if a landlord can't afford to install air conditioning where air conditioning is required, they should be forced to sell any and all properties that don't comply.
actually, hold on, let me fix that for me:
landlords should be forced to sell any and all properties except the one they live in. period.
The media loves to have us hate on private landlords, blaming them for the housing bubble and supply issue while it’s partly true it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the scummy rental corporations who have been buying up single family homes and renting them out en masse.
The small landlord that has 1 or 2 rental properties will eventually die and their properties will be liquidated, the companies however will hold onto these properties forever.
America is not the only place in the world. In places without mass corporate landlords, private landlords happily fill that void and are absolutely still the problem.
Show me a landlord that genuinely finds efficiencies that arent just 'hire a cheaper contractor than they would hire for their own home'.
Absolutely correct, same principle applies to lots of other areas too. Such as food supply.
As a renter who just recently bought, im almost upset this isn't comimg fast enough after years in 30+ temperatures in the summer. However I do have 1 small complaint about how they intend to implement it.
"[Those buildings] are not very viable economic propositions," he said. "And it's society that has imposed that on the property owner. And now, at least in our view, it should be for society to help solve the problem that society has created
This qoute is in the context of an old building trying to be sold instead of the landlord updating. We've fucking catered to landlords enough in this province. We don't need to bail them out. If they can't sell a property because of a condition it is in, thats their fault for maintaining it at that level. If no one will buy the property because the rent to price ratio is too high, then i guess they'll have to lower their asking price. Our province has bigger financial problems to tackle than helping landlords sell their neglected buildings or helping landlords bring them up to modern standards. Those risks and responsibilities should be on the landlord who has been profiting this entire time.
that’s a responsibility for society at large
You're right, let's nationalize your properties.
Wrong country. If you want communism you gotta move to one of those super successful countries like North Korea. Good luck with that.
Yep, there's the way things are happening now, and nothing else. Any other way of doing things is impossible.
Like how every mature democracy is veering toward fascism and there's not a damn thing we could have done differently.
Well 'nationalizing' private property isn't exactly 'another way of doing things' it would be a complete makeover of our society's core values and very unlikely to happen with the consent of the owners of that property. So unless you're proposing forced compliance and starting a revolutionary war, how exactly would we "nationalize" trillions of dollars worth of private property?
Right, Canada's never nationalized anything private, aside from rail networks, hydroelectricity, and mining operations. All cheap and cheerful. And when has a government ever managed housing?
Doing anything about rent would surely require the blood of millions.
So you think buying a railway network is the same as buying single family houses from MILLIONS of Canadians, some of whom, like me, live in them or actually built them ourselves? Ok then, good luck with that brilliant plan. Im sure there will be no pushback on that idea.
I think you can figure out the difference between your housing situation and rental.
... oh, I just skimmed your comment history. Fuck off.
running any business comes with risk. “help” should go to the tenant before the business. if a landlord cant afford a business then they should quit and get a normal job instead of being a piece of shit human.
landlords should not exist, to begin with. they are garbage people.
landlords should not exist, to begin with. they are garbage people.
This. Landlords are simply unnatural. An abomination of nature itself.
Landlords are not philanthropists. You are not going to find a big group of homeowners who want to rent at a loss out of the goodness of their own hearts.
I would love if the government took strong measures to encourage home ownership and discourage treating real estate as an investment. Really, I would. But that will take many years of hard work and economics PhDs to concoct a plan that works. So, until we find a government with the balls to do that for real, we have to understand that dealing with landlords in a realistic way is a necessary evil.
Because if you nuke rentals without first ensuring people can afford to buy, all you'll accomplish is to create a mass housing shortage worse than you've ever seen.
Saying you want real estate to not be treated like an investment is a pipe dream. It is the most expensive purchase most people will ever make - looking at it without a financial lense is a terrible idea!
Fortunately, what you want has a straightforward solution, and requires few if any economics phds. Because an economist already solved the problem a long time ago. Henry George noted that landlords provided a valuable service to people by building and maintaining housing - but that the value of the land that their building was built on (which made up the bulk of the reason people were willing to pay their rent) was made by the community. A 300 sqft studio in Boston rents for more than a 2000sqft house in bumfuck Nebraska because it is in Boston. The public infrastructure, the businesses, the other peoples homes, the parks, the universities - all these things contribute to the value of that studio in a way the landlord had nothing to do with.
The land itself has value depending on where it is, and we should not let landlords capture this value. Instead, it should be returned to the community, which is the source of the value in the first place. Hence, George proposed issueing a tax on land values, such that landlords would be unable to profit on the value of land itself. Instead, they would be required to earn value from the land by building and maintaining something of worth on it. And when something of worth is built, this improves the community further!
I highly recommend looking into Georgism.
This is the first time I've ever actually intentionally saved a comment on Lemmy or Reddit.
This makes a lot sense, but the obvious question is how do you prevent people from being forced out of their homes, just because the government decides to spend it's money on the military instead of building more cities?
Like right now, if you were to implement that in Toronto, a whole lot of people would be taxed out of their homes so that a developer could buy the land and build denser housing on it.
All the most valuable housing that's near subway lines is already at a relatively ideal density, consisting of townhomes, rowhouses, and semi-detached houses, whereas our suburbs and in-city suburbs are generally not near transit, and thus not nearly as land valuable and not as well suited for density.
It seems like we would end up tearing down all our ideal housing and replacing it with over dense housing, rather than building transit out to the less dense areas where it's needed.
So, Georgist land value taxes are a great idea and solve a lot of problems. But it is important to note that they do not solve all problems. That is one of the big hurdles that the idea needs to clear - it is such a good idea that people think it should solve every problem in the world, and then are disappointed when it doesn't. So they declare the idea "bad" because it isn't perfect, rather than accepting that there is no such thing as a perfect solution to all problems.
just because the government decides to spend it’s money on the military
There is nothing preventing the government from doing this right now. Henry George proposed returning the land value tax equally among citizens as a "citizen's dividend", which would solve this problem, but might not be an optimal use of the money. But governments spending money poorly is just a big problem in general.
prevent people from being forced out of their homes
When we build more housing, housing gets cheaper. Certainly it is a tragedy when a family is forced out of their beloved home. But it is also a tragedy when a family cannot find housing at their price point because more housing was never built. The difference is that the first scenario is just more visible than the second. With any change in land use policy, there will be some people who end up getting the short end of the stick. But it is clear that the long term benefits of making better use of existing land outweigh the negative impacts to a subset of the population who is forced from their homes. Unfortunately, policy makers must take a utilitarian view of harms and benefits in order to make sensible policies.
At the same time, there is no reason we couldn't choose some kind if gradual implementation path in order to minimize these negative consequences. The obvious one is to inform all land owners of their potential LVT tax burden, and allow them to choose either to switch to LVT or to stay with their current taxation scheme. Allow them to keep this choice as long as they want, until the land changes ownership - or after a certain time period for corporate land holdings.
relatively ideal density
There is no such thing as "ideal density", because different people want different things, at different price points. Some people want to live in Manhattan, and some people want to live in Montana, and these options should be available to people, even if they dont always get exactly what they want.
If land is very valuable in a neighborhood, then there should be more housing there. Sure, maybe some people would prefer to live in a townhome in that neighborhood. Some people might want a ranch style house on 5 acres in that neighborhood. But if the land is very valuable, this is a good indication that more, denser housing should be built there so that more people can enjoy the value that the area provides. Allowing people to continue living in low-density housing on very valuable land is allowing these people to hoard this value for themselves.
As land value taxes increase the effective rent on this land, the people who live there will have a choice: pay more to continue living in low density housing, choose to live in higher density housing in the same place, or move to a different place with lower density housing. There is no "wrong" choice, but it is a choice these people should have to make, rather than being allowed to hoard valuable land.
our suburbs and in-city suburbs are generally not near transit, and thus not nearly as land valuable and not as well suited for density.
These are mutable facts about the land. Land value taxes solve a lot of problems, but they work best with sensible zoning reform and appropriate infrastructure development. Low density suburbs should be upzoned and served by transit, along with cycling infrastructure. Importantly, these areas should allow a mix of uses to be built anywhere, allowing shops and social centers to be built among the housing, reducing residents need to commute long distances in the first place.
As a final note - in far to many places in north america, we have overbuilt our infrastructure for the sake of providing people with low density housing at any cost. This should stop. Low density areas need to pay their fair share for the infrastructure that serves them - either by downgrading their infrastructure (eg, gravelling roads), increasing taxes, or increasing the density of their communities until they have sufficient residents that the individual tax burdens are reasonable. They should not get to free-ride off of the more productive (not to mention more egalitarian and ecofriendly) parts of their cities.
It seems like we would end up tearing down all our ideal housing and replacing it with over dense housing, rather than building transit out to the less dense areas where it’s needed.
In general, infrastructure should follow development, not lead it. But thats besides the point. Land value taxes have the biggest impact and create the biggest changes in undervalued land. A rowhouse downtown might see a slight tax increase, with some modest pressure to be redeveloped into a small apartment building. But the surface parking lot across the street will see a huge tax increase. The single family homes out in the burbs might even see a decrease in taxes (since their land is mostly worthless), but the "Up House" will see a huge tax increase. The biggest impact of land value taxes is to stop speculation - land owners who hold a piece of valuable land for decades watching the value go up as everyone else makes the area better and better, only to sell and profit by doing nothing but sitting on their ass.
As far as getting the government to intelligently expand their transit infrastructure to encourage more medium density areas.... again - Georgism is not the solution to all problems. I'm not saying this is not a legitimate problem. It just isn't one of the problems that Georgism solves. This problem requires a different solution, like better guidelines for infrastructure development, or more citizen advocacy for improved transit service.
House ownership should be a right not an investment.
I agree! However, it will take a lot of time and carefully crafted policy to make that happen, without perverse incentives appearing. In the meantime, we have to live in the real world and deal with landlords as a (hopefully temporary) fact of life.
we have to understand that dealing with landlords in a realistic way is a necessary evil.
What is this supposed to prove?
That we don't in fact have to deal with the parasites to have housing avaliable for working people
So do we just... fuck over all the renters living in landlord-owned units for the next 5-20 years while this cool new mass public housing is being built by all those extra construction workers we definitely don't have a shortage of?
Landlord brain: Charge the city then raise the rent due to increased value.
We need to get rid of the 'grandfathering' law. We have standards but existing building can be exempted. A majority of ontario houses would never meet code because of this BS.
My current slum lord is one of those investment landlords who promise the world but refuse to do any maintenance or bare minimum if required by the law.
Fuck invesent leeches and outdated laws
refuse to do any maintenance or bare minimum if required by the law.
This is the business model but they also were able to reap a lot of wind fall due to rising prices for housing.
Landleach tears are delicious.
Gosh yes. The landlords as victims. A novel concept.
I am shocked we don't have this already with new record temperatures every year. 26 is a perfectly reasonable temperature as a MAX and boohoo landlords who would rather leave people live in life threatening heat.
Yeah well they can go fuck themselves
Ya sure. We are low income and our low income shit building charges $250 cdn per air conditioner per season. Like they are going to put airco in. Fucking pipe dream.
My landlord wanted at least an additonal $100 per month if i were to install a window shaker.
No they don't. They've been profiting off of doing no work for decades. They can sell their cottage if that's what it takes for their tenants to have a single reasonable home.
Well, if there was one thing Mao did right...
An air conditioner unit for a single room is as cheap as $140 brand new at Walmart and often used they're just $40 on marketplace. But the tenant pays the power bill. Sure I'll buy you a couple, not exactly a big deal, its your power bill.
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