I’ll say it once and I’ll say it again. Even the father of capitalism thought landlords were parasitic leeches on the economy. Even the father of capitalism hated landlords
Making an investment out of a necessity is immoral any way you cut it.
Health should be public.
Food needs to turn a profit, that’s understandable, but also food food is not finite where the rich can hoard it all… Or maybe that’s their next thing 🤔 nah won’t happen because it’s perishable
That’s what the capital is for. Why hoard something that rots and can’t be easily moved around? Capital knows no borders and actually increases in value just by moving it around.
It’s basically an infinite food hack, but not just for food - for everything
What’s the alternative? Not defending landlords; I genuinely don’t understand. If you don’t have money to buy a home/condo, you’re going to have to rent from someone. Until housing is not subject to scarcity, there will always be landlords.
I might be wrong, but I think even if you changed nothing else about society except abolishing landlording, supply and demand would drive down home costs and force banks to offer mortgages to the people they currently deny. Ideally though, abolishing landlording would be part of a larger change to the way housing works.
Suburbia is lines of houses with the same items in them not being used. Full of people who become petty tyrants comparing about a car being parked to close or a yard not neat enough.
If you start to question how we should live together it’s easier to see a way for landlords to cease to exist.
Henry George wrote about this extensively. The solution is a tax on all land at just under 100% of it’s rental value. That allows landlords to profit from the structures they build and maintain, but not from the land itself. It disincentivizes real estate speculation, lowering the cost of land and housing and improving accessibility to people who use it productively.
Two (current) real world solutions: Most people in China outright own their homes with no mortgage, as the government owns the land itself and subsidizes housing purchases and even outright gives housing to its citizens. Similarly, most people in Singapore live in subsidized government housing.
If so many jobs didn’t stupidly require college degrees and if college wasn’t stupidly expensive and if wages had kept up with production for the last 50+ years and if corporations werent allowed to own vast swaths of housing and if the world wasn’t run by greedy power hungry capitalists then maybe, just maybe, PERHAPS people might have a few extra bucks to be able to afford something.
Just a thought. Maybe, the issue is money has been taken from the people in so many ways.
Landlords are the reason housing is so expensive. By buying up realestate and renting it out, landlords are directly contributing to the scarcity. Personally housing should be a human right. If you don’t want to go that far here’s a different solution. Literally just make apartment’s buyable rather than rentable. Don’t allow landlords to buy up all this realestate thus raising prices by creating a fake scarcity of housing. If landlords didn’t own all of it, and people could buy apartment’s rather than rent them, the prices would lower and become more accessible for people
Adam Smith saw the nobility with more money than the workers (craftsmen) so he came up with a system that pays based on hours put in
In a capitalist society everyone makes the same amount per hour and it’s just the one who works the most. There can also be no inheritance because that is profiting off someone else’s work
"forcing people to give up large portions of their income while building absolutely no equity in it simply to not be homeless due to policies we lobbied for isn't exploitative!"
No one’s forcing anyone to rent any specific place. People have a choice. There’s thousands of rentals. They can live with family or friends.
If people want to build equity in something, they can buy their own property.
There’s nothing exploitative about trading money for a service. People trade money for services every single day. You want your oil changed for you? You pay someone to do it. You pull your car into their facility, they use their tools, and you gain a service – for a price.
Large groups of landlords/property management companies buy the majority of residential buildings in an area -> theres essentially nowhere else left to live -> they collude to increase prices
This would make sense if we were talking about something that is inherently optional for anyone to purchase.
We aren’t though. Housing is a basic necessity for everyone, and the hard reality is that working full time does not mean you can afford to purchase housing, so you have to rent or be homeless. It’s exploiting specifically the poor because they can’t purchase housing, so they have to make a choice between renting or being homeless (which is also the more expensive option).
It’s not exploitation because people have a choice of where to live. There’s hundreds of rentals in any given area and millions of rentals across the country. There’s not just one place for people to live. There’s also the option of living with family or friends.
It’s not exploitation because people have a choice of where to live.
That does not follow logically. You have a choice who gets to exploit you, but unless you have the capital to purchase housing, you are being exploited.
This is simply because renting prices are effectively almost exclusively profits for the owner of the rented space. Nobody is generating an equivalent in value through work. When people say they’re the main breadwinner in their landlords family, that is actually the objective truth.
Being a landlord is a job. There’s no exploitation with renting out properties. People expect to get paid for their job. This is an extremely simple concept. I can’t fathom why you’re not understanding. Maybe I need to make it even simpler?
Landlord = self employed
Self employed = Charges for services rendered
Rent = Payment in exchange for services
renting prices are effectively almost exclusively profits for the owner of the rented space
Because society agrees it is. Society also once agreed that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction with no factual indication to.
Maybe I need to make it even simpler?
I asked you to explain the logical holes in your ideas, you ignored them. Funny you think the problem is that those simple concepts go over my head when you’re refusing to explain away basic logical problems.
This is simply because renting prices are effectively almost exclusively profits for the owner of the rented space.
I don’t think that’s true in all cases. If you think about the price of properties and know how much a credit costs. Properties in cities easily cost a million dollars so with 3% interest that’s 30 000$ a year you have to get just to pay interest on your loan.
People on the internet seem to think a landlord is one guy scamming hundreds of people.
If you’re landlord is an individual, most of the time they’re renting the house and using the funds for a big expense, most of the time mom’s nursing home bill
It's such a weak argument too. The majority of renters aren't renting from your neighbor Joe who's renting out his basement, they're doing so from property management companies who sole existence is to exploit the fact that nobody can afford a home anymore
I interacted regularly with plenty of them in a former job. Most of them drove cars worth more than I made in 2 years. They weren't renting just so they could pay for granny's retirement
What?? Who is making enough rent off one property to sustain a vehicle of 6 figures in addition to the rest of their life’s expenses? One property rental isn’t a cash cow.
I think you may have read the data wrong, in two places it says
Most rental properties – about seven-in-ten – are owned by individuals, who typically own just one or two properties, according to 2018 census data.
and
Businesses own larger shares of units because individuals, while far more numerous, tend to own one or two properties at most, while businesses’ holdings are larger. In fact, 72.5% of single-unit rental properties are owned by individuals, while 69.5% of properties with 25 or more units are owned by for-profit businesses.
The first sounds like most (read: more than 50%) do, but, and I may be reading the census data wrong, it seems like less than 20% own a single property for rent. The use of typically would indicate that most do, but they don't actually include the data in the article, which is odd and worrying.
The second also looks like it agrees with your assessment, but it actually kinda says the opposite- 72.5% of people who own single units for rental are individuals. This is surprising because it means there are 27.5% of single unit properties that are owned by businesses. However, it doesn't mean that 72.5%, or even 50% of individuals (individual landlords) own a single unit to rent.
This article all comes from the 2018 census, when the 2021 census is also available, but I wasn't able parse either very well.
Landlords arent fond of termites. The renter is not so subtly threatening the property they reside in because the landlord is threatening to raise the rent so they can continue their lifestyle despite inflation and not working.
In my experience it’s best to make friends with the roommates your landlord forces you to live with. I live in an apartment for years that had cockroaches, I told myself they were eating the bed bug eggs. Probably not true but I felt better. Landlords are scum-bags.
I think it’s the “said no land Lord ever” bit. There’s a lot of investment property owners with hundreds of units that can be shady AF. It’s just tough to be the " I can handle this mortgage if I get a basement suite rented out and work really hard" and get lumped in.
Yeah one of my better landlords was a sparky that worked hard af. This is Aus though so might be different. Any time we reported shit with the house he was out the immediately when he didn’t have a job to fix it personally and you could tell he was hot shit at his work too because he had his own business.
The corporate owners and management companies have always been the problem. Individual owner landlords of course have a risk of being picky, nosey and overbearing, but 99% of the time they just want to preserve the investment value of their property while ensuring it pays for itself instead of being a huge money pit. Corporations are in it to maximize profit extraction by doing the minimum legally required maintenance (if even that), and literally nothing else.
If it is the landlord’s primary home then they should not be lumped in. Renting out a room to help pay mortgage on the home you live in is not the problem. It’s the second homes, the third, fourth, tenth, hundredth homes where it is an issues, and I do think we can lump all of those together. They are using our limited housing supply as a portfolio piece, inserting themselves as profit-driven middle-men and making it less attainable for lower income families.
Entities that buy and own homes purely for “investment” at any scale are the problem. For-profit housing should not exist at any level. Want to own a second home and rent it out to cover the costs? Sure, but require that it be a non-profit.
Yeah. I think there is a pretty big difference in the dynamic between a person who owns and directly manages rental properties and a corporate land lord that exists purely to extract as much money as possible from a tenant.
Ya, I don’t love the mom and pop landlords who own a few rental properties as a way to actually retire at a reasonable age. They aren’t the same as fucking blackrock and the other corporate landlords who grew at exponential rates after the 08 collapse and have worked so hard to make housing unaffordable. At least the small guys seem to give a shit about their property even if they’re scumbags. So if there’s a water leak, mold etc they’re probably more interested in fixing it so it doesn’t get worse.
Except this is real. Land"lords" are parasites on our society. They could easily be replaced by an overseeing body or really nothing at all would even be better.
Facts. There’s really no excuse for being a landlord. Even the “mom and pop” ones people are sucking off in this thread are a fucking scourge who are hoarding resources and exploiting the working class. I don’t care how sweet and polite they might be about it.
The only good landlord is…
Edit: Blocklist fodder itt, so many greasy bootlickers…
What service do landlords offer? Every property I’ve ever rented myself or seen from my friends is falling apart and shitty for an insane amount of money each month. If landlords charged half as much as they do maybe you’d have a leg to stand on.
Rental property owners charge for the service of providing housing. Home Depot charges for the service of renting their tools. The bouncy house places charge for the service of renting their bouncy houses.
hoard (verb.)
To accumulate money, food, or the like, in a hidden or carefully guarded place for preservation, future use, etc.
Rental property owners don’t hoard shelter.
I might be inclined to agree with you if landlords took out the locks and made those empty rental properties into interim homeless shelters, but we both know they would never do it.
“There are currently 28 vacant homes for every one person experiencing homelessness in the U.S.”
landlords dont provide shit, they hoard properties and make it harder for non-landlords to get housing, which drives up prices and forces more people to live on the streets.
they are a leech on society, making everything worse for the rest of us.
The article you linked is misleading. Houses are vacant for various reasons. Some are temporarily vacant:
some are undergoing renovations
some are between tenants
some are for sale
Some are more permanently vacant because they’re in such a state of disrepair that they can’t be lived in.
Rental property owners rent out properties, which keeps people housed and off the streets. However there’s been a lack of housing development over the past decade in the United States which leads to a housing shortage.
The homeowners who let their house rot because they couldn’t afford to fix it or they just didn’t care? There’s been so many foreclosures that were blights on the neighborhood until investors bought them, fixed them up, and rented them to families who wanted a nice place to live.
So every business is a provider in your eyes? You would say that McDonald’s provides food for everyone? That’s ridiculous and not the way anyone uses the word provide it’s just been brought into landlording to make leeches feel better about themselves
You aren’t doing yourself any favors bringing home depot into this, the owners are also greedy cunts.
There’s also a huge difference between something that protects you from the elements and renting a tool. There is no fundamental need for a tool, there is a fundamental need for shelter.
With how invested you are on your side, I wouldn’t be surprised to see you admit that you’re a landlord.
Home Depot is just one example. Any other example works.
People can grow their own food but choose to use the grocery store. The grocery store charges more for the food than they pay for it, because they’re providing a service.
Pharmacies sell medication and people buy from them. They are providing a service of having all the medication in one place.
People trade money for goods OR services. That’s how the economy operates.
A landlord does not take housing off the market. Rental housing is still on the market for families to live in.
Rent costs more than mortgage payments because it includes the payment for services to the owner. If you work a job you expect to get paid for your work and so does the landlord.
I said they take property off the market, not housing. By buying it and holding it indefinitely, that property is no longer available for purchasing.
Yes, services. Services that an owner could very well get done himself/herself without the bureaucratic overhead of having to use the landlord as an intermediary to a contractor.
The only landlords that could get things done faster than doing it yourself are those who have contractors and supplies on call. In other words, management companies or multiple-property landlords—the same ones who are in it solely to profit from the lack of available housing in urban areas.
The property is still available for families who want to rent it. You take all the rentals off the market and those who want to rent housing will have no choices.
There’s still many properties available to purchases. Having a mixture of some properties for rent and some of sale gives people choices.
Many people don’t have the skill or resources to manage their own property, let alone pay for large expenses all at once.
We can agree that the land and building is still available as housing, but it’s not property. The renter has no stake in the real estate. They don’t own it. It’s not their property, and their privilege to stay in it is subject to the terms of the actual owner—the landlord.
There’s still many properties available to purchases.
Sure, if you can afford an $700k apartment with a down payment of jack-diddily-squat because most of your income went to paying off some other guy’s mortgage and topping up their savings.
While we’re at it, let’s keep pretending that people purchasing property for the sole purpose of rental doesn’t artificially increase demand and drive up pricing.
Many people don’t have the skill or resources to manage their own property.
If you don’t have the skill to Google the number of an electrician or other tradie, I don’t know what to tell you.
And therefore don’t have to incur the burden of large expenses such as replacing a roof, a sewer line, etc.
if you can afford an $700k apartment
If you want to cherry pick an example of the most expensive areas of the country instead of the more reasonable examples of a $70k single family house. But then the person buying the property is responsible for all the repairs and maintenance.
doesn’t artificially increase demand and drive up pricing
The lack of housing development with increased demand creates a housing shortage. When there’s a shortage, pricing goes up. The United States is at least a decade behind where they should be in housing development.
That’s what a mortgage is for.
A mortgage just pays the bank for the loan. A mortgage payment does NOT pay for repairs on the property. If the furnace goes out in the middle of winter, it’s up to the homeowner to come up with the money – typically thousands of dollars all at once.
And therefore don’t have to incur the burden of large expenses such as replacing a roof, a sewer line, etc.
If someone bought a house without doing an inspection, that’s their own fault. If it’s a natural disaster, that’s why you have insurance. If it’s expected wear and tear, you would have emergency savings to cover it.
At least as a homeowner, I know I can actually get it fixed before freezing to death. Can’t say the same when waiting for profit-driven landlords to go through the script of checking it out themselves, finding some reason to claim its not broken, and then eventually pestering them for long enough that they do their damn job and hire someone to fix it in a couple weeks.
If you want to cherry pick an example of the most expensive areas of the country instead of the more reasonable examples of a $70k single family house. But then the person buying the property is responsible for all the repairs and maintenance.
I’m sure I could build a nice doomsday-prepper shack in the woods somewhere for $70k, though.
The lack of housing development with increased demand creates a housing shortage. When there’s a shortage, pricing goes up. The United States is at least a decade behind where they should be in housing development.
And you don’t see how landlords—who are buying more real estate than they actually use—create increased demand?
A mortgage just pays the bank for the loan. A mortgage payment does NOT pay for repairs on the property. If the furnace goes out in the middle of winter, it’s up to the homeowner to come up with the money – typically thousands of dollars all at once.
Not everyone who owns a house has emergency savings. Not everyone is good at saving money.
Can’t say the same when waiting for profit-driven landlords to go through the script of checking it out themselves, finding some reason to claim its not broken, and then eventually pestering them for long enough that they do their damn job and hire someone to fix it in a couple weeks.
Not sure where you’re getting that false narrative from.
I’m sure I could build a nice doomsday-prepper shack in the woods somewhere for $70k, though.
Or a single family house in a Midwest city. The United States isn’t just the coasts, you know. There’s a huge portion of land in between.
And you don’t see how landlords—who are buying more real estate than they actually use—create increased demand?
People live in those properties, they’re not “unused”.
They buy all the houses and put them up on a subscription service that costs more than what the person would’ve paid for it and keep increasing the prices every month.
When someone is on a lease, the rent amount cannot increase during the lease period. At the end of the lease period, the person is free to move somewhere else.
That’s incorrect. Houses need maintenance. They are not self healing. Things break, items need replacing, grass needs to be cut, light bulbs need to be changed, etc. Tenants also need to be managed.
Interesting that every rental I’ve been in is in some state of disrepair, if that’s what you claim the extra is for. You’re purposely avoiding the fact that rentals are there to make the landlord money, and nothing more.
What service? They own something I need to live. Landlording is inherintly exploitative, there is really no way I can think of that renting out a property is ethical.
Before you say no I can’t live in a tent or my car that’s a crime. Sure technically I could but I wouldn’t be able to park or put up a tent without tresspassing or violating a no parking order, also not allowed to live in a caravan park either.
They provide a place to live that you can move into almost immediately with little upfront money, and with no worry about any maintenance costs that are associated with owning a property.
It’s very useful for social mobility as it allows people to move around for work relatively easy if they plan on relocating, especially when they’re young.
Buying a property not only takes a sizeable upfront amount of capital but it’s also a very slow process. I think it took 6 or 7 months for us to go from putting an offer in to getting the keys.
That’s the service and that’s why a rental market is important. I’m not defending scrupulous landlords here, they’re 100% an issue and there definitely needs to be changes to address that.
Problem is that the upfront cost for renting is still steep. One months rent as a deposit (which 9/10 you won’t even get back even if you left the property pristine) on top of your first months rent is quite expensive, and most mortgage payments people make are also usually cheaper than what they would pay renting but they do not have the startup capital to even get on the ladder.
you also have to ask permission to even decorate the place and more than likely if you do you then have to put it back the way it was. So you are stuck with lovely magnolia walls, and if you want to redo the bathroom you best be careful that the landlord doesn’t decide your renovations increased the value and charge you more rent because of it.
Of the people I know who rent, which is basically everyone in my age bracket, they want to own a property but cannot afford to it’s a massive issue.
I agree buying properties takes ages I cannot dispute that, and you can still get screwed by unscrupulous sellers.
The place I live now is the best rented property I have and that is only because the estate agents actually listen to me and fix issues promptly. Which as far as I am concerned is the bare minimum which most just don’t do, you also have no recourse because the landlord has way more power over you.
Don’t get me started on flat inspections every 3 months is a piss take.
No, owning rental property is not exploitative. It gives people a choice of where to live. No one rental property is required for anyone to live – there’s millions of choices in the United States alone for places to live.
And yes, camping is legal. People camp every single day in the United States. And yes, people own RVs. They live in them and travel around the country. This is legal. Both of these give even more options for places to stay.
It doesn’t though you get a property you don’t own and you enrich someone else instead of making enough money to actually own a property which you won’t be able to afford anyway
Good for the USA I suppose not for me though, and that falls apart if the person wants to live in or near a city
Owning a property means shelling out money, sometimes unexpectedly. The furnace goes out in the middle of winter? Better fix that quick. Don’t have the money? Let it get to freezing now your pipes burst and that’s just thousands of dollars more to spend on top of the thousands of dollars to replace the furnace.
If I owned the property I could get the boiler fixed faster but seeing now I have to wait on the landlord and hope he understands the urgency, or I fix his property and good luck for me getting that money reimbursed.
Landlords are leeches. They’re not valid by any stretch of the imagination. Even the “good ones” are exploitative.
I’m just not willing to downplay this just because someone has a hard time accepting that a friend or loved one who’s a landlord is a colossal piece of excrement.
It’s hilarious how many people are trying to defend landlords like they’re actually somehow good for society.
Outside of the rare landlord-as-a-roomate to afford the mortgage scenario, landlords and renting are a solution to a problem they’re creating themselves. They benefit property owners and developers, while creating housing environments that encourage the rest of us to be dependent on them until they day we die.
Yeah, it’s pretty disgusting and disappointing to see that here. I just had some bootlicker write a novel about how his father in law was “one of the good ones.”
My FiL owns a few properties that he rents out. He “retired” at 49. Now he spends most of his day, every day, either improving empty/not ready properties, or maintaining the currently rented properties. The people he rents to simply cannot afford a house, at any price, or they do not have the time and skills or maintain their own home. He’s only evicted one person in his time as a landlord, literally because the tenant didn’t pay for 6 months, turned the property into a drug den and went on the run when the police tried to serve a warrant.
I get that landlords on the surface level can be seen as predatory, and I agree that there are a disproportionate amount of scum and anti-humam business drones in the rental business; but its important to remember that there are genuine people who buy, maintain and rent out properties so that their community isn’t rife with dangerous dilapidated buildings filled with squatters.
Anyone who buys housing to rent it out is a part of the problem. Housing is a basic human right, not an investment.
Unless your fil was providing housing for free, fuck him, and fuck off with the classist shit about squatters. I’d take a million squatters over one landlord.
The people who owned and lived in it would maintain it, because it would be their home and they own it. He only has to maintain it because he’s getting other people to pay for it for him as an investment. The building wouldn’t just poof disappear if it were owned by a housing coop, and people could actually be earning equity with their living situation instead of paying for your FIL to spend 95% of his time fucking around doing nothing and 5% fixing leaks or whatever.
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