ID: A Sophie Labelle 4 panel comic featuring Stephie in different poses, saying:
Landlords do not provide housing.
They buy and Hold more space than they need for themselves.
Then, they create a false scarcity and profit off of it.
What they’re doing is literally the opposite of providing housing.
Landlords do not create the false scarcity.
Government does, by constantly suppressing new construction.
Government does this via:
- Density zoning, which caps the number of units in places the market would support much more
- Making construction investment uncertain, by slowing permitting processes to a crawl
landl*rds
Say a renter starts doing good job and money wise for themselves. They invest their surplus in investment options like mutual funds and deposits and so on. Then their surplus is enough to invest into real estate. Should they not?
If by “invest in real estate” you mean purchase a property that they will then live in while it appreciates in value, effectively making that property a hedge against inflation, then yes absolutely.
And if after doing that they decide to purchase a second property to rent out, then sure, why not?
But no individual should be allowed to own more than two, maybe three properties.
No corporation (or any legal entity other than a person) should be allowed to own a single-family home or any other classification of single-unit residential property.
And banks should not be able to deny someone a mortgage if the monthly payment would be equal to or less than what that person is paying in rent.
If the landlords do not provide a service, you’re welcome to go to the bank to approve your loan, buy or build a house, maintain it, pay back the loan and deal with delinquent renters and sell it when it’s time for you to move out. None of which concerns you as a renter.
It is a massive PITA and it’s a so-so store of value at best. That there are assholes who charge you through the nose for the rent doesn’t mean it’s a landlord problem. It’s an asshole problem.
Nobody tell this dude about co-ops, market rate housing, non profits, etc.
What is stopping renters to use these then, and give a middle finger to the landlords?
The real estate cartel, the landlords themselves are stopping this. If housing is treated as a human right, their profit evaporates, so they’ll never willingly let that happen. They intentionally make zoning harder, kill government initiatives to make housing cheaper, etc.
It’s like asking a dictator to install democracy. Nothing short of a leftist takeover of the DNC, coupled with large scale local level cooperation, tenant unions, etc will solve this.
Bull-fucking-shit.
20 years ago, houses in my neighborhood were selling for around $50k. Those same houses today hold a current market value of over $800k.
For comparison, the value of the USD has lost roughly 40% in value over the last 20 years, meaning if the houses in my neighborhood were only a “so-so store of value” (tracking inflation) they would be worth roughly $80k today, 10x less than the current market value.
For another comparison, if you put $50k into an index fund that tracked the S&P500 20 years ago, it would be worth roughly $350k today. That’s not even half of the return houses in my neighborhood are getting over the same time period.
Sure it costs a lot of money to maintain a house and pay taxes and insurance over that 20 years and that’s going to eat into those returns. But I can guarantee you I’m paying more than that to rent a similarly-sized property, which you would be doing anyway if you didn’t have the capital to own a home.
You’re sure living in a real estate bubble. Not going to last, thankfully.
A lot of people will probably doubt this when living in the middle of the bubble. But it has happened elsewhere already. China’s RE bubble has melted down spectacularly and their economy is still deflating despite massive government stimulus. I imagine this will be the fate of the American Everything Bubble too, albeit we can’t know when it will happen. The last deflationary episode around 2014 coincided with the meltdown in the American shale oil industry, which as we well know is going to happen again with the decline of the Permian - maybe this will start the bubble bursting.
it’s a so-so store of value at best.
For that to be true you need to be living in a place where price/rent has not doubled or even quadrupled in the past 10 years.
