Reality is worse than this picture though. The landlords are contributing to all thkse knives and grenades, intentionally.
I’d say that’s what separates a good landlord from a bad landlord, is if they are intentionally adding knives and grenades.
Smith goes into great detail in “The wealth of Nations” about how landlords are parasites. He explains why theoretically and empirically and gives specific examples. He lacked an understanding of historical materialism, so he wrongly thought capitalism would naturally get rid of them.
I dislike personifying landlords just like I dislike personifying greedy corporations. It’s the system which is broken, and entities which act in greedy self-interest are merely a symptom.
You can’t buy a house because $2.5k per story pays the mortage for the landlord and the rental property.
Dead Kennedys have a great song about how to solve this
Oh yes
You know how California got sick of greedy companies ripping off people for insulin so now they’re going to sell insulin themselves at a reasonable price? Yeah, they should do that with apartments.
I lived in a housing market like that. It was a college town dominated by a church subsidized school. The students had to live in on-campus, off-campus and registered, or unregulated housing. The only people allowed to do unregulated housing were those who had their stuff together e.g. married or living with family. Housing was cheap and any landlord disagreements could be complained against the uni housing office. The uni provided so much housing that prices were based on the uni’s low cost instead of anything higher. A friend from high school had her dad choose to “invest” by buying a small apartment building out there, but even with his daughter as manager, he didn’t make a good return because he didn’t have the scale to provide the minimum level of service. I think he sold it.
Students there tended to get married and have children while still in school.
Long story short, housing market regulation can be done via a dominating entity over demand, but non market forces are not common everywhere.
This literally happens in some areas outside the US. I can’t remember if it’s NotJustBikes or HappyTowns that talks about it on YouTube. But basically, the government offers affordable housing to force landlords to compete on quality and price. Shockingly in those areas rents are down and the quality of apartments is decent.
Vienna, Austria is a classic example. Don’t know about the current situation, though.
California’s housing would be much less of an issue if the high speed rail was built
High speed rail such a great way to travel medium distances anyway it’s downright criminal the US hasn’t figured it out yet.
thank you I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I think about this. It would revolutionize California. More affordable housing Central Valley with career opportunities in whichever city, less pollution, less car wrecks, likely to stimulate the economy.
There is a reason Musk tried blocking the high speed rail from getting built- it’s so he can sell more cars CA is his biggest buyer, if the rail was built he would be saying goodbye to his foothold in CA.
If you spend enough time in CA, it’s unbelievable how clear it is this rail needs to be built, and not in the next 30 years, we need it now
That picture is incorrect.
The landlord isn’t pictured inside a Porsche SUV.
mine has a gtr
Rant incoming. I’m trying to rent a apartment that is less than 1/4th of my salary but I might not get it because the landlord is too stupid to understand 80% of my salary is stocks so they won’t show up on a paystub. This is the people that love to label themselves as savvy investors. God damn it. Rant over.
why don’t you just buy a house?
My president just consolidated the three branches into one so I’m holding up in case I have to flee.
Fair enough, prioritise people who actually work and do things. They deserve housing before anyone else.
Then also people who do not work and make money off of others people’s work may have a house.
I tired to rent an apartment once. I had 100k in liquid in my bank account. I showed them this but it wasn’t good enough. I’m 1099 and officially make very little money (it’s all above board and legal. I have a CPA.)
They needed paystubs. I don’t have pay stubs. I don’t even get paychecks.
It’s kind of a weird catch 22 for them. They’re ok with some bloke making 20 bucks an hours with nothing in savings as long as he can “prove” his income but someone with actually money is just too much of a risk.
As if we’ll be allowed to flee, or that the dollar will be worth anything by then.
Not American
Learn skills that will be easily transferable across countries. Look for a country you would like to live in, learn the language if necessary, research where they are hiring.
Do it before Trump’s third term, there will be a lot more chaos then
Pretending that small landlords and corporate landlords are the same is like saying your local grocer is as bad as Walmart.
Renting is an essential part of the housing market. Not everyone wants or can commit to home ownership and all it’s unpredictable maintenance costs. A plumbing failure can be as cheap as $200 to fix or cost you $10,000+ for a full replacement and restoration from the biohazards of black water damage.
The reason why the housing market is fucked is because poor regulation allows corporate landlords to buy up tons of investment properties and control the housing costs and supply.
All landlords are parasites. Paying a landlord is not the same as having home insurance…
Home insurance does not cover costs associated with maintenance and negligence.
Your sewer line failing because it’s 50 years old and made of cast iron is not a valid home insurance claim.
Ok? A landlord is still no substitute for actual insurance
Removed by mod
Rented a flat from a family for 3 years. The flat had not been renewed in over 60 years, but I was alright with that. The flat had several problems, they never wanted to fix.
One day the electrical system starts going out over and over again, fuses would burn every few days. I had to tell them that in case of fire they’d be responsible for everything I had in the house before they agreed they should fix the electric system.
Since they were going to fix the electric system, they decided to do a bit more work and change the floor and a few things more. They wanted to increase the rent 50% to account for these improvements; even though that is illegal I accepted, since they were in fact improving the flat.
I had to move out for two months while the works were going on. One week before the end of the works, the flat was really not done yet. I asked several times whether it would be ready, because I’d need to find and accomodation in the meanwhile. I asked for a discount of half a month so that I could cover expenses and because nobody knew when they would actually complete the works.
The day before I was supposed to get back into the flat, they decided that I was posing way too many conditions and kicked me out. They decided to keep the safety deposit because a plastic floor old over 60 years had started cracking. 8 months later, they still have some boxes of stuff which is mine but never have time to meet me to give it back to me.
Time has passed and I still have to go to a lawyer, because I the meanwhile I had a bunch of trouble to solve. I’m sure I can win a trial against them, but even if I do win the trial I’ll have gone through a bunch of trouble just to get my safety deposit back. I’ll be doing it just because they need to fuck off, but still…
Now, most people renting places were I live are exactly like this. It is not big corporations, it people who got one or maybe a few flats on rent.
Housing is a human right, not an investment. Nationalize housing
Based
Socialized housing isn’t an overnight project. It starts with regulating the current housing marketing and prioritizing the take down of corporate slumlords. It starts with revising zoning laws, promoting higher density housing and multifamily homes, and creating walkable and accessible neighborhoods for all.
I get the idealism from Lemmy, but this is also it’s pitfall. Anything less than a leftist utopia is not worth working towards, and so we sit in righteous inaction.
Housing is a human right, not an investment.
Yes and yes 1000%
Nationalize housing
Fuck no.
Social housing in Vienna
Ok? That’s not all housing which to me is nationalizing. All countries have some concept of co-op or subsidized housing which is owned and administered by the government. It can and does exist in parallel. Should the government be doing more of it? I would argue yes.
Renting is important to have available but it absolutely does not need to be at the level its at. The amount of people paying for someone else’s investment while wishing they could own something of their own is crazy and it’s insane that we’ve normalized that. And all the while they’re just hoping nothing goes wrong because it seems like even the “good” landlords are hit-or-miss when it comes to getting them to do literally anything. Mine’s usually pretty good but right now there’s a fucking hole in the foundation and getting them to properly address it is a hurdle I shouldn’t have to go through. In order for these buildings to be profitable the tenants need to not only pay for those issues you mentioned but now they’re also paying for someone else’s salary AND in the end that person gets to sell the building and keep all that money, too.
The reason the housing market is fucked in the US and Canada is becauss there are very few rent controls and a lot of the power sides with the landlords. In Montréal you have to be worried about going taking them to court because future landlords can just look up if you’ve ever done anything and deny you a place to live even if the problem was your current landlord is dogshit. Oh, and there’s a new law that’s around landlords being able to use necessary renovations as excuses to raise your rent! They have all the power and it doesn’t matter if they’re big or small, it’s a “business” that attracts the kind of people who don’t mind making easy money off of making you pay for their stuff.
Your landlord(probably) isn’t going to let you hit it because you’re glazing them on Lemmy. Stand up for yourself and others, even if you got lucky with a landlord who is considered good because they don’t throw a hissy fit when you ask them to do their fucking job.
You’re getting flack but you’re not wrong. When I moved into my current house I was a landlord for over 3 years adopting the basement tenant already in the house. Rent was well below market rate and I never raised it. We were both respectful. Ultimately I terminated their lease because I have kids that are getting older and I need the extra space as well as just not in the mental headspace to rent my basement anymore. I’ve since gutted it with the intention of making it a proper finished basement for us all to enjoy.
I gave them over 3 months notice. First month rent back and provided references.
Some of us just want to do good.
Not sure what the graphic is trying to say. Are landlords supposed to protect people from increasing costs of home ownership? 🤔 How are these ideas connected?
Mind you, ownership implies that you are not renting your home, you own it.
People say landlords provide a service that is providing housing to another person without them having to pay the full cost of homeownership. Yet, because the landlord is not only covering their costs but extracting as much profit as the market will allow, the cost and experience of renting is pretty damn competitive with that of ownership. So to answer your question,
Are landlords supposed to protect people from increasing costs of home ownership?
Yes, that is the way most non-landlords justify the existence of landlords to themselves. The alternative is to acknowledge that landlords exist only for the sake of enabling the owning class to generate capital for themselves by exploiting the working class.
O-kay. I can think of a myriad of other reasons than sheer cost why I might not want to buy a home straight away. But I see how the graphic kind of makes sense in the way you describe.
I’m not a big fan of landlords, by the way, and the instant downvoting for asking a simple question is extremely rude. Doesn’t exactly foster community engagement, guys! 😑
I can think of a myriad other reasons than sheer cost
Tell me what those are and how they can’t be solved with capital
downvoting
They’re fake internet points, you don’t get anything for them. You said something and people expressed disagreement. Don’t sweat it.
That the landlord is well out of the way of harm is the most accurate part of this meme 😂
Ahahah thanks for clarifying 👍
I’ve seen a recent finance bro fad saying renting and investing is better than owning. My brother in Christ my rent was much higher than my mortgage for a shittier spot and I didn’t get equity.
It depends, it can definitely be more worthwhile to rent.
During the last housing bubble, you could rent the same place for less than 1/2 the cost of buying it. Renting and investing made more sense then.
Currently buying a house is overpriced but rent is even more so.
The best financial decision right now is to live with your parents your entire life. If you don’t have a parent you can stay with, then a tent and cardboard boxes in the park it is.
I just did the math for renting/investing vs buying, including rent/house value yearly increase, income taxes on capital gains, mortgage rate, down payment amount, and initial house price. The results indicate a strong dependence on rent price and taxes/insurance for buying. I found that renting/investing can be a better financial option depending on the inputs. As another commenter pointed out, the main reasons are taxes/insurance and the greater time return rate for market vs home value. This was surprising to me, so I’m glad I ran the numbers. That tells me the real difference is your life choice of wanting a place of your own vs renting and moving around.
I should’ve known better than to trust my intuition on this. I previously ran the numbers on investing vs double mortgage payments and found investing to be far superior.
It really depends on the circumstances. For me personally renting and investing is indeed better - but my rent is 500 Eur per month for 100m² cold and I can’t finance a similar sized house for that here. Everyone needs to do their own math for their situation.
I never understood this brain dead obsession that Marxists have with landlords.
Landlords own property like anybody else does or could, and they use their property to offer a commodity in demand a for a fee like any other service. You never hear anybody complaining about a car rental service or hotels or any other rental service, just this one. This is a strong sign that it’s not based in any merit, it’s just ideological brain rot.
You could be nuanced and argue that certain types of landlords are bad or that certain practices are harmful, and that’s fine, but to say the concept of people renting out housing units is inherently bad just because is just stupid. Renting has it’s advantages even if you don’t understand or won’t acknowledge them, there’s are plenty of reasons why renting exists.
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Shelter is a necessity. A hotel isn’t.
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Property is a limited resource. When people scalp concert tickets they get vilified. When they do the same thing for something necessary for survival people like you defend it with “well there are pros and cons…”
But this is a fundamentally flawed analogy. Renting is not scalping. If you want to criticize specific practices like predatory leases or speculative hoarding, that is a fair and nuanced position. But claiming that renting itself is inherently exploitative ignores how markets function.
Just because something is a necessity does not mean it can be free. Food, water, electricity, heating, and medicine are all essential, yet we still pay for them. Not because we should, but because we have to. These goods and services come from complex systems that require capital, labor, infrastructure, and logistics. Every step costs money. To keep these systems running, consumers have to pay enough to cover those costs and allow for future investment. That payment can come through taxes in public systems or through private transactions in the market. Either way, the cost is real and unavoidable.
Housing is no different. Building homes is expensive. It requires land, materials, skilled labor, permits, and time. Buying a home is a major investment, and renting exists as a practical alternative. Not everyone can or wants to buy, and renting provides access to housing without the upfront burden of ownership. There’s a huge luxury rental market for wealthy people, even though they have the means to buy houses. This means that there are real advantages to renting that go beyond just not being able to buy a house.
Like any market, housing is shaped by supply and demand. When supply is low and demand is high, prices rise. That is not exploitation. It is basic economics. If you want to make housing more affordable, the solution is not to vilify landlords or pretend rent is evil. The solution is to increase supply. Build more homes. Reform zoning laws. Encourage development. More housing means more competition, and more competition drives prices down. We know this formula works. We’ve seen it work countless times. Actually we’re seeing it work right now. Take a look at Austin and how they’re rental and housing prices have been dropping considerable over the years. That is how you fix the imbalance. Not by attacking the existence of rent, but by addressing the root cause of scarcity.
Building homes is expensive. It requires land, materials, skilled labor, permits, and time. Buying a home is a major investment
And yet it not very long ago it was feasible for a single income earner on minimum wage to not only be able to afford a home, but do so while supporting a family. So what has ballooned in price to make that out of reach for the vast majority of people? The land, materials, skilled labor, permits, or the house itself due to it being used as an investment?
Like any market, housing is shaped by supply and demand.
There are many viable houses sitting vacant because the landlords would rather wait for someone that can afford the absurdly high rent than risk lowering the market value of rent for their other properties.
If the first person in line to a concert purchases every ticket then resells them for 10x the cost the solution is not “make more tickets available”. The scalper will just buy them as well.
And yet it not very long ago it was feasible for a single income earner on minimum wage to not only be able to afford a home, but do so while supporting a family.
You’re correct, but at the same time, buying a house was still a very expensive back then as well. It was major purchase for most people, just not to the same extant relative to today.
So what has ballooned in price to make that out of reach for the vast majority of people? The land, materials, skilled labor, permits, or the house itself due to it being used as an investment?
All of the above, but also, by far the single biggest reason why house prices have gone up is because we haven’t been building enough houses to meet demand. If you look up the US housing inventory over time, you’ll basically see that it has basically collapsed since the great recession to near all time lows. In the meantime, this country’s population has grown quite a bit since then, we’ve added well over 20 million people since 2010. So there you have it, that’s the root cause. If we built houses as the same rates as we have in decades past, we would be an experiencing a housing boom right now reverse the current seller’s market into a buyer’s market.
There are many viable houses sitting vacant because the landlords would rather wait for someone that can afford the absurdly high rent than risk lowering the market value of rent for their other properties.
It’s actually more nuanced than that. The majority of the houses that are vacant are either seasonal houses in states like Maine, Florida, or West Virginia or they’re undergoing renovations (source). There is still a decent portion that are being held as investments, but the number of actually vacant units are smaller than a lot of people think. As for the ones that being held for investment, it’s not your mom and pop landlords who are doing that, it’s massive corporations like Blackrock or JP Morgan Chase who actually have the means to sit on empty properties, pay the taxes, and play long manipulative game.
If the first person in line to a concert purchases every ticket then resells them for 10x the cost the solution is not “make more tickets available”. The scalper will just buy them as well
If you want to make the argument that corporations should be banned or greatly limited to buying residential housing, then I agree with you. However, that is a different discussion than saying that rent is inherently bad.
You’re correct, but at the same time, buying a house was still a very expensive back then as well. It was major purchase for most people, just not to the same extant relative to today.
Okay, so we agree that there is a problem then. It was feasible in the past and basically impossible now. If housing prices were relatively the same as they were when I was a child I wouldn’t be upset about landlords, but we are in a housing crises now and something has to change.
The majority of the houses that are vacant are either seasonal houses in states like Maine, Florida, or West Virginia
You mean vacation homes. People who own multiple properties so that can sit vacant the majority of the year. Boo-fucking-hoo if people have to sell their vacation home to someone who actually needs a place to live.
they’re undergoing renovations (source)
The only thing your source says is “Some are seasonal homes, some are undergoing renovations, and others are simply being held as investments.” it does not provide a number or a link. 2 houses undergoing renovations counts as “some”.
There is still a decent portion that are being held as investments
That’s exactly the fucking problem. Yes.
it’s not your mom and pop landlords who are doing that, it’s massive corporations like Blackrock or JP Morgan Chase who actually have the means to sit on empty properties, pay the taxes, and play long manipulative game.
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So we agree that the majority of rental properties are owned by a landlord that is making life objectively worse for people? Then we should do something about that instead of clutching pearls about the 1% of houses owned by “mom and pop landlord”.
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And speaking of, can we stop with the “mom and pop landlord” bullshit? I have family members who are exactly the type of people you are talking about. They own a rental property and take care of it and their renters. If suddenly they couldn’t do that anymore they would be fine. The property is not their livelihood, it’s an investment. They would just invest in something else. These are people that can afford multiple properties in the current market (which we already agreed is much too expensive).
Property can be affordable or be an investment, not both. I’m arguing that it should be affordable (being a basic requirement for survival and all). People using it as an investment can go invest somewhere else.
that is a different discussion than saying that rent is inherently bad.
There’s a reason rent seeking behavior is a derogatory term.
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Uhh, I hear people complaining about those services all the time, see Air BnB.
Regardless, a rental car or hotel is not a living requirement like a semi-permanent home is. Definitely comparing apples to oranges here.
You can acknowledge the benefits to renting while also acknowledging it’s an unbelievably toxic and abused system that profits off the poor for the gain of the rich.
Until everyone is housed, no one should be profiteering off thoes that aren’t.
Uhh, I hear people complaining about those services all the time, see Air BnB.
The complaints are about the scale of people who are opting to turn their units into Airbnbs, which takes them off the rental market, which deceases supply, and thus increases prices. You’ll almost never hear somebody complain about how someone turning their property into a hotel is an inherently bad idea.
You can acknowledge the benefits to renting while also acknowledging it’s an unbelievably toxic and abused system that profits off the poor for the gain of the rich.
I disagree with this premise. I don’t think that renting is inherently toxic, abusive, or exploitative. There’s no valid argument to argue as such. Property is a commodity, those who have excess of this commodity are opening it up for others to use for a fee. That’s a service, and just like any other service there’s nothing wrong with it. I also think that you’re misguidedly assuming that only poor people rent, which is not true. There’s an absolutely massive luxury rental market as there is one for every budget and style. It truly is a market, and like all markets, it’s still dictated by the law of supply and demand.
I think the crux of our disagreement stems from the fact that I think our housing crises stem from poor and outdated policy, not from an economic system. Capitalism has been proven to be extremely effective at efficient mass production, so why is this not the case for housing? It’s because we have backwards housing policy. It takes years, sometimes even decades, for any developer to get their project approved. It takes a lot of money to go through all the legal proceeding, lawsuits, fees, and demands made by the town/city. Even if the developer finally gets to the point where they can finally start building, they’re still now allowed by law to build mixed units or multifamily units, they have to build either single family homes or strip malls. Not only that, but a big percentage of the property has to be dedicated to parking spaces, again this is by law. Even if the developer complies with all these nonsensical laws, demands, pays the fees, and spends years going through the process… the whole thing can be killed at any moment by NIMBYs for the dumbest reasons. This is why we have a housing crises.
You want to fix the housing market? Do what Austin has been doing for the past decade. For whatever reason, it seems like they’re only ones in the country who figured out that if they make the development process easier, reform their zoning laws, and incentivized developers to build, they can build so many new units that they supply of housing not only meets demands by exceeds it, thus leading to a decrease in prices. Austin has seen pretty substantial decreases in both rents and house prices, and the trend is not slowing down (source). The average rent of a 2 bedroom apartment there is around $1400, which is well below the national average of $1630 (source). Keep in mind, that Austin is a big and growing city, and yet they’re prices have nearly dropped to prepandemic levels. Clearly they’re doing something right, and the rest of us need to follow their lead.
That’s sounds to me like a way more grounded, nuanced, practical, and realistic plan and approach than just simply insisting that renting as a concept is bad because Marxism insists that capitalism is bad, and therefore we should get rid of it and replace it with a system that’s proven to be worse. A rigid ideology that’s built on a house of cards made up of baseless assumptions and relies and the most extreme option at every turn shouldn’t have any place in modern discourse.
It’s so fucking dumb. Landlords aren’t the problem, corporations owning hundreds and thousands of homes is what’s driving rent through the roof.
That’s definitely a factor, but our housing supply is largely self inflected with outdated and poorly thought out zoning laws. Developers can’t build anything because the process to build anything takes years (sometimes decades), a fuck ton of money before they even break ground, and the law requires literally requires them to dedicate a certain ratio of their property (sometimes half) for parking. Not only that but so many projects get easily killed by NIMBYs for dumbest reasons. It’s no wonder we have shortage.
If we look at places that are building a shit ton of units, like Austin, the prices are actually going down and have been for years. Both the rent prices and house prices have gone down in Austin because, for whatever reason, they’re the only ones that figured out that the way to solving a housing crises is to pump the supply to the point where it exceeds demand, thus causing prices to fall. That’s what we need nationwide.
Yeah, because the renter will have to pay $5,000 when the AC unit craps out.
they’ve already paid for it
What AC unit?! 🤣
