I had a contract with yearly price adjustment that lasted 3 years. We updated the price on January and in February there was A LOT of inflation in my country so I did get “cheap” rent for that year. When the end of year was approaching we made the math and the new total was outside what we could realistically pay so we ended the contract (paying the respective fees) and she tried to guilt trip us saying how much she had LOST because we adjusted on January.
Good luck with that. I’m not feeling sorry for someone who sits on her ass all day and expects money to just show up on her account. She didn’t even fix shit that was going to cause permanent structural damage to the house
Reality is worse than this picture though. The landlords are contributing to all thkse knives and grenades, intentionally.
I’d say that’s what separates a good landlord from a bad landlord, is if they are intentionally adding knives and grenades.
Smith goes into great detail in “The wealth of Nations” about how landlords are parasites. He explains why theoretically and empirically and gives specific examples. He lacked an understanding of historical materialism, so he wrongly thought capitalism would naturally get rid of them.
You know how California got sick of greedy companies ripping off people for insulin so now they’re going to sell insulin themselves at a reasonable price? Yeah, they should do that with apartments.
This literally happens in some areas outside the US. I can’t remember if it’s NotJustBikes or HappyTowns that talks about it on YouTube. But basically, the government offers affordable housing to force landlords to compete on quality and price. Shockingly in those areas rents are down and the quality of apartments is decent.
Vienna, Austria is a classic example. Don’t know about the current situation, though.
California’s housing would be much less of an issue if the high speed rail was built
That’s an idiotic take
That’s an incredibly lazy comment
Yes but he said “high speed rail” which is popular here so now you’re getting downvoted.
You’re right of course. It’s an idiotic take.
It’s kinda like saying housing would be a lot better if there were more forest rangers.
It’s kinda like saying housing would be a lot better if there were more forest rangers.
How is that at all the same?
Rant incoming. I’m trying to rent a apartment that is less than 1/4th of my salary but I might not get it because the landlord is too stupid to understand 80% of my salary is stocks so they won’t show up on a paystub. This is the people that love to label themselves as savvy investors. God damn it. Rant over.
why don’t you just buy a house?
My president just consolidated the three branches into one so I’m holding up in case I have to flee.
Fair enough, prioritise people who actually work and do things. They deserve housing before anyone else.
Then also people who do not work and make money off of others people’s work may have a house.
Yes? I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to add here.
Not sure what the graphic is trying to say. Are landlords supposed to protect people from increasing costs of home ownership? 🤔 How are these ideas connected?
Mind you, ownership implies that you are not renting your home, you own it.
People say landlords provide a service that is providing housing to another person without them having to pay the full cost of homeownership. Yet, because the landlord is not only covering their costs but extracting as much profit as the market will allow, the cost and experience of renting is pretty damn competitive with that of ownership. So to answer your question,
Are landlords supposed to protect people from increasing costs of home ownership?
Yes, that is the way most non-landlords justify the existence of landlords to themselves. The alternative is to acknowledge that landlords exist only for the sake of enabling the owning class to generate capital for themselves by exploiting the working class.
O-kay. I can think of a myriad of other reasons than sheer cost why I might not want to buy a home straight away. But I see how the graphic kind of makes sense in the way you describe.
I’m not a big fan of landlords, by the way, and the instant downvoting for asking a simple question is extremely rude. Doesn’t exactly foster community engagement, guys! 😑
I can think of a myriad of other reasons than sheer cost why I might not want to buy a home straight away
Me too and you make a great point. The problem isn’t with renting homes as a concept, it’s with renting from a private owner at market prices. Publicly owned housing for rent at maintenance cost-prices would eliminate the exploitative relationship and still allow people to rent for as long as they want.
Pretending that small landlords and corporate landlords are the same is like saying your local grocer is as bad as Walmart.
Renting is an essential part of the housing market. Not everyone wants or can commit to home ownership and all it’s unpredictable maintenance costs. A plumbing failure can be as cheap as $200 to fix or cost you $10,000+ for a full replacement and restoration from the biohazards of black water damage.
The reason why the housing market is fucked is because poor regulation allows corporate landlords to buy up tons of investment properties and control the housing costs and supply.
All landlords are parasites. Paying a landlord is not the same as having home insurance…
Nah. I’ve been renting where I’m at for over a decade. My landlord has been amazing. I’ve had times where I’m out of work and he’s allowed me to be 2 months late paying, I’ve had hard times and he’s helped out, he let’s me do what I want with the place and he foots the bill. He’s also only raised my rent in that 11 years by 125$. I’ve also seen his house, and it’s worse off then mine. My truck is better then his as well. Not all landlords are the same. Some actually do want to help as much as they can.
I’m genuinely happy for you getting a good landlord, but access to housing shouldn’t be conditioned by being lucky to get a decent and altruistic landlord (a minority in people’s experience, hence the massive upvotes of the post).
Housing is a human right, not an investment. Nationalize housing
Socialized housing isn’t an overnight project. It starts with regulating the current housing marketing and prioritizing the take down of corporate slumlords. It starts with revising zoning laws, promoting higher density housing and multifamily homes, and creating walkable and accessible neighborhoods for all.
I get the idealism from Lemmy, but this is also it’s pitfall. Anything less than a leftist utopia is not worth working towards, and so we sit in righteous inaction.
It’s not a utopia, housing has been nationalized successfully in several countries, with the result of the abolition of homelessness, extremely affordable rent (think 3% of monthly incomes), and evictions essentially not existing.
I’m all for revising zoning laws, enacting rent caps, and other transitional measures, but the end goal should be the collectivization of housing, which would eliminate the parasitism altogether.
History is path dependent. Not every country has the same literacy rates, civic participation, income inequality, intergenerational wealth, social inertia, and so on.
What is rational and common place in one country is radical progressivism in another.
You can do what is ideal, or you can do what works. You can deny a reality of systemic barriers to affordable housing, or accept that they are real and must be tackled one at a time.
In an ideal world, yes, there would be no landlords. In the real world, property, laws, the economy, and people are so deeply intertwined that to propose the elimination of landlords is about as facetious as eliminating bankers because of exploitation in banking.
I don’t know why you keep bringing up the word “ideal”. Marxists are opposed to idealism, we’re staunch materialists. Saying that “things change over time and place” doesn’t automatically negate historical examples , and following those historical examples doesn’t imply not achieving progressive victories over time.
You claim to follow the path that works, but that’s what the western left has been following for the past 50 years and look where that led us.
Pretending that small landlords and corporate landlords are the same is like saying your local grocer is as bad as Walmart
Your comparison is valid, but it works against your interests. Your local grocer, as a business owner, is every bit against rising minimum wage as Walmart is: both of them see reduced profits when minimum wages are increased, so the class relations between them and their workers make them support anti-worker-rights policy.
In the same manner, your local landlord has every reason to be as opposed to measures such as rent caps or rent freezes as BlackRock.
Yes, rent should exist as an alternative to home ownership, but the housing for rent should be publicly owned and rented at maintenance-cost prices as has been done successfully in many socialist countries before which managed to abolish homelessness. As an example, by the 1970s rent in the Soviet Union costed about 3% of the monthly average income. Can’t we do better than that 55 years of technological progress later?
both of them see reduced profits when minimum wages are increased
But one doesn’t have to act in the shareholders best interest.
My friends are renting in an apt from a mom and pop landlord who hasn’t raised the price in years - they roughly play half of what market price is at this point.
So sure, the direction of Mom and pop landlords interests may be the same as a corporate landlords, but that are under much less pressure to leverage that.
Whether or not a small business owner is for or against raising wages depends entirely on their own ethical compass, and whether that compass is strong enough to turn away from the temptation of extra profit. It’s rare that individuals are so altruistic to be able to fully turn off the impulse for profit incentive and personal enrichment.
In contrast, a worker owned coop would not have that issue, as all workers would have equal incentive to raise wages as much as is reasonable while still maintaining the ability for the coop to thrive. Their individual ethics or moral compass wouldn’t factor in nearly as much.
Worker owned coops equivalent for housing is a housing coop complex, which I believe is the most sustainable model of housing.
However, I’m not sure how that would apply to single detached houses.
EDIT: I didn’t really address the original point.
The comparison was between Black Rock and Mom and pop landlords. You can bet your ass that black rock is trying to squeeze out profit. That statement does not hold as true for Mom and pops, because there are other reasons why they may be renting out.
In a theoretical socialist society, people would not be allowed to own multiple single family homes, only the one they’re currently using, since renting an essential need creates a power imbalance.
As a stop-gap, all currently rented single family homes (as in renting the entire house, not just a room in a house), could be converted to rent-to-own contracts, so that at some point that power imbalance ends and the renter is no longer being exploited.
Who maintains the homes that no one is living in?
Could you elaborate what you mean?
Yeah, because the renter will have to pay $5,000 when the AC unit craps out.
What AC unit?! 🤣
I once rented a house from friends that were out of the country. We paid exactly their mortgage payment (plus utils and I did and paid for handyman level stuff, they covered big stuff), which was $600 a month less than the market rate for places a step down in quality.
Once we left I told them to increase the rent by $200 for higher insurance and a real handyman and whatever else and it’s still a huge favor to anyone they get by word of mouth only. The next couple thought they had won the lottery scoring a place for almost $5000 a year less than the rest of the area.
You paid a mortgage payment (and then some) and only received shelter, when you should have received shelter and equity in the home. Are you trying to say your friends did you a favor?
It’s nice that your friends didn’t screw you I suppose, and maybe your friends will give you a payout proportional to the amount you paid towards their mortgage when they sell the home, but until that happens, you did them a favor, not the other way around.
I know you mean well here, but this is fully bonkers. This is not how friends behave with each other.
They absolutely don’t owe me shit. We lived with them for a month before they moved, all in same house, for free. So there’s money we didn’t spend right there. We shared meals, shared hangovers, and shared their other friends in a place we were just moving to, which is priceless. But if you’re still really worried about money, they sold us their car for well under KBB as well. The guy’s brother and mom were who we called when stuff broke, and who brought us pupusas randomly when they were in the neighborhood. We trust them and they trust us, so we aren’t going to fuck up their house, and we got landlords that respond to shit immediately. I’m not going to ruin a 20+ year relationship with some tankie notions about “oh, bro, you owe me home equity.” And you can trust that anyone doing something like this knows when they have a good thing going without having to explain details.
