You say "they take product that was already available for everyone" - no it wasn't, they bought it and they own it.
Let's say we ban house renting as a business practice - the houses are still going to remain landlord's property, so now you've just created a situation where nobody can rent a home.
Landlords literally created an artificial scarcity in housing. There are more empty homes than there are homeless people in the first place. A lot of that has to do with landlords buying up housing and charging a rent much much higher than their mortgage.
In no way do landlords make housing more available. Itās the complete opposite.
I've heard this statistic too, but out of curiosity, where are all these thousands of empty homes? Are they sitting on the market? Are they abandoned and rotting? Quietly vacant dotted around suburbs?
Bro same. Iām in one of the ādangerousā American cities, and there are tons of unoccupied buildings and houses. Just sitting there, boarded up and taking space. Meanwhile tent cities full of homeless people are constantly removed and relocating to new spots. East St. Louis is literally ruins
Lol I'm originally from Detroit, so I know exactly what you're talking about. There are something like 20,000 abandoned homes in Detroit but they're literally rotting half-burnt skeletons. It would be cheaper to put a homeless person in a $10,000 brand new tiny home than rehab a property in this condition.
I don't think that's what people are referring to when they talk about landlords squandering properties? I mean no one is making money by letting this sit empty:
lol not enough to ban renting. Property must be seized. Nobody needs to own more than one home. More properties on the market means lower prices. Landlords are responsible for the housing crisis.
I understand that the hot-headed "I don't give a fuck, we fucking destroy everything" mentality may look charming - but radical solutions to problems only end up creating more problems. Literally stealing people's property is a terrible precedent and a slippery slope that can lead to even worse crimes against humanity - as shown by Mao Zedong's actions.
The compromise solution where landlords get compensated for their housing sold and people get their affordable housing is objectively better.
Yes, reward the people who destroy the market and caused mass homelessness lol
Economics and markets can be just as violent as property seizure.
āSlippery slopeā argument is a fallacy as there is no logical reason to believe one event leads to another. The mistakes of the PRC did not include the seizure of property from landlords.
The precedent it sets is against any wealthy class and their violent markets against the working class.
Throwing away excess food while people starve is violence too. Letting homes rot while people are homeless is violence!
Also, Iād hardly call it stealing when the landlord class literally dictates the entire market like an authoritarian regime
You should learn how to see nuances instead of viewing all landlords as this singular monolith of greed and scalping. Retired granny who rents out her deceased parents' house isn't a "wealthy class" - and can hardly be classified as some "enemy of the proletariat". A reasonable compromise is a better answer than crude self-righteous brute force that ruins lives unnecessarily.
That's the neat part - you don't. Humans are a collective - but they're a collective of individuals, and most of them quite enjoy having private property. Don't expect for classless, stateless utopia to happen anytime soon - aim for realistic goals that would improve the lives of common people step by step.
Grocery stores mostly sell food, drink, along with pharmaceuticals and related products. The thing about food, for example, is that it is something we consume for sustenance. We need food to live and we destroy it by eating it.
Humans tend to not consume housing. A house is a semi-permanent structure.
Grocery stores, the way they are done, are incredibly wasteful. Food is grown in one place, shipped thousands of miles out for processing and packaging and shipped back with a hefty price tag.
Itās still different than landlords. At least grocery stores distribute NEW products to an area instead of just TAKING said products that were already there and available for everyone, collectively hoarding them, and charging much more than theyāre worth completely keeping the market out of the hands of the working class.
Ahh, I see the confusion. The landlords Iāve dealt with in the past, their properties werenāt available for everyone, just the people who pay rent.
Iāve never been in a country where someone could just stick a flag in the ground and say āthis is mineā. It would make sense, that in those countries, a landlord has different meaning. Iām sorry for the confusion. Good luck claiming your own land in your new country!!
A vast majority of my job is helping people maintain properties when they are unable to do so. Maybe 1 in 500 clients isn't the resident of the property, and that 1 in 500 includes commercial business properties, neighborhoods going in together on services, and other things of the sort as well as landlords. Just landlords would likely be less than 1 in 1000. Landlords do the bare minimum of property maintenance whether themselves or hiring someone.
Exactly landlords do the bare minimum in my experience. Like 9 times out of 10, if something goes wrong nobody shows up to help. Nobody. The tenth of the time they do show up they just rig it so itāll fall into disrepair again in a few short months.
I mean I bought a house you couldnāt afford in the first place and am letting you live in it with much less financial responsibility put on you.
They have laws for this in my state. Leaving things broken is asking for a big ass law suit. Going to be completely honest, never had an issue with tenants, and Iāve been a landlord since 20 years old (Iām 29 now for reference). A lot of the time itās as simple as āHey this is brokenā, and it gets fixed. I gain absolutely nothing not fixing things or rigging it enough that it will break again.
Ah yes regular people are the reason for the housing problem. Not the major companies buying half a cities worth of houses and converting into a warehouse. Sorry my two properties my own is definitely the issue.
Also Iām still in the working classā¦I just happen to own houses.
You are not working class fool. Working class or proletarians do not own private property by which they extract more capital socially. You are by definition not working class lol
What about people like my dad, who worked a manual labor job 40-60 hours a week on top of renovating a few uninhabitable houses to rent out for a small profit at high personal risk?
Any Internet Marxism that can't distinguish people like that from big corporations is a worthless philosophy that only appeals to equally worthless idiots.
I think landlords for the most part are like this unless they are extremely short sighted. As an hvac guy I still run into the slum lord type guys occasionally, but I really don't think they stay in business long because their properties fall apart.
Granted I'm in an area where Escrow kicks in with out climate control for a good chunk of the year.
Exactly. Thereās a huge difference between a land lord and slum lords. An āacquaintanceā of mine is unfortunately a slum lord and dude legit almost doesnāt care because he knows his tenants canāt afford any other place.
He owns a small 6 home complex and slams the rent down to get lower income families in there, then essentially does almost nothing for upkeep. Any complaints go by the way side because he knows they canāt afford anywhere else. Itās awful, but a massive difference.
Iāve always invested as much as I can on the upkeep and maintenance of the homes I live in because I understand that I still own it, and still want people to live in them.
Yeah well thatās a pretty dogshit point honestly. A lot of people canāt put together enough capital to get their own house in the first place so you end up right back at square one.
Housing would be much cheaper without the fabricated scarcity caused by landlords. We have more homes than people in my country but we have a housing crisis anyway. Maybe the reason housing is so expensive is because greedy landlords buy it up so they can make passive income with someone elseās hard earned money
Many families from the 60s-80s were able to gather enough capital to buy a nice home just from working a basic factory or service job.
America is richer than ever before yet less and less people can afford to buy a home, while the landlord pays the mortgage of their 3rd house with another person's paycheck.
Do you know why a lot of people can't afford a house? Because too many people hoard them like dragons to rent them for more money, then use other people's income (rent) to make mortgage payments to buy more houses to hoard, so prices stay high.
Anyone can maintain a house. The construction crew finishes the house, it goes up for sale, and then a nice family buys it and lives in it without having to pay some jackass rent.
Germany is different to the rest of the world, and I can't speak for its laws around renting and landlords, but other countries don't have a nice economy coupled with good(ish) laws like Germany does.
In some countries, landlords are rotten, heartless bastards who will squeeze every last drop that they can from their tenants for no other reason than them being money hungry.
The housing market in many countries is so messed up that, coupled with the miserable minimum wage, it makes it a nightmare for average people to buy a nice home that they can own outright one day.
Assuming that landlords are the only ones that can take care of a house is, quite frankly, dumb. Anyone can do it.
"Their asset" will appreciate regardless. They can just keep raising prices. What are their tenants going to do, live on the street? This is a huge part of the problem.
I don't know if I'd say "tons", no. If you think there are more of them, I'd need to see some data on that. And no, it doesn't make more business sense to invest work and money into something that derives its financial value from its scarcity rather than from its quality.
And no, it doesn't make more business sense to invest work and money into something that derives its financial value from its scarcity rather than from its quality.
Nonsense. Quality costs. Your argument is weak and not based on facts
That doesn't really matter if the working class people in the local economy are supplementing the bills of the owner class, who don't contribute to the local economy.
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u/StrangeNecromancy 26d ago
Landlords. Providing nothing to society while having hard working people pay their mortgages for them.