I don't think private landlords are really that bad. Renting out your dead nan's house or buying a duplex to letting the other half is fine as long as you charge appropriate rent and treat your tenants well. In an ideal world, houses would not be investments but rather something that everyone can own and live in, but we're not going to get that by going cold turkey as some people are suggesting. Reform is slow and boring but usually works out better than trying to tear everything down at once.
The real problem is companies buying up an absurd number of units and hoarding the available housing stock while squeezing tenants and generally just being miserable landlords.
Imo if you own more than the house you personally reside in, you can go to hell.
Pretty sad to see this kind of attitude. The problem IMO is buying with the intent to rent, and companies owning too much property. I rent, but I don't think that if you inherit something you're immediately a bad person until you sell it. Or if you bought something while single, once you move in with a significant other you're a bad person. I wouldn't have a problem renting from people like this either. There needs to be % cap on company rentals, and there needs to be a cap on private properties owned, but I don't personally think the number has to be 1.
Owning more property and being richer than me doesn't make someone automatically a bad person. People nowadays can only see black and white. We're so frustrated and tired of dealing with shit that we can't empathize with fellow human beings. Not everyone is a "real estate investment firm".
No second helpings until everyone has grabbed a plate policy.
What if I find myself in a situation when I have 2 houses? How can I become a better person?
As an example of the problem, no one in my entire social circle has any hope of ever owning property, and many of us are just barely skirting homelessness. Unfortunately this is extremely common in the same world where some people own multiple homes. If you found yourself in that situation, I imagine the best course of action depends on where you live, but a good choice might be to convert your property into a non-equity low-income housing cooperative. There are lots of other options though, the main thing is just to get it into the hands of people who need it.
What if I have a secret family?
I kind of find it funny that people on Lemmy are so strictly against owning multiple houses, while it was completely ordinary for many people in my country (Croatia) to own two houses while the country was under literal socialist government (Yugoslavia).
This tbh
Y'all forget some people don't want to own. When you rent, your landlord fixes what breaks.
Move in with the landlord in their one house.
establish 👏 tenant 👏 owned 👏 cooperatives 👏
Eli5 can an apartment complex do that?
Depends on your region, but in general if you can find at least 3 people you want to live with, you can apply to establish a cooperative.
Do note that securing a mortgage would probably be a bit harder than buying on your own, but with more people you can acquire a larger space and split the costs that way.
Fundamentally, it's unlikely it will be cheaper than buying outright - however you'll have a community of people to rely on if at any point you become temporarily unable to pay your installments, which can make it safer than self-ownership.
But the biggest plus comes when the mortgage is paid off, as then the coop can decide if you'd rather slash prices to include just bills, or keep the same monthly amount but put the extra towards a shared coop fund that can be used to convert more landlord owned properties into cooperative housing.
In my area - non-mortgaged coop properties have about 40% lower monthly payments.
So condominiums essentially?
The idea is sound but for most places I've heard of (ie in my city), condos just pay a management company to do all the landlord stuff, so even as an owner, I still have to call some crabby woman when the roofers drilled a hole in my A/C and fight with her -- and then also fight with the roofers -- to get it fixed
IF yOu ArE ANtICAPiTaLIST Why dO yOU HavE A JOb? energy I'm getting from this post.
No, I don't think renting out your first home is a grave issue, but it's a snow flake in the avalanche for why housing is unaffordable. Housing is either a necessity that should be affordable, or an investment that grows and grows in value. Society has to pick one. And it would be obviously ruinuos for the status quo of housing to outpace inflation to continue.
Just put a limit on the prices. I still get value from the house i lived in before i moved(especially because maintaining a house costs a lot of money) and stupid landlords cant hike prices up.
There are situations where it does make sense to rent or put a property up for rent. For example, if you are relocating temporary for a job or education, it would make a lot of sense to get a short term lease, rather than buy or stay in a hotel (depending on price, of course). An individual who know that a property of theirs won't be used for some time can then lease it out to this person. It's a win-win, as tenants don't deal with the process of closing or the responsibility of ownership, and the landlord makes some extra cash on the underutilized property.
However, the problem really comes down to when it becomes a business. Companies buy up large quantities of land and property and rent them out, allowing them to shift the costs of mortgage and taxes to the tenant while reaping the benefits of increasing equity. Furthermore, the amount of property for sale decreases, artificially lowering supply for housing to own. This drives up costs. As the company buys up more and more property, they also get to jack up the prices because of their local monopoly. In the individual landlords case, this wouldn't happen because they have to compete with the rest of the diverse market. So overall, prices go up for housing everywhere.
I see a few paths to a solution.
- Limit the number of properties a corporation/individual can lease and/or increase taxes exponentially. This prevents the ability to lease out tons of property, while still allowing businesses to own multiple properties as needed for actual work.
- Remove restrictions on single family only housing and residential zoning. This is mainly a US issue, but it would allow for denser housing options, increasing supply in places where that is currently impossible. It would also create more opportunities for economic growth, as placing residencies in areas with businesses reduces demand on cars and makes it easier to network with people.
Robespierre: "You get the guillotine! You get the guillotine! You ALL get the guillotine!"
Wasn't that the same guy who revolted against the french government, got they're heads cut off, and then got his head cut off?
He might have gotten a little guillotine happy, but, honestly, once you've beheaded one royal you'll always be chasing that high so who can really judge?
You just made me spit tea on my keyboard
I think its a weird argument to say all landlords are evil because even if they were forced to sell their real estate properties, they would just put their wealth elsewhere. They would instead become shareholders or creditors.
The problem is more so in general with people that have a lot of wealth, regardless of how they choose to hold it.
And furthermore, the problem isn’t even with people that have a bit of wealth, it’s with billionaires. If we taxed those assholes properly then governments could just afford to build high rises which would drive real estate prices down.
Landlords are unique in that they are entirely rent-seeking, ie they create no new value at all and seek to eternally gain income without losing any amount of ownership.
Billionaires are certainly the most excessive, but all Capitalists work against the Proletariat.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent
I really want more people to engage with the idea that the utter worst thing a person can do in a economic sense is "rent-seek". The IDEA of turn key businesses, investment properties, money for nothing means you are taking from someone else.
They've attempted to expand this downward into welfare, but that's a ridiculous canard that doesn't examine just how much money is being siphoned from the working class by people who leverage capital against them.
Wealth inequality is definitely a huge problem, but the issue with landlords is that they are artificially restricting the supply of, and price gouging an already incredibly limited resource that scene needs to survive. At least with food, someone else can always make more and sell it for cheaper, or you can decide to eat something else. But with how housing is now, it’s not uncommon for just a few companies to snatch up nearly all available houses in an area, and there’s only so much “I’ll just move a little farther out” before you are an unsustainable distance from your workplace. That isn’t true of hardly any other market.
i think the "who is getting the guillotine?" is malicious framing. i assume u just worded it that way because it sounds funny but it still has effect of making ppl more reluctant to voice criticism.
no landlords should be killed. their private property should be transfered to a public ownership model and portions of their financial wealth should potentially be seized. ideally all housing would be made public but as a transitionary step, at least private housing should be.
for your examples, since we currently dont have good options for simply making those houses into public property, with the peopl who previosly owned them getting dibs on living there, its fair for them to keep the houses as private property for a while, without living there. letting other people live there for the meantime is also a good idea. just let them live there for free, under the condition of keeping the house livable and paying for upcomming costs. maybe offer yourself as a hireable manager for the house, if you want to get moeny out of it. why should people have to pay you for using something you dont need, if thats not reducing the value?
and yes, i am aware that being ethical with ones private property is hard, because its discouraged by current policies and public mentalities, but that doesnt mean its something we shouldnt strive for, on an individual and grander social level.
I have literally seen multiple people here within the past few days making jokes about killing all landlords.
Except that it isn't malicious framing to some on Lemmy.
How about buying a cheap house that needs a lot of work and renting out rooms to your friends so that all of you can have an affordable place to live?
I think that's just called informally splitting a mortgage, homie
If the mortgage is in your name and you charge them rent, you don't co-own the house, you're a landlord that's gaslighting your "friends" and probably getting free maintenance and labor to boot.
Everyone would be on the mortgage if the goal wasn't to exploit them to build your own equity.
Do you exploit them less than others would? Possibly. Or maybe not depending on circumstance. Congratulations on being the last in the line.
I feel like corporation or rich person who owns a shit ton of properties for the specific use of renting as their only means of income is much more evil than working class guy who invested in a second property because that’s what he was told he was supposed to do as a “smart investment.”
But the whole privately owned land where rent can be collected thing is a garbage system that creates serfdom and serves the rich while damaging society as a whole.
Renting isnt the problem. If tou own two houses and an apartment and rent out them except the one youre living in that isnt really the problem. When a single person owns a whole city thats the problem. Most people rent out houses/apartments as a small passive income. If its your only form of income that means youre not really contributing to society. Youre getting money for an asset that already exists.
