“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
Modern rent seeking is rooted in a feudal concept. The lord maintained an army that protected the land, and the workers paid the lord for the upkeep of the army that protected them.
Modern landlords provide absolutely nothing but exploitation of their tenants. They take rent and provide nothing anywhere near equal in value.
They are parasites on the working class. Our labor gives them profit, and they offer only what should be ours by right.
We pay to live here. It’s our home. You only rent seek, you fucking parasite.
Not sure why you’re being so heavily downvoted, it’s true. Landlords, due to their position in society benifit from high poverty, less rent control, etc. Working class people want the exact opposite. It’s a clear and obvious dielectic contradiction
That's the issue - do we want people to be homeless? No. So we should proactively fix the situation and build social housing, implement rent control and limits on non occupied structures.
Even setting aside love and empathy, it's to the benefit of society for people to be productive, which is hard when you're scrambling just to meet basic needs. And the cost of homelessness on society (shelters, emergency medical care, crime) outweighs the cost of providing permanent shelter. There have been studies.
Funny you say that, since the reason why houses are so expensive is because landlords are buying all of them to rent, and creating artificial scarcity which drives up the price. They create a problem where the only solution is to pay them.
Without landlords, worst case, housing would be far more inexpensive. Best case we could even make them free, and start treating housing like a human right and fundamental need.
One separate reason housing is expensive in the US, at least, is that most jurisdictions make it very hard to build new housing. Law of supply, if supply goes down, price goes up, if supply goes up, price goes down. Supply hasn't been allowed to increase much for the last few decades, therefore price goes up. If we could double the amount of housing over night, it wouldn't matter how much landlords wanted to buy everything up, they wouldn't be able to keep up.
It's also not enough to just have enough units in total (which we don't have), you also have to have them in places people are actually willing to live. People are on average wanting more and more to live in cities each year. Cities are exactly where it's hardest to build and where we're most short on housing relative to demand.
Location is an obvious factor but so are vacation homes, homes on the market, and homes for rent. Rising rent prices and home prices are the number 1 cause for vacant homes