Rent is theft? I thought rent empowered people. How is it theft for a car rental company to rent you a car at at an airport? How is it theft for uhaul to rent you extra storage space when you need it?
Renting a home to live in is theft. Work with that example in your head, not cars or uhauls. Not many people say hotels are theft (though, it's worth considering as well)
We all gotta start reading beyond volume 1 of capital :( there's a lot of useful stuff in 2 and 3!
I'm surprised so many people are running defence for landlords in the comments
Look I'll be honest, as a renter, I've not heard a realistic alternative that I like better. Do I think landlords should be better regulated? For sure. Do I think housing should be a right, and free, high quality housing should be available everywhere to anyone who wants it? Yes, please!
I like the option to rent a place that's even better than what the baseline option would be. I like that I can move around as I need to. I like that I can get a bigger, better, or just different, place when I have the funds. I like that I never have to deal with broken appliances or roof repairs and get to pick the type of place I want to live in.
I'm not lol. .world is basically Reddit 2.0, warts and capitalists included 😆
Hey I'm not really worried, my landlord is actually really cool. The place I live in is actually better than the place he lives in. My rent is well well below market rate for what I should be paying. I lived in the same place for the past 11 years and he's only raised my rent twice for less than $200 total. Not all landlords are bad, not all of them are in it just to get rich. And not all of us would be able to buy a house regardless of paying rent or not. And I'd much rather pay rent to somebody for a nice place to live then be living in a tent by the river.
Damn, you're right. It's like how I'm not worried about wealth inequality because I lucked out and have a steady 60k a year job with a nice employer. Not all employers are bad.
Or how I don't give a shit about abortion because I made the stone-cold choice to not be a woman.
When things aren't affecting me they don't matter so why are people making a big deal about it?
Nope, gotta kill your landlord and then get in a shootout with the cops when they come to ~~his~~ your house, you heard the tankies. Time to die for their utopia soldier!
Rent isn't theft. It's payment for a service. Whether or not that service is of value to you is a different story, but not everyone is interested in owning.
There are benefits to renting. You don't have to be financially responsible for repairs, you don't have to do maintenance or pay someone to do it for you, you have much less financial risk, and you can relocate much easier.
And not all landlords are rich people. I do agree that corporate ownership of residential property shouldn't be allowed, though.
Rent isn’t theft. It’s payment for a service.
What service does the land speculator provide to the tenant? The landlord doesn't develop the property, that's the builder. The landlord doesn't maintain the property, that's done by contractors. The landlord doesn't secure the property, that's done by the state. The landlord often doesn't even finance the property, as the property is inevitably mortgaged and underwritten by banks one step removed from the title holder.
Quite literally, the only thing landlords do is collect the check and transfer portions of it onward. They are, at best, payment processors. And even this job is routinely outsourced to a third party.
There are benefits to renting.
There are lower institutional barriers to renting than to owning, largely resulting from the artificial shortage of public land and public housing. Rents are the consequence of real estate monopolization and public malinvestment. Once the landlords themselves vanish, the "benefits" of renting vanish with them.
And not all landlords are rich people.
There's an old joke Donald Trump likes to tell, back in the 90s when he was underwater on his personal holdings. He's driving through Lower Manhattan in a limo with his daughter and he points out the window to a homeless man. Then he quips, "I'm $800M poorer than that man". To which his daughter replies, "If that's true why are we in a limo while he's out on the street?"
Should hotels be illegal too? That’s basically renting out a room by the day. What if you cannot afford to buy a house, or only want to live somewhere temporarily? If you cannot rent any place to live, what would you do?
As with most things, it is a matter of degree.
The key thing that the landlord handles is risk. If the roof is very expensive to fix, that is not the contractor's problem. If the property does not generate revenue, that is not the bank's problem. If the property is not worth the cost to build, that is not the builder's problem. If the property is unsafe to live in, that is not the renter's problem.
The landlord's financial risk in the property (should) provide an incentive to maintain and make use of that property.
I'm not saying there aren't other system of distribution people to homes, and I'm not saying that the capitalist system in the US is the best system to do it. I'm just pointing out that a core principle of capitalism is risk, and that is what the landlord provides, a single point buffer of risk for the other parties involved.
Go and have a look at property prices over the last 50 years and see how risky it is.
You're intentionally leaving out that the landlord maintains the property and appliances. That's no small thing.
There are absolutely bad landlords who will do as little as their tenants will allow them to, for sure. Landlords aren't like cops though, the continuing existence of bad landlords is not enabled by good ones like how "good cops" do.
The landlord uses my rent money to pay others to maintain the property. It's an entirely middle man position of zero value to society
You can own a property and pay landscapers and handyman for less than the cost of renting. Hell, I've had landlords pay property managers to handle even that.
Good landlords will only be as good as they need to be, to continue renting. In a housing shortage, that means they will keep getting worse over time, doing little and hearing little from their tenants who have only ever dealt with predatory landlords.
They will almost always charge as much as they can, not doing anything to help the renters.
The exceptions to this will be invisible on the market, because renters will do everything in their power to never move out or change their situation.
Long time renters are trapped, because they are paying nearly as much as a mortgage, and getting no equity from it, unable to save a down payment to get out of it.
Renting to seasonal, temp workers or students is about the only exception where renting is a necessary service, but currently its way over priced, so its not a great value. So still predatory.
Been renting the last 20 years, and I can rightfully say FUCK YOU!!!
I do not believe that which was created through collective labor should be able to be enclosed, so that the encloser can extort others for access.
The house was not built by its owner. It was erected, decorated, and furnished by innumerable workers--in the timber yard, the brick field, and the workshop, toiling for dear life at a minimum wage.
The money spent by the owner was not the product of his own toil. It was amassed, like all other riches, by paying the workers two-thirds or only a half of what was their due.
Moreover--and it is here that the enormity of the whole proceeding becomes most glaring--the house owes its actual value to the profit which the owner can make out of it. Now, this profit results from the fact that his house is built in a town possessing bridges, quays, and fine public buildings, and affording to its inhabitants a thousand comforts and conveniences unknown in villages; a town well paved, lighted with gas, in regular communication with other towns, and itself a centre of industry, commerce, science, and art; a town which the work of twenty or thirty generations has gone to render habitable, healthy, and beautiful.
A house in certain parts of Paris may be valued at thousands of pounds sterling, not because thousands of pounds' worth of labour have been expended on that particular house, but because it is in Paris; because for centuries workmen, artists, thinkers, and men of learning and letters have contributed to make Paris what it is to-day--a centre of industry, commerce, politics, art, and science; because Paris has a past; because, thanks to literature, the names of its streets are household words in foreign countries as well as at home; because it is the fruit of eighteen centuries of toil, the work of fifty generations of the whole French nation.
Who, then, can appropriate to himself the tiniest plot of ground, or the meanest building, without committing a flagrant injustice? Who, then, has the right to sell to any bidder the smallest portion of the common heritage?
Kropotkin
These days it is hard to own a house, its like the system is designed to cater to the burguoise - because it is. Regular people cant have their own personal ownership because capitalist leeches known as landlords exist.
The system feeds on the profiting of others misfortunes.
I’m very lucky to have my own house. The number of spam calls I get from randos trying to buy houses is staggering. Some are obviously from call centers. I don’t understand how it makes financial sense to pay people to cold call every fucking homeowner in the US constantly in the hopes that they catch someone looking to sell quickly (and cheaply?). WTF is their endgame?
I kinda want to get everyone on board with refusing to sell single family houses to anyone who isn’t going to live there as their primary residence. Back in the not so old days, people would refuse to sell to “undesirables” because they didn’t want to tank property values, which would also carry significant reputational harm. We need to use that energy for good.
In theory, developers who would replace single family houses with multiple houses, townhomes or condos would be OK. We do need more housing in general. Although, IDK if real estate developers are a trustworthy bunch.
In theory, developers who would replace single family houses with multiple houses, townhomes or condos would be OK. We do need more housing in general. Although, IDK if real estate developers are a trustworthy bunch.
Trustworthiness of developers is a moot point because exclusionary zoning laws prohibit that replacement in the vast majority of urban areas anyway.
That's what so many people in this thread don't get: the law, designed to give even more privilege to already-privileged single-family homeowners, creates literal housing shortages (in the places people actually want to live, because housing is not fungible between locations), and then they somehow confuse that government mandated distortion of supply vs. demand as "capitalism." They keep blaming "foreign investors" and other scapegoats, but they're not the real cause of the problem.
This is exactly why I own. Yeah it sucks dealing with maintenance and HOA bullshit, but, no. I won't enrich some piece of shit for no gain.
My God, it’s so simple. Just buy a house!
My hot take, you shouldn’t be allowed to rent out single family homes under 2k sqft. Larger homes and multi family buildings are fair game for real estate investors. Lots of holes in my opinion. Maybe it would incentivize building more apartments. Are homes under 2k sqft being built anymore?
This would incentivize only building houses that are 2,001 ft² or larger, so they can rent them.
my hot take is that no one should own more than one house
There should always be a rental market of all sizes.
I was thinking you should be capped at the number of residential properties you own regardless of size.
Maybe increase property tax rate of subsequent properties by a multiplier?
Second property, additional 10%, third property 15%, and so on. Maybe 10, than 20, then 30, etc... Whatever drives down ownership and home costs.
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