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Comment by computerphage | Hacker News Reader

I mean, as opposed to other businesses where owners expect customers to pay <100% of the costs of the product?

There’s a bit of a difference here, in that the landlord is also coming out the other side with an appreciating asset, not pure costs and the consumer coming out of the transaction with the asset.

So it is services generally that you have a problem with?

> the landlord is also coming out the other side with an appreciating asset

This isn’t true of services in general. Are you reading the comment you’re responding to, or are you just being belligerent?

The restaurant isn't disassembled when you leave, when you eat a meal at a establishment you pay for the upkeep of a building that will grow in value over time and yet receive no upside. If you take an Uber, you pay the auto loan of the person driving you. I guess a pure service like housecleaning doesn't leave behind a productive asset, although the business itself is one.

Obviously you get a hard product when you get a meal. You get someone's labour when you ride and Uber and consume gas and car.

When you rent, you basically are buying someone else a house. You don't get any service in many cases, as the landlord can contract our 100% of maintenance and repair and still make massive amounts of money.

When you eat at a restaurant you are in the very same way also buying them a restaurant. That food will only satiate you for a few hours and eventually you will have to eat again, having nothing to show for the service. In the same way you can rent a house from someone, have shelter from the elements for a time and once that business has concluded have nothing to show for it.

I don't' advise eating out too much or renting long term if you can avoid it. I also don't advise living in a major city. You can more easily take the first two pieces of advice if you take the third first.

No, you're absolutely not buying them a restaurant. They are fundamentally making money because they provide labour in exchange for it.

A landlord is not providing labour. They are acting as a middle-man between you and the bank. They provide no service to society. A restaurant is, as they provide cooked food. One is a zero-sum game, the other is actually producing something.

Your advice is frankly shit on the societal level. There is no way for everyone to avoid long-term rentals unless we do things you are opposed to. Equally it's impossible for everyone to avoid living in big cities, the entire economy would collapse. It's senseless to punish people for doing things that are necessary for our common prosperity and interests, such as living in major cities.

‘ A landlord is not providing labour.’ All built structures undergo entropic decay so maintenance would count as labour being done in both cases, the apartment and the restaurant using the textbook definition. These costs would be packaged into the rent and the price of meals.

Plenty of landlords subcontract maintenance, actually. There is landlording, and there is maintenance, some landlords do both, many do no maintenance themselves.

So through market calculation we can deduce that maintenance is only a small part of rent, the majority of rent is derived from being a middleman with the bank.

This is not the case for a restaurant, you'll find that all of the value in takeout comes from the labour and the capital necessary to make that labour efficient.

Would any landlord sign an agreement stating that you would do all the maintenance and then allow you to live there for free? Of course not.

> Would any landlord sign an agreement stating that you would do all the maintenance and then allow you to live there for free?

This happens frequently enough that you can find a number of articles on how to approach that very arrangement from a tax perspective[0].

[0]https://homeguides.sfgate.com/record-work-done-rental-proper...

That's not what work done in lieu of rent means. Work done in lieu of rent will only replace part of rent. For example I might get annoyed that repairs aren't getting done and offer to do them instead of paying on month of rent as part of a yearly lease, but no one will allow you to only do maintenance and never pay rent.

Show me someone who, on the open markets, offers to allow you to live in a property in exchange for nothing else.

>no one will allow you to only do maintenance and never pay rent.

> Show me someone who, on the open markets, offers to allow you to live in a property in exchange for nothing else.

Property caretaker

A property caretaker is a person, group, or organization that cares for real estate for trade or financial compensation, and sometimes as a barter for rent-free living accommodations.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_caretaker

‘ you'll find that all of the value in takeout comes from the labour and the capital necessary to make that labour efficient.’

Last time I checked kitchens and kitchen equipment are not immune from entropy…

Kitchens and kitchen equipement are necessary to allow cooking, but repairing the kitchen by itself provides zero value to anyone.

Huh? Even a kitchen not in use provides value as all tools do. Unless you don’t believe that tools have latent value?

Don't many restaurants rent? They're stuck in the same predatory situation.

The landlord gets 100% of the appreciation as well as 100% of the equity being built by the mortgage payments while the tenants are forced to pay for everything except the initial investment. It's extremely unfair and hurts the most vulnerable people in society.

So any company that increases its valuation as a result of more customers or more revenue is also extremely unfair?

Sorry but this is an ignorant take of someone who I presume does not own property. I would have thought similar until we bought a house. Some costs that a renter never thinks about: property taxes, home insurance, flood insurance, leaky roofs, flooded basements, mold remediation, HVAC system replacements, the list goes on. If you think a landlord buys a house and never has to put another dollar in, you are on crack.

If you are a landlord you face plenty of other risks - time between tennants, you incur all the expenses and none of the revenue. Ditto if your renter stops paying and it takes you months or years to evict them. Or your tennant does damage to your property that their security deposit doesn't come close to covering.

On top of all that, there are real risks of asset decline. Just because that hasn't happened recently in most places doesn't mean it won't happen. I can name 5 plausible scenarios under which my house ends up never being worth what I paid for it.

It seems to me that you and others claiming that being a landlord is free money just have zero idea of what it actually takes.

All of those things and more are paid for by the rent since it keeps going up 5% every year while the mortgage payment stays the same.

I don't understand how anyone can view this as unfair. It's as basic as basic economics gets. It is obviously the case that downstream consumers of goods and services pay more than upstream suppliers. The initial investment is an enormous risk for the landlord, not something to just shrug off.

I guess if you view housing as somehow exempt from market dynamics, then this view holds water. I'm sympathetic to that view, honestly.

Housing market dynamics are strongly influenced by federal policy and the National Association of Realtors is one of the biggest spending lobbyist groups in the country so I would say that by design the housing market is unique and I believe that landlords are abusing that situation, intentionally or not, in a way that harms vulnerable people.

Many markets are strongly influenced by federal policy and have enormous lobbying groups, and capitalism by its nature harms vulnerable people. I don't see what makes housing unique in this sense.

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