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this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Asklemmy
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A landlord is anyone that owns a property, and rents it out, whether it's commercial or residential, short-term, long-term, or even leasing land to hunters.
Landlords aren't a problem per se. Think, for instance, of student housing. When I moved to go to school, I needed a place to stay, but I didn't intend to live there for a long period of time. It would have been entirely unreasonable to buy a house or condo in order to go to school. I couldn't stay at home, because my parents lived a long way away from any university. (Dorms are utter hell, as are co-ops. I've only ever had one roommate that wasn't a complete and utter bastard.) You have a number of people who have the expectation in their career that they're going to be moving from city to city frequently, or will need to be working on-site for a period of months; it's not reasonable to expect them to buy either.
Then there are businesses. Most businesses don't want to buy, and can't afford to do so. Commercial real estate is it's own mess.
Taxing landlords won't solve the problem; landlords simply raise rents to achieve the same income. Preventing landlords from incorporating--so that they're personally liable for everything--might help. But it would also limit the ability to build new housing, since corporations have more access to capital than individuals. (Which makes sense; a bank that would loan me $5M to build a small housing complex would be likely to lose $5M.) Limiting ownership--so a person could only own or have an interest in X number of properties--might help, but would be challenging for Management companies are def. part of the problem in many cases, but are also a solution to handing maintenance issues that a single person might not be able to reasonably resolve.
Government ownership of property is nice in theory, but I've seen just how badly gov't mismanaged public housing in Chicago. It was horrific. There's very little way to directly hold a gov't accountable, short of armed revolution.
I don't think that it's the simple problem that classical Marxists insist it is. It's a problem for sure. I just don't think that there's an easy solution that doesn't cause a lot of unintended problems.
Anything is bad if you do it badly. It's ridiculous to dismiss an entire concept because you can name examples of when it was done wrong.
Bad drivers exist so no more cars. Bad laws exist so no more laws. Bad governments exists, so no more governments. It's an asinine way of arguing.
Unless you can formulate clear arguments as to why government management of rentals cannot work as a concept, you should not dismiss it as a solution.
It's not that it cannot work as a concept, it just has not worked when it's been done so far. Typically the issues come down to funding. Politicians have to be elected, and politicians control funding. In order to get elected, politicians cut taxes--because everyone wants lower taxes, right?--which means that they have to cut funding. Typically the funding cuts are to the most vulnerable populations. So you'd have to create a system where public housing couldn't be systematically de- and underfunded. I don't know that even a constitutional amendment would be sufficient (see also: the entire history of 2A, Ohio trying to block the amendment to their constitution re: reproductive freedoms, etc.)
I'm generally opposed to continuing to repeat the same mistakes and expecting different results. If gov't funded housing has always resulted in shoddy, run-down, and unsafe (both in terms of structural integrity and in terms of crime) housing, then we need to fundamentally rethink how we're going about it to ensure we aren't repeating the same problems, rather than just throwing more money at it.
Big, BIG "citation needed" on that one chief. Just speaking from my own experience growing up in England, council housing schemes were fantastically effective at getting people into housing with reasonable rental costs. And similar schemes have been successful all across Europe. I'm told there are similar success stories in the US as well.
I think you're just picking one or two bad examples and just treating that as the whole dataset because it fits your prior assumptions. It's easy to do, because people complain when government efforts don't work (and often they complain even when they do; there are plenty of "bad" government programs that are actually fantastically effective, people just moan about their imperfections to the point where everyone assumes they're broken) but rarely celebrate the successes.
I can't speak to every single city in the US, but in Chicago, Detroit, and near me in Atlanta--all areas that I've lived in--public housing has been badly underfunded, has been allowed to decay by the city, and is often so bad that the buildings end up being condemned. Most US cities seem to trend more towards public-private partnerships, where the private company mismanages the property, and the city fails to take enforcement action. One of the largest public housing projects in Atlanta has finally been condemned and seized after something like two decades of mismanagement and lack of care in enforcement from the city. (And yes, Atlanta is nominally a Democratic city, although I sincerely hope that Andre Dickens and the entire city council that's supported Cop City all die in a fire.)
The real problem with government housing in the US specifically stems from our worship of billionaires, which requires us to demonize the poor. If a rich man is selfmade due to his virtues then poor people must lack virtue. That worldview implies that no amount of help will redeem the poor. Thus safety net programs are half-assed at best, and cut to bare bones or cut entirely at the worst.
The narrative that government-run programs are useless just does not hold up to the evidence. Even the housing program you mentioned is an improvement over nothing. But take a look at some of our programs and imagine the horror of a private alternative: US Postal service (I can send a letter to the smallest town in Alaska with a single stamp), rural electricity, roads (my God could you imagine a private road system), public school. You need to remember that the alternative to any flawed government program is NOTHING.
The best alternative to a flawed government program is nothing, it can get far worse than that
The best alternative to government housing is no housing? Landlords run at market rate and that keeps a lot of people out, so for them that's no housing.
That's the worse than nothing option, because it also invites gentrification to the area, which drives up prices of everything else nearby. So now not only can people not afford a place to live, they also can't even afford some food to eat, and are forced to migrate somewhere else. This is how you end up with homeless encampments.
I would argue it doesn’t include one group your definition includes: hotel owners. Property that’s purpose built for short term lodging often lacks what you’d want for long term residence and provides a valuable service
But yeah I agree with a lot of your points. I do think we have a solution though. The new deal skyrocketed homeownership rates. If instead of taxing landlords we subsidize ownership of personal residential properties and actively remove barriers so that the mass of commercial wealth doesn’t steamroll the residential buyer that has shown positive effects in the past. We can also use it to subsidize building newer more environmentally friendly housing and mid range housing
Hotel owners are absolutely landlords, IMO. Even though hotels may not usually be intended for long-term residence, there are plenty of long-term hotels, and very, very low-rent hotels that end up functioning as residences.
I do think that tax incentives, etc. for owner-occupied homes is probably a good step. I know that there are some pretty good deals for first time buyers, but that doesn't help when the housing supply is so tight. And the supply is tight, in part, because it's more profitable to pave farmland and build McMansions than it is to build high-density housing in the cities that people work in. I'm seeing that in my town and county; my town is poor as shit, and farms have been bought and turned into housing "starting in the low 500s!" for people that want to drive 90 minutes each way into Atlanta. The county I live in is one of the fastest growing, even though there are no jobs here. It's just more sprawl.
It will never not boggle my mind how many people willingly deal with an hour and a half commute in Atlanta traffic. I’m on the west coast now but as soon as I had a full time job that could afford it I moved ITP. I know folks that would commute from fucking Rockmart to Buckhead on a daily basis
I'm going to move much farther out if I can, like, northern Maine. That should get me far enough out of the Atlanta suburbs to avoid the traffic.
Ha…what an un-Lemmy thought.
I don't think that they necessarily are. I think that the issues are individuals and corporations owning significant portions of the real estate market, rather than--for instance--small landlords that rent out one or two units in a multi-family building that they also occupy. No one begrudges the maintenance man his wages; he earns them through repairs and upkeep. Similarly, a small landlord should be doing the same thing and providing value to the renters. OTOH, many places (landlords/management companies) are predatory; they allow the buildings to fall into disrepair and take all of the rent as profit.