this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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Are we talking about eliminating renting altogether?
Cause that is what it sounds like in this thread. Folks wanting to completely eliminate renting and drive folks to buy a house Everytime they move.
This ignores things like closing costs, realtor fees, really high property taxes, expensive home repairs, and temporary work assignments.
Maybe you really need a job but don't want to straight up buy a house and instead rent something until you can find a job back in your local area or you decide it's time to take the plunge and move for good.
Sure there are many a-hole companies and landlords that try to squeeze their tenants for every dime and treat their tenants like crap (lord knows I've run into those), but on the other hand there are folks who need a place to live but haven't decided where they want to settle down and people who can rent their old property at a decent date based on the low interest they themselves were able to lock down.
Some are folks (like me) who moved but couldn't afford to keep their house empty for an extended period of time to put it on sale while they're paying rent or a mortgage in another state. So renting, even if you're barely breaking even, makes sense.
Better to rent your old house for barely above the costs for the property taxes, homeowners insurance, and mortgage interest, and maintenance costs than to take a 6-12 month hit where you have to pay the above while not living in the house because your new job is in a different state. And that is if you sell in 12 months and don't take a big hit on the sale.
If you're buying/selling a house every 3 years then you're really going to get screwed. I personally went from living in a home I owned (and paying a mortgage on) to renting for 3 years just to understand where I wanted to live in a new state, which areas had the best employers, and wait out on a low APR and decent buyers market.
If I had to buy a house instead of having the option to rent, then I would have ended up buying a house near that employer which would have been over an hour commute from the better job offers I got after I moved here.
Nobody is saying to "get rid" of home rentals, but they are saying get rid of landlords.
Particularly for SFR homes, there's no reason for a person who is not living there to 'own' the property and extract rent. For those who are transient -as you described- there are community land trusts, cooperative housing, limited equity housing coops, and municipal housing that can all fill the role that would traditionally be done by private landlords. Those of us who advocate eliminating private home rental's for profit do so knowing it wouldn't happen by choice, and that alternate arrangements for housing would need to be established alongside any legislation that bans for-profit rentals.
Private landlords are systemically problematic because it inflates home values and locks an increasing portion of the population from the option of building equity (or benefiting from community equity, as it were). Nobody is saying you're a bad person, only that landlords (the category of private capital ownership that collects rent for the use of property) are perpetuating a huge problem and ought to be banned as a matter of benefiting society as a whole. Just like how towns or neighborhoods are democratically governed, homes should be too.
I knew I liked you.
Thanks for sharing alternatives to the status quo. See a lot of people complaining in this thread without proposing what the new system would look like. Guess it's easier to do that though
I've asked this very question before on reddit in a genuine attempt to understand what alternative the anti-landlord crowd is advocating for. Aside from the onslaught of personal attacks on my character, the best I could decipher was some sort of system where a landlord could only rent at actual cost of their mortgage, taxes, insurance, maintenance, etc. No profit could be earned. I said no one would be a landlord for free, especially considering the risks of owning land (natural disasters not insured, market crash, etc).
Their "landlords shouldn't profit off of renters" argument fell apart when I asked profit for who? Was the bank allowed to make a profit on the home loan? Was the insurance company allowed to make a profit on the policy? Could the maintenance and repair folks earn a profit on their services? Could the home remodeling companies make a profit if the home needed updating? Or is every person and entity involved in home ownership allowed to profit from the rental except the landlord? They stopped responding.
I'll just copy paste my response from above.
You still didn't answer the question. So get rid of the landlords means what exactly? You realize there's about two dozen or so industries whose entire commercial existence is tied to landlords and rental properties, right? Do we get rid of all of them? Or just some? Or just the landlord, who is one small cog in a very big capitalist renting wheel?
Everyone is so oddly and furiously fixated on the landlord as some sort of big bad, and therefore assert that getting rid of the landlord position entirely will just magically make everything awesome. It's odd to observe otherwise intelligent people stop so outrageously short of the complete picture.
Actually, I think I did, you just didn't understand it. What we mean by 'landlord' can be essentially boiled down to 'private ownership'. The problem with landlords as a class is that they exert complete control over a 'property' while having the least use of it. When Adam Smith wrote about 'rent extraction', he was specifically identifying a portion of an economy that was unproductive.
Landlords are defined by their ownership; they could also maintain the property, but what makes them 'landlords' and not 'maintinence workers' is their ownership over a property someone else is using and charging rent for that use. The other arrangements I listed in my previous comment address that inefficiency by democratizing the use of that asset, instead of allowing the monopoly of the landlord.
I would really have to agree.
No, you didn't. And the drivel you just wrote still didn't answer the question. At this point it's clear that it's intentional.
Tell me you have no idea how property ownership works without telling me you have no idea how property ownership works.
"No you". Nice one. Good luck friend, this back and forth is pointless.
Good luck yourself.
Seeing the same thing here. Apparently I'm scum because I'm renting my previous home for -10%/+10% of: mortgage on the lower price I paid 10 years ago, plus property taxes, plus home owners insurance, plus repairs and maintenance.
Apparently I would no longer be scum if I stopped renting it and refused to renew my tenants lease, sold the house and made a huge profit now, and the next person will have to pay brand new closing costs plus a mortgage on double the home value and double the APR.
I'm guessing most folks down-voting the sane responses saying rentals aren't needed have never tried selling a house (and gone 6+ months paying the mortgage for a house you no longer live in) or don't know there's a "break even" calculation that tells you how many years you have to live in the same house before you're better off than having just rented (realtor fees to sell the house, closing costs, time to sell the home where you'll still be paying your mortgage + taxes + insurance, time to close, getting credit approval for a mortgage, etc).
Hell, I did the calculation when I had to move to a new state and I was able to rent a house for less than it would have cost me to pay for closing costs and realtor fees when I would have sold the house 3 years later. Not to mention the time to come up with 20% down payment.
But fuck me for not taking the easy way out, kicking out my tenants and cashing in on the current huge property values to sell my old home.
Again: nobody is saying you're scum, they're just saying it would be better if we didn't have landlords.
But if you like to play the victim go off I guess
Maybe follow the thread?
https://lemmy.world/comment/9580949
Edit:
Idk what you meant to link to there but I saw no personal attacks
Updated with the specific quote. The sentiment of which has been echoed in this thread multiple times.
That is certainly pointed language, but they're calling landlords leaches. In the Adam Smith economic sense of the word, rent seeking is non-productive economic activity and could certainly be described as 'leaching' value.
It feels shitty to be tied to that word but they're not making a statement about your moral worth, they're making a statement about the roll you're filling.
Housing should be socialised, with any profits being put back into expanding housing stock.
Whose profits? See my post above:
If your answer is "anyone and any entity making a profit", then that's about two or three dozen different industries (including banks, insurance agencies, title companies, all kinds of home builders, repair folks, etc.). Regardless of my opinion on that argument, your problem isn't with the landlord, it's with a huge swatch of industries who are all tied to and profit from renting.
It's only the profit derived from ownership that's of concern here, none of these other industries (aside from the bank, arguably) apply to the critique.
Your question is literally answered in a sibling comment.
Fuck no, just the landlords. Housing should be socialised.
Its important to remember that in your example of "barely breaking even" some poor schmuck is paying off your mortgage. So it doesn't make you a martyr to barely break even, it still makes you a parasite.
Buying house for say 100k at 3% APR, renting it because you were laid off and cant afford moving expenses, rent in a different city, plus paying a mortgage on an empty house for 6 months to a year while it sells. Then years later you still keep it because, while you could sell it and cash in, with the low APR you got on it you can afford to rent it for less than the corporate scum suckers who try to monopolize housing = Parasite
Kicking out your renters and selling said house you bought at 100k for 200k to corporate scum suckers who will turn around and sell it at an even higher price or rent it at really high rates OR someone else who will end up paying way more than the rent I was asking for the place because interest rates are about double and the house has also doubled in price = internet hero
No room for nuance, got it.
If you move or can no longer afford your house, the property should be absorbed into a community coop (or sold to them) and leased back to the tenant or a new family. You keeping ownership of the home is not a requirement, it's actually a huge problem.
The only ones insisting on the alternate scenario you just described are landlords who think of themselves as martyrs.