Reason I’m asking is because I have an aunt that owns like maybe 3 - 5 (not sure the exact amount) small townhouses around the city (well, when I say “city” think of like the areas around a city where theres no tall buildings, but only small 2-3 stories single family homes in the neighborhood) and have these houses up for rent, and honestly, my aunt and her husband doesn’t seem like a terrible people. They still work a normal job, and have to pay taxes like everyone else have to. They still have their own debts to pay. I’m not sure exactly how, but my parents say they did a combination of saving up money and taking loans from banks to be able to buy these properties, fix them, then put them up for rent. They don’t overcharge, and usually charge slightly below the market to retain tenants, and fix things (or hire people to fix things) when their tenants request them.
I mean, they are just trying to survive in this capitalistic world. They wanna save up for retirement, and fund their kids to college, and leave something for their kids, so they have less of stress in life. I don’t see them as bad people. I mean, its not like they own multiple apartment buildings, or doing excessive wealth hoarding.
Do leftists mean people like my aunt too? Or are they an exception to the “landlords are bad” sentinment?
Your Aunt should be paying enough taxes that owning a second property should be more or less unfeasible.
A fair system would have her seeking other retirement vehicles.
It would vary depending on who’s saying it.
There are lots of kinds of “leftisms” with lots of different attitudes toward landlords—but to take Georgism as a concrete example that exclusively focuses on land ownership:
Georgists would say that the portion of the rent equal to the market rent of the unimproved lot—including the value generated by the presence of the surrounding community and infrastructure—should go back to the community, but the portion of the rent contributed by the presence of buildings and other improvements should go to the owner of the improvements.
There is no exception to stealing housing from other people.
If you rent to house mates, is that stealing? Do you need to have joint ownership with everyone?
I don’t think rentals should exist. You could literally put a house anywhere a couple hundred years ago, and all you needed to do was build it. Now we have artificially stunted the supply of housing to make good little worker bees our of everyone. The threat of homelessness and starvation is a fantastic motivator to not rock the boat in society.
You could literally put a house anywhere a couple hundred years ago, and all you needed to do was build it.
I think you have to go back way more than a few hundred years for that.
In the US there were programs that kinda sounded like that but it was just the US government trying to get working class white people to displace native people.
In Europe wasn’t everything owned by nobles snd royals who demanded a cut of your labor? Could people just build a random house anywhere in ancient Rome or Greece?
Well, not quite. You’d have to have rights to the land to do that. Else someone could ride up and just take it from you.
My two cents—which is worthless (thanks inflation!):
Not unless you are taking advantage of them. It really is going to depend on the specific situation. But if you are renting to housemates you’re not really the landlord class most people are talking about.
But what is taking advantage of them? If someone owns a house outright, isn’t charging any rent charging more than you need to? At that point, they’re not contributing anything. I agree that’s not what most people are talking about, but I don’t see how it’s categorically different.
If you’re not charging them above what is required to cover their share of the mortgage, then that’s not immoral at all.
But you would be the one getting ownership from the mortgage, so I’d think charging less than the share of the mortgage would be fair. But that ratio depends on your and their particular time value of money, which is hard to pin down. And once you paid off the house, the rent should go to zero?
I agree, that sounds fair.
I suppose after the house is paid off, they could switch to pay the equivalent percentage they were paying for the mortgage, toward property taxes and utilities instead.
According to the lefties, everything should be communal property, and you should be happy for a chunk of bread and two eggs a day.
Why bother what those clowns have to say.
Ideologies tend to sort people into a limited number of overly simplistic categories. This makes theorising easier but applying it to reality much harder.
Is there an ethical way to try and ensure that I will have food, shelter and medical care as I age? In the US we can’t depend on the government safety net. Everyone isn’t as able in their 60’s and 70’s as they were in their 30’s and 40’s, so assuming that I’ll be able to work and make a reasonable income the rest of my life is wildly optimistic. Anyone working at a job for 30+ years shouldn’t be stressed about survival but that’s not reality. Putting money in a savings account at a credit union is good but I don’t think that will move the needle. Any decent pension or retirement plan is gonna put money in the stock market. Even with passive investing in index funds, you’re on of the stock holders that fucks like that UHC CEO was trying to appease. Given the state of the economy in the US today, buying and renting a duplex, triplex or small apartment building might be less evil than owning random stocks.
No raindrop thinks itself responsible for the flood.
I’ve never heard this phrase before and I love it.
Quit exhaling! We have a climate crisis!
But this is my regulated breathing minute!
Leftists don’t say that, advocates for the Chinese Dictatorship say that.
It’s literally propaganda straight out of the Chinese Communist Party’s playbook, and useful idiots repeat it for them.
you are aware that the KMT who opposed the CCPs land grab also chose an anti-profit driven land distrubition model through the Equalization of Land Rights as well right. As mentioned before, KMT were Georgism focused, and all profit should go back to the community, and any profit the owner gets is meant to go back to the building or land for improvements, none for profit. There is an effective 100% tax on any profit of land trade.
Perhaps, but doesn’t the US history of hobos, homeless, company towns, and housing crisis mean…regardless of how you feel about the various flavors of socialism/communism, that the criticism is correct even if you don’t like the solution?
I think if you rent out your attic, whatever, i don’t think anybody cares. If you have a spare airbnb property or an investment property or you own an apartment complex, then yes, they’re part of the problem.
“Landlords provide housing like scalpers provide concert tickets.”
https://lifehacker.com/why-everyone-hates-landlords-now-1849100799
Or public housing
I’d say even your aunt is included in that. Don’t worry though, my mom is on the same list. They’re extracting wealth from someone else’s labor.
My grandfather was a landlord back in the 80s-90s. He owned several small homes and duplexes in a big city, and he did all the maintenance and upkeep on them himself. I saw him work his ass off, how would his tenants paying him rent not be compensating him for his labor?
I dunno about pricing back then but the issue is the amount of wealth that can be generated from a situation like that.
Like, hypothetically, let’s split your grandfather into two people. A landlord, and a maintenance guy hired to maintain those properties, getting paid a fair wage.
Would the landlord make money, after paying a mortgage and his maintenance man?
If the answer is no, then becoming a landlord isn’t financially beneficial, and your grandfather could’ve just been a handyman, and made a steadier income, his money not directly dependent on whether or not someone paid rent.
If the answer is yes, then your grandfather made more money than his labor was worth. While he earned money doing labor, the real issue is the money he earned by doing nothing. It’s likely your grandfather made quite a bit more money than his labor was worth, given the fact that property management companies live entirely off of the price difference from labor put into housing and the price they can charge.
Landlords are middlemen. They’re used car salesman for houses. Are there landlords that aren’t shitty? Yeah. My last landlord was awesome, he actually sold me the house I was renting, when I told him I was gonna buy a house and start my family. He was nice, reasonable, all those things. The total rent at the time (pre-covid, so a lot better than now, and split among 6 people) was 2250$, and my mortgage worked out to be 900$.
Did your grandfather put effort in? Yes. Did he make money doing nothing? Also yes, the difference between what his labor was worth and what he got paid.
That margin didn’t come from his labor or his smart investments, it came from other people trying to live, and potentially created hardships. If his tenants could’ve paid for the actual cost of housing instead of whatever your grandfather charged, that might mean another kid got to go to college, a father getting to retire earlier, a family that could’ve worked 1 job instead of 2.
Your grandfather is probably fine, he likely understood hardships and acted like a human being, but he still belonged to a class of people that are better off if they find ways to minimize the amount of money other people have. Some people judge others for taking what they don’t need.
I appreciate you breaking it down this way. It helps me understand the stance so many hold on landlords.
However, I think you’re missing a lot in your distillation that everything above mortgage + handyman salary is making money for nothing.
Owner also pays property taxes, insurance, all maintenance costs, all upgrades, and possibly utilities or yard care. The benefits for the renters include having a maintenance person on-call all the time, not needing to vet each tradesperson, not needing to get quotes, no expenses when an appliance breaks, no liability in case of a disaster, and more.
If I didn’t have a handy partner and the market was reasonable, I’d love to rent. I don’t want to deal with maintenance and I like having a consistent monthly fee rather than suddenly having to spend $2k on a new water heater like I did last month, or being afraid that our heat might die suddenly this winter because we weren’t ready to spend >$20k this summer to replace the air handler when it went out and needed a new part. Plus my partner took 3 half days off work to get 3 quotes for it. They each told us significantly different things that we needed to do, so we couldn’t decide if we were comfortable doing business with any of them. That shit is stressful! Having the assurance that I can call just one person and someone else will take care of it is worth a good price.
So the cost of owning some units is more than just the mortgage, and the benefits of renting are more than just a maintenance person’s salary. Distilling it to just those two things is an unjust comparison.
Should a person get stupidly rich off of being a landlord? No. That’s exploitative. The cost of renting should match the cost of the property and maintenance (as averaged out over time) plus the cost/savings of the additional benefits of renting. That’s all. But that’s a lot more than just mortgage + handyman salary divided out over however many units the landlord owns.
(Also this assumes the person is actually a good landlord, and we know there are many landlords out there who aren’t.)
Thank you for putting this so eloquently. Most reasonable line of thinking I’ve seen ITT
It’s not a coherent argument, people just don’t like paying rent so they lash out in frustration. If you can’t own you have to rent, if you have to rent you have to rent from someone. It’s just a fact of life. Just like food is also a requirement to live and you need to pay someone for that too if you’re not self sufficient. There’s good people selling food and bad people selling food. It would be dumb to consider all food merchants evil in principle just as it’s dumb to consider all landlords evil in principle.
I honestly feel like when this issue comes up, everyone saying stuff like this is an alien. Do you seriously not know how much work maintaining property is? You say it’s exploiting someone else’s labor as though the several times a year every household needs work is, what, either worthless, unmentionable, or something people are owed by divine right? My parents owned some apartments and sound similar to OPs aunt. If anything, they were exploited by the people they bought them from (that aspect is a long story).
They charged people under market rate, went out of their way all the time to be kind to people by doing things like driving half an hour to personally come pick up rent payments, letting people stay for a year without paying rent since they felt bad for them, went out to fix maintenance issues in the middle of the night, and the list goes on and on. They treated people better than any other landlord and worked their absolute asses off to make a profit (some years they took losses). It was only after a 20 year struggle, full of manual labor and dealing with difficult tenants, that they were able to sell the apartments and be free from the stress and be free of all of that manual labor. They basically cleaned toilets and replaced filthy carpet for people who would spit in their face for evicting them after a year of non payment.
According to you and this thread, the people doing the spitting weren’t morally bad or the lazy ones. Nope, it was my parents.
I have several friends who could not possibly afford to own a home without renting out a room. I was in that situation myself for many years, having barely scraped together enough to buy the property for my farm. I mean without renting out a room I wouldn’t have been able to eat, much less pay the mortgage.
But nope, apparently this makes us parasites judging from all the comments here, like this one:
“If you make a profit for allowing another person shelter (particularly if you don’t need that space for yourself and/or your own family), then you are a parasite.”
Obviously there is some ambiguity around the word “profit” in this context. Owning land or a house is almost always “profit” but that “profit” isn’t usually realizable except over very long time scales.
But hey, nuance I guess.
Typically small landlords (I was one) are not the problem, But they aren’t making things any easier. They still take up houses that they don’t need that should be on the market, and they charge about twice what thier mortgage rate is to renters, which then artifically inflates housing prices, while also restricting home inventory. People with a handful of properteries aren’t really the main driver of the issues though. One corporate landlord with 500 properties would do much more damage, but they all harm the market to an extent.
I don’t know if I’m leftist, but the US spectrum is well right of most of the world.
The question is multi-layered. Your aunt may or may not be a bad person, I don’t know her. Them renting out property may or may not be for good reason, even if they’re doing it to “survive” in the capitalistic economy.
The real issue is that capitalism itself is exploitative, and (depending on where you draw the line) participating may fall under being complicit.
My understanding of parasitism is extracting resources for their own benefit, with little to no benefit for the exploited/system.
The first hint of parasitism is amassing resources they aren’t using for living. Your aunt and husband made surplus money to be able to afford buying the properties. Unless they did that by extracting resources, refining them, working them and making provisions for them to be recycled and ecologically compensated - others will have had to pay the cost. Either by working harder than them, or suffering more than them, for example due to an imbalance of ecology. This is one form of parasitism.
Another perspective of parasitism is inserting themselves as a middle party. Your aunt almost certainly isn’t providing the housing at cost, where rent barely covers their labor and property upkeep. That means they are keeping someone from a home, unless they pay extra to your aunt. Just like a bully.
Now, this doesn’t mean that your aunt has any malicious intent. The point is that the system itself is evil, like a pyramid scheme of bullies, where each layer extracts something from each underlying layer. This is useful for making ventures, but at the cost of ever increasing exploitation and misery. Especially when capitalists are allowed to avoid paying for restoring the exploited, or incentivised to do it more. I’m sure you’ve heard of enshittification.
Now, example time!
I’m sure you’ve thought that air is important for you to survive. And maybe you’ve ever worried that traffic or other pollution might make your air less good for you?
Enter the capitalist! For a small premium we’ll offer your personalised air solution, a nifty little rebreather loaded with purified air you carry with you all day. The price is so reasonable as well, for only $1/day you can breathe your worries away!
Now, producing the apparatus means mining and logging upstream of your town, removing natural air filtering and permanently damaging your environment, but they only charge for the machines and labor. Restoration is Future You’s problem. Selling and refilling the apparatus happens to also produce pollution, making the air worse for everyone. But that makes the apparatus more valuable! Price rises to $2/day.
Competitors arrive, some more successful than others, all leaving ecological devastation and pollution that can’t be naturally filtered. Air gets worse. One brand rises to the top, air is more valuable and lack of competition makes it so that air is now $4/day.
Then an unethical capitalist figures that if we just make the air slightly worse, profits will go up! They don’t want to be evil, but cutting corners when upgrading the production facility means the pollution gets worse. Other adjacent capitalists see that they also can pollute more without consequences. Air gets worse and price increases to 6$/day.
Air is starting to get expensive, rebreather sharing services, one-use air bottles, and home purifyers crop up, increasing pollution and raising costs, air is now $8/day for most people.
People start dying from poor air, new regulations on apparatus safety and mandatory insurance come up, driving prices further to $10/day. You now also need a spare apparatus and maintain it in case your main one breaks down.
Etc.
The point of the example is that through a series of innocuous steps, all making perfect sense within capitalism, you are now paying $300/month more to live than before capitalism, with little real benefit to you, and no real choice to opt out.
Each and every step is parasiting on your life, by requiring you to work harder for that money, and/or suffer more due to pollution and ravaged environment.
The only solution to not work/suffer into an early grave is to have others work on your behalf, perpetuating the parasitic pyramid scheme. This is where your aunt is, is she evil? Probably not. Is her being an active part of an evil system bad? Yes, yes it is. Capitalism bad.
If landlords are so evil, would their tenants alternatively buy the apartment where they rent? People rent for many reasons - perhaps they can’t afford to buy , or perhaps they like paying a fixed amount so someone else can fix the house when things break.
Either way it isn’t the landlords fault that many cities have restrictive zoning laws and we are still reeling from missed housing development during the great recession. Demand for housing has well outdated supply and inflation has made the inputs more expensive, thus prices have gone up. More supply will help reduce the rate of increase, but real prices will not decline without another deep recession, and the impact of that would still be temporary.
If landlords are middleman, would you prefer everyone lives in government housing? Explain the alternative in your fantasy land related to housing, not some ridiculous anecdote about charging for air.
My point is, if you read “aunt” as “landlord”, my comment is not about the landlords as much as the system.
Without landlords, we’d not have a housing crisis. There would be enough housing for everyone, we have plenty of resources and land to build them. The US, not to mention the world, is still big enough for everyone to have their own plot of land and housing.
How did people live before Capitalism? I’ve read that housing existed before even banking was invented. Somehow there wasn’t a housing crisis back then, until/unless we had exploitation.
You’re not wrong in what you’re saying though. The basic difference of perspective between you and I, I believe, is that you’re viewing this from inside the capitalist system, where landlords do indeed provide a function. But if we’d not have capitalism, we’d still have housing, and with less value extraction/parasitism.
As for the obscure anecdote, let’s instead use the simile of marketing. They add no value to you as a consumer, and if there weren’t so many marketers finding what you need would be easier and cheaper (as there would be no marketing cost). For the capitalist they add value, for the rest of us they’re an ever increasing drain on resources - a parasite.
How did people live before Capitalism? I’ve read that housing existed before even banking was invented. Somehow there wasn’t a housing crisis back then, until/unless we had exploitation.
In self-built primitive mud shacks under a very low population density.
Without landlords, we’d not have a housing crisis.
Maybe. Or maybe it’s not so simple. Because:
There would be enough housing for everyone, we have plenty of resources and land to build them.
But would they be built? I’m in no way saying this is “right” but for them to be built builders have to know they are going to make a profit. The smaller that profit the more pressure to build fewer. Now maybe we get lucky and all this downward pressure on prices balances out. But I’d guess that far far fewer homes would be built and so the question ends up being is it still enough? Some say there are plenty of houses already and it would be, but that assumes those who paid the inflated prices are willing to accept less money now.
tl;dr we’re fucked.
Profit, price pressures, inflation are not necessarily meaningful terms in a different system.
Homes have been built for many thousands of years longer than we’ve had those as concepts.
Profit, price pressures, inflation are not necessarily meaningful terms in a different system.
What exactly do you mean by that?
Homes have been built for many thousands of years longer than we’ve had those as concepts.
If you include cedar bark as a major construction material then sure. Not knocking cedar bark here - it’s great. But not quite the same investment in time or durability.
Profit, price pressures, inflation are not necessarily meaningful terms in a different system.
What exactly do you mean by that?
In a circular or planned economy, those aren’t really significant measures, neither in a subsistence living context. Which are strategies that have housed all of humanity until the last few hundred years.
In a post-capitalist economy, we might be able to provide the human necessities without exploitation. I don’t know how, but I know it’s not through more capitalism.
Homes have been built for many thousands of years longer than we’ve had those as concepts.
If you include cedar bark as a major construction material then sure. Not knocking cedar bark here - it’s great. But not quite the same investment in time or durability.
As mentioned in the last reply, the Palace of Knossos, as well as the Petra were marvels of craftsmanship and engineering, staggering investments, and have stood for over 2000 years. Would probably have survived longer if maintained properly.
The pyramids, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassos, the Taj Mahal, all are landmark (literally) feats for the contemporary technology and societies.
You comparing them with modern construction methods necessitated by capitalism, and with modern technology seems an unfair comparison, as well as circular reasoning.
In a circular or planned economy, those aren’t really significant measures,
Ok, sure - you just said “different” and did not specify.
As mentioned in the last reply, the Palace of Knossos, as well as the Petra were marvels of craftsmanship and engineering, staggering investments,
That involved massive exploitation and slave labor. And let’s not forget significant taxation, looting, etc.
You comparing them with modern construction methods necessitated by capitalism
I’m comparing them because I’m making the point that profit, price pressures and inflation obviously arise when private entities make huge capital investments.
So now that you’ve actually specified “different” as meaning non-capitalist systems, it leads me to wonder if you thought King Minos sought out volunteers… or did he pay everyone fairly? Are you really using “public” works built under autocratic rule as positive examples we can replicate?
That was over a decade ago. We absolutely could have covered the gap by now if we were serious about it.
And yes government housing is fine.
Found the landlord.
Yes, it is landlords’ fault for zoning laws. Yes landlords are to blame (not solely) for the great recession. Yes, landlords are responsible for the demand for housing outstripping supply.
Landlords are parasites, not middlemen. The alternative to landlords is not everything being government housing, but also that’s not an issue if you take away landlords and stop them from having any power to corrupt the legal and political systems of the world.
I’m not a landlord. And you’re just incorrect. This is no stupid questions, but there are plenty of stupid answers. The great recession was caused by homeowners and banks making loans they shouldn’t have with adjustable rates and predatory practices (ever heard of a NINJA loan?) that greatly increased demand for housing, and then the banks created derivatives on derivatives that all went up in smoke when the underlying loans defaulted. This resulted in many people losing their homes, but more broadly financial markets tightened and housing starts plummeted, which is responsible for the housing shortage today. We had like 5-10 years of development well below replacement.
I would also point out that most local zoning laws make multi-use housing like apartments that we lust for in the 15 minute city difficult to build in favor of the single family home. I would argue that is actually the average homeowner’s fault more than a landlord.
“The alternative to landlords is not everything being government housing, but also that’s not an issue if you take away landlords and stop them from having any power…”
What the actual fuck does that mean? Do you hear yourself? The alternative is not the thing I said, but something else that still remains imaginary.
You know housing costs money to build right? So, for that to happen, someone has to invest. There are these institutions called banks, maybe they haven’t made it to lunatic Island where you live, but they charge interest so you can have money today to build or buy rather than waiting years to accumulate that money.
Now that housing is built, the person that built it wants to sell it. Someone buys it and then someone lives in it for a cost. Without government intervention, what is the alternative?
The problem is not OP’s Aunt or even most apartment management companies, but I will give you that Private Equity getting into single family housing is a problem. That should be addressed, and I seriously doubt it will.
Landlord/wannabe landlord - what’s the difference?!
No, you are just plain old incorrect - do you even hear yourself??
Landlords have always been the people with money and power and they have welded that influence to create these situations. It doesn’t matter if there was malicious forethought - most of them think they haven’t done wrong because they’re looking out for them and their own - oh and it’s just the way the world works so what can they do?!! Lots. If you’re not part of the solution, your part of the problem. You need to educate yourself on a lot of things buddy.
Yes, the problem is OPs aunt, and property management companies as well as private equity (which is another name for a group of OPs aunt and property management companies)
Do you know what’s so hilarious?
I am willing to bet with actual genuine monopoly money that 95% of the people here who are complaining about landlords will be totally on board with landlording once, later in life, they are in a position to do so.
I am in a position to be a landlord and choose not to be.
I am in a position to be a landlord and choose not to be.
IOW, you are in a position to not need the income. I.e. you could afford the usurious prices for real estate.
Yes, landlords are responsible for the demand for housing outstripping supply.
I’m curious how that makes sense to you. In theory and practice landlords want to landlord and thus rent out their property, not withhold it from the market.
Dont forget how the secondary real estate market drove prices up and as been doing so since the 70s
My understanding of parasitism is extracting resources for their own benefit, with little to no benefit for the exploited/system.
This defines almost every transactional function in our society.
