Because the only way to escape an exploitative system is to become an exploiter…
Well this is gross. Its extremely had to buy ONE property, to exist in, if you dont have Bank of Mom and Dad to rely on.
I know people like this. They truly believe like they are doing society a favor by buying up houses and renting them out. The disconnect from reality is wild.
It’s a little better than corporate real estate vultures though. If you think about it, these small landlords and renters are more alike than the people at Blackrock buying up all this shit.
Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables track #4
How does the second tenant pay their mortgage? One apartment’s rent should not be enough to cover the mortgage of four (or five - including the one they live in). My guess is that they only payed all the mortgages for these four properties and this is about the mortgage of the apartment they live in.
The cheat code to a stress-free life is to own lots of real estate to being with.
Oh, some rents are getting crazy and the buildings were purchased 10-20 years ago so the mortgage isn’t that high. It’s all a scam.
Of course they mean their own personal mortgage. The mortgage of the property they rent out is already covered by the tenant.
I mean why not?
How is this legal.
How is it legal that people buy property and rent to those who want to rent instead of buy? My question to you is why wouldn’t it be legal?
Pretty much been covered by others already.
In principle it’s fine and it fulfills a market need… not everyone wants to buy. But in practice, under-regulation in a market where many people want to buy but can’t exacerbates wealth inequality by reducing the available housing and driving up home costs. This in turn drives up rental costs. It’s a nasty cycle.
Absolutely, a problem that is improved by increasing housing supply (thus lowering costs). We need more government investment in building homes and to remove barriers that prevent or slow homes from being built. Simply outlawing rentals, as OP suggests, would do the opposite, it would take out a huge chunk of people who are building homes, drastically lowering supply and exploding housing prices.
There are definitely alternatives, where there is more tax incentive to own one home that you live in, and increasing penalties for holding more properties, especially for a long period of time and especially if they are in areas of high housing demand.
OP isn’t directly suggesting making rentals illegal; in fact it’s a bit vague what specific practice they’re blaming. My best guess is that they generally don’t feel laws should allow/incentivize owning so many housing properties, especially if one is not personally doing anything to earn money from them.
A responsible landlord is “doing” arrangements for property maintenance and handling all tax and other legal requirements, and my hard feelings are towards slumlords who let dwellings become unsafe, or property flippers who kick all the renters out and build new dwellings to sell to more wealthy buyers.
But also, isn’t the hate for landlords equally applicable to banks and other financial institutions that hold mortgages? They really are earning money by no other responsibility than having the capital available at the start.
The solution is for the state to guarantee that everyone must have a place to live. Shelter is a human necessity, it should not be conditional.
Are you envisioning the government being a major landlord, like in Singapore? It seems to work really well for that country, but Americans seem uncomfortable with the idea of government housing.
those who want to rent instead of buy?
Who actually wants to spend 1/3 of their paycheck on something every month and not own it?
It dawned on my that my wife and I pay 30k a year to live in our house. I made 65k last year, the most I’ve ever made and the amount I told myself in Highschool that if I could get a job making that I’d be set. Feels like I’m still bussing tables at fucking Texas Roadhouse.
For context, im in tech and she’s in the arts. Combined we’re at about 110k a year. Wild that that feels like just scraping by.
Biggest plusses people argue in favor is not having to maintain the property yourself and being able to move much more easily. If you are one of the people who would prefer to buy, I highly recommend you do so. Maintaining your own stuff is quite nice, as it lets you keep it up to the quality you desire.
Lmao this guy thinks landlords maintain the property.
Great, you can move more easily to another overpriced unmaintained property. You will own nothing and you will be happy about it.
My exact thoughts. Never had anything in my apartments maintained by the landlord, always had to maintain everything myself at my own expense. And despite maintaining it for them, they still keep our deposits when we try to leave.
Keep our deposits, jack up rent despite doing nothing for us, and when they sell to a new landlord you have rich freaks coming into your home while you’re eating your lunch in your kitchen to stare at you and inspect the place to decide if they want to purchase you or not.
Never had anything in my apartments maintained by the landlord, always had to maintain everything myself at my own expense.
When is the last time you bought a furnace, a water heater, or a new roof for a property you rent? Ever?
It isn’t that the owner isn’t maintaining it, it is that they aren’t maintaining it do the standard you would prefer. And that absolutely is an issue. And it is one of the primary benefits of no longer paying a landlord and instead buying a property and maintaining it to your own standards. You will almost certainly end up with a maintenance standard you like as you will be the one dictating and implementing it.
A basic standard includes a ceiling that isn’t caving in, a foundation that isn’t sinking causing the windows to pull the wall above them apart, but either way the landlord won’t address it and I’d never have the money to correctly address it myself. In those instances it feels less like my personal standard isn’t being met but rather the basics and fundamentals aren’t being maintained.
I would love to own though. If I were ever in a position to own and afford maintenance I would feel safer.
I apologize by the way if I write in a confusing way, or have a hard time communicating my point, I have trouble with that. Owning is preferable in my opinion, property and privacy are power and a form of independence I long for.
In a word, corruption.
In two words, legal corruption.
In three words, blatant legal corruption.
In four words, United States political system.
Meh.
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This isn’t an America problem. People do this in every country
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This is capitalism not corruption
For everyone here’s a fun thought experience. You have a room with 100 people. In that room is 100$. 1 person (Elon Musk let’s say) holds 95$. 4 people (let’s say various CEO class people) hold $1 each. The remaining 95 people share the remaining 1$.
And yet here we are all fighting because some of our deluded asses think we are going to be one of those 5 people one day.
Its definitely not capitalism. Our system survives by creating economic slaves, for instance the mortgage acts as a gatekeeper in the fiat system, by locking up economic value and an inelastic good in a form that can only be unlocked by completing the payment obligations. Housing rises in price to max out the metaphorical bucket of whatever interest rates allow for debt accumulation, and property ownership is controlled by one’s ability to secure debt. This ensures that the financial system has a steady stream of obligations that help sustain the flow of currency, which helps drive aggregate demand.
The goal is to create a 2% inflation, as calculated by an index that excludes housing appreciation and investments, you require ever growing money supply. Money supply is grown via debt accumulation, this then funnels down into foods and services, excluding substitutions and hedonic adjustments, reversing technological deflation, deriving a 2% inflation to a dynamic basket of goods. Housing works well for this because housing is finite and demand in inelastic; prices can rise faster than fundamentals, and it is therefore a liquidity sponge that is a necessary liability to take.
Meh.
- This isn’t an America problem. People do this in every country
It’s WORSE in the US than in most other countries, including all other wealthy countries, though. Differences in scale matter
- This is capitalism not corruption
Taken to the extremes it will inevitably reach if not sufficiently restrained, capitalism IS corruption with fancy packaging. It’s right in the name: it’s an ism (belief system) where accruing capital is the most important of ALL things.
In every Western country other than the US, accepting large sums of money and other perks from rich people who want favors is the DEFINITION of corruption, whether or not there’s a specifically stated quid pro quo.
It may be worse in the USA but capitalism absolutely is the reason it happens.
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It’s the same here in the UK, unfortunately. Is that neoliberalism? Or just a rehashed kind of feudalism? I don’t know, I’m mostly a gardener.
Yeah, it’s pretty much a defining aspect of Neoliberalism. Just like turning the corruption up to 11 in both severity and blatancy is a hallmark of the economics of fascism.
In the case of the screenshot, absolutely.
I have a question though, and I am curious about the perception here so please be honest as to what you think about my situation. (EDIT: I have received a few responses, and they are terribly informative of all of your perceptions. I want to thank you all for contributing your knowledge to my understanding, as I think by ingesting it, it has made me a better person. Thank you!)
In my case, I own a condo. I worked my ass off doing technical shift work and my parents were fortunate enough in their lives to give me a gift of $20,000 dollars in my local currency to try to buy a home. I am floored. I never thought I would afford the opportunity to potentially own a home of any kind.
I buy a small condo. Two bedrooms. One living room with an attached kitchen. The floors of the building are thin. I can hear my upstairs neighbors walking around and opening and closing doors and drawers at all hours. The insulation is bad, it is cold in winter and hot in summer. I am happy. I have a roof over my head, and I answer to no one for the walls, the fixtures, the plumbing.
I lose my job because the business I worked for fucked up and lost some clients. Because of the lack of cash flow, I and many others are laid off.
I hold on for as long as I can but eventually the cost of mortgage, insurance, groceries add up. I go on unemployment insurance. The economy is fucked because of covid, no one hires me for a year and 6 months.
My unemployment insurance runs out after having submitted 4 resumes daily this entire time, maintaining a log of them for the government EI program.
When I only have a couple thousand dollars left in my bank account, if I want to keep the ownership of my home, I have to move in with my parents again and rent my condo out to keep it at all. My dream of being able to just exist in a home I own is at stake.
The government EI program calls me in for questioning to insure I am a legitimate case. I feel some of the most stress and fear I have ever felt. Logically I know that I have been doing everything I can, but somehow I still feel guilty for having to take advantage of it. I perform the interview, I bring a document detailing the URLs, Descriptions, Dates, everything of every job I have been applying to. The interviewer shows shock on her face. I get the impression that the level of detail I have been maintaining is uncommon. They let me leave without incident.
For rent I charge the exact amount that I have to charge to cover mortgage and insurance, legally required, to maintain my the ownership of my home and nothing more, no profits. I have lived under abusive land lords before and the way they operate disgusts me. I will never be that, I would die before I let myself become that.
A Ukrainian family, Husband and Wife with their 3 year old Daughter are the first to apply. I discuss the property and their lives with them and they are some of the strongest, most responsible, wonderful people I have met in my life who came to my country to escape the situation in theirs. I accept them as my tenants immediately because I recognize how absurdly lucky I am to have these people living in my home, given how smart, how responsible, how kind they are. I promise to myself that at the first opportunity, I will show them the same kindness.
I finally find a job, even though it doesn’t pay much, and begin reducing the cost of their rent because I can finally afford it. I begin paying rent to my parents because they are owed that. My bank account begins saving about $100 a month in case I have an emergency I need to cover.
The interest rates lower and condos begin to become cheaper. I intend to lower the cost of the rent based on this when my tenants renew the lease.
This is the last 5 years of my life.
Am I a leech?
As someone without parents I immediately thought what kind of job pays enough to pay all your bills and rent. Then realized you probably aren’t paying the starting rate of thousands of dollars each month to parents?
Correct, it is the only reason I am not homeless.
This is what people mean when they say there is no ethical consumption in capitalism. Yes, you are a leech, but only because the system has forced you into it. In a different system, neither you nor the Ukrainian family would have housing insecurity.
I don’t say this to judge you, btw, I think we should applaud every landlord who keeps rent low. Just pointing out that it’s impossible to both “keep your hands clean” and “get ahead” in capitalism.
Absolutely not. Do what you got to do to move back to your condo.
my parents were fortunate enough in their lives to give me a gift of $20,000 dollars
just FYI, when you use a dollar sign you don’t also have to type out the word “dollars”
Am I a leech?
Technically, I guess so, you’re profiting just by owning the property. And having tenants exactly balancing out the costs of owning property.
Morally? Fuck no. What you’re doing you are doing to survive, not to live excessively.
Thank you.
I don’t think most people really think a vacation home or single rental makes you a leech, but when your entire portfolio is single family 2-3 bedroom houses you’re kind of sucking the air out of the local market. I know in my city there are tons of “small landlords” with less than 30 houses, half of them don’t even live in the city but in ex-urbs an hour away. They don’t do anything for the neighborhoods and see their income stream as completely legitimate.
This is tough, because even though you are charging your tenants the exact amount of your minimum mortgage payment, you are still earning equity in an appreciating asset-- eventually you will be able to turn their rent payments into profits. Now, in my opinion, your level of exploitation is very low, and barely worth considering at all.
I would like to move back into my home when it is affordable, but these people are so wonderful that at whatever juncture I owned the property outright and was not paying mortgage, I would lower the cost of their rent to just the insurance cost if that happened, and allow them as much time as they required to find something that works for them before doing so. I know they would understand. I have been up-front about my situation with them from the very beginning because I am not a liar. I am incredibly fortunate to be afforded the potential ability to do such a thing, because my parents are not too concerned with the living situation. It would also bring me immense joy to only charge them $700 or $800 as rent if the mortgage were paid off, just to cover the insurance costs. It would bring me greater joy if I could charge them nothing without bankrupting myself.
Like I said, I never want to exploit anyone. I just want to try to survive like anyone else, to keep what I have. If there are opportunities along the way to help other people, I would much rather that, and if it costs me an absolute zero, or occasionally a little into the negative at this point, that is fine by me. I would love to have these people live in my condo forever for the actual lowest possible cost, or to have their own fully owned home, but if I go bankrupt, the fucking bank or insurer will just take the condo away from both of us.
Thank you for your opinion.
Its more of the levels and degrees of action taken rather than the action taken itself.
a person owning 1-3 properties, properly maintain the properties, not gouging the heck out of their tenants and looking for long term tenets who will be allowed to live in the property (hang pictures and make it to a degree their own) and generally stay 5-10 years, is in the realm of what i would consider a ethical.
As opposed to slumlords who buy properties to exploit for maximum profit, barely maintain it and cycle through tenants who merely occupy and never feel like they truly live there (out of fear of the expenses on the moving out) and pay for it for 1-2 years before moving because of constant rate increases.
Its the ethical and humane management vs exploitive management.
You will rarely ever hear a peep or complaint against the first. But the latter gets all the vitriol, and rightly so.
I don’t believe binary logic is very useful. So I’m not going to answer “am I a leech” because I don’t think it has a yes or no answer.
You have an asset that you can’t afford, and to afford it you rent it out. That is absolutely valid in a capitalist society, and many people do it. This allows you to hold the asset instead of selling it. That means there’s one fewer property on the market, which means that if somebody wants that home they have to rent it from you, where your equity increases and they get a place to live. Again, in a capitalist society this is absolutely valid. And it’s not like you aren’t taking risk, you could get a bad tenant and they could damage the unit, in turn decreasing your equity. One common “protest” I’ve seen among renters is to poor grease down the sink, damaging the plumbing over the long time, creating a huge long term cost for the owner. Or flushing cat litter down the toilet, causing a blockage, and similar results. You are accepting risk, and capitalist society says if you accept risk you deserve reward. But from a human-focused perspective you get a very different conclusion.
An issue many people have with this is that the renter is gaining no equity and you are while you aren’t contributing production to society. In the world we live this is valid. Another example of this would be dividend stocks, if you hold KO (Coke) you get quarterly dividends, and really you’re not actually contributing anything. These are capital gains.
My biggest issue with capital gains is that they’re usually taxed lower than labour gains. I think that should be reversed. If capital gains were heavily taxed and that tax was used to better the community then I think it would have more justification. But I digress,
If you sold that property it would probably just go to an investor, but in a world where people couldn’t own investment properties it would go to a person or family who would live it in, allowing them to build equity themselves. The number of properties being held and rented out has an impact on the homes available to people buying, or rather being forced to rent.
But ultimately I believe that renting and charging rent is bad for society as a whole. But I also don’t think you selling your property wouldn’t have any meaningful impact. I think it needs to be a systematic change to be meaningful.
So I’d say you do you, but you are taking advantage of the system and renters. But that’s the reality of the world we live in. Doesn’t mean it’s OK, but does mean you can do it. Also means I won’t have sympathy for you if somebody damages your property. But maybe that’s because I’m a bad person, I don’t know.
I firmly believe homes are for living in, not generating income - even if that income is only to maintain your ownership on your asset. But if you follow that perspective your life will be a bit worse.
Like I said, I don’t take the binary perspective.
My biggest issue with capital gains is that they’re usually taxed lower than labour gains. I think that should be reversed. If capital gains were heavily taxed and that tax was used to better the community then I think it would have more justification.
This is exactly the issue. It is what divides the upper from the lower classes. When you are the asset any issues in your life are compounded and there is no liquidation option like you have when its all assets. The safety nets are so drastically different between with what level of “becoming whole again” that its ridiculous we have gotten this far with capital gains not being seen as a real privilege. But that is why we are seeing a major generational gap between the realization of how bad things have gotten.
An issue many people have with this is that the renter is gaining no equity and you are while you aren’t contributing production to society.
This is true and I understand.
There is however a government program in my country where people newly immigrated to the country who are renting can rapidly increase credit based on input from their landlord.
While my tenant cannot gain equity as a result of this situation, I notified them of this program and they signed up, allowing me to increase their credit in this way.
I am fully aware this is not a great trade-off regardless, but I wanted to do what I can because I recognize that any rental deal sucks. When I rented from a shit landlord, every day of my life felt like hell because my money went into a black hole from which there was little benefit. I was not even making enough/paying enough to make credit to get a mortgage at the time.
In addition to this, my tenant wanted to try to set up their own business, and needed an address for the purposes of a business license, so I absolutely allowed them to use the condo’s address (whether or not I am legally required to - I did not even bother looking it up because I want to do everything in my power to help this person and their family out without bankrupting myself).
I agree with you as well that selling to an investment firm/for-profit landlord would be worse, and that there has to be some systematic change. A world where one cannot profit from property is one I would want to live in, because if this were the case, I wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.
I disagree with you, and I won’t get into it with you because you write things like “I agree with you” and proceed to disagree with me.
Believe whatever you want.
On the one hand you’re getting someone else to make full payments on your mortgage. On the other hand, it’s your sole property and the only way you could maintain ownership of it. You weren’t profiting over cost, or collecting money from the renters that would go to maintenance (the only actual service/labor that landlords perform). Your choices were practical, not profitable. At least less profitable than you might think. Profitable to the minimum that the system required for you to keep your one home. Short of a revolution where all mortgages are zeroed out, it sounds like you did the best you could.
You are a person in a bad position, nothing more nothing less. If you are providing a competitive rate for rent you are benefiting these people, especially since you were up front with them. Your plans were not to be a landlord but this is where you have been forced. Hopefully you are able to return to your home soon
there is one separating detail that is not shared between most of us. It really depends on how long that tenant lives there. if they are living there for a long period of time and like the place, then yes you are a leech, but a good one since they enjoy living there enough to stay. On the other hand, if you switch tenants often because of high rent costs or bad housing(maintenance included), then you are just simply a leech and not a good one because you are not even providing anything, you instead are holding the property that is simply rotting away with no way for the family holding it to be able to make changes or work towards making it better as they don’t own it. If they leave for other reasons outside of your control, then you are not a leech and provided good housing for someone.
Since this isn’t usually known by most and takes time to build that moral ideal, it is usually up to you to consider how to act and there is not really an incentive or demand for you to act morally good. Your current living arrangements, life choices and poor job market is not applicable here, you held a home and still operate on living on someone’s paycheck. I hope the best for you and anyone who might be put in a bad spot, I know I am in my own bad spot. Would I try to hold myself to a moral high ground? maybe, though pain is short and I will likely still act not morally good at times, though I am not going to consider myself otherwise but a leech if I do. I would rather make sure I can get new tenants by making sure I get the current one is able to get one that is better or their own property, and help someone new with housing. That is what I think a good landlord could do but if the family likes the house then I can help them afford to buy it off me. See it is just business.
That is only for leeching aspects. I bet there are more complex thinking involved but this is what I think who a financial/real state leech is.
Obviously that depends on how you define “leach” and this community is going to give you a fairly skewed perspective.
They act like everyone could do this.
If everyone did this, the system would fail, because the profit here is scooped off the top with no actual production or service.
It would also require everyone to own 4+ houses which isn’t exactly feasible
It would require a lot of housing density for everyone to own four dwellings (and would kill rent demand well and good), but I wouldn’t call it infeasible. For everyone to have a quarter acre lawn and a 2,000 square foot house that shares no walls with neighbors? With those additional requirements having everyone own four is infeasible, sure, but a belief that’s the only dwelling worth owning is how we have throttled our housing supply in the first place.
Landlords don’t contribute to society
Buy a home, don’t contribute to landlord’s profits.
Quite the opposite in fact.
Yeah they contribute a lot of pain and suffering
If it would destroy the economy if everyone did it, then it should not be doable in the first place.
It’s funny that one probably-landlord downvoted this. You know who you are, scum-sucking leech.
It’s kind of a false dilemma to say everyone should do it or nobody should do it. There are a lot of things that would destroy the economy or even the world if everyone did it. I think there is a healthy amount of small family owned rental properties like the one in the meme.
It’s a simplistic statement, but it’s not meant to be that broad, it’s meant to be taken for this type of practice.
If everyone lived off leeching off someone else or from being middlemen, without producing anything, there would only be money moved with no products, labor, or services.
It’s not meant to be applied to something like “what if everyone’s business was just opening a pub?”. The economy would be destroyed without diversification and many kinds of businesses. But being a landlord isn’t anything like that. Particularly those that won’t freaking repair anything wrong with the house, just take their checks and the tenant is on their own.
Hey bro sorry, I need to pay my rent a week late.
That’s true for teachers, too.
If it is a lifestyle that would destroy the economy if everyone had it, then that’s another story.
If everyone went to work every day for 8+ hours for the direct benefit of the members of their community, the economy and the community would both be incredibly healthy.
If everyone purchased the tools that other people need to live and work and decided to rent those out instead of doing their own labor, the economy and community would fail.
This should be incredibly obvious.
What? Your comment doesn’t make sense. If everyone did any profession solely we would destroy the economy. If everyone became doctors, there would be no engineers or pilots. We would still be doomed. A diversity of vocations are necessary regardless of which vocation.
*Edit. I was thinking maybe you mean investments. But the same holds true there. AND because of hedgefunds and private equity it’s becoming more and more of all the money funneling into a handful of companies. All the economists are sounding alarm bells on this. But considering the direction our leaders are taking us, I think this is all part of the plan.
Landlording is not a profession.
Handyman is a profession. Real estate management is a profession. Landlording is simply siphoning money through the act of owning something.
The economy can tolerate a finite number of leaches before dying. We currently have too many. The ideal number is zero.
It’s also not capitalism.
Adam Smith is seen as the person most responsible for coming up with the concept of capitalism, and he hated landlords.
“Landlords’ right has its origin in robbery. The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth.”
More details about what he thought of rent in his book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Adam Smith imagined a world with well-regulated capitalism. In that world, a capitalist might invest in a factory to make a widget. They’d take raw materials, use capital (including labour) and end up with a product that people would want to buy. That capitalist would always have to stay on their toes because if they got lazy, another capitalist could undercut them by using their capital better, to either undercut the widget’s price, or to sell it more cheaply. This competition was key, as well as the idea of the capitalist putting in work to continuously improve their processes. A capitalist who didn’t continually improve their processes would lose to their competitors, see their widget sales drop to zero, and go out of business.
In Adam Smith’s time, the alternative to capitalism was feudalism, where a landlord owned a huge estate, had serfs working on that estate, and simply collected a cut of everything the serfs produced as rent. In that scenario, the landlord had to do almost no work. It was the farmers on their estate who did the work. The landlord just owned the land and charged rent. Originally, serfs were even tied to the land, so they weren’t allowed to leave to work elsewhere, and their children were bound to the same land. But, even once that changed, there was still good farmland. The landlord could lower the rent until it was worth it for a farmer to work the land. The key thing is that the landlord didn’t have to do anything at all, just own the land and charge rent for its use.
I think the reason that people are so pissed off with capitalism these days is that what we’re really seeing is a neo-Feudalism, or what Yanis Varoufakis calls technofeudalism.
Think of YouTube. A person puts tons of time and money into making a video, they upload it to the only viable video platform for user-made video, YouTube. YouTube hosts the video, then charges a big cut of any advertising revenue the video generates, basically charging rent for merely being the “land” on which the video lives. In a proper capitalist world, there would be plenty of sites to host videos, plenty of ad companies competing to buy ad spots for a video, etc. But, YouTube is a monopoly, and internet advertising is a duopoly between Google and Facebook. They mostly don’t even compete anymore, each has their own area of the Internet they control and so they’re a local monopoly. This allows them to behave like feudal lords rather than capitalists. There’s no need for them to innovate, no need for them to compete, they just own the land and charge rent. Same with Apple and their app store. There are no other app stores permitted on iPhones, so Apple can charge an outrageous 30%.
It goes well beyond tech though. Say you’re a Canadian and you want to avoid American products, but you love your carbonated beverages. You could buy Coke, but that’s American. Pepsi? That’s American. Royal Crown cola? Sure sounds like it might be Canadian, or British, but no, it’s American. Just look at the chain of mergers for its parent company: “Formed in July 2018, with the merger of Keurig Green Mountain and Dr Pepper Snapple Group (formerly Dr. Pepper/7up Inc.), Keurig Dr Pepper offers over 125 hot and cold beverages.” Sure, if you look you can find specialty things like Jarritos, but the huge brands just dominate the shelves.
Capitalists hate capitalism, they want to be feudal lords, and since the time of Reagan / Thatcher / Mulroney / etc. competition hasn’t been properly regulated, allowing all the capitalists to merge into enormous companies that no longer have to compete, and can instead act as feudal lords extracting rent.
Landlording is simply siphoning money through the act of owning something.
This actually applies to most all investments.
Which is why buybacks need to be illegal again, and dividends need to be regulated and taxed better baed on factors like how much the company benefits the community.
And employees need to be guaranteed a proportional cut too, ensuring that better performance and higher company earnings always means they earn more, and not that they get fired and the one who gets a bonus is some random CEO who only kept trying to push bad ideas the employees kept fighting all the time.ALL forms of making money from having money need to be abolished completely.
If you’re not creating/selling a product or providing a service, you’re not EARNING money. Furthermore, rich people getting richer through passive income is the #1 thing diminishing the returns from actually worthwhile endeavors.
I somewhat agree with you. And I 150% agree that “rent seeking behavior” doesn’t add to society.
But what if you want to sell a product you designed but can’t afford to create it or to setup a factory for it, so you want funding, so you try to get investments, maybe by selling equity in your company. Is that not valuable to society? The people that take the risk that your product may not sell?
But what if you want to sell a product you designed but can’t afford to create it or to setup a factory for it, so you want funding, so you try to get investments, maybe by selling equity in your company. Is that not valuable to society? The people that take the risk that your product may not sell?
That’s where small business grants from the government comes in.
Helping people thrive without being beholden to ruthless opportunists or run the risk of bankrupting private investors is EXACTLY the kind of thing tax dollars should be spent on in stead of the MIC, subsidies for the most profitable corporations in the world, and other such enriching of the already rich.
This is mythical thinking. Frankly, there’s just not that many products that need inventing, particularly that need a factory. We are past the era where a revolutionary bread slicer will change society. Most of the actual advancements we are seeing come from grants into general scientific research. Not from some lone Einstein with a vision.
What actually is happening is some of these discoveries are very good and they ultimately get scooped up and patented by some corporate entity that thought the research was marketable.
Recognizing that reality, that innovation basically never comes from the founders of a company, should really lead you to understand what’s broken about the US economy.
How did anyone do anything before currency was invented?
Your comment implies that what you describe is a requirement for a functioning society
It isn’t.
Before currency was invented might be a stretch— back then, which was a long long long, time ago we likely didn’t even have professions in the same sense. Albeit Dave might have had a knack for fishing, Kendra for making canoes etc.
There was plenty of space in the wilderness you could just go live for free. Now we have a lot of people, we need agriculture to support that population; there isn’t enough land for hunter gatherer societies to exist without a large population collapse first.
Now to your point I suppose we could have a society without money; yet I think there is some freedom in currency even if everyone gets a UBI. It allows two random strangers to come together and have one person buy something without having to trade an item that the other person wants, then the seller can go buy something they want.
Without currency we would have to have a somewhat complex trading system, which inevitably would see certain items of rarity never traded, or traded for so much surplus goods that a new ironically materialistic moneyed class would develop. It would make for an interesting book, but I think so long as people have varied interests and desires, and create creative works, money is a useful thing.
Yeah, it turns out that a system that rewards people for simply having possession of something leads to behaviors that are harmful for society.
The problem isn’t landlords, that’s just the group that most people interact with directly. The problem is that our rules (primarily taxes) are setup to reward that behavior and to add burden to people who actually do work for their income.
If you’re a billionaire you can get your effective tax rate to single digits or zero. If you work for a living you pay way more taxes proportional to your income.
Getting a paycheck automatically means that someone has more money before a product, or service is delivered. So I’m gonna stretch this a little… If we like jobs that pay money then we gotta live with rich assholes. But if we want no rich assholes and truly everyone’s time is worth exactly the same amount, then we need something other than capitalism. We need socialism. But how do we prevent kings or rich politicians in either scenario? Tax them in capitalism for one. In socialism we just downright make that illegal.
Instead of a rich asshole, you can have worker owned cooperatives and such.
everyone’s time is worth exactly the same amount
That’s just objectively not the case. Some people are able to provide more essential or better quality services and labor than others. There are also more and less enjoyable activities.
Everyone’s time can be worth the same amount for the same activity at the same quality level.
how do we prevent kings or rich politicians in either scenario? Tax them in capitalism for one. In socialism we just downright make that illegal.
You will always have people in more powerful positions and some will take advantage of it. What you can do is rotate people with term limits and such. However that can also have downsides in effectiveness and efficiency.
You can also impose limits on how much stuff a person can own. There are ways to circumvent this with non profit NGOs and such.
Socialist economies also need taxes to pay for infrastructure and the operations of the state.
This is basically where not even I believe in myself.
Cooperatives… A few billion of us get together to build a rocket…never gonna happen. A few of us build a power plant…yeah right! Never gonna happen.
What about life? My life, how much is my life worth? Is it worth more than yours or less? Divided into life/second, if I’m worth the same as you are, then I should get paid the same as you no matter what I do… I could be a painter or a seamstress or a cook or a bricklayer. I should be worth the same. Even a bum who wants nothing to do with anyone should be worth the same as the most smartest person to ever live. Its a life. You don’t get to be worth more by being smarter or making more stuff.
I would definitely not want to live in a society where my kids will be homeless even though I am the hardest working worker. If my kids are lazy I still want to ensure they live better than I did. So although I don’t like this consumerism centric capitalistic society, that socialistic society sucks.
I much rather be in a society where you can own things and give them to your kids, and have those things hold some value. I don’t want the government limiting what I can and cannot do. To some extent I think this sort of capitalism is possible, but the billionaires have got to go puff. I would love living a grand life with a big house in a sunny part of California. That’s impossible now no matter what I say or do. Meanwhile some billionaire could just buy California if he wanted to. That sort of money accumulation I’m totally against.
The fact that landlording is bad and not a profession isn’t the point.
The point is that @MithranArkanere@lemmy.world’s argument failed to convincingly argue that because it was logically fallacious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division
In other words, the fact that thing A would “destroy of the economy if everyone did it” is an emergent property of everyone doing it, which doesn’t apply to any single entity doing thing A.
Yes yes. Many people fail to accept hyperbole. You don’t need to explain that you don’t either.
That guy said what I was pointing out. Also, it’s not a hyperbole, it would absolutely destroy the economy if everyone did the same thing regardless of what that thing is. Even if everyone decided eating chicken would be the only protein that we eat would destroy the economy. Which is why I added my edit. It’s not just about a profession, but anything, literally anything done in unison by every other human would wreck an economy.
Are you’re saying that if an economy has an increse the concentration of farming activity then economic ouput will deteriorate as fast as if it were to have instead had the same increase the concentration of parasitic activity? Very interesting idea.
Maybe I’m dense but the only way I can see that working is if the parasites become super-effective livestock and can be turned into food that is either more nutrious or has a longer shelflife than the feedstock.
Tangentially related: this comment chain reminded me of the categorical imperative (the first formulation in that article)
what’s the difference between real estate management and landlording?
Real estate Management is about rent collection, property maintenance, coordination of finding new tenants, etc. There’s labor there.
Many single property landlords are also real estate management and handymen of their own properties. And that part of the situation is actual labor.
In common parlance, people will often conflate these. But I find this dilutes the harm caused by actual landlords, which are mostly large corporations that simply own property and collect income.
A landlord can pay a manager to take care of the properties they own for them.
A manager, on the other hand, cannot pay for someone else to “landlord” for them.
Landlording is about ownership, management is about labor.
It has little to do with the “profession” and more to do with the distribution of goods. If everyone owned rental properties, nobody would live in these rental properties, meaning for lords to exist there must be serfs.
I had to rant in a couple of comments because I drives me crazy when people defend leeching.
On a more constructive note: Housing cooperatives. I think they should be more widespread. Some people come together to build a house and then live in it for the cost it takes to actually support it. No crazy big apartments with a reasonable amount of people (roughly one bedroom per person), shared luxury such as gardens, in house shops, hell even a pool if you want. There is no leeching, just collective ownership.
Housing cooperatives (wiki) are quite great. Where I’m from they are rather common, but unfortunately the ‘buy in’ costs have increased a ton in the last couple decades. Even then, paying e.g. a third of what a comparable owner apartment costs, still makes it a lot more affordable for many people.
Wait, do I understand correctly that in your place, the buy-in costs are roughly a third of the value (insured value or similar) of the appartment?
It was my rough estimate, from looking at both years ago. You do have a higher monthly payment, beyond shared expenses, but that varies greatly depending on things like how much debt the cooperative has.
A wealth and property cap would make way more sense and solve way more problems.
This species isn’t ready for it yet, though, and continues to suffer accordingly.
Future generations are laughing.
The property cap is a lot easier in practice. You can’t hide land!
Why not both?
If you want to collectively own houses, nobody is stopping you.
Step one: Have a shitton of money to buy property to rent out.
Oh, you don’t have enough money? Hhm, have you tried not being poor?it’s about suggesting that the social order that propped you up and elevated you basically arbitrarily based on birth is a reason you’re cool, and not just some shit that happened. none of this is about actually helping anyone. if they actually believed this shit from the bottom of their hearts, breathing a word of it would be fucking stupid.
That’s the question. Are they dumb and mean it or are they just assholes? I also tend to think it’s the second.
they’re trying really hard to believe it, and seeing others struggle to achieve it validates them. they want to believe. they need to believe. but some part of them doesn’t, or it would be kept on the down-low.
The meme specifies Mortgage which means they also don’t have any money. They obtained a loan that they will be paying back for 15 to 30 years, at which point the property will deteriorate to a much lower value if any at all. If they sell the properties then they will owe depreciation recapture which works similar to a capital gains tax, as if it were additional income on top of the actual capital gains tax on the sale of the property itself. Plus closing costs to realtors.
I used to have my own place before my wife and I got married, and she had her own house too. When I moved in with her I decided to rent out my place to a friend, otherwise I’d have to still pay like $650 a month for my mortgage. I set my friends rent at $900 a month for him and a friend, with cats. I paid my mortgage and had some extra to save up in case a repair was needed. Average rent for an apartment (not a house) was 1200-1500 in the same area. My renters ended up taking better care of the house than I ever did. It was beautiful when they lived there. I ended up making about 5k to 10k extra bucks over the course of a few years and my mortgage was paid for me. Eventually they had to move out due to some issues between the two at which point I sold the house and made over six figures(net profit, not gross), off a house that cost less than $80,000 when I bought it.
See what I did there? I charged a reasonable rent and still made a totally stupid amount of money off of just one property. I wasn’t a goddamn parasite who tried to bleed my tenants for everything they were worth.
People like these total shitbags. They’re the reason why America’s youth have no future
You made a profit from people who thought they were your friends. Classy.
Using my “friends” to pay off a personal debt while making $250/mo in profit off them. See, it’s possible to be a good landlord, everyone!
Did you share any of what you made from the sale with your “friends” who helped you pay for it and kept it in good condition for you?
It seems like it was a situation where everyone felt like they got a good deal and nobody felt taken advantage of. He gave them a better deal than they were going to find anywhere else.
To me, it doesn’t sound like he was exploiting his friends.
Did those friends run the risk of having to pay for a new roof or anything else that can go wrong with a house? Tell me you’ve never owned a house without telling me you’ve never owned a house
Don’t try to talk sense into the senseless.
Did the landlord have to risk losing his own home when the person who owns it decides they are done being a decent human and kicks them out for a higher paying tenant, or sells the property to another landlord who will do the same? Do they have to beg someone to come fix their shit in a timely manner or do they just call a repair man who doesn’t charge them $250/mo for the privilege of paying off someone else’s mortgage so they can call the repair man for you?
I rent two apartments in a state where all of that is not possible. Evictions take months and if repairs are not made quickly the tenant is legally entitled to withhold rent. But while on the topic I am most certainly on the hook for inflationary swings in:
- any and all repairs
- gas and electric
- insurance
- property taxes
- landscaping and snow removal
There is no free lunch, no one side is correct. Stop pretending this topic is black and white. There are some good landlords, many bad. Same goes for tenants.
There is no free lunch, no one side is correct
Except the only reason they do any of the shit you just mentioned is because of government regulation. And it varies wildly by state.
There is a reason that those laws exist. Because they need to exist.
So no, this is not a “both sides” thing.
That’s also completely ignoring the completely off-balanced power mechanic that exists between landlord and tenant, equating them as you did is super disingenuous.
One reason it’s obvious you don’t have experience with home ownership is that you’re acting like the repair man is free and not easily an aggregate of 250/month when expensive repairs are needed. That is $3000 my dude, which is easily a single plumbing problem that the landlord, not the tenant, has to pay for out of pocket.
It’s clear you’ve never had to rent a property from a shitty landlord before or you’d know they would just evict you, condemn the property and sell the land to recoup their “investment” rather than pay $3000 of their hard earned money fixing the damage some ungrateful shit did to THEIR property. You keep coming up with convoluted hypotheticals that assume the landlord will always act in the best faith to justify a practice that fundamentally should not exist. One or two “good” landlords don’t redeem all of them.
The people here arguing against this live in states that have literally legislated protections for tenants against predatory landlords. The only reason they even think they have an argument, is because people fought very hard in their state, for minimal tenant protections.
Most of the same people would be doing every single one of those predatory things if they were legally allowed to.
He received over a million dollars for the house in the end, plus the 5-10K in profit.
That is $3000 my dude, which is easily a single plumbing problem
If you mean busted water and all the repairs, sure, but that’s on the landlord for not ever checking on their property (unless the tenant did something very stupid, which is possible)
I own my home and just had some plumbing work done in California (king of expensive) and 3k is about 10x what it cost me for a couple hours of plumber work
You still take someone elses money, just less of it.
See, when the Landlord charges reasonable rates, and actually provides services in exchange for that rent (helping update appliances to newer, having paperwork on hand for any code/inspections needed for property changes (that the landlord would ultimately benefit from,) and in general treating it as a matter of ‘I have obligations’ instead of ‘I will do nothing but I will absolutely blame the tennants for the inevetable crumbling of the property.’
I dislike the concept at base level, but that is a someone who is trying to not be a scumbag.
The renting part isn’t even that bad, the owning part and selling for profit is the problem.
Can we not shit all over normal people for doing normal stuff? This dude doesn’t run Blackrock, he had a single rental property.
Hundred years ago it was normal to beat women of they were out of line. Millenia ago it was normal to own slaves. It’s also “normal” for the US Healthcare to screw over people who need Healthcare. Just because something is “normal” doesn’t mean it’s somehow right. Slavery was normal but then different societies over time understood that slavery is not right and it stopped being normal. Beating women used to be normal but over time we learned that’s also not right and it stopped being normal. I don’t know about you but I don’t think ripping people off is right. However ripping people off has been normalized for capital owners (including land lords).
Nobody should be wishing for his demise (compared to Blackrock and its kin, who I do think should cease to exist), but at the same time he shouldn’t be padded on the back for not ripping off his friend as much as he could’ve. What he did shouldn’t be normal.
He didn’t rip off his friend at all. He took just enough to pay the mortgage and save something up in case of repairs. That isn’t ripping him off. That’s doing him a favor since he charged him so little.
He could’ve given the rest money back to his friend after all the repairs were done. He chose to keep that money.
So given the equity to his friends?
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Dude, they explained perfectly well how they ended up with two houses. 2 people had houses, they got married and only needed one. They weren’t preying on people, it just happened to them.
That doesn’t change the fact they aren’t normal people. Most people would love the hope of ever owning one house in America, as a dual income household, much less two single people who are rich enough to have their own homes.
Yeah fuck that guy for being born early enough to be able to buy an $80k house via mortgage
So what, they should just give their house away for free?
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If they sold it they’d be scumbag real estate agents, since we’re apparently taking everything to extremes.
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Yeah but what if they ebded up separating with their partner? It just made sense to keep the property. Renting it out just covered the cost and made sure it was not empty.
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There’s a line to draw between exploiting tenants, and compensation for providing dwelling.
You might even argue the OP creates this ambiguity based on interpretation of the wording, or poor communication.
For a productive conversation, let’s be crystal clear where that line is drawn.
This is something I think gets left out, but understandably so when there are so many issues with landlords.
But, as a property owner, you’ve got all the liability and are responsible for repairs and ensuring that the property is livable and usable. I think there’s a level of compensation you can be earning from your time, but I think that having extremely high rent PLUS the ROI of your property increasing in value over time is double dipping. When you consider that your money is invested in property and you’re getting value that way, it IS leeching IMO if someone else is doing all the upkeep and paying a premium for that.
Looking at the OP that way shows that those people are just exploiting others. But I do think there is such a thing as ethical landlording. But I think generally we’re not there.
Not everyone is in a situation where they can or even want to own a house. Renting is much safer in terms of sudden emergencies. Water heater blows out in a house? Fuck you, 3k to replace at least. In an apartment? That’s a landlord problem.
So?
Someone who needs a place to live in and doesn’t have the money or doesn’t want to buy their own place. IMO, it is a fair trade as long as the landlord isn’t a cunt. The reasons to why they don’t have enough to buy their own place have nothing to do with a single landlord, some people don’t want to take roots in a single place. If you wanna go to war with someone, go to war with companies, ban companies on owning and renting places, not people.
go to war with companies, ban companies on owning and renting places, not people with that I can agree. But taking money is still taking money.
By that thought everyone should be doing everything for free.
Based
I live in the UK and many neighbours of mine are “professional landlords” and it is so annoying seeing them so relaxed and doing nothing while I am stressed and anxious at my job.
Your “friend” still paid a substantial portion of your mortgage and gained nothing from it beyond being out of the rain. You used him and paint it as mutually beneficial.
How is a stable comfortable place to live ‘nothing’? If being out of the rain was all it took we’d all live in tents and this conversation would not occur. Owning a house and keeping it repaired/functional is hard and expensive. You don’t do your side favors by acting like our boy kept his friend in a locked closet when we all know that isn’t true.
I’m not going to argue with you. Shelter is not a commodity.
Why do you get extra properties to rent out to others while he has to pay the rent?
The only reason why he doesn’t have enough is because people like you have too much.
We’re coming for you.
That’s nice, but you shouldn’t have an extra property to rent out to others when there’s not enough to go around.
TBH I think you’re even overstating how lucrative it is for the average person. Most houses don’t double in value, most areas don’t rent for $1500 USD, most tenants don’t maintain properties well.
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Are hotels parasites too? When you lease a car, are the dealers parasites? How about short term rentals for traveling nurses. Are those parasites too?
If I own a house and have roommates, am I a parasite too?
Grow up man. Renting a home has advantages that people like me pay for.
The place I’m renting is in an amazing area that I would never be able to afford. My son goes to school in a nicer, safer area.
I can move out whenever I want to without worrying about selling my place.
When something breaks, 1 phone call and my issue is fixed.
I pay less than a mortgage and the money I save, I get to diversity my retirement/investment. Instead of dumping my entire asset in a home.
Are those parasites too?
Yes?
retirement/investment
Probably also parasitic
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All so that none of their tenants can afford any of those four things without constantly struggling!
That’s because they haven’t seen that tweet from a money genius who invented the cheat code on life. You just need more money streams for more money. Who knew? Here I was, just sitting with a gazillian dollars stuffed under my mattress nor knowing what to do with them.
My engineering brain is trying to figure out how it would actually be possible… Some kind of reverse scaffolding system that ratchets down instead of up.
Start with a tall platform, build the cap of the pyramid, then build an additional layer under, while also bringing the platform down by one layer. Repeat for each layer.
Cunk is hilarious though…
probably involves multiple properties
To be fair, they’re exaggerating in order to scam people. Not that many people paying actual double mortgage, especially if you count any kind of upkeep.
But that’s just another way of leeching.
