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What do families do, that only want or need to live in a place or area for like a year or so? Buy a house, pay thousands in closing costs and inspections, lose several thousand to realtors, and then have to go through the trouble of trying to sell the place a year later?
We very much need landlords. What’s screwing everything up is corpos doing it as a business or individuals with like 20 homes instead of one or two. Renting a house is a viable need for some people and it would actually suck if it was an option that didn’t exist at all.
The only reason costs of houses are so high in the first place is because they are lucrative investment objects, along with the fact that the most important part of city (and rural) planning, building homes, is largely left to private companies. You are assuming houses would be just as inaffordable without landlords, which is a problem of the current paradigm and not the one proposed.
A couple of years ago, my boss’ father (who founded the company and still worked there on and off) and I had a chat over lunch. I’m not sure how the topic of house prices came up, but he mentioned that when he and his wife bought their house, a car cost more than a house, so you knew that someone was really well off if they had two cars in the driveway.
I think that’s the first time I’ve actually gotten my mind blown. The idea that a car could cost more than a house just didn’t compute, and it still doesn’t quite sit with me.
Of course, the general standard of houses decline the further back in time you go, but houses were a lot cheaper back in the days. Below is a figure of housing prices in Norway relative to wages at the time (mirroring the situation almost everywhere in the west):
Factoring in the increased production capabilities over the same period of time, the construction cost of houses are not that much higher. If we designed our communities better and had a better system for utilizing the increased labour power, we could have much more affordable housing and more beautiful and well functioning societies.
Do not let it sit right with you. This future was stolen from you.
There’s no reason that local governments can’t do this job, there’s no need for middle men leaching money.
But you could replace just about any product with that statement.
Now, you’re getting it…
I love the theory of a really effective government that can produce things that are consistently better than private corporations. But that’s just never been my experience. In fact, it feels like the bigger a government gets the worst it operates. So how would you imagine a government that produces all the products and services for a society better than a free market?
Just look at most developed countries in Europe and you will find government operated services that are much better than what the free market came up with the in the US. Namely health services and transportation for instance. Postal services as well.
I just did a week long trip in the USA and all the National Parks were a joy to visit. I actually thought about and commented that it would be a totally different experience, read worse, if those things were privatized.
Honestly the whole argument that private entities are run better is bullshit. There’s nothing stopping any government from hiring the same managers and you just eliminated a certain % that would be the middle men. And now the main objective isn’t profit at all costs, so it will very easily be a better service for us, the consumers.
The problem is that these socalled “viable needs” are treated as and acted upon like they are elective priviledges by charging exhorbitant prices for the properties that are being made available. Blaming the market for it is just passing the buck and not owning up to your own choices in what you charge. I get that the ‘market’ has some effect on your rates but making it the main driver for your price that reflects the cost of the entire mortgage on the property is what makes you look like a parasite. If you and your tenants shared the cost of a mortgage in a more equitable fashion, i bet there would be fewer complaints.
Some of the biggest law breakers and abusive landlords are independent landlords. They’re also the ones who don’t seem to realize that being a landlord is a full time job where you are the handy man, maintenance, property manager, etc. It’s not just collecting a cheque every month, you actually have to earn it.
Not really. I don’t have to fix things on a monthly basis at my own house. When my parents rented the landlord would have to do something maybe twice a year.
But OP just said it’s not a job in the meme. Which is it?
Yeah managing and up keeping properties. Dealing with taxes, zoning, and potentially HOA. Mitigating liabilities and complaints. Landlord is absolutely a job.
I’ve known a couple people who have inherited property that already had tenants and were excited for the extra income. I think both of them sold the property within 3 years because it was a nightmare to manage.
I’m not op, and the thing is that 99% of independent landlords don’t do shit. I was a model tenant at my last place and I’m a handy man by trade so I would actually do every minor repair in my apartment, I would keep that place tip top and never bothered the landlord. He still thought I was a shit tenant and kicked me out as soon as he could because he wanted to charge more for the place.
Mao was right about many things. But he was most right about Landlords.
Rental income is considered income, and taxed assuming reasonable tax brackets much higher than investment income (That is to say, caiptal-gains. Interest/Dividends are also taxed at the higher income rate)
The cost of maintaining a livable home, property taxes, insurance, property depreciation, and renter interactions eat into the supposed windfall that landlords make.
I’m not saying it doesn’t suck sometimes and that certainly these formulas are out of whack in some situations, but there are no easy answers.
Don’t many landlords… manage the home(s) they’re renting out? Like cutting the grass, doing maintenance work, investing into the property for upgrades etc… ?
I don’t see how the landlord is stealing from the renter.
Side note: I don’t support corporations buying up property and renting them out or converting them into AirBnBs.
Housing as an investment should not exist as a concept. Housing is to provide shelter and comfort, not generate wealth.
So then should that be true about all the other necessary things? And if people are not incentivized to do things efficiently then why would the cost not increase?
Folks, there’s a difference between a slumlord and a decent landlord. I’ve owned a house for ten years now, and in addition to the mortgage and taxes and insurance I pay every month for the privelege, I’ve had to spend tens of thousands replacing the roof and doing other regular maintenance tasks. I’m actually about to dump thirty percent of the original purchase price into more deferred repairs and maintenance to get it back to a point where all the finished space is habitable again. Owning a house is expensive in ways that I did not fully understand until I bought mine, and decent property managers are taking care of all that for you, and if that’s not a job I honestly don’t know what is.
Slumlords and corporate landlords can fuck right the hell off, though.
There is no such thing as a decent landlord.
How has no comment in this thread yet mentioned Georgism or Land Value Tax? That is the solution to Landlordism
A land value tax is a good tool to help ease the transition away from landlords, but it alone is not enough.
Regardless, we definitely should be primarily relying on LVT for government income.
it’s really not tho, i’m sorry but all Georgism/ and value tax is/was a form of pre-marxist capital taxation.
or do you think that Property tax is stopping BlackRock as we speak?
Property taxes != Land value taxes
Further, it’s not a tax on capital; it’s a tax on land. It’s very explicitly designed to target land, as land has distinct economic properties that make it a prime target for taxation.
And yes, it does target speculative investments like those of Blackrock:
It reveals that much of the anticipated future tax obligations appear to have been already capitalised into lower land prices. Additionally, the tax transition may have also deterred speculative buyers from the housing market, adding even further to the recent pattern of low and stable property prices in the Territory. Because of the price effect of the land tax, a typical new home buyer in the Territory will save between $1,000 and $2,200 per year on mortgage repayments.
A tax on land is a tax on capital. Land has been capital longer than the concept of capital has existed.
It’s not, though. The classical factors of production, whence we get the concept of “capital” as a factor of production, has land and capital as clearly separate:
Land or natural resource — naturally occurring goods like water, air, soil, minerals, flora, fauna and climate that are used in the creation of products. The payment given to a landowner is rent, loyalties, commission and goodwill.
Labor — human effort used in production which also includes technical and marketing expertise. The payment for someone else’s labor and all income received from one’s own labor is wages. Labor can also be classified as the physical and mental contribution of an employee to the production of the good(s).
Capital stock — human-made goods which are used in the production of other goods. These include machinery, tools, and buildings. They are of two types, fixed and working. Fixed are one time investments like machines, tools and working consists of liquid cash or money in hand and raw material.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factors_of_production
And it’s an important distinction. The fact that land is not made and inherently finite makes it zero-sum. Meanwhile, the fact that capital such as education, tools, factories, infrastructure, etc. are man-made and not inherently finite makes them not zero-sum. This distinction has truly massive implications when it comes to economics and policymaking. It’s the whole reason LVT is so effective, so efficient, and so fair: it exploits the unique zero-sum nature of land.
It seems you’re using a more technical definition than I was. I was thinking something along the lines of definition 1a(3) in this dictionary entry. I agree there are important differences between land and other money-making assets.
It is a job when you’ve got dozens of shitty tenants always complaining about petty little things like heat, mold, and infestations
Landphobia on my Lemmy? It’s more likely than you think.
Name one functional society that’s big enough to have property rentals but doesn’t.
Name a functional society
you can’t make me!
Removed by mod
The USSR and China were much more widespread examples of eliminating landlords, both were vastly successful. They were third world countries with terrible conditions, both became global superpowers, all-the-while providing housing at a vastly more reasonable rate.
China has since regressed on this, and they’re starting to feel housing troubles as landlords destroy the housing market through scalping, but for a long period they were improving.
The best example is probably the USSR during the 70s. Still a country with vastly less wealth than America, recently developed into a global superpower, but still was providing housing to citizens at an average of 5% of their income. America has been operating very consistently in the 30-80% range for a long time.
Landlords create housing in the same way scalpers create tickets: They don’t.
The houses are built, the work is done.
Well yeah but who pays for the work that’s required to build a house ?
The people who live in it.
Not a person who owns a piece of paper that says they own it.
I have so many questions…
If you built a house, lived there for 50 years, and then wanted to live somewhere else, what happens to the house? Can you sell it to someone else?
What if you only lived there for 5 years? Or 5 days?
Or… what if I want to go on holidays for a year and then come back to the house I built? Am I allowed to rent it while I’m gone?
Great questions!
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Yep, you can sell it* to someone else. Or it’ll just sit there and then I would advocate for some kind of common sense squatters law to take effect.
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Short answer: See 1; long answer: you could find somewhere run by e.g. a housing co-op, or a (long-stay) hotel, or a property management company* and stay there.
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Yes I’d be fine with that, caveats:
- You are also benefitting from someone tending to the house while you’re gone, so I’d expect the amount to be commensurate with that*.
- You’re not going on holiday to another one of many other properties you own which you also rent out when you’re not in them.
Note: All my answers involve exchanging some kind of value (indicated by *) for money, and that’s my key point. If you’re actually contributing something then I have no problem with that. But that’s not what being a landlord is. A few ways this is evident:
- We already have words for all the jobs: Architect, building super, cleaner, designer, engineer, landscaper, manager, plumber. These are useful skills, people should get paid for them, but:
- A landlord is different. They make money by rent seeking, per Wikipedia: “the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth”. They don’t do anything except own a piece of paper (and the blessing of our current laws) which says they can do that.
Now, the water can get muddied when people are both landlords and do the other jobs (e.g. cleaning), but it’s pretty easy to think of other examples of this:
I also skim money out of the register, but I also get paid to work in the store. In both cases (rent seeking and skimming) I’m making money, but not actually adding any value.
Or, to my original example: Scalping tickets. I’m not putting on the show, I’m not the talent, or involved with the venue, I’m not printing or shipping the tickets. I’m not doing anything except gaming the system to make money.
Just like robbing a bank, just like ponzi schemes, and just like Sam Bankman-Fried: Gaining money, not adding value (aka creating wealth).
The only difference is we decided (as a society) some are legal, and some are illegal, and I have a good idea why (see Figure 1.).
Sorry, this is just semantics. You’re defining “landlord” to include everything that’s wrong with capitalism in your particular area, while saying some types of ownership are ok by you.
Being a landlord does not necessarily imply rent seeking.
Being a “landlord” and deriving rent is an inevitable component of life in contemporary society. Like anything, it’s problematic when excessive and greedy, but in general it’s just part of a healthy economy.
How would you defined a what a landlord does, then?
I’m happy to use a different word if that would help, but whatever you call it, there is a structure in place that allows people who own property to make money by doing nothing. Call it ‘land lording’, call it ‘passive income’.
is an inevitable component of life in contemporary society
Yes, but only if it’s:
a. Legal, and: b. Some people can accumulate enough wealth to buy up multiple properties, and: c. Some people are too poor to afford any property (or qualify for financing).
Which is the situation we’re in.
it’s problematic when excessive and greedy
Well we can agree on this. But I’d go further and say that’s always going to be the case, because:
a. Housing isn’t something you can opt out of. b. The people who own the homes have all the bargaining power. c. The more money you can accumulate through renting the more power you have.
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Qaddafi was murdered because he refused to sell Hydrocarbons to west powers, especially France, if he did he would still be alive
