https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I've therefore banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
secondly, ask anyone who's ever rented — landlords are notoriously awful at keeping up with maintenance. so if we're considering it a job, then they get paid far more for doing far worse work than any other occupation i can think of. does that not make you angry?
I'm not really following what you're saying here. It doesn't really make any difference whether or not the landlord does the work themselves. Either there's risk, and work to manage that risk, in renting out, or not. If there's not, then why wouldn't everyone be a landlord?
> secondly, ask anyone who's ever rented — landlords are notoriously awful at keeping up with maintenance. so if we're considering it a job, then they get paid far more for doing far worse work than any other occupation i can think of. does that not make you angry?
Some landlords are awful, yes I agree. Some people are bad at their jobs, you must also acknowledge. You vastly, vastly overestimate how much money an average landlord actually makes.
> does that not make you angry?
Why would it? If being a landlord is so easy, why wouldn't everyone do it? I like the flexibility of being able to move and not having to necessarily put down hundreds of thousands of dollars up front for property
maybe just sit and think about this one for a minute?
the answer is that they don't have the capital, which is why it's a relationship of exploitation. by virtue of owning more capital than me, my landlord feels entitled to the fruit of my own labor. it's just feudalism in a new garb, as reflected in the terms we use (landlord/lady)
The reasons to not be a landlord are plenty:
- potential downturn in the area
- tenants ruining your property
- inability to do maintenance affordably
- provide basic amenities and keep up with legal obligations can and do change unexpectedly
- potential eviction expense and risk
- rent collection, as we’ve seen from the pandemic
- dealing with people
People who think being a landlord is a slam dunk as long as you have the capital and it’s no work don’t know what they’re talking about.
Reminds me of people who think running a website is free money because the computer does everything.
In other words, here’s the world’s smallest violin for my landlord’s “potential eviction expense and risk”
as for mortgages, please show me a worker living paycheck to paycheck who’s been approved for a mortgage for a twelve unit building
Tenants are under no obligation to rent to a given landlord or in a given area.
Your example doesn’t really make sense - someone living paycheck to paycheck would default on a mortgage even if they got one. It’s for those people that renting makes the most sense.
You originally implied that renting out property is not a job, which implies no work. To receive money for doing nothing would be “free.”
Anyway, you seem to have an irrational hatred of landlords based on falsehoods. Hopefully you can find solace.
They hoard housing, making it scarce, thus forcing others to rent it from them if they want to be housed.
If we outlawed the practice, landlords would have to sell their properties, significantly increasing the number of residential units on the market, and thus reducing the price and making it much more likely that someone living paycheck to paycheck would be able to afford a mortgage on one.
None of the work involved in maintaining a property requires that the person (or company) doing so be the property's owner. It would still be perfectly reasonable for an apartment building, as a co-op, to hire a single management company to handle cleaning, maintenance, etc—somewhat similarly to how some HOAs hire a company to do landscaping for all their residents. And, yes, potentially subject to inefficiency and corruption, but we live in an imperfect world, and it's not like apartment maintenance is a perfect bastion of competence and altruism today.
I lived for months out of a tent, and virtually the only reason I don't now is because of the retarded CPS / child abuse regulations in US let petty bureaucrats arbitrarily decide what adequate housing is. The US has insane building codes and zoning regulations that make housing way less affordable than it could be to build with a working man's cash.
The favelas in Latin America, whose property are they actually built on?
Sure, I don't really have a problem with landlords benefitting from investing into a house and renting it. I'm kind of with Adam Smith on the problems of rent-seeking of the value of the raw land, but I'm not sure a better system than private property can be found for dealing with that.
> The favelas in Latin America, whose property are they actually built on?
Maybe somebody elses, maybe nobody's, maybe their own? I have no idea. If you aren't discriminating you can build a house brick by brick anywhere until someone with guns or a sledgehammer makes you stop, be it a land owner, gangster, government, whoever. I'd be interested in knowing myself.
you just made my point for me — there is a class of the population that is forced into spending a third (often more!) of their income on housing, which is being hoarded by another class. no different from a feudal serf being forced to turn over their hard-won harvest to the nobility. but sure, they can go find another manor to live on, they’re under no obligation to give their labor to this particular lord...
> Say he was a high-ranking professional or a successful entrepreneur and he used the capital he earned to buy a building - what's immoral here exactly?
he’s using his capital to extract more wealth from those with fewer resources than himself. (that’s also how he accumulated the capital in the first place — but that’s another conversation.)
"Capitalism" is just liberty + private property. The idea of a free class of citizens has been around for millenia, and the idea of private ownership of property has been around for longer. Property owners and tenants have existed since the dawn of agrarian civilization.
The radical innovation of the last few centuries was the private, limited liability corporation, but that's not really the problem here is it?
> he’s using his capital to extract more wealth from those with fewer resources than himself.
As every living thing competing with other living things in an environment of material scarcity has done since life began.
Also, it's quite common in the US for retired people to have a lot of their retirement savings invested in rental property.
There's a reasonable argument that it's unjust that being richer by itself gives you access to better returns but small time landlords are not the worst affected by that.
Have you owned a normal-sized house? Repairs, insurance, inspections, et cetera. Also staging, advertising, pursuing delinquencies.
Rental yields in most cities are in the low single digits. Where that isn’t true, it’s because local politicians protect the landlords by restricting development, often in cahoots with grandfathered-in renters.
rents in the city where I live are up 11% in the past year. did the cost of repairs and inspections increase by that much?
> Also staging, advertising, pursuing delinquencies
ah, so I'm paying for my landlord to increase their rate of return and put my fellow tenants on the street. got it.
I'm charging about 20% more than I did this time last year for repairs. Material, tool, and fuel prices have been going up, and those affect me greatly. I'll probably go up more soon. I have so much work lined up that it'll be 2023 before I can get to you if you talk to me today. And it's near impossible for me to find any helpers right now.
It increased much more, even the official inflation is 7% over 2021.