The Market is also why my company tells us our pay is low, our raises are terrible, and next year we have to take shitty Cigna health insurance and like it. (And is Absolutely definitely not because CIGNA is suddenly one of our single largest clients who we also just closed a new additional deal with.)

if they weren’t charging more than their fucking mortgage for it…

Disgusting freeloaders.

The policy issue to overcome here in America is a robust pension system. Home values are obscene for a lot of reasons but one of the biggest reasons no one does anything about it is because for most non elite Americans the home they own is their most valuable asset and the growth in equity ends up becoming a significant contributor to retirement

Even with that the dream is over; the days of baby boomers buying houses and seeing explosive growth of 12-20k in 1960 to 200ish-k in 2010 or even gen x buying a house for 100k in 1995 and seeing it mature to 400k in 2020 are unsustainable. The people buying 250-400k houses now (like me) would be foolish to expect their homes to be worth millions in 30 years outside of hyperinflation.

But I bet money we will cling to it. It’s difficult having seen the past several generations retire very comfortably via the equity in their home, while we make the $2000 mortgage payment that will get us housing but not this benefit. Another way millennials get fucked out of something that every modern generation before them had. To be fair this one had to die but it just sucks all of this gets saddled on us because it’s not like there’s a strong likelihood social security is getting fixed in time

Hear hear.

Rich people: "Can I have a 4th home, just as a little treat for myself?"

I mean this can happen, but nobody should have to rely on the good will of some random person. Thats one thing i learned as a kid, never trust people with money amounts of that order unless they are legally obligated to fullfill their promises. People can be super cool and nice right until they need money.

You had me in the first half, ngl..

You don't have to rent from a landlord, you should have the ability to rent from a nonprofit, a co-op, etc. Housing is a human right and should never be about profit.

Landlords aren't the exclusive source for short term housing, and don't need to be defended in this way. Advocate for and support collective ownership via housing cooperatives. Landlording is the practice of leeching money from the working class.

Land Contract (sometimes called "contract for deed") provides all of those same benefits, from the same people, to the same people, as renting. It is a bit of a misnomer in that it applies to any real property, and not just "land".

The difference from renting is that with the land contract:

• 1. The monthly price is fixed for the life of the contract;
• 2. After three years (in my state), the occupant begins gaining equity.

Grad students, visa holders, travel nurses, etc. might not necessarily want to purchase the property they are staying in, but they might also find themselves living in that area for longer than they expect. A land contract gives them the security of fixed housing costs and the flexibility of being able to walk away at any time and for any reason. They also allow the occupant to begin earning equity while still living in "temporary" housing, allowing them to save more for the future.

But, in our current market, renting is more lucrative to the landlord.

So how do we drive landlords to offer land contracts instead of rental agreements? We provide property tax exemptions to owner-occupants. We increase the nominal property tax rate: run it sky high. But, the owner-occupant exemption means the effective tax rate for homeowners (including land contract buyers) doesn't actually increase. Only investors - people who own housing they don't live in - will be paying that punitively-high tax rate.

With that sky-high tax on investment properties, today's landlords will be incentivized to become private lenders. They will be taking the exact same financial risk on the exact same people, but now those people will be called "buyers" instead of "tenants".

The only "renting" that will still remain is from landlords who live in one unit of a 2-4 unit property, or a roommate agreement, or short-term use like hotels and motels.

Home ownership is the single best predictor of financial prosperity in the US. Every housing contract should include some sort of provision for equity.

There is a legitimate service being provided there. It just shouldn't be "lords" who provide it.

The problem is that the "lord" is earning tens of thousands of dollars per year for essentially no work. This makes it essentially similar to how a "lord" worked in a Feudalist system. This isn't even capitalism where someone owns capital and uses that capital to generate profit. This is just demanding a payment for being in a place.

Since being a landlord requires essentially no work, landlords can accumulate wealth, buy more property, get even more income, buy more property, etc. More wealth / property means more political power. The main thing that political power will be used for is to gain and retain more wealth, which is equivalent to more power.

Imagine how different would be if nobody could ever rent out more than one property, especially combined with a vacant units tax. You'd still have "landlords" but they would be much less lord-like.

there actually is a legitimate service that landlords provide.

one I don't want to pay for, but also one they don't actually give me. My apartment is still missing several doors and I've been here for a year now. They don't give a fuck. You're also setting it up as if I have a choice but to be serviced. I don't. I don't earn enough money for my bank to want to give me a loan, even if I wanted to be in debt, to buy even the shittiest house on the market here, so I don't have a choice but to live under the thumb of a landlord.

I rent my house to military who don't want to buy because they'll leave in 2-3 years

I'm in a similar situation. Add disability (which means at least 80% of properties aren't suitable without serious adaptation) and benefits to the equation, and I'm considered "too big a risk" (even though having me as a tenant means funnelling government money directly in to landlord's pockets). The polite landlords and agents will play along and pretend to take me seriously before they very obviously put my aplication at the bottom of a pile and never call me back, while some feel comfortable enough to openly discriminate against me, because despite the law saying they can't, no one actually enforces it, and they know they can get away with it. The ratio of applicants per property are so obscenely out of whack, they can place as many illegal conditions as they like, and people will continue to flock, borderline beg, to be allowed to spend 75% of their income on a shitty little hellhole.

I realised that I had to limit myself to only applying to places that are at least £100 less a month than I pay now, and even those automatically reject me on grounds of "affordability", meanwhile my landlord just keeps putting my rent up in an attempt to push me out so they can then charge the next person even more, and I keep paying it because I simply can't find anywhere else suitable to go.

To say it's distressing would be the understatement of the century.

I live in a city where property values have increased by an order of magnitude over about 40 years.

Yes, we have a lot of speculators and wealthy landowners who need to be taxed out of existence.

But we also have a problem where seniors on fixed incomes who have owned their homes for 30 - 50 years cannot afford their property taxes because the land their homes are sitting on has exploded in value.

Not all sequential art is meant to be funny.

Side note: One of the best non-fiction books of all time is Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.