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Comment by 6gvONxR4sf7o | Hacker News Reader

Here's an analogy. The police seize your car, which you needed in order to get to work. You stop earning income from the job you used to be able to commute to, but you still owe rent. You're still making car payments too. A year later, they give it back to you. Is it right for them to do that without compensating you for the loss of your car/income? At the very minimum, they should have been making the car payments for that period.

A closer analogy is that the government seized your apartment for a year while still keeping you on the hook for mortgage payments and is now giving it back.

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>Is it right for them to do that without compensating you for the loss of your car/income?

Right as in "morally right" or right as in "consistent with established precedent"? Because the answer is different depending on which one you pick. There is tons of precedent for people having negligible recourse when it's the government doing the screwing.

It's complicated, though, right?

Maybe landlords losing their rental properties would allow more people to become homeowners. Earning money by charging rent (at a profit) is pure capitalism.

People not able to scrape together enough for a down payment on a house aren't magically going to be able to afford one if landlords need to sell their properties. A decrease in market value of rental properties due to major increase in sales is just going to invite private equity firms that will come in and snatch them up from the smaller landlords that cannot afford to continue. A better system to increase homeownership would be to reduce the need for down payments. Plenty of people can afford a mortgage and the other costs of homeownership but simply cannot save up the initial investment. The government already offers student loans for tens of thousands of dollars with no collateral or down payment, why not do the same for mortgages? Obviously its a little different than college degree, you can't sell your degree to pay off the loan but I could see a future where some sort of federal mortgage program can exist.

Thank you for a reasonable response to a very hypothetical question.

The landlord does no work for the income though, unlike your analogy.

Other than fixing plumbing, doing gardening, fixing the roof, etc.

That doesn’t even happen every month. Just how much should a landlord be paid per hour? As a tenant I’d be happy to pay market rates for maintenance instead of rent.

If you were paying for a mortgage, gardening, repairs, property taxes and whatever other costs there are you would just be paying for the house. Many people cannot afford all of those expenses or do not want to deal with all of that which is why they rent in the first place.

A mortgage is different, because it is based on the price of homes inflated by speculation. Decades ago before speculation was so common, both homes and mortgages were very cheap relative to wages.

I’d happily pay everything besides the mortgage, it’d be far cheaper than my rent. Most months it’d even be zero. I could absolutely afford all maintenance costs, while I can’t afford the speculation-inflated price of the home I live in.

If you are not going to pay for the mortgage or rent then who owns the house? Nobody? Everybody?

I’m just pointing out that the vast majority of what I pay my landlord is due to widespread asset speculation, as opposed to any labour he has done or paid for.

Collective ownership would be even better, sure. Before 89 my parents paid to the state ~5% of one wage for a good sized flat. That covered amortised construction costs and maintenance. Housing doesn’t have to be expensive.

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