But in fact 'rent' means to tear, split, rip, etc, and that's exactly what it is. People who 'own' land, ripping money from people who don't. But, land is common heritage like air and water, it belongs to us all, and individuals should not be able to own it, or at least not to own and 'rent' it.
Rent is a ripoff, by nature, and in it's very name.
Rent as in a tear comes via Middle and Old renten/renden and back to Proto-West Germanic and then it goes cold.
Before buying my first house in 2021, I was paying $2k / month in rent in a 2 family house my landlord bought 2 years prior for $350k. There was another person paying an additional $1k/month in the same house for a total of $3k/mo of total rent for a $350k house the landlord purchased through a LLC the year prior.
When I ended up buying a house, the monthly mortgage payments were about the same as rent except the house is 2x larger with 5x more property (on the same street as the apartment I was renting).
In other words, for mobility to really be worth the cost of renting, you really gotta be taking advantage of that benefit and moving around a lot. If you’re renting a house like I was for a long period of time, it makes absolutely no sense.
Unfortunately, I think most renters do so out of necessity (not able to afford a $75k down payment, for example).
But the right to own land is an essential part of a functioning society. The idea that no one should be able to own land is ridiculous and does not work. There are plenty of examples of this all across the globe.
But land ownership as in subletting and sub-subletting and sub-sub who knows how many levels up, that is not a necessary consequence of the concept of land ownership. What if only personal use was allowed? Sure, you would definitely see hoarding and countermeasures would not be without their own problems, but there is definitely room between unbounded capitalism and "property does not exist" level socialism.
Even trees do that. Eucalyptus literally poisons land near it to kill competition.
What do you call the territorial animals then? A tiger will chase other tigers from the area it considers its own. Same as wolves and many other species. It's not exactly property in the sense that it cannot be traded but it is indeed the ownership. Without property rights humans would have had the same: the strong chase the weak off their land or force them to pay for being on the land.
That's precisely what property rights are: "the strong [...] forc[ing the weak ...] to pay for being on the land". That's what property taxes are. To "have rights" is to be paid up with a protection racket. Yet as depressing as that is, it beats the alternative! In many places it's not a bad deal!
There is admittedly also an element of magic here: People generally view property rights as legitimate, and the police who enforce them as legitimate, and so on. But when that belief system fails, it's ultimately the State's ability to deploy force that reestablishes the faith.
Indeed, the law is ultimately based on force but it still does allow physically weak to have rights, unlike a natural law.
In practice, with housing, such leases are effectively ownership. The terms on these are often 100 years or more, and when they come to term, since there are often significant improvements built in the land, the terms can't be renegotiated since the lessor can't force the sale or relocation of the improvements.
so for most of recorded human history society did not function?
the only reason we're allowed to buy land is because it was commodified during the industrial revolution as the process of capital extraction from labor had moved from the land to the factories.
Since governments are in the business of governing, not real estate, they'll almost definitely outsource that work (or big parts of it) to private contractors like they do for defense.
The end result is that your landlord is now an even bigger private entity (that might be a conglomerate of smaller entities, which might or might not look like the institutional landlords that exist today) with the near-infinite financial backing of the government and the insanely slow processes that come with that (such as having to go through an intermediate to get that Tesla Powerwall you want to install approved, only to be told that Tesla isn't an approved supplier and that you should use this battery from $VENDOR_THAT_WE_DONT_HAVE_RELATIONSHIPS_WITH_WE_PROMISE).
Then you realize just how difficult it is to build. It takes just as long as the build sometimes and costs thousands and thousands upfront just to get to the point where you can start.
We need a streamlined process that allows standardized housing to be built with minimal upfront costs and on small affordable lots.
ADUs are up to 1200sq feet — for most people this is a whole dang house not an accessory dwelling unit.
Want to see how easy improvement could be made? Imagine if you could write off 50-70 percent of the total cost of an ADU over 15 years as long as it’s rented out to no more than 3 tenants during each year — and eliminated the ability of cities and counties to block their development as long as they fit on the lot. You’d have a massive increase in affordability in just a few short years.
It’s the laws and the zoning that are the problem. You’re spot on.
I built more than one house, not alone of course.
The problem with modern US building codes is that there is still too much over-regulation (e.g. AFCI's required in essentially all residential splits), combined with the dangerous interconflict of builder's EGO -vs- inspector's EGO — particularly egregious when the inspector feels a one-off homebuilder "deserves" differential treatment.
I think the dumbest jurisdictions (AHJ's) are the ones which prevent homeowners from (e.g.) installing their own electrical outlets, not even in owner-occupied structures. Homeowner maintenance becomes illegal, in certain stupid AHJ's (e.g. Chattanooga); and is thus done unpermitted by a helpless-to-stupid-regulations policy.
/rant
Thanks for allowing my vent, and re-enforcing some of its basis.
No it doesn't. 'Rent' in this context derives through french from a latin verb that means "to give back".
Your confusion comes from the fact that 'rent' can also be the past tense of 'rend' which has a different origin and comes from old english and germanic roots rather than French and latin.
But yes, it's true that many people who dislike rent may be happier owning a single family home.
After all, the apartment building will inevitably come with some sort of political process to decide things like how much this year's residents ought to put aside ready to replace the roof in a decade's time. And while such payments may not technically be rent, they'll smell very similar.
At least when you rent, you can easily move elsewhere and hope for thicker walls. I don't know how it is elsewhere, but in France, selling and buying a new house is a very expensive ordeal. The state gets to tax you 7% of the price of the new home. And with housing prices being absurdly high, 7% is quite a sum.