>but that would make it even harder to find a place to rent
Maybe i wasn't clear, but my point was that when renting is the most common way of living, it is not healthy for society.
Ownership promotes community and responsibility. Renting is parasitic and enables social stratification in to elites and tenants.
Prices are inflated and are used as investments rather than housing. This is where the government needs to add regulation to prevent exploitation of the market.
> Of all the investment opportunities available to people, I'm not particular sympathetic to purchasing property to seek rents.
If forbidding renting properties to tenants would solve problems, I would be on your side.
People will always need to rent. A society has to allow them to without allowing them to be exploited. But once you allow renting, you have to protect property owners from tenant caused damage as well.
I'm not saying we're there - we may be far from it. But renting is not only useful, it is necessary.
> Why do you assume every resident wants to own their property?
Actually, I don't. I know that there are people who would prefer not to.
But because of the way the system is set up, it is so trivial and common for landlords to be extremely abusive. I would rather see things changed so that some people who would prefer to rent have to shrug and buy something instead—but actually have that option, because what would have been set up as rental properties are instead genuinely low-cost housing for purchase—than see the system continue as it is now.
I also know it's very unlikely that the status quo is going anywhere, so this is almost entirely a theoretical discussion.
> I have a sinking feeling the situation would quickly improve if ownership had per-person limits
Running an economy on feelings is a sure way to ruin an economy. People who buy multiple dwellings would be more than happy to rent them. Renting is good. It provides a liquid market to access housing. If the market is efficient, rent or buy should be a preference rather than a financial decision: The financial impact should be the same.
If people refuse to rent, or sell their property then you have something wrong with your economy (too much regulations, people are afraid of devaluation, etc...). You don't fix a structural problem of an economy by implementing a per-person limit to buy houses.
>Maybe I'm missing something, but the flexibility of renting seems a lot bigger advantage than the small advantages of owning a house.
This varies a lot.
I don't actually care to own a house too much but we are going to buy one soon because the rental market in my area has gone in-fucking-sane in the last few years so its ao much cheaper to own in my neighborhood, I'm basically lighting dollar bills on fire every month with how inflated rents are.
Oh, and landlords are so stupid. We are model tenants, both very high income... but we have a cat so we are ineligible to rent 90% of properties, no exceptions.
That is because it is a landlord's market right now.
I don't think governments have any business promoting home ownership though and society shouldn't make you feel like you didn't "make it" until you are strapped with a mortgage you can't afford.
> rental housing isn’t “an evil thing that needs to go away.”
I disagree, rental housing is a thing that does need to go away, or at least be severly limited.
Because there's a strong trend towards corporations owning all housing and then everybody must rent from them.
(as a milenial my chances of owning the place I live in are small... specially in big cities; I looked into it, I would need to get a loan and then pay the loan amount twice over for the next 30 years to buy a shitty small appartment without a real kitchen).
I hate to go all "citation needed" on you, but I'm not sure this is true.
Do I want to pay for upkeep of a property? Probably not. But since renting is basically equivalent to burning money in our economy, any responsible renter will eventually feel a pull towards ownership if only to stop the bleeding.
I think we need a society where renting isn't so expensive AND owning a property isn't so heavily subsidized by tax breaks. The entire housing market is a massive bubble because of investors and speculation. At some point, that bubble prices people out, leading to homelessness and missed opportunities because people aren't willing or able to move.
Much like freedom of car-free movement, housing ought to be a fundamental human right. Not a business or a place to hide your money.
I would say that widespread renting is actually quite terrible. It means that property is kept in the hands of class of landowners (and when wealth is concentrated, this also tends to concentrate power); that instead of investing one's income, renters are basically paying off the owner's mortgage; that generally, people prefer to own, and so widespread renting is a sign of being unable to participate in the real estate market; that it generally is associated with a rentier economy.
> But you understand that these people are renting because they have no other choice, right?
That doesn't change the fact that renting is, by definition, non-permanent while ownership is permanent.
What do you suggest as an alternative? That all ownership be done away with? That a special exception for ownership of things be made if the thing in question is land or houses? That ownership of things that is either land or houses be limited? Taxed higher?
Government protecting the right to own things is the basis of civilisation.
Residential renters have their own protections too, in many places, allowing for renters to sometimes live for extended periods rent-free. There are limits on the rental adjustments, limits on evictions, etc.
A solution could be to encourage more housing to be built. Another one is to encourage economic development in other areas, so renters can move to other areas where they can afford to buy.
Insisting that people should not have to move and should be able to purchase their own home where they are, AND if they want to rent, then they never have to move again is simply unreasonable and ridiculous.
> The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market, the better.
How do you or we decide it's not a market?
If people are paying money for housing, it's a market. And it's not just money, but the largest lifetime expense by an order of magnitude and more.
> I'm also of the much more radical opinion that we should protect tenants over landlords in nearly every case
That's already the case, at least in many places (I know not all). If you take it too far the result is no landlords, thus no rentals. Perhaps that's ok if everyone wants to buy, but if there is anyone who wants to rent, it's useful to have rentals.
> If someone is rich enough to rent things to others, by definition, they have more than they need.
I don't know of many landlords who will continue to own property if the rent does not pay their expenses and a reasonable profit. Profit is not bad, it is the reward society gives individuals for taking risks. Rental prices start from basic supply and demand. People who need a place to live will pay what they can afford, often unwisely paying more than they would need to if they were content with less. Landlords adjust prices accordingly - up if there is more demand, down if there is less.
Add in the emotional component of "owning my own place", which drives up the price of single family properties and forces landlords to raise prices if they will cover costs and profit. Add in the property value increase caused by tax benefits the government has, in my opinion, unwisely handed out to homeowners. Push up prices more due to large minimum lot sizes and NIMBYism constraining supply in desirable areas. (After all, what makes an area desirable? From an economic standpoint, the ability to easily exchange labor for money or some other store of value.) The result? Society largely is responsible for its own dilemmas.
Thus landlords are the one to actually finance those buildings.
> A landlord provides about as much value to a consumer as a stockholder does to a public company.
Which is a significant value, for a company (even if I would like more companies to be privately owned). In this model a landlord is how people can get access to housing without huge initial capital and/or long term commitment.
A rent-based housing economy causes huge problems for those that want to buy an house (somilarly to how Airbnb/short stays cause problems for rent seekers) but this is not about one sector being parasites, it is about an imbalance in the market.
the situation would not be better if landlords did not exist.
I think ownership is better because people value securing the shelter where they sleep. Renting is worse because you can't make decisions about how to improve land and architecture. You are only permitted to be there under a limited contractual agreement vs. being able to stay put until you decide to sell.
> I need landlords to invest their money in houses I can rent.
No, you need affordable housing. There's no reason that has to double as a way for someone to make a considerable ROI. Having to rent means that even if you stay in one place long enough to pay for the cost of building/buying the house twice over, you still get to pay an ever increasing rent every month just for the service of not kicking you out of your home.
> If you don't like it, it's fine, but leave the rest of us live and rent in peace.
But that's the problem, isn't it? Everyone needs housing. It's not something you can simply opt out of. You can try being homeless but that precludes you from most ways to make an income. If you're wealthy enough, you can buy a house so you never have to rent again but again that's not a choice most people get to make even if they could afford it (because it hinges on their ability to get a loan, which is up to the bank).
I'm not saying you should have to pay a million bucks to have a place to live. Nothing I said contradicts the idea that you may want to live in different places over time. I'm saying commodity housing (i.e. having housing subject to a housing market) necessarily leads to a housing shortage and there are better options than trusting the benevolence of every single landlord not to charge as much rent as they can get away with.
> If being a landlord was so profitable and risk free, we would be drowning in properties for rent.
This (drowning in properties for rent) doesn't logically follow from that (being a landlord is very profitable) and that isn't what I said. There are other factors involved like how profitable being a landlord is relative to other things you can do (like selling) and how high the initial investment required to run a profitable landlord operation (with multiple properties) is.
> The fact that it doesn't happen, but we have a massive house shortage speaks by itself.
If it's a housing shortage, that's a supply problem. But according to other comments from people claiming to know the situation in Spain, there is no lack of housing supply (i.e. there are plenty of houses for sale and many empty houses for rent) so it seems to be a problem of pricing.
It's more profitable to sell (or rent out) a highly priced property even if it means you'll sit on it for a longer time, as long as you can afford the initial investment and maintenance. In fact, overpricing a property can be beneficial if you own other properties in the same area because it can raise the average and thus justify increasing the prices for other properties in the area. Not to mention that due to population growth over time demand goes up and new development usually happens in the outskirts, meaning supply in the area won't increase.
You can be okay with the status quo. That doesn't mean there aren't good arguments why the status quo is bad in certain ways. And changing the status quo doesn't mean removing one thing and being done with it. As much as some may feel it when rent is due, I don't think the solution is to kill all landlords (or more figuratively: abolish the profit model of being a landlord). De-commodification doesn't mean simply banning the sale of something. It's about replacing one model with another and there can be intermediate steps (e.g. the Red Vienna model of public housing).
> If you believe that landlords should control the world
This seems like such an emotional response. The landlords are also controlled by mortgages if they are small, or by boards of directors - and shareholders if they are large.
The landlords can control the rent for their units, that's it.
As to investment properties vs affordable ones, there can be some issue there, for example if you buy a house just to park the money somewhere, but you don't rent it out, you keep it empty. That kind of behavior can be really damaging. These are the only kind regulations I would introduce: 1. don't allow properties to sit empty - tax them heavily. And 2. also don't allow airbnb's in highly troubled cities. Unless you're literally sleeping in the same house with the guests, airbnb's shouldn't be allowed for individual housing units.
> I don’t think housing should be an investment
Let's run a thought experiment: Let's assume you're a retired small business owner that has 5 million dollars in the bank. You can A. built a house in your city and rent it out or B. put the money on the stock exchange.
Everything else staying equal, which of the options would create more housing units in your city?
> Anyone whose main income is from other peoples rent has an incredible amount of explaining to do if they want to claim that they are anything but a useless leech
What would you envision as the alternative to tenanted apartment complexes?
Let’s say you could wave a wand and outlaw rental housing as a business. Do you think the world would be a better or worse place?
Maybe i wasn't clear, but my point was that when renting is the most common way of living, it is not healthy for society.
Ownership promotes community and responsibility. Renting is parasitic and enables social stratification in to elites and tenants.
Prices are inflated and are used as investments rather than housing. This is where the government needs to add regulation to prevent exploitation of the market.
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