheep. My sympathy goes out to your family and I wish ewe well.
Apparently not liking capitalism lumps you in with the tankies.
Do you even know what tankie means?
it’s 2026, everyone is either a tankie, anti semite, zionist or pedophile.
i have been called all four in the same thread once. proudest moment of my time in the fediverse.
makes you know you are on the right track with everyone hates you and thinks you are evil
It does.
Bugger off liberal swine. There’s other boots to be licked, hop to it.
Hey I’m not really worried, my landlord is actually really cool. The place I live in is actually better than the place he lives in. My rent is well well below market rate for what I should be paying. I lived in the same place for the past 11 years and he’s only raised my rent twice for less than $200 total. Not all landlords are bad, not all of them are in it just to get rich. And not all of us would be able to buy a house regardless of paying rent or not. And I’d much rather pay rent to somebody for a nice place to live then be living in a tent by the river.
Damn, you’re right. It’s like how I’m not worried about wealth inequality because I lucked out and have a steady 60k a year job with a nice employer. Not all employers are bad.
Or how I don’t give a shit about abortion because I made the stone-cold choice to not be a woman.
When things aren’t affecting me they don’t matter so why are people making a big deal about it?
Think the point being it’s nuanced, there are valid rental scenarios. So when someone sees renting shouldn’t be a thing at all, they can be understandable put off, exactly the same way you are put off by someone saying they actually have a good renting scenario.
Renting should be an option, but housing stock shouldn’t be slurped up by big firm either. There needs to be reasonable path to ownership as well as choices to rent. Depending on the area, the balance is of off one way or the other.
Going from a safe place to live, to a steady income, to abortion. Dude you’re an idiot. Fuck off out of this conversation. What are you, 13? Get real dumbass.
Their point went over your head because you keep your eyes cast downward
Or their anger at what their life is blinded them.
“I didn’t get their point”
“I did”
“Well maybe they’re just angry!”
Nope, gotta kill your landlord and then get in a shootout with the cops when they come to
hisyour house, you heard the tankies. Time to die for their utopia soldier!
People aren’t defending landlords per se. People are defending the opportunities afforded by having extra space and letting someone else pay what it costs to live there.
Renting as a concept goes back to antiquity, and this is an absolutist stupid take that makes it sound like OP doesn’t understand how real life works.
Not everywhere is a large city. Not all renters live in the same place for 20 years. Not all landlords are evil shitbags or faceless corporations. Sure, plenty are. Some are just families that are lucky to not have to sell their house if they move for work that lasts only a couple years.
I end up moving every couple of years, and so I’ve had to sublet the last part of a lease I’ve had, and gladly rented places from friends, random people on Craigslist, whatever, for weeks or months at a time. So I’m a thief because I sublet an apartment for 3 months? So dumb.
Long-term renting is really more the issue as landlords do just sit and leech and renters get nothing to show for it. But the fact remains that renting a room or an apartment is something that has since literally ancient times made more sense than huge amounts of unused housing you aren’t allowed to use. So this is actually a nuanced argument against a particular class of people and corporations. Meaning that the premise is flawed enough for most people to roll their eyes and ignore it.
The whole “rent is theft!” trope doesn’t even make sense from a political messaging viewpoint. What’s your suggested alternative? That’s not apparent at all. So this ends up sounding like saying “I want hot spaghetti for dinner!” and just expecting it to happen.
Also, a rather large number of people have rented something out, rented a room out, etc. thanks to AirBnB that this messaging makes enemies out of a whole lot of normal people by using absolute terms. People like me ask “Did my friends that helped me out steal from me? Of course not.”
If you think that anyone who thinks a reasonable exchange of a service for an agreed up on fee are committing theft, then you’ve alienated 98% of people with the premise alone by calling them criminals.
Six paragraphs of you not understanding the issue: the problem is not the concept of renting a living space for a given time, the problem is private rent, i.e. rent for the landowner’s profit.
Every single problem with current rent could be solved by socializing housing and making it available to rent at production+maintenance prices, and people could still move freely without being tied to a house in particular, without the risk of being evicted, would be able to paint the walls and have pets…
Every single problem with current rent could be solved by … [theoretical solutions]
Just because things could theoretically be handled differently doesn’t make landlords “thieves” as the title claims.
I’m currently a home owner and not a landlord, but if I would become a landlord, it wouldn’t be in my power to implement any of your solutions, leaving in the middle whether they have merit or not.
All I can do is try to live in the system that exists, and in that context there’s nothing unethical about charging rent to provide someone exclusive access to a property that I worked 20 years for to pay off plus 10 years to save for the down payment. Like, I’m just a wage slave myself and there’s literally over 250k of my own money in my house … why should I have to give that away for free? Seems to me that trying to take the fruits of my labor (i.e. the house that I worked for) for free is the thievery here.
I’m currently a home owner and not a landlord, but if I would become a landlord, it wouldn’t be in my power to implement any of your solutions, leaving in the middle whether they have merit or not.
It would be in your power to set the rent. If you set the rent at the cost of maintenance + any other recurring costs, then yes, it’s totally fair. If you set the rent such that you make a profit, you’d be earning money for doing nothing.
Like, I’m just a wage slave myself and there’s literally over 250k of my own money in my house … why should I have to give that away for free?
The property that you worked 20 years to pay off and 10 to pay the down payment for is yours, you get to keep it. You don’t have to give it away for free, you’ll either sell it for a fair price and keep that money, or your heirs will have it. All that the opponents of rentseeking and landlordism are asking for is that you not use the property to make profit between now and when you sell it or pass it on to your heirs.
thanks for the detailed and explanatory response. love to see more of this commentary on lemmy rather than the ‘rent is evil’ crap that goes on around here.
it’s about as informed and reasonable as ‘taxation is theft!’ crap. It’s just the left-wing warcry equivalent to that.
and all the ‘rent is evil’ idiots i know in real life… took mommy and daddy’s money and became landlords themselves and now they complain about how taxes are evil… it’s almost as if people are selfish jerks who just like to complain about obligatory costs…
and all the ‘rent is evil’ idiots i know in real life… took mommy and daddy’s money and became landlords themselves and now they complain about how taxes are evil
Yeah, the turn that the Trustifarians take is always so fast. Like you can not see them for a few weeks and suddenly the locks are gone, toes confined to shoes, and they’re already clamoring for trappings as a totem of having forsaken their “sordid past.” All the whiplash from suddenly realizing that your paths in life end in the same few places, simply because your ideals force others to push you away.
It’s really not too dissimilar from Flat Earthers - outrageous ideas that at first put you in a fun and weird community, but long term are the thing that makes everyone your enemy. Though, since Flat Earthers don’t specifically reject economic methods are part of their idealism, they can fare well for longer it seems. Though I don’t have data to back that up.
pretty much. they cosplay at being working-class/poor because it makes them feel like they aren’t rich douchebags like their parents, and once it gets old/difficult/mom and dad get mad, they ‘grow up’ and stop doing it.
I am in my 40s and I meet a lot of trustafians. they get so ANGRY when they realize I am not like them and I’m some ‘loser’ who made my own way up in life with hard work and didn’t spend my 20s partying and traveling and working low-income jobs because it was ‘authentic’. i had a low income job because it was the only one I could get until I had enough experience to get a better paying job.
my rebelling was going to college and working my ass off, because my parents were uneducated lazy morons.
I hear you on this. I was homeless as a kid, and in college I had a friend who I just didn’t understand was wealthy, as I hadn’t learned the subtle social cues outside of a small town context. I was sort of still processing the fact that yes, living for years in the back of a store and not a house was not the experience that other people had, and it is defined as being homeless. Though certainly not as bad as living out of a car or on the streets. “Homeless lite” maybe? Anyway, I told her this one day and she immediately came back with “Oh! Me too! We lived in a hotel for 3 months while looking for a house to buy!” Even trying to get a bit deeper…nope. Steamrolled into her Eloise story.
A year or so later, another friend got it out of her that she, indeed, did have a “small” trust fund for college. To her credit, she wasn’t a shitbag at least. Meant well, but just zero wherewithal about the discrepancy between paying daily to live somewhere and making up a bed every night of camper seat cushions and a sleeping bag
we don’t have this fundamentalist religious idea that rent is usury
more conformation of the religious nature of the commies
Being a worthless parasite that doesn’t have to produce effort in life sure does make people fucking stupid doesn’t it?
Felt confident enough in yourself that you didn’t bother looking up the word, did ya?
Who’s the worthless parasite? The person who feels they shouldn’t have to work and pay for their shelter?
Yes that’s absolutely correct. You are a parasite because you expect other people to work so you can have money you didn’t earn. That is a literal description of the financial relationship.
how do you know you aren’t the parasite?
My initial reaction was the same, to call OP a baby, etc. The problem isn’t rent. It’s landlord leeches.
I have an apartment in one country but moved to a different country, where I’m renting myself. I had two choices - either rent my first apartment to someone, or sell it. If I sold it, it would go not to a family in need, but to a BnB company or an “investor” (that’s the reality in my home country).
Instead I’m renting it to a family of Ukrainian refugees. They basically pay off my mortgage so that I’m not actively losing money on the whole thing.
They also pay rent to the housing association. This money goes to things like trash removal, hot/cold water, taking care of the green areas in the neighbourhood, cleaning the staircases, etc., etc.
Is this so bad and horrible?
Is this so bad and horrible?
Yes.
Instead I’m renting it to a family of Ukrainian refugees.
You are actively exploiting refugees.
You are no different than the BnB or the investors. You are on the supply side of the problem. Rent is, indeed, the problem.
You could offer to sell your property to those tenants. You could act as a private lender, allowing them to pay you instead of a commercial bank. You could offer them a “land contract”, which is a rent-to-own arrangement. If they choose to leave your property in the next three years, it was no different than a rental. If they choose to stay beyond three years, it automatically converts to a private mortgage, and they begin earning equity.
They basically pay off my mortgage so that I’m not actively losing money on the whole thing.
Leaving it vacant and just paying the mortgage yourself, you are gaining equity in exchange for your money. You are not losing anything. Renting, you are gaining that equity without paying for it.
The only way renting isn’t a problem is if the rent is far less than a mortgage payment on the same property.
indeed. i frequently see people confusing cash flow and equity in these conversations. landlords claim if they are cash flow negative they’re ‘losing’ money, completely ignoring the equity they’re gaining.
What do you call the thing where you can’t afford to support your family abroad because you need to pay the mortgage?
I also wondered about doing that when I ever get rich. Like buy houses in a coveted neighborhood, rent it out to low and middle income people at social housing rates and then convert the lease to a mortgage after a few years and sell the home below market value to the tenants. But how do you prevent them from selling it to an investor above market rates for profit within a few years. Like sure they have equity now but the home is also lost to an investor who will rent it out at a premium to an expat or tourist.
I actually know a landlord who owns a farm and rents it out, and does so precisely for the reasons you state. They don’t want the land to go to some soulless big company
They charge a pittance in rent, enough to cover insurance and taxes. The farmer would pay about the same if they owned the property.
They got contacted by a company wanting to build a datacenter, and got to say “hell no”.
This is mental that we sell arable land to build expensive, low quality condos or big buildings like a data center.
Yes, absolutely. Easy to turn viable farmland to bullshit data center, almost impossible to do the former. The datacenter boom causes us to act against our collective interests.
Cities would rather pollute a new parcel of land than fix the contamined ones.
There is a city nearby that has an abandoned industrial district and they plan on building a new industrial district instead of razing the old one and decontaminate it.
And shocker, they want to make the new district on farm land.
Many options available. At the “ownership” level, you can establish deed restrictions and covenants requiring owner-occupancy. At the local level, you can establish zoning requirements. At the tax assessment level, you can enact punitively-high tax rates that are exempted for owner-occupants. If anyone tries renting these properties, they will face the full tax rate; these properties can only be feasibly owned by people who will occupy them.
What about cases where the move is only temporary? Should people sell every time and hope there is a place to live when they return?
In the private lender case, do you see that as different from someone who starts their own company and manages the property themselves while the renter pays them directly?
The earning equity piece isn’t necessarily incorrect, what the owner is losing is potentially the opportunity to move at all. This assumes they can afford a mortgage + whatever it costs to live somewhere else.
What about cases where the move is only temporary?
In their initial phase, land contracts are, effectively, a rental agreement, including for short-term. (With one difference: the payment is fixed for the life of the agreement; it doesn’t increase year over year) When “temporary” turns into “long term”, (as it so often does) a land contract already has you covered, by locking rent through the initial phase, then gaining you equity through the final phase.
In the private lender case, do you see that as different from someone who starts their own company and manages the property themselves while the renter pays them directly?
Vastly. One includes conveyance of equity; the other does not.
The landlord/property manager retains 100% equity throughout the life of the rental agreement. The private lender retains only the value of the loan. With a land contract, the seller/lender retains 100% of the equity for a couple years, before the agreement automatically converts to a private mortgage.
The earning equity piece isn’t necessarily incorrect, what the owner is losing is potentially the opportunity to move at all.
Completely false. Absolute worse case scenario, they abandon their equity and return title to the lender/seller. Terminating the loan/purchase agreement in this absolute worse case scenario is functionally identical to renting. At its best, renting gives you this outcome, and creates new, worst-case possibilities: where the landlord absconds with security deposits and charges additional fees.
I have to ask: in which country do things work like that? Because definitely not in mine.
You are actively exploiting refugees
Good on you for not knowing shit but still making assumptions.
Right, because if not for the horrible me, they’d be able to rent for significantly more in the area.
Like, they’re not “we have nothing but the clothes on our backs” refugees, they’re a family that got a kid coming and needed something relatively good-standard, and pay for it thanks to the husband’s IT job.
You are on the supply side of the problem. Rent is, indeed, the problem.
“I’m 12 and this is deep”.
You could offer to sell your property to those tenants
Why would they buy a property in my country? They want to go back to their own country. WTF are you talking about?
You could offer them a “land contract”, which is a rent-to-own arrangement
Again, they don’t want to own an apartment in a foreign country.
[all the mortgage stuff]
Sure. I could bear the costs for the high and mighty idea.
Sadly, I can’t afford that.
The only options for me would be to:
- Sell the apartment to someone who would start charging twice than what I am.
- Completely upend my life and go back to my home country to live in that apartment, I guess.
What would you have done in my shoes?
I’ll give you another scenario.
A house gets inherited. The person receiving the house has a child who wants to live there, but the child is about 5 years away from moving out. So they want to rent the house out rather than trying to leave it unoccupied. The tenant knows up front it is a limited time arrangement.
Note this is an unusual circumstance, but there are folks who find themselves in need of temporary housing and people who have an upcoming need, but not current need for a property.
In his case, if he had said he was renting for an overseas assignment but was going to move back, then I would have thought it was a slam dunk. I suppose if the refugees had explicitly stated they wanted to move back home in a couple of years, similar situation.
Leaving it vacant
That is even less helpful than renting it out.
Let’s start from the beginning: a mortgage is a neutral agreement. Effectively, the lender conveys equity to the borrower over time. Equity is the right to permanent, unlimited use of the property.
A rental agreement conveys no equity. What the tenant gains is a short-term, limited use of the property. “Temporary” is considerably less valuable than “permanent”, so a fair value for “rent” is considerably less than a fair value for a mortgage.
Rent prices don’t reflect this. Even after including a maintenance expense, (that the owner would have to pay regardless of who is living in the property), fair rent for that temporary privilege is still far less than the mortgage for the permanent right.
And yet, the market has been manipulated to the point that rent prices are well above mortgages. In a fair market, people seeking housing would generally choose the better option. If a mortgage is cheaper than rent, they would choose a mortgage. The laws of supply and demand would react to this choice by increasing the price of a mortgage, and decreasing the price of rent.
Since this isn’t happening, we know that the market is being manipulated, and tenants are being exploited. “Fair rent” does not exist: tenants are paying far more than the cost of a mortgage, yet they are not receiving the value of a mortgage.
That is even less helpful than renting it out.
You would have a point if “fair rent” existed, but it does not. In the absence of “fair rent”, we are left with the perverse position that a vacant home does, indeed, cause less harm than a rented home.
A house gets inherited.
The full context of that scenario includes the manipulated market. The scenario you present is only reasonable in a fair market.
In his case, if he had said he was renting for an overseas assignment but was going to move back
Same thing: the scenario for renting is only reasonable in a fair market, but the underlying context of your scenario is the manipulated market where the value of a temporary privilege is modeled greater than the value of a permanent right.
rent prices are well above mortgages
So this is even in the USA over here not seemingly universal. Hitting up some detached housing in Zillow in my area, even with 20% upfront, mortgaging 80% over 30 years, the minimum property tax+mortgage+insurance on a house that might be $3,000 based on the sales price of other houses in the neighborhood in the past year, the typical rent is about $2300… So absolutely someone renting out a mortgaged property in this area is paying for that equity while the renter can come in with a modest deposit and get maintenance taken care of at a much lower rate than even a 30 year mortgage. At least the rental market here seems to be aggressively competing with 30 year mortgage payments with 20% down sort of picture…
(that the owner would have to pay regardless of who is living in the property)
Property doesn’t get damaged through use if nobody lives there, what are you talking about?
yet they are not receiving the value of a mortgage.
You’re looking at this from the perspective of someone just looking at a spreadsheet.
Sure, you’re technically correct - money-wise, they are not getting anything in exchange for them renting the apartment.
What you’re seemingly blind to is the utility. They don’t have the money for a purchase, they don’t have the ability take mortgage themselves, most importantly - they don’t want to own property in a foreign country, but due to the geopolitical situation and due to the employment status of the husband, the family wants to temporarily live in my home country.
Sure, there should be cheap rental opportunities, but both the rental market and the mortgages are fucked where I come from. I’ll be 80 by the time I’m done paying off the apartment, and thank god I was able to purchase it before getting married, because that has lowered my credit score to the point where I wouldn’t be able to purchase at all.
So, I have two options here - sell (to an investment company or a hoarder, because practically nobody else can afford apartments in that area of that city at this moment), or rent way below the average for the area, but still above my mortgage - because I can’t afford to pay that on top of being the breadwinner for my family.
I’m renting it to a family of Ukrainian refugees. They basically pay off my mortgage
Holy fuck, my sides. How can you be this BLIND to reality? You fucking said yourself that you have A FAMILY OF WAR REFUGEES PAYING OFF YOUR MORTGAGE. In 30 years time, you’ll own a house and those refugees will own what exactly?
For reference, when the war broke out I was a tenant in Germany. You know what I did? I HOUSED a Ukrainian refugee in MY OWN HOME for NO COST, because I’m not a piece of shit
In 30 years time, you’ll own a house and those refugees will own what exactly?
Hopefully a home in Ukraine, where they want to go back to?
Like, what do you expect them to do? Run away from their home and BUY a house in a foreign country? What exactly was your point?
You know what I did? I HOUSED a Ukrainian refugee in MY OWN DAMN HOME for NO COST, because I’m not a piece of shit
Good for you! I did the same. 9 people in total lived in my apartment made for 3-4. I slept on 90cm cot with my wife, so that they could use the bedroom bed to sleep with their little children.
What was your point again?
And how exactly will they purchase a home in Ukraine if they’re spending their income to pay your mortgage?
It might surprise you, but:
- They already have a home in Ukraine. Will probably need renovation, though.
- They’re not spending the entirety of their earnings on rent. What - other than “landlords are literally Hitler” - gave you that idea?
if I sold it, it would go not to a family in need, but to a BnB company or an “investor”
You know you can choose who to sell it to, you can reject offers from investors. The family in need may not get you the highest price but reducing the price makes housing more affordable, at the expense of your bottom line though.
Sure the family could’ve tricked you and sold it right back to an investor but with closing costs, fees etc. it would make it hard to make a profit by doing that.
You know you can choose who to sell it to, you can reject offers from investors
Not how it works in my home country. There were even cases of people selling to families, and then those families immediately selling to investment firms, because they were just plants.
That’s one issue. The second issue is that most actual families can’t afford apartments at all. Sure, I could sell way below market value, but I’m not well off enough to do it for the cause, I wouldn’t be able to afford the leftover mortgage.
The economists’ answer is that renting exists for the people in this situation. You may be moving to another country for a year or two. Are you going to buy a new house every time you move? Renting gives flexibility in that regard.
Likewise for refugees, putting them up in a rental is a more efficient solution than building new housing for each family.
That said, the model provides an inherently exploitative market and needs some kind of overlay to function efficiently, which in most US cities it doesn’t at all.
“But if I wasn’t a parasite someone else would be so that makes me good”
Said the nazi taking over the Jewish bakery. Said the zionist taking the Palestinian home.
They basically pay off my mortgage
How generous of you!
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While you are undoubtedly better than what I’m about to say… I still wouldn’t say you’re a good guy in this instance.
But, the real massive issue I see here is that big companies and rich douchebags use owning land and housing solely for profit. THAT should be illegal.
Renting out property between individuals should pe perfectly legal though, as long as some now-inexistent laws are followed, like not being able to hoard housing for rent money.
Renting solely for profit should be illegal.
Renting just to be able to keep a property that you may need in the future should be legal.
Renting out property between individuals should pe perfectly legal though, as long as some now-inexistent laws are followed, like not being able to hoard housing for rent money.
Vampires are legal they just can’t bottle it
I still wouldn’t say you’re a good guy in this instance.
I have two options: either sell (to an investor/hoarder) or rent. In the latter case, I can’t afford being both the breadwinner for my family and the mortgage for the prior apartment.
What would you suggest I should do in this situation to “be the good guy”?
But, the real massive issue I see here is that big companies and rich douchebags use owning land and housing solely for profit. THAT should be illegal (…)
100% agree with this and the rest.
Well, selling to someone who needs it would be best in my book but yea… You staying the owner is a billion times better than some company or land developer buying it… You’re right, no hard feelings
Why is that better? A parasite owns it either way.
What? I said
selling to someone who needs it
As in someone that needs it to live in it
Why lie?
You staying the owner is a billion times better than some company or land developer buying it
I pretty much agree with this. The economy has grown up to be for parasites made by parasites. The value of work should be way higher that it currently is. The economy should work on people actually doing things rather needing to own to become prosperous.
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I can agree with some arguments about the rental market, or laws about rent protection / rights. But rent in itself is not theft. Somebody wanting to live in somebody else’s property whether it’s for the night, a week or a year has to pay for it, or go buy their own place to stay in.
With all due respect, I can’t agree with this. It’s theft when a multi billion company buys home properties and then rents and manipulates the market. If someone buys a house and succeeds into buying himself another studio apartment for future kids and in the meanwhile rents it, that’s not theft, pal.
Rent isn’t theft. It’s payment for a service. Whether or not that service is of value to you is a different story, but not everyone is interested in owning.
There are benefits to renting. You don’t have to be financially responsible for repairs, you don’t have to do maintenance or pay someone to do it for you, you have much less financial risk, and you can relocate much easier.
And not all landlords are rich people. I do agree that corporate ownership of residential property shouldn’t be allowed, though.
Rent isn’t theft. It’s payment for a service.
What service does the land speculator provide to the tenant? The landlord doesn’t develop the property, that’s the builder. The landlord doesn’t maintain the property, that’s done by contractors. The landlord doesn’t secure the property, that’s done by the state. The landlord often doesn’t even finance the property, as the property is inevitably mortgaged and underwritten by banks one step removed from the title holder.
Quite literally, the only thing landlords do is collect the check and transfer portions of it onward. They are, at best, payment processors. And even this job is routinely outsourced to a third party.
There are benefits to renting.
There are lower institutional barriers to renting than to owning, largely resulting from the artificial shortage of public land and public housing. Rents are the consequence of real estate monopolization and public malinvestment. Once the landlords themselves vanish, the “benefits” of renting vanish with them.
And not all landlords are rich people.
There’s an old joke Donald Trump likes to tell, back in the 90s when he was underwater on his personal holdings. He’s driving through Lower Manhattan in a limo with his daughter and he points out the window to a homeless man. Then he quips, “I’m $800M poorer than that man”. To which his daughter replies, “If that’s true why are we in a limo while he’s out on the street?”
The key thing that the landlord handles is risk. If the roof is very expensive to fix, that is not the contractor’s problem. If the property does not generate revenue, that is not the bank’s problem. If the property is not worth the cost to build, that is not the builder’s problem. If the property is unsafe to live in, that is not the renter’s problem.
The landlord’s financial risk in the property (should) provide an incentive to maintain and make use of that property.
I’m not saying there aren’t other system of distribution people to homes, and I’m not saying that the capitalist system in the US is the best system to do it. I’m just pointing out that a core principle of capitalism is risk, and that is what the landlord provides, a single point buffer of risk for the other parties involved.
This is completely ignorant of the fact that landlords can get insurance for those things and often dont have to pay anything at all. And when they do have to pay themselves, they will pay the minimum amount possible to maximize their profits often resulting in degrading housing that people living in suffer the consequences for.
Housing is a human right. Capitalism commits violence against the people by denying them shelter. It’s a crime against humanity. Landlords exist only to profit off of this system. By your own exact definition all homeowners are the same point of risk mitigation, and therefore all renters would also be the same point of risk mitigation. Landlords have inserted themselves as a middle man to steal the labor of the working class. They profit off of the venture. Thats the whole point of them doing it.
This is completely ignorant of the fact that landlords can get insurance for those things and often dont have to pay anything at all
They still have to pay insurance to get insurance. And I’m not sure you can get insurance against the roof getting old (not in my area anyway). When the roof is too old and needs replacing, you do it out of pocket/bank loan. Complete roof replacement are not so often (depending on material), so you can (and should) as a home owner save up to this.
Sure, but half the income of your tenants that you steal from them every month supplies you with more than enough extra money to make such a thing a minor expenditure in the long run.
Sure
I’m glad that we agree.
This is completely ignorant of the fact that landlords can get insurance for those things and often dont have to pay anything at all.
You’ve got this upside-down. The existence of the insurance industry in a capitalist system is proof that risk is a thing that can be bought, sold, traded, banked and spent. If there was no financial cost to risk, then there would be no market for insurance to mitigate that risk.
The landlord gives up some income in order to mitigate risk, and most of the time, only some of that risk. I have yet to see or hear of an insurance policy that would basically cut a check for 100% of an insured item’s value unconditionally. If it did exist, it would probably be more expensive than the object itself.
As opposed to the tenants just getting rid of the landlord, buying their own insurance, and covering costs collectively. Thereby entirely eliminating the landlord and they can keep their wages to themselves.
Good luck finding 30 people who are willing to pool together 6 million to buy/build an apartment complex and live together.
I mean co-ops can happen, but the majority of time when something like that happens, it’s actually a cult.
Go and have a look at property prices over the last 50 years and see how risky it is.
Should hotels be illegal too? That’s basically renting out a room by the day. What if you cannot afford to buy a house, or only want to live somewhere temporarily? If you cannot rent any place to live, what would you do?
As with most things, it is a matter of degree.
Should hotels be illegal too?
If they’re monopolizing the housing market, absolutely.
What if you cannot afford to buy a house
There are 16M vacant homes to distribute among around 770k homeless people. With such an enormous housing surplus, why is the clearing price for a housing unit so far above a new prospective buyer’s budget?
You posit that people can’t afford to buy homes without asking why homes are unaffordable.
Investors accounted for 25.7% of residential home sales in 2024.
Investors accounted for 25.7% of residential home sales in 2024.
In that article, the word “investors” is deliberately lumping together individuals, and institutions/corporations, in an obvious attempt to trick people into thinking that category is comprised entirely of the latter. Underhanded semantic maneuver. Within the same article:
While large institutional investors continue to get most of the headlines in the single-family rental space, small investors account for more than 90% of the market.
the word “investors” is deliberately lumping together individuals, and institutions/corporations, in an obvious attempt to trick people into thinking that category is comprised entirely of the latter.
Corporations are people, my friend.
Underhanded semantic maneuver.
Is ownership less virtuous in a partnership than a sole proprietorship somehow?
If they’re monopolizing the housing market, absolutely.
I think there’s a middle ground between ‘consuming all housing stock in hopes of making airbnbs’ and ‘illegal’. There’s a legitimate case for short term and medium term residence that doesn’t make sense with ownership. However while we should accommodate those, it is a fair point the market should be regulated so that people have a reasonable path to ownership if it makes sense without being stuck with competing with rent-seeking corporations sucking up all the inventory.
There’s a legitimate case for short term and medium term residence that doesn’t make sense with ownership.
Sure. Neither case requires speculative investors to enter the market and maximize profits.
You’re confusing physical infrastructure with rent seeking bureaucracy.
I merely pointed out that not all ‘rent is bad’, ‘landlords are evil’.
Among probably many reasons that housing is unaffordable for many is that some persons or corporations are awful scumbags that want to maximize their profit beyond what is reasonable or fair.
Renting isn’t bad. Capitalism isn’t bad. Abuse of these things is bad.
Abuse of these things is a core feature of capitalism. How can you contradict yourself so quickly?
The world is not black and white. I don’t accept the validity of your claim.
Shelter is a fundamental human need, locking it behind an unnecessarily high and ever increasing pay wall is the epitome of abuse. Landlords are leeches.
The world is not black and white. But still you will 100% keep your claim. Again. Contradict yourself in two sentences.
Capitalism is most definitely bad tho, like come on.
I merely pointed out that not all ‘rent is bad’, ‘landlords are evil
I think we’re a bit beyond good and evil.
Renting isn’t bad. Capitalism isn’t bad. Abuse of these things is bad.
Sure sure sure. Love the sin, hate the sinner.
All rent is bad and all forms of landlords are evil. They are a separate class with legal mandate to steal the labor value of the working class. They serve no function whatsoever and it is entirely conceivable that an apartment building’s occupants could pool money together for repairs when that is necessary.
Shelter is a human right. Housing is a human right. Landlords are not mechanics, they are not repair men, they are not construction workers, they are not laborers. Some Landlords may do some of those things, but it doesn’t change the fact that by virtue of stealing from the working class they are still evil. If they want to do repair work, I should be able to simply pay them for the repair work they do. If they want to do property maintenance work, I should be able to simply pay them for the property maintenance. They have a legal document enabling them to steal half of my income every month for no reason. They do not live in my home, I live in my home. If I stopped living there it wouldn’t be my home anymore.
There are 0 downsides to entirely rejecting the housing market. Housing is a human right, it should be fairly distributed to everyone. I couldn’t give a fuck about real estate markets, they could all dissappear today and no one would ever profit off of housing again and not a single tear would be shed. I’d really like it if everyone could have a fucking home. All Landlords are evil. There are NO exceptions. If they collect rent for someone else’s home, they are evil.
If I own a house that is too big for me, and I can’t afford the taxes and upkeep, so I rent out some rooms to make a little money.
I am now a landlord. Are you suggesting that I am evil? That it should not be allowed?
I think you are conflating slum lords and greedy corporations with any and all people who have rental properties. Something, something… deals in absolutes.
You are not a landlord if you are sharing your home, you would be a roommate. If you are charging them rent, then yes you are a landlord :) no should ever profit off of housing! Housing is a human right! No one should ever have to sleep in your home, everyone should be able to have their own shelter that belongs to them! This is an absolutely conceivable reality homelessness is entirely a manufactured byproduct of capitalism. We have millions of empty homes and wasted infrastructure that could be used to house people.
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a place to live
There are a few fundamental things a landlord provides:
- Avoiding cost of transitioning a property. Government, insurers, and lawyers make transitioning ownership of a house expensive. That by itself erases about a year of typical ‘equity’ gains. If you have to mortgage, then net loss is likely over the first couple of years. If you know you will leave in say 4 years or less, this has value.
- Ease of leaving. If you own, you can’t just immediately cash in and move out with the proceeds. If you have to move, you get stuck having to pay for two residences until you can manage to offload.
- Potentially access to rent a home when no one will loan you money. On top of being only there for college, when I started renting I had no history, so no bank would have loaned me money anyway, certainly not at a reasonable rate. Sometimes landlords will have as strict a credit requirement as banks, but it’s at least more likely to find a willing landlord than a bank willing to risk the loan.
This comes together for renting making a whole lot of sense for people on a remote work assignment, college students, and seasonal occupants who need a residence for a few months or a couple of years. Also for people who have just moved out on their own and need a residence while they get some credit history under their belt, hopefully being in a situation like university where the need is short term as well.
Avoiding cost of transitioning a property.
Landlords don’t do this. You’re describing the rental management agencies/staff, which do not actually own the property.
Ease of leaving.
Landlords don’t provide this, either. Again, you’re describing building staff, not the property owners. And you’re describing it within an artificially calcified market, with prices that prohibit people from easily transferring their positions.
You’re also ignoring the reality of rental contracts, with all sorts of deposits and fees tied to move-in/move-out, particularly if you’re operating outside a long-term rental period.
Potentially access to rent a home when no one will loan you money.
Landlords don’t provide access to real estate, they deny access to real estate. In some instances, they can exploit a scarcity of units by collecting application fees without ever renting the unit.
This comes together for renting making a whole lot of sense for people
You’re describing an artificial scarcity of housing created by speculative investment in vacant properties. The “renting just makes sense” argument falls apart when you realize the cost of these units is often several times the market cost of the property itself.
Turn the administration of vacant units over to the public sector with a mandate to fill units at-cost and the monthly rate for all these units craters.
You’re intentionally leaving out that the landlord maintains the property and appliances. That’s no small thing.
There are absolutely bad landlords who will do as little as their tenants will allow them to, for sure. Landlords aren’t like cops though, the continuing existence of bad landlords is not enabled by good ones like how “good cops” do.
The landlord uses my rent money to pay others to maintain the property. It’s an entirely middle man position of zero value to society
Well, not always. Back in college (btw, a prime example of valid rental scenario), when the water heater in my rental started dripping, the landlord himself was there with a new water heater in his pickup same day.
Some landlords (by far not all, maybe only a minority) take on the risk directly and do the work themselves.
They’re still buying a surplus of housing, creating scarcity that raises home prices, and charging you more than it costs to live in the housing they’re hoarding.
So even if they’re doing the maintenance themselves (and no guarantee they’re doing a good job), they’re still a drain on the resources of actual workers.
Housing must be decommodified.
Their scenario was that they bought the house and rented it out while their kid went to college, with the expectation that they would have the house for the kid after college (their college was like 30 minutes away, and the kid lived in the dorm, so it was a perfectly reasonable expectation they might want to move into a house in the area).
Ultimately, the kid didn’t move back and they sold the property, but they bought it during what they saw as a dip in the market and used rent to keep it active while waiting for the kid to return.
You might say that a different system could have provided for all of this, but within the framework of the system they had, they were decent folks doing the right thing as landlord and not sucking up housing stock that they didn’t plan on actually having be owned by the resident. I’m reasonably confident that they even charged less than a mortgage+insurance+taxes would have been for me and between interest and closing costs, no way I would have come out ahead buying and then selling the property in the short time I lived there. Even with that reasonable rent they waived it when I got laid off from my college job.
Again, not every rental experience and in fact probably a small minority, but a landlord is not automatically evil.
Eating meat is not automatically evil but if you look at it objectively and at the current scale it is indisputably a moral wrong. Same goes to hoarding homes.
Good landlords will only be as good as they need to be, to continue renting. In a housing shortage, that means they will keep getting worse over time, doing little and hearing little from their tenants who have only ever dealt with predatory landlords.
They will almost always charge as much as they can, not doing anything to help the renters.
The exceptions to this will be invisible on the market, because renters will do everything in their power to never move out or change their situation.
Long time renters are trapped, because they are paying nearly as much as a mortgage, and getting no equity from it, unable to save a down payment to get out of it.
Renting to seasonal, temp workers or students is about the only exception where renting is a necessary service, but currently its way over priced, so its not a great value. So still predatory.
Good landlords will only be as good as they need to be
I mean, this is an overly dismissive statement, those aren’t ‘good landlords’, but it’s also fair to note that the likelihood of getting a ‘good’ landlord is like a lottery.
In college I experienced both a person renting out a property they owned and a more ‘corporate’ arrangement. The corporate arrangement was ‘meh’, didn’t do much one way or the other. The personal rental was nicer and cheaper, and they were out the same day when we reported the one thing that ever needed fixing. When they heard I got laid off, they waived rent until I got a new job.
Keep dodging.
This “landlords are purely evil and rent is stealing” discourse doesn’t do any of us any good. It’s dishonest and makes people with sense not want to join your cause. If we actually want to make housing better and more available, we can’t be wasting our time throwing with this.
Landlords are purely evil, they are nothing but a drain on society, and if you disagree you’re my enemy and we have no common cause.
Which of my statements are false?
You can own a property and pay landscapers and handyman for less than the cost of renting. Hell, I’ve had landlords pay property managers to handle even that.
land speculator
Tendentious language.
What service does the
land speculatorlandlord provide to the tenant?You think providing exclusive access to a house for the renter to live in is not something that has value?
Soon I will probably become a landlord, not because I want to but because it makes financial sense. My partner and I are pooling money to buy a place together so we can live together, she will sell her apartment and I will rent out my old apartment, which I bought with my own money and worked 20 years for to pay off. Are you suggesting I should just have to give the fruit of my 20 years of labor away to someone for free?
You’re fucking insane.
Soon I will probably become a landlord
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it
My salary? I am a wage slave just like everybody else.
Anyway, you didn’t address the main questions:
- Do you think providing exclusive access to a house for the renter to live in is something that has no value?
- This house didn’t just happen to fall in my lap. I put 250k of my own money in over the course of 30 years (10 years to save for the down payment + 20 years of mortage payments). Money that I worked for, doing a job. It’s literally the fruit of my labor. By what ungodly reasoning should I have to give that to you or anyone else for free?
It seems you are the one here who is not making any effort to be understanding.
What service does the land speculator provide to the tenant?
The ability to live somewhere that otherwise would have been reversed?
I am lucky enough to be able to own a home. I can live here, and nobody else. But if I decided to rent my home out and they paid me rent, they could live here instead!
They could also live there if you sold it to them.
As mentioned elsewhere, owning isn’t necessarily for everyone.
Freedom isn’t necessarily for everyone has also been mentioned throughout time. Slavery has existed all through history.
That doesn’t make it ok but anyone who is an enslavery or aspiring enslaver is going to argue some people want to be slaves.
Removing and restricting the agency of others is never ok. When it’s for economic gain, it’s always exploitation.
The big difference being that one thing being owned is completely inanimate, and the other is a literal human being against their will 🤷♂️
The point is people are really good at exploiting each other and justifying it as for the greater good.
Only if they can afford its price.
Who gets to originate the claim on property? Who gets to set the price and collect on the sale?
The ability to live somewhere that otherwise would have been reversed?
The land speculators do not provide access to the tenant, they prohibit access. That’s what inclosure is. You’re blocking people from the land on pain of injury and death.
I can live here, and nobody else.
Until the state decrees otherwise, sure.
But if I decided to rent my home out and they paid me rent, they could live here instead!
There are three people and three houses. How do you decide which of the three people owns all three houses and which of the other two pay that first person rent?
Clearly you are much smarter than myself. Can you tell me why renting land/a home is different than any other object that can be owned? Obviously shelter is a greater need than a chainsaw I could rent at Home Depot, but I thought the basic concepts should still apply?
And again, maybe I’m not smart enough to understand what you’re saying, but it seems like land owners (or “speculators”, if that’s the correct term now 🤷♂️) prohibit access to everyone except for tenants, and tenants instead have rights to use that property?
Can you tell me why renting land/a home is different than any other object that can be owned?
For starters, you can’t own much if you don’t own land. So it becomes a prerequisite for accruing any other objects.
If you’re locked out of owning land, you’re locked out of owning anything.
it seems like land owners (or “speculators”, if that’s the correct term now 🤷♂️) prohibit access to everyone except for tenants
Speculators (or, “land owners”, as you’re calling them) aren’t required to host tenants. They can leave their property vacant without regard to social need.
And landlords can evict tenants for any reason or no reason at all - or raise rents so high that an eviction is inevitable.
A question you need to ask is why the landlord possessed the land to begin with. What allows a landlord original access to property?
People need homes.
You buy a pressure washer, and rent it out, thats a good business. Theres no shortage of pressure washers. I can live without one. I can biy my own relatively easy. Choosing to rent or own is a question of how often I expect to want to pressure wash something.
You can only rent a home that you buy. Which means you had to take it off the market. You can also only rent a home (or room) that you aren’t living in. Which means you need somewhere else to live. You’re taking more than you need, to charge someone else who also needs it, to cover your cost of owning it, maintaining it, and presumably profiting from the difference.
When this is done at scale, you have owners skewing the market to make it harder and harder to buy.
They make more money, buy more properties and make it worse. While renters, and young adults get trapped i to renting because they have no options.
That is what makes it so much different.
Can you agree it’s at least exploitative?
It can be exploitative, but it’s not automatically so. Both parties benefit from the agreement in different ways.
Last I looked into the difference, (in my area) if you planned to stay longer than three years, owning was the cheaper option. Less than that you’d be better off renting. Assuming no big house repairs of course, and no crazy house value changes.
Cheaper isn’t always the goal. Home ownership comes with a lot of stress and time investment that you don’t have with renting.
I don’t get how this above conversation isn’t just /thread.
7 people who downvoted, care to explain? Genuinely curious what your take is.
Of course it’s exploitative, that isn’t a question. The entire purpose of rent is to exploit. The down voters are people who recognize that it’s complete nonsense to suggest housing rental could ever not be exploitative.
The downvoters are probably people who have never owned a home and don’t realize that it has its own set of issues that renting doesn’t.
If it really sucked so much to own a home, the upper class wouldn’t be buying as many of the fucking things as they could.
Owning a home is 100% upside 0% downside. You have your name on it and someone else pays for it. You use their money to pay other people to maintain it, skim the rest and fuck off to the beach. If you fail at this you wouldn’t last an hour at a real job.
Sounds like you’ve never dealt with home ownership. It’s definitely not 100% upsides.
Renting you don’t have to keep $30k on hand in case you need to replace your roof or HVAC. Renting you’re not saddled with an asset that you have to unload before you can relocate.
And the wealthy aren’t buying as much residential property as they can because they find home ownership preferable to renting.
Just because both sides benefit doesn’t mean that it’s not exploitative. A slave gets the benefit of housing and food provided by their master, that doesn’t mean the slave isn’t exploited.
Like slavery a landlord uses a claim to property to extract labor / wages / money out of a person that doesn’t have a claim to property. That is exploitative.
So if I hypothetically own a home and rent my basement suite out, you think I would be inherently exploiting someone? What’s my alternative? What if I need the rental income to afford the mortgage?
I feel like following this train of thought results in either nobody owns anything to keep it fair, or everyone is entitled to a home for free, both of which are not realistic.
If all the money just goes to the interest on the mortgage then no, you aren’t exploiting them, the bank is exploiting both of you. If the person is paying for your equity then you are benefiting off of that person’s misfortune of not being able to own a house.
Many slave owners were relatively poor or heavily in debt, Washington wasn’t solvent until after his presidency, Jefferson too. They would probably say they have to work their slaves to pay off their debts, doesn’t make it right.
I feel like following this train of thought results in either nobody owns anything to keep it fair
Sort of, both anarchists and communists support the abolition of private, not personal, property, ie stuff you own not to use, but to make money off of. So you can own a house to live in, you can’t own a house to rent out.
or everyone is entitled to a home for free, both of which are not realistic.
Not necessarily, the third option is public / social housing. The government owns housing and operates it at cost instead of seeking a profit. So all the money used to pay for housing is going to produce and maintain housing instead of into the pockets of landlords. It’s not exploitative assuming the government is democratic, just as taxes aren’t exploitative if you get a say in what happens to them.
Well, I can’t say I necessarily agree with everything, but I can see your points.
Thanks for sharing your POV.
both parties benefit
I don’t mean to be shocking, but this feels very much like “she orgasmed when I molested her”.
The other option is homelessness. You rent at the barrel of a gun. How could you possibly call that consent?
I dunno man. When we moved into our apartment we got a new water heater, new washer/dryer, new kitchen sink, and HVAC repaired within the first couple weeks. We’ve gotten multiple smaller things fixed as well including exterior tuck pointing to fix a leak.
Sometimes I lament not owning, but that would have all been out of pocket if we had bought a property as is with those issues. Didn’t cost us a dime.
There are undeniable benefits to renting. I rent. It’s still a for-profit business in the end, though, and per capitalism, they’ll fuck you as hard as you let them.
But I also fuck them as hard as they let me. And in my city and state, which have very strong tenants’ rights protections, my fucking goes a long way.
Good on you.
It’s hard for most people who see rent rise faster than salary. Which is the case for most of the United States.
It’s hard for most people who see rent rise faster than salary.
You say that as if the cost of home ownership isn’t also increasing faster than salary. This is not a function of landlords/renting.
Agreeing: Appliances, repairs, taxes, HOA fees, and utilities are all going up in cost faster than salary. The only homeowner cost I can think of that isn’t going up is my mortgage, which is fixed-rate. With a variable-rate mortgage, even that could be going up.
It’s important to be aware of the fact that as long as we allow landlords to exist, they will work tirelessly to get rid of all of these regulations. They have the money and power to do so, and their condition depends on it.
“Vigilance, Mr. Worf. That is the price we have to continually pay.”
Been renting the last 20 years, and I can rightfully say FUCK YOU!!!
So you’ve only experienced one side of things.
If you’ve never dealt with home ownership, how can you draw such a conclusion? I know several people who sold theirs and went back to renting because they were sick of dealing with all the shit that goes into owning a home.
I can draw that conclusion simply by looking around me seeing how better off are home owners financially.
Where I live, paying a mortgage is 30% cheaper than paying rent.
Also paying a mortgage is like putting money inside your bank account while having somewhere to live, whereas by paying rent you simply put money in your landlord’s pockets further enriching them or allowing then to not work.
Additionaly there are guardrails for when you can’t pay your mortgage while in most countries there are none for not paying your rent.
Edit: I guess the people you mention are so well off that they don’t experience any financial insecurity, have passive income unrelated to actual work and thus can threat home ownership as a services. Aren’t they?
So you’ve still never experienced home ownership and don’t have the requisite experience to comment on it.
I’m done engaging with you.
So you can only talk about what you experienced, noted.
You have no empathy nor capacity of abstraction.
No wonder why you are incapable to put yourself in other people’s shoes.
Even in this conversation you have to run away from anything that jeopardises your comfortable way of thinking.
Good for you, but then again Fuck you.
Owning a house isn’t a service.
Providing maintenance/repairs and carrying the financial risk is.
Providing maintenance isn’t being a landlord. You can be a landlord and also do real work on the house as a maintenance person, the same way you can be a landlord and also work at McDonald’s. But being a landlord is not a job and provides no value.
This is one of the most capitalist takes you’ll ever see on lemmy. I wonder if this person is a landlord or has landlords in the family…
In the interest of pedantry, technically you are correct.
Land ownership is theft, rent is just the symptom.
By that logic owning anything is theft.
Yeah, that’s not what your link is saying.
I said anything, not only things used to exploit people. It straight up says that owning possessions is fine.
Yes! Exactly! That’s why I said “you’re almost there”. You almost had the right idea, but you needed the exact distinction between owning possessions and property. This distinction, plus a little bit of critical reflection, should be enough to come to the conclusion that landlordism is exploitative. The FAQ explicitly sketches out the argument that landlords exploit people.
The land monopoly consists of enforcement by government of land titles which do not rest upon personal occupancy and use. It also includes making the squatting of abandoned housing and other forms of property illegal. This leads to ground-rent, by which landlords get payment for letting others use the land they own but do not actually cultivate or use. It also allows the ownership and control of natural resources like oil, gas, coal and timber. This monopoly is particularly exploitative as the owner cannot claim to have created the land or its resources. It was available to all until the landlord claimed it by fencing it off and barring others from using it.
Mostly, yeah. In the western world, anyways, pretty much everything we have was gained via theft. So it isn’t earned and we shouldn’t treat property like it’s gained via merit.
Spot the landlord
You might want to get your eyes checked. I don’t ever intend on owning rental property, but I’m not naive enough to think the renter gets nothing from the deal.
Nobody said nothing. Just not enough
Part of the payment is for services, but it doesn’t make sense overall to call it a service because the cost is only in small part determined by the value of upkeep etc. being handled, there is no option to do this yourself instead and not pay. The main thing driving the cost of housing is the supply of housing, the desirability of the location, and who owns it all.
Think about mobile homes; how well built a mobile home is, or how well it is maintained, ultimately doesn’t matter that much and it will still depreciate if it is located on rented land, because the real driver of housing value is the value of the legal right to live in that particular location, and that right is ultimately controlled by the owner of the lot. Same goes for any housing; what matters most is the land, being able to safely and legally sleep there, and the ability of the property owner to control who can do that.
The costs of the services aren’t the only thing a landlord provides. They also get to deal with the contractors to do work and repairs, and they carry a large amount of financial risk. Not to mention that tenants are typically way more protected than landlords, legally.
You also get the benefit of being able to leave basically whenever you want. With a home you’re stuck with it until it sells.
Like I said, that situation doesn’t work for everyone, but the truth is that literally any service is going to be more expensive than doing it yourself.
I absolutely know people who sold their homes and rented because paying extra was worth more to them than the hassle of owning.
Also, I did have landlords who would subtract from my rent the cost of hiring a repairman if I did the work myself. It was worth it to them to not hassle with flakey contractors.
Also, I did have landlords who would subtract from my rent the cost of hiring a repairman if I did the work myself. It was worth it to them to not hassle with flakey contractors
This isn’t quite what I meant though; the fact remains that willingness to do more things yourself will not by itself get you housing, you still have to pay. As I said, I’m not disputing that part of the cost of rent is for services a landlord provides, or that these have value. Rather I am saying that there is a more substantial baseline component to the cost that has nothing to do with these services and has everything to do with control of property, and because of this the statement in the OP comic is broadly accurate.
Rent isn’t theft. It’s payment for a service Sure there’s a service and the owner has costs, but it’s actually quite unrelated to the rental price in most places. I think the question is about the regulation of markets for basic life requirements. Alternatives aren’t very appealing IMHO: social aids (taxes on the rich), charity (by the rich), or persistent homelessness.
I’m all down for regulating the markets on necessities. Like I said, I don’t think businesses should be able to own residential property at all.
But a tenant/landlord agreement doesn’t only benefit the landlord.
The nuanced take is always controversial here. Lemmy generally doesn’t like speaking against the hive’s directives- so it’s refreshing to see something like this in the positive.
Yeah, I fully expected to be heavily in the negative, so I’m glad that at least some people got the nuance I was going for.
Yes, many times, especially with corporate owned housing, the agreement is exploitative, but that’s not all rental situations.
The second paragraph is only true under most laws in the world
Rent is the acquisition of a temporary privilege to the use of a property.
A mortgage is the acquisition of a permanent right to the use of a property.
Where a tenant’s rent payment is greater than a landlord’s mortgage payment, the temporary privilege is deemed more valuable than the permanent right.
This condition is absurd. It can only exist in an artificially manipulated housing market.
And yet, it is also the current norm.
in my housing market mortgages about double what rents are.
is that absurd? or is that correct. because i live in the #1 or #2 most expensive market depending on the year.
If the concept of rent must exist, at least have it go to the government. It’s obvious that in private hands it will eventually favor the most rich, and it should not be used as a means to speculate. Unfortunately, political leaders never learn, and if they see thing X that moves a lot of money that they can trickle down off of, fuck the consequences of thing X, that thing is going to be allowed. Crypto, AI, housing, cloud PCs, they will kneel away their autonomy bit by bit.
Fun fact: no landlords, no trump.
Rent-seeking behavior is unfortunately very common.
These days it is hard to own a house, its like the system is designed to cater to the burguoise - because it is. Regular people cant have their own personal ownership because capitalist leeches known as landlords exist.
The system feeds on the profiting of others misfortunes.
I’m very lucky to have my own house. The number of spam calls I get from randos trying to buy houses is staggering. Some are obviously from call centers. I don’t understand how it makes financial sense to pay people to cold call every fucking homeowner in the US constantly in the hopes that they catch someone looking to sell quickly (and cheaply?). WTF is their endgame?
I kinda want to get everyone on board with refusing to sell single family houses to anyone who isn’t going to live there as their primary residence. Back in the not so old days, people would refuse to sell to “undesirables” because they didn’t want to tank property values, which would also carry significant reputational harm. We need to use that energy for good.
In theory, developers who would replace single family houses with multiple houses, townhomes or condos would be OK. We do need more housing in general. Although, IDK if real estate developers are a trustworthy bunch.
In theory, developers who would replace single family houses with multiple houses, townhomes or condos would be OK. We do need more housing in general. Although, IDK if real estate developers are a trustworthy bunch.
Trustworthiness of developers is a moot point because exclusionary zoning laws prohibit that replacement in the vast majority of urban areas anyway.
That’s what so many people in this thread don’t get: the law, designed to give even more privilege to already-privileged single-family homeowners, creates literal housing shortages (in the places people actually want to live, because housing is not fungible between locations), and then they somehow confuse that government mandated distortion of supply vs. demand as “capitalism.” They keep blaming “foreign investors” and other scapegoats, but they’re not the real cause of the problem.
Or more like we let companies own private homes and that fucked the market together with Airbnb
Indeed. The system is currently set up to prevent people who aren’t already earning rent from acquiring property to earn rent.
instead of encouraging citizens to buy one property to rent it out…at a reasonable price, perhaps…and have a relationship with their tenant…our system punishes small owners or people trying to enter the market and rewards those who already have the wealth.
