Reason I’m asking is because I have an aunt that owns like maybe 3 - 5 (not sure the exact amount) small townhouses around the city (well, when I say “city” think of like the areas around a city where theres no tall buildings, but only small 2-3 stories single family homes in the neighborhood) and have these houses up for rent, and honestly, my aunt and her husband doesn’t seem like a terrible people. They still work a normal job, and have to pay taxes like everyone else have to. They still have their own debts to pay. I’m not sure exactly how, but my parents say they did a combination of saving up money and taking loans from banks to be able to buy these properties, fix them, then put them up for rent. They don’t overcharge, and usually charge slightly below the market to retain tenants, and fix things (or hire people to fix things) when their tenants request them.
I mean, they are just trying to survive in this capitalistic world. They wanna save up for retirement, and fund their kids to college, and leave something for their kids, so they have less of stress in life. I don’t see them as bad people. I mean, its not like they own multiple apartment buildings, or doing excessive wealth hoarding.
Do leftists mean people like my aunt too? Or are they an exception to the “landlords are bad” sentinment?
No raindrop thinks itself responsible for the flood.
Don’t take it personally, but landlordism is fundamentally parasitism. It’s a matter of fact that private property, whether it’s a townhouse or a factory, enables its owners to extract value from working people. If people personally resent landlords like your aunt, it’s probably not so much because that’s where the theory guides them as it is that almost everyone has had a bad experience with a landlord or knows someone who did. Landlords have earned a bad reputation.
For most of my life I was not interested in owning a home. Owning meant I couldn’t pick up and move or travel when I got the urge, which I did several times. One time while in a foreign country for a stay of undetermined length, I was able to contact an old landlord and secure a place to stay when I learned my return date. How would I have had a place to stay if landlords did not exist?
“Land contract”.
A land contract starts out similar to a rental agreement. You make fixed monthly payments. If you stay in the home for 3 years, it automatically converts to a private mortgage, and the first three years of “rent” becomes your down payment. If you leave before a year, you forfeit your “security deposit”, just like renting. If you leave before 3 years, you gain no equity; again, just like renting.
If you ever do decide to settle down in one spot, you’re already well on your way to ownership.
I would solve the rental problem by creating a massive, punitively high tax rate on all residential properties, and issuing an equivalent tax exemption to owner-occupants. A land contract is recorded with the county, much like a deed or a lien, and the buyer/tenant would be considered the “owner” for tax purposes.
That’s nice that you found a place to stay after traveling the world, that you found some personal benefit from a system that leaves more than half a million people without proper housing (at least in the US). What does that have to do with anything that I wrote?
Presumably because he/she is a person who wants to live somewhere without the hassle of having to own a house and that is impossible without landlords. And they are not the only one like that.
So your idea that all of it is parasitism has met someone, arguably you mean to help, who likes landlords. Because despite what some people think, a lot don’t want to sign on the immense debt for a house nor maintain it. Landlords provide a service in that case and why is it your right to deny renters and landlords that service?
That doesn’t mean there aren’t parasitic landlords because there very much are. But a blanket statement that it’s all bad seems foolish. Perhaps nuance is very much lost on people nowadays.
I don’t disagree that landlords are for the most part acting parasitically. However I would argue that in order for society to function “parasitism” is a requirement. I want to be clear and state that THIS form isn’t required, but some form is.
Let me explain my thinking. Nearly half of the population doesn’t work. The population of non workers can almost entirely fall within these categories: children, attending school, disabled (mentally or physically), or retired.
These populations need money even though they are not producing any. I would guess that most of the extracted profit that comes out of “mom and pop” rentals goes to providing for non-worker expenses.
Now I believe these expenses should be covered by taxations and redistribution of the factor income, but since we have a pathetic system of this in the US it’s hard for me to fault someone for using investment property to hedge against child care and/or retirement
I am not as well read as I would like, but I don’t think Marxist theory really faults anyone for acting in their apparent self-interest. The point is to become aware that you belong to a class with common interests, likely the working class, and that you can team up with your fellow workers and tenants to build leverage and get a better deal. Eventually, you can stop surrendering the wealth you and your class create to the minority bourgeoisie class.
To your point, a landlord who also has to hold down a regular job is still part of the working class. However, they might fall into the subcategories of labor aristocracy or petit bourgeoisie. Because they have it a little better, they’re less reliable or even traitorous in the class struggle compared to regular workers, even though they rarely have the juice to make it into the bourgeoisie.
What you’re talking about, I wouldn’t call parasitism.
The owner of a home has “freedom”. When you buy a home, you are free to do with it what you want. What makes landlords parasites is that the tenant is paying for that landlord’s “freedom”, but they are not receiving it themselves.
You can only say that landlords extract value from working people if they take money without giving anything in return. But landlords provide housing, which is certainly of great value.
Emotional reasoning tells us this is parasitism in the following ways:
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we believe housing is a human right therefore no one can claim they provide it as a value - it’s something we are all entitled to.
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once a house exists it seems like the landlord doesn’t “do” anything in order to provide the housing, except sit there and own it. So this must be theft because they are getting something for nothing.
#1 I understand and if you feel this then work to have it enacted as law in your homeland, because until it is enshrined in the system, you can’t expect anyone to just give away housing.
#2 is somewhat naive, because owning a house has costs including (minimally) taxes, insurance, and maintenance. Owning housing always carries a large risk too - you could incur major damage from a flood, hurricane, earthquake. And those are incredibly expensive to recover from. Not for renters, though - they just move.
The most important question of all is: how does housing come into being? If we make housing something that cannot be offered as a value, who will build? The up front cost to build housing is enormous and it may take decades of “sitting there doing nothing” to collect enough rent to recoup that.
People make all the same arguments about lending money. It’s predatory and extracts value from the people. But without the ability to borrow money, no one could build or buy a home, or start a business.
Much could be done to improve how lending and landlording work, to make them more fair and less exploitative, but when people say that in their very essence they are evil I think they are just naive children seeing mustache twirling villains everywhere.
It’s not emotional reasoning. The rental income that a landlord collects is not a wage based on any labor that they do. It is a dividend on a real estate investment. The crucial mechanism to a rental property investment is the license to withhold or take away housing from people. That’s what makes landlordism extractive and parasitic. Landlords simply do not provide housing. They capture it and extort people for temporary permission to live in it.
If you want some emotional reasoning as to why people resent landlords, here’s a short list I wrote from a similar thread:
- Almost everyone has had or knows someone who’s had to deal with an especially neglectful or difficult landlord;
- landlords have been engaging in notoriously greedy and abusive behavior since the industrial revolution;
- landlords aren’t doing themselves any favors they way some of them publicly brag and whine about being landlords;
- and there’s just something that isn’t right about owning someone else’s home and probably everyone has some faint sense of that.
You skipped the most important question, as all anti-landlord idealists do.
how does housing come into being?
Well one “simple” way is for all the builders to be rolled up into the civil service: the government pays them to do their job, i.e. build houses, which the government then owns and allows people to live in. This must necessarily be rent-free, otherwise the government becomes one massive landlord therefore not solving the problem, and also takes the bottom out of the mortgage market because why would anyone buy when they can just move into government-provided housing without a 25-year millstone tied round their necks. It also creates a ton of job security because it means you can just walk away from a shitty employer without fear of becoming homeless.
It also drops anyone with a mortgage into the worst possible negative equity problem, which will be a massive problem for a massive number of people, therefore has zero chance of ever being voted in. So for this to work there has to be a solution to the mortgage problem, e.g. the government buys all that housing stock for the current outstanding mortgage amount, but that’s a massive investment into something that now necessarily has zero value, which would likely crash the economy. IANAE so it’d be interesting to get a real economist’s view on how this might all work in practice.
Yeah as your air quotes indicate, it’s simple to say but extremely problematic to do. Still, there are incremental approaches to this. Public housing does exist, it’s just extremely small so it doesn’t have any of those systemic effects. We should dial it up. But until it’s universal, it will always face the good old American problem of “my taxes shouldn’t but you free stuff.” It’s things to like this that make UBI look simple.
“Landlords provide housing like scalpers provide concert tickets.”
https://lifehacker.com/why-everyone-hates-landlords-now-1849100799
That said, I do think there need to be ways to rent housing rather than buy it, since many people need that flexibility. Looks like the answer to that might be community land trusts?
The answer you receive will vary based on which political ideology you ask.
I will answer from the perspective of an anarchist.
Your Aunt and her Husband are not committing the greatest of evils, but in the grand scheme of things, they’re a part of a bigger problem, one that they themselves would not even perceive, and in fact would have strong personal incentives not to grant legitimacy were it explained to them.
Anarchists, or libertarian socialists, are generally against the concept of private property in all forms. This is not to be confused with personal property, which are things you personally own and use, such as the house you live in, your car, your tools.
Private property is something you own to extract profit from simply by the act of owning it, and necessarily at the deprivation and exploitation of someone else.
By owning those townhomes that they themselves do not live in, they are able to exploit the absolute basic human requirement for shelter in an artificially restricted market, and thus acquire surplus value in a deal of unequal leverage.
You could argue they are justified due to offering below market rates, taking on the financial risk of owning and maintaining the property, and fronting the capital to own the investment.
But the issue is: their choice to become landlords is what in fact creates the conditions for which they can then offer solutions in order to claim moral justification.
For if we consider if landlordism were completely abolished, and people were only allowed to own homes they personally use, it would result in an insane amount of housing stock to flood the market, causing housing prices to plummet. This would in turn allow millions of lower income people to be able to afford a home and pay it off quickly, allowing them to actually build wealth for the first time instead of most of it going to pay off rent (remember, your aunt charging below market is the exception, not the norm).
Most humans would much rather pay off a small mortgage on a non-inflated home themselves, instead of paying off someone else’s artifically inflated mortgage and then some.
But that’s all assuming we have a housing market still. In an ideal Anarchist society, housing would be a human right, and every human would have access to basic shelter and necessities of life, like was enacted for a short time in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War.
So anarchists want Basic from the Expanse pretty much?
Basic in the world of the Expanse provided people with a very basic apartment with a bed, table and a TV along with three nutritionally complete (not delicious) meals per day for free.
If you wanted anything more, you had to work or enlist.
Yeah, that sounds about right. I only read the first few chapters of the expanse, but I believe the world is still capitalist overall, yes? if so, that would make it more in line with perhaps the end goal of a social democrat, where there’s a super strong welfare and social safety net, but still capital and big businesses.
The assumption from Anarchists is achieving that Social Democrat ideal is impossible under capitalism, as it would remove almost all of the leverage corporations have to exploit their workers, leaving little profit left for them, and thus inciting them to revolt, like they almost did during The Business Plot in response to FDR’s new deal finally giving the working class some room to breathe.
I think the backstory is so that there aren’t enough jobs for everyone due to automation, so they offer people who don’t want much the option of Basic (income), with the option to get more if they get a job or start a business.
(remember, your aunt charging below market is the exception, not the norm)
Isn’t this definitionally true? The norm, by definition, is the market rate.
Yes. You shouldn’t be allowed to have a second house to rent out. The problem is limited supply in a given area, and if everyone buys a second, third, fourth house (or townhouse) then there is no supply left for people that want to actually buy to live in that house. Frankly I think it’s unethical. There are plenty of other ways to invest your money.
I also don’t think this position is limited to leftists, although yes the leftists here have a very dramatic take. I think anyone that thinks about this should see the problem.
Who is allowed to rent to the people who don’t want to buy?
Should the city own property just for that and run it as a non-profit?
The community should have ownership of whatever rentals are necessary and it should be not for profit.
Yes. The ability to have a place to live should be a basic human right and therefore be affordable.
If that means the government* subsidises it for the low income families (as in owns them and rents them at below market value), so be it.
We used to have “council houses” in the UK for exactly this purpose, but in the 70s, Thatcher came up with a “right to buy” (at a decent discount) and then made two mistakes - there were no restrictions after buying to stop you selling to anyone else, and there was no building of replacement stock after they were sold. So the result 50 years later is that there are nowhere near enough council houses any more, and a lot of the old ones are privately owned and being rented out at market rates, which are (depending on the area) very expensive.
*local or national, I don’t really care which
If that means the government* subsidises it for the low income families (as in owns them and rents them at below market value), so be it.
Not everybody who doesn’t want to buy is low income. I’m too lazy / risk averse to maintain everything myself, so I happily pay my landlord a reasonable premium to bear the risk of shit burning down (or breaking in less dramatic ways) for me. I also like that I would be able to pack up and move without worrying about selling my old place. I might change my mind later on, but right now I’m good.
Why should governments subsidize the lifestyle choice I’m consciously making?
Yes, that’s ideal. In Germany (where there is a culture much more oriented towards renting than owning) there are a lot of state run landlords and they are great to rent from, reasonable rents, reasonable to deal with (in the local context), etc. And of course they have good laws to protect tenants to back it up. Not necessarily a perfect system but definitely one the rest of the world can learn from. Unfortunately things are still heading in the wrong direction there too right now.
That’s not true in any big city. While the laws keep the landlord madness limited, real estate and rent prices are out of control because of speculation, and there are tons of horror stories to go around - and by experience, I would say they are even more common with individual landlords than with large companies, at least large companies don’t usually do anything obviously illegal and have less venues to make their tenants homeless.
