> Every house owned by a landlord is another house not owned by an owner occupier.
> the renter/landlord system is toxic for healthy society
> Only a fool or someone choosing to would think I am advocating for an end to renting.
I mean, you use terms like "every" and say the whole concept is toxic for society. Its not some misreading of your statements to see you're stating for an end to renting when "the renter/landlord system is toxic". If that relationship is toxic for everyone who is not a landlord, isn't eliminating the whole thing the cure for this toxicness?
> 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.
> 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?
>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.
> There’s nothing wrong with, say, buying a two family home, living in one unit, and renting out the other to help pay the mortgage.
There's obviously something wrong with that.
> But corporate landlording, where an organization owns multiple buildings and runs it as a profit-maximizing enterprise, is a cancer on modern society and needs to be phased out.
It's literally the same but on a larger scale?
And actually I found little landlords to be the most "profit maximizing", petty, cruel and stupid. At least big organizations have some sort of reputation to protect, unlike anonymous landlords.
> I basically acknowledged that my view contradicts itself. People need the option to rent, but rent-seeking landlords are terrible people.
I don't understand how it advances the conversation to say that, without backing it with some level of analysis (even if minimal, back of the envelope kind) of what you'd do differently.
> The onus of finding a solution does not have to lie with the people pointing out the problem.
It very much does. In most circles it is not considered productive to simply be negative without offering any potential ideas for improvement.
> 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).
>>Most landlords I have met buy properties and then outsource their administration to property management companies.
And the cost of buying a property and outsourcing its maintenance is 0 right?
The landlord magically pulls a home out of thin air and some group of people maintain for them for free?
>>Landlordism is parasitic in the literal sense of the word. Landlords get rent and capital appreciation for doing nothing but possessing an ownership title. The propertyless pay the propertied a premium to live.
This applies to any investment, including things like 401K, pensions, getting an education, or even taking care of one's health.
Why should anybody in an economy be better off than the other part of the population by being disciplined, making routine and early investments?
Good news is you can plan and start working to go over to the winning side by taking action on it today. Or you can call others 'parasites' for making smart decisions you don't make. Calling others names might mask your own failure, and downplay their achievements, but is unlikely to change anything for your or for them.
> 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).
> the landlords and homeowners who reap all the benefits from the status quo have somehow been able to dupe the housing have-nots who suffer from it
And by that you mean the people who worked and saved to invest in something wisely to have that take out from under them? I cannot stand people who think home owners and landlords as evil people just because people who come after them cannot have it easy. It was never easy for anyone. It's not the have and have not's, it's the market and hardwork, sure some people are born into wealth but most the time it's just hard work.
Ok, so if you acknowledge that being able to rent is a useful option, it means someone must own a place that gets rented out.
> Buying a house for the sole purpose of extracting profit makes you a financial vampire
You just said renting needs to be an option. But now you say nobody should buy a house to rent out for some profit.
So what's left? Should people buy houses to rent out at a loss, as a personal sacrificial service so renters can have a place to rent? Who do you expect to do that?
>complete misunderstanding and misrepresentation of landlord's motivations and interests...rents are generally set through market forces
Should their motivations and interests matter if market forces ultimately decide the outcome, which isn't "as little of their tenant's paycheck every month" as you contend for the average tenant?
>People shouldn't be able to use tools or implements of any kind to generate income?
This seems to conflate an apartment someone owns to, say, a laptop or another tool which they actively use to generate productive work. I don't agree with the comparison but I do agree that it is more grey than my parent comment portrayed it to be.
>than food or water, yet I don't see activists...
You haven't seen activists who protest the commoditization and sale of drinking water?
>And you wrap up with a statement that is solely based on some version of a landlord that easy for to you to hate, regardless of any relation to reality.
You're right, that was a strawman and bad form from myself. But I'm not sure the 17 million vacant homes versus the 200,000 or so recorded unsheltered homeless individuals per the 2019 American census[1] is that unrelated to reality. If you're suggesting that it is removed from reality in that the motivations for those properties remaining empty cannot be outright attributed to malice like I did, I would be open to that assertion but I'm not sure it matters as long as the disparity exists. I still feel it is fundamentally immoral.
I appreciate you engaging with the content of my argument in good faith and apologize if I have failed to return the favour.
> I think many of these ideas are sound but IMO your hostility towards “landlords” is misplaced.
I see landlords like ticket scalpers -- they have the money up front to buy a product, and provide 'liquidity' and 'free markets' by selling that product at the market rate.
For some reason, we generally view ticket scalpers as negative, and landlords as "just what you do when you get wealthy enough".
And, to be clear, I have been a landlord. I know the challenges in maintaining a unit, finding tenants, chasing down rent, dealing with legal challenges, wondering if I would need to evict someone because they were destructive/loud/etc.
(Ultimately, I paid back all the rent I had collected that contributed to my principals on the unit, keeping only the money I used to pay for maintenance. My feelings about landlords come partially from being a landlord and realizing that I was profiting off of people only because I was rich enough to afford a house in the first place.)
> the renter/landlord system is toxic for healthy society
> Only a fool or someone choosing to would think I am advocating for an end to renting.
I mean, you use terms like "every" and say the whole concept is toxic for society. Its not some misreading of your statements to see you're stating for an end to renting when "the renter/landlord system is toxic". If that relationship is toxic for everyone who is not a landlord, isn't eliminating the whole thing the cure for this toxicness?
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