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Comment by jcbrand | Hacker News Reader

I know people who live in cooperatives and I've explored it for myself as well.

You might pay less in a cooperative, but you're expected to be more involved in its internal politics and in keeping things running, so you're likely making up for the lower monetary price by paying with your time and energy.

There are also many opportunities for interpersonal conflicts.

> you constantly have to give up a significant portion of your income so someone else makes profit from basically doing nothing

When something goes wrong in the house I rent (which has happened multiple times), it's up to my landlord to fix it. The landlord also has to spend time and money on upkeep and maintaining the property.

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It depends on the size of cooperative how much you have to be involved --- if it's only one house, you'll surely have to be involved. Other coops have thousands of members, in these you can choose to just be a renter (in fact most people do that in my parents coop, less than 10% go to the annual meetings etc.).

It's certainly true that individual landlords have some trouble with renting out their property. The majority of homes however is held by companies, whose administration deals with renters. Maintenance costs of a single home can be uncertain, but of a number of homes it's very predictable. So the risks of big companies holding properties is manageable, and in no proportion to the profits that big conglomerates such as Deutsche Wohnen make.

I've rented three different properties (2 flats and now a house) in Germany, in three different cities, and each time it was from an individual owner, not some faceless corporation.

I also own a property myself in a different country.

Big companies don't own the majority of homes in Germany[1]. This is just the left-wing version of right-wing people overestimating the number of immigrants in a country.

https://www.quora.com/If-so-few-Germans-own-their-own-home-w...

>...doing nothing

This is unfair. There is nothing wrong with passive income. Owning shares or bonds, or having a bank deposit is also "doing nothing" yet no one would blame anyone for it.

Are you seriously comparing owning shares with taking advantage of the need to have a home to take ~30% of someone's monthly income?

they are very comparable. Owning shares in a company that takes money to provide essential services? That has been the model of capitalism - fee for service - for a long time, and it has worked. The service gets provided, at the right price that the market can bear ,and still produce a profit for those providing the service. The alternative is to not have that service provided at all!

Then please stop providing the service.

If we had no landlords renting we would all own domiciles.

So please, stop providing these 'services'

If we had no grocery stores we would all own farms. Please stop providing these services

In an ideal world.

There's an entire political ideology which totally disagrees with you -- Georgism. Basically most of capitalism is fine, shares, bonds etc. but natural monopolies and value derived from land are not the same thing and must be treated specially. There's one very pithy way of expressing this which goes back to Adam Smith -- taxes on land do not cause economic inefficiencies in the same manner as other taxes.

> There is nothing wrong with passive income. Owning shares or bonds, or having a bank deposit is also "doing nothing" yet no one would blame anyone for it.

The wrong part is that having passive income of that kind is a privilege that only few can reach, and it works by squeezing the rest. It isn't possible for everybody to have such passive income.

As long as you pay for maintenance and don't raise the rent, it seems like it would be the same as an investment.

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