I’m not saying you’re a bad person or a parasite, our landlady is lovely, but you have to be frank about the fact that someone else is working to enrich you to some level.
They presuppose that a personally held view, and oftentimes fringe one, is universally true and accepted and then make a bold unsupported criticism.
The charitable take is that people making them don't know that their view is controversial and think it is shared fact.
The less charitable take is that they are intentionally misleading, and doing it as a debate tactic to claim ground while avoiding discussing the real disagreement.
If you want to read further, look at history on colonization or apartheid which sets up these types of infrastructures or variations of it. History w/ Native Americans and what is going on in Israel are two recent/ongoing examples.
As for pre-capitalist history, you can look up "feudal land tenure", and before that is just different concepts of modes of land ownership across different geographies.
Being a landlord is an economic and political matter. To pretend the status quo of current hierarchies is fine to go with because it is the status quo belief is an awful way to live. Imagine if any radicals you admire in history behaved this way.
this is like if Marx's Manifesto was one page saying "everyone knows landords are bad"
On the topic of radicals, there are a lot that I don't admire and were atrocious. being against the status quo is not inherently virtuous. Imagine if X mass murderer just respected the status quo.
you can be for challenging hierarchies, the status quo, and a more dynamic socio-economic structure without making yourself slave to your neighbor. For that matter, you can do it without trying to enslave your neighbor
I know this is an old comment (for HN) but I will check back in 24 hours), or we can take it offsite. I always like a good chat. "S1artibarfastHN" at Gmail
I have informed opinions on property ownership and housing. I was a director for 100-person housing Co-op. I have been a renter. I am currently a landlord squeezing one tenant for market rate and providing another tenant housing and perpetuity for utility costs.
- I’m unhoused and identify as a lumpenprole. - Everything is a spectrum imo. - I was referring to radicals that aren’t radlib or fascist leaning.
I’d be interested in the email I send you and a response on which orthodox left-wing radicals were atrocious. Or if we agree that those specific radicals were not atrocious but many others are.
Awesome being director of a coop! Though IME most housing coops are exclusionary and not remotely democratic*
*I mean real democracy, not what neoliberal countries have.
My wife and I recently decided to buy after renting voluntarily for decades. We did all sorts of calculations. In some scenarios renting comes out on top. In others buying is more favourable.
Ultimately, our decision was based on the uncertainty created by the referencing system, on the recent spell of inflation and on changed personal circumstances rather than any long term financial advantage.
I don't like the sort of relationship that exists between landlords and tenants in the UK, but I'm not convinced that it is necessarily one of financial exploitation.
Small landlords have their money tied up in a badly diversified, inflexible asset that comes with unpredictable maintanance costs. I would never invest my own money like this.
If all goes well for the landlord, they make a profit. If not, only the bank makes a profit (unless interest rates rise too quickly and they have issued too many fixed rate mortgages).
If you buy your own home, the bank makes a profit and if you're lucky it turns out well for you financially. There's no guarantee that it will.
Yes, there are a small number of cases of a small landlord, with one property that they're having a hard time breaking even on, but those folks have a bad investment, and if they can't afford their investment, they should sell it to try to minimize their losses. Renters aren't on the hook to make them profitable.
By holding rental properties, they're inflating the value of homes for sale, making it harder for people to buy, and forcing people into renting.
We don't pity people who make stupid business decisions, so why should we pity landlords?
What I'm disputing is that it is necessarily exploitation and that owning your home is always the preferable choice.
I do understand where your sentiment comes from. The name "landlord" basically says it all. It hasn't always been a normal business and there is still quite a lot of that history left in the relationship between landlords and tenants (as well as in the grotesque distribution of land ownership in the UK).
About inflating the value of homes for sale I'm not sure. On one hand the available land is limited and so demand should inflate prices. I'm not even sure private ownership (or at least inheritance) of land should exist at all.
On the other hand, the price of homes as well as the level of rents is mostly determined by how many homes are built. More (private and public) capital flowing into building new homes makes home ownership and rents more affordable. Buy-to-let landlords provide some of that capital.
The other thing that could be done is changing planning rules and the taxation of land ownership so that more affordable homes get built.
I don't think home ownership deserves the status it has. Renting is fine. Affordability is far more important than who owns the place.
There's lots of systems in which renting can be done through cooperative systems that doesn't involve leeches.
Also, it shouldn't be impossible to debate systemic issues without comparing people to pests.
There are many scenarios where people would far rather rent than buy. E.g. you are trying to get to know a city to decide where to buy a house. You want to work in a city for a few years. You've just moved to a country and don't want to buy a property until you get a feel for where in the country you want to live, or maybe until you get permanent residence sorted out.
And that's not even covering cases where people don't have the money to buy yet. And no, it's not realistic to expect that people will all always have money to buy. Maybe they are young and just entered the workforce. Maybe they are an immigrant looking for a better life and came with little cash.
There has to be a rental market and thus there have to be landlords. Being a landlord does not make one "evil" or even taking advantage of people. It's needed and frankly shitty job. I'd personally never want to do it.
I'm being frank, your attitude is pretty toxic does not help the people who need the help the most.
Also, being a landlord isn't a job. Owning property isn't a job. Property management can be a job, but the typical landlord is barely lifting a finger to do much of that.
They made an investment and want you to maximize the returns. A very, very small percentage are active in their management, and those folks tend to be the worst form of slumlords, because they're so cheap they won't hire people to professionally manage the properties.
How are most of those things alternatives to housing ownership?
There's really only three possibilities. The occupant owns the place, or some other private party (individual or corporation) owns the place, or the government owns the place (public housing in its many variants).
Everything you list is one of these three (except for LVT which is an unrelated thing).
You can make this argument about literally any purchased good. Everything bought by a worker is the same thing.
Expanding it out, I doubt it’s specific to humans, more like a property of known life forms.
It also doesn't help that exploitation is so poorly defined in these discussions that it could simply be substituted by "bad" or "something I don't like".
That said, I like it and would be interested in exploring it more. Exploitations is a transaction that increases leverage for future transactions is one that I havent heard before.
Im also curious about the inverse.e.g. what transactions reduce leverage?
1. Buying in a bad neighborhood and things just get worse. 2. Tenant falling far behind for some reason then moving out. 3. Overpaying or over capitalizing. 4. While looking for a buyer or tenant, squatters or looters move in.
Please don't use terms like 'exploit' without specific details.
I prefer to be a tenant so that I have less worries, more freedom and more capital available for other investments.
Being a landlord should be risky. If it isn't, something is incredibly wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_General_Theory_of_Exploitati... by economist and political scientist John Roemer
It goes over exploitation. The wiki summarizes the thesis.
I can tell you've never done property management, because the most profitable areas are bad neighborhoods. In the US, section 8 housing is effectively guaranteed income, at favorable rates. The tenants don't really have much say in the conditions of the apartment, and all that's needed is to pass the housing authority inspection (which only cares about safety, not quality), so costs are generally low.
Being a slumlord is extremely profitable.
> Tenant falling far behind for some reason then moving out.
For the vast majority of the US, you can evict a person for nearly any reason with 30 days notice, and can evict someone for non-payment with 5 days notice. Holidays can extend that by a few days here and there, but for the most part, you can avoid tenants being months behind in rent, especially if the market is saturated.
Some landlords like to let their tenants fall behind because as long as the tenants eventually pay the rent, they get the late fees, which can increase their rents by 20% or so. Preying on the poor is also very profitable.
> Overpaying or over capitalizing.
You can do the same with any investment. Unlike other investments, though, you can write off most of your expenses, and you can carryover loss for essentially forever. Even bad real estate investments can be beneficial. There's a reason real estate investment is heavily favored by the rich.
Landlords aren't guaranteed to get rich, but it's extremely difficult to actually lose money as a landlord, unless you're a really shitty investor. Nearly everything you spend money on can be used for tax deductions (sometimes for years or forever after the loss), so even losses tend to be beneficial, when you're diversified properly. The law is way too favorable to property investment.
> While looking for a buyer or tenant, squatters or looters move in.
I did property management for a long time and can tell you this simply isn't a real problem. Squatters rights take a long time, and the police will forcibly remove them.
No one loots an empty apartment.
I rented for almost ten years before buying my place.
The idea that my landlords were exploitative is complete bollocks. They provided me with a useful service.
I would never want to own an apartment or house in many of the areas that I rented. I didn't want to be there long term.
[0] Things were better during the 100% remote environment of the pandemic, but many employers are now doing RTO [1] In the recent past, I've had to replace my AC and my roof. The AC repair bill was equivalent to 6 months of mortgage payments and the roof was equivalent to a year's worth of mortgage payments.
It would be nice if most of the renting was city-built and ran, with maybe buyout option if you live there for more than 5-10 or so years. THen city could easily control development, earn a bit of profit, and control the costs
Even if you sell low to low income people, they may be forced to sell at some point, to the highest bidder. I think OP is doing something really great: provide affordable housing on good terms.