There’s a lot to unpack out of this reddit moment.
If we want people to take us seriously about advocating for reform in this housing crisis, this ain’t it. Stripping nuance out of the conversation isn’t helping the cause, it just makes us look uninformed.
Yes, the vast majority of landlords charge too much and do to little. But claiming that no work is required to be landlord does two things:
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It absolves the landlord of the responsibility to maintain the property
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It diminishes the scope of the work required to provide people with affordable housing and doesn’t set clear goals to accomplish
There is a rule of thumb called the unrecoverable costs to owning which is typically 5% of the property’s value. This goes towards plumbing, electrical work, landscaping, HVAC repairs, roof work, pest control, interior upkeep, and much more. The reality is that a property doesn’t take care of it self and someone has to.
Yes, the system is broken, rent is unaffordable, and home owner is neigh impossible these days. What we need is regulation on the housing market, getting rid of speculators, reform zoning laws for high density housing, public transit and good urban planning, more subsidized and public housing, etc.
Even when you have all of that you will still need landlords, just not the kind that we have today. Because for housing to exist there is an inherent risk that somebody has to carry to guarantee the mortgage is paid for and that it will not go up in flames.
Capitalistic landlording is wholly unnecessary. Homes can be personally or publicly owned without needing a landlord rent-seeking. Ownership is not labor, and creates no value.
This isn’t a “reddit moment,” it’s a leftist moment, and given that lemmy is the leftist answer to the Capitalist Reddit, it’s a bit interesting that you think this is more reddit than true to Lemmy.
I didn’t say ownership is labor. I said maintenance is labor.
Seriously. Have you tried: re-painting a house, replacing drywall, installing new floor boards, replacing light fixtures, redoing baseboards, hooking up new washer/dryers, replacing doors knobs, fixing broken ceiling fans, installing security cameras, vetting and hiring handymen, plumbers, electricians, HVAC technicians, getting permits with the city, installing a new faucet, cleaning up sewer leaks, cleaning up mold, fixing stucco, dealing with bedbugs and termite extermination, get HERS testing, spec out a new electrical panel, debug for nuisance tripping, and so much more shit that I don’t have time to list them all.
This stuff doesn’t do it self. I live in my own home now and I had to learn how to do most of these things, at least the ones that don’t require certification. Handymen are expensive, and right fully so because doing maintenance well is not an easy job. If I can’t learn to do it right, I’ll need to pay someone else to do it.
My point is that owning a home is kind of like owning a pet. You need to be fully prepared for shit over the house and know how to deal with it when it happens. Unless you’re some property conglomerate, owning a house isn’t just a deed transfer, it’s practically a living thing that you need to take care of.
Maintenance is labor, and you don’t need ownership to perform maintenance. There will always be plumbers, but you don’t need a landlord to hire a Worker to do work.
Owning a home doesn’t need to be like owning a pet, again, you can have robust and nice public housing or personal ownership and contract maintenance yourself. Neither option necessitates neofeudal landlords.
Already answered. Exactly none of that requires a Capitalist landlord, you can accomplish every bit of that either publicly or with a worker-owned maintenance firm that can oversee all of that.
Capitalism is entirely unnecessary.
Already answered Okay, where is the answer?
worker-owned maintenance firm Sounds like an HOA with extra steps and oh boy, I sure love dealing that those.
That’s an absolute dodge. I answered, contracting complex maintenance in no way requires having a Capitalist own your home. You can either have publicly owned housing, or you can personally own it, and choose to contract a maintenance firm or do it yourself.
All of these are superior to having a Capitalist landlord, designed to extract as much profit from you as possible for as little maintenance as possible. The closest to a Capitalist landlord would be public housing, except public housing isn’t concerned with extracting profits but getting results and covering costs.
Why exactly do you think some dude needs to own your house in order for them to coordinate maintenance? It’s nonsense.
Sounds more like a home warranty company. Which works pretty nicely in practice.
I’ve never had First American tell me what color I can paint my walls.
The vast majority of landlords doesn’t do any of that. They just pay for it to professional people from the revenue that they get from renting the house. The only labor that they perform is maximizing rent and minimizing maintenance costs (usually at the expense of the renters) and having to find new tenants from time to time.
The majority of the revenue is simply achieved by having the asset or capital to acquire said asset. They don’t really provide any service that wouldn’t exist without them, they are simply exploiting an asset and people that need a place to live.
why need landlord when have worker to call and say “fix my pipes”. he come over and fix your pipes. what can landlord do that worker man cant.
Because having one plumber fix 10 houses is fundamentally different from having a landlord oversee fixing 10 things in the same house.
Imagine if every mechanic only fixed one part of the car and you had to go to 10 different ones to fix 10 different things. No mechanic would be able to point to what’s wrong with the whole car and can only tell you what’s wrong with each part.
There is a degree of vertical integration needed to maintain a single dwelling. As an example, I wanted to replace my stove that had a broken oven. In order to do so, I needed to fix the gas line. However, I need to finish removing an old gas furnace and installing a heat pump. In order to do that, I needed to repair the broken sewer lines under the unit, and in order to do that, I needed to resolve a dispute with the city over sewer line maintenance (they admitted fault eventually).
This wasn’t just a bunch of small projects that 10 people could each do one of. There were a myriad of dependencies and choices to make that would affect other parts of the house.
Funny enough, the same principle is part of why the US healthcare system is so shit because the lack of vertical integration due to the insurance system is why patients have such a hard time getting the diagnosis and medications they need. If you or a family member has multiple health issues, you may be familiar with this.
My point is, keeping a house alive isn’t some group project that you can get 10 people to each do a little bit of. At the end of the day there are executive decisions that will determine the outcome of other parts of the house.
And all of that can be done either publicly or at a worker-owned maintenance organization. None of that needed a landlord.
I think that the broader point is, a proper landlord, one that actually has investment in the land they own and maintain, can allow for a more holistic approach to any given problem. If one entity is aware of the nuances of the situation, they’re better able to get things moving in all of the little codependent issues that may arise.
None of this excuses shitty capitalist landlords who just buy up shit and rent it for a profit. And yes, it could be handled by the person living there instead of a landlord. Or government approved… Maintenance overseers for each individual property?
There are a myriad of ways to approach the problem besides a landlord, but the point still stands that having someone with a broader knowledge of the individual property can make repairs a ton easier.
The thing is, that managerial position has absolutely no reason to require ownership. The home can be personally owned and a local worker-owned firm can be contracted, or it can be maintained by a local public manager.
The point the original commenter was making was that somehow nobody decrying landlords had put this into thought, and that Capitalism is therefore the correct answer. You can follow their comment chains, its pretty blatant. They end up calling the Worker firm a glorified HOA and then stick their head in the sand.
I don’t agree with all of their statements, particularly the glorified HOA bit (I didn’t see that on this specific thread, probably elsewhere they posted), merely trying to point out that some of their statements are accurate.
I’m pretty sure I carved out several possibilities for non-landlord people who can fill out the same role. I’m just saying there’s a bit of truth to having someone actually knowledgeable about the specific property facilitating maintenance.
I get that, my point is that nobody thinks housing doesn’t need managers, despite the original commenter pretending that’s the common stance of people decrying landlords.
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As a landlord, you can hire someone to handle reparations, disputes, enforcement of contracts and rent collection. Therefore, being a landlord is really not actual work. It’s like the difference between being the owner of a company and its CEO: it sometimes goes hand in hand in smaller companies, but the owner isn’t pocketing the company’s profit because they do management work, they get the profit because they’re the owner.
Because for housing to exist there is an inherent risk that somebody has to carry to guarantee the mortgage is paid for and that it will not go up in flames.
So just build public housing, which can actually be priced attending to the real cost of building it and maintaining it rather than market speculation.
https://youtu.be/skz9odeewpc?si=Gfu5bOG2XZcAXXMP
kill all landlords
In Minecraft.
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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Edgy honestly
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Godzilla says:
sex workers are more honorable then landlords
Sounds more like a Klingon saying
do they carry big sword and scary samurai demon mask to battle
If you pay them enough and they have a sense of humor, absolutely.
I just got laid off and am collecting unemployment while I find a new job.
I also have a roommate who pays me rent (I own the house and it’s a good situation for both of us), and I was wondering if my rental income would impact my unemployment, so I called them up to ask. Interestingly enough, the unemployment office does t consider rental income to come from employment, meaning they don’t see being a landlord as having a job.
Edit to add: the roommate situation is new, and it’s had me all sorts of uncomfortable because we had to sign a lease (they are on rental assistance and they required a lease to be signed), so I got a boiler plate lease that we both felt good about and signed it for month to month. It makes me feel a lot like a landlord when we’re really roommates, but ultimately I benefit from the situation because even if I dedicate that money to upkeep, repairs, and improvements to their living space, it still ultimately increases the value of the house for me.
How can I be ethical while collecting rent from someone?
The problem isn’t with landlords as a whole, it’s exploitative landlords. The reality is a house is expensive, and having someone who can bear that up front expense, trading that initial cash for a long-term but stable supply only benefits people. Issues arise when super-rich investors buy up homes with the intention of keeping them empty, start charging exploitative amounts, etc.
In short, keep the rent as low as is feasible, and if you’re living there anyway, there’s really zero issue.
If you are collecting less than half the mortgage (excluding utilities) in rent I think it’s mostly fair. You are giving someone a cheaper place to stay and they should contribute to that, whilst you have seemingly no profit incentive.
If they were to stay with you a multitude of years and will therefore have contributed a significant portion of the entire mortgage then it would be most fair if they saw some part of it back upon sale, though that isn’t entirely realistic either. Perhaps in a perfect world it would be, but if it were a perfect world they wouldn’t have had the need to live in with you.
Though “you are providing a service and ought to be compensated for it” comes close to some landlord arguments, given it’s not exactly a business model for you with multiple houses I think it’s unethical nor immoral.
Oh yea, I’m asking waaay less than half the mortgage. With the rental assistance (where nothing comes out of their pocket) it’s 22% but also covers their utilities, and without that assistance it’s 11% not including utilities.
Ya’ll are easing my conscious quite a bit. Thank you. I’ve been so in my head about it that I lost sight of what makes being a landlord problematic.
The thing is, you’re not looking at this as a job, or an investment, or a profit-generating enterprise. You have a friend who is staying with you, and helping you with the bills. I don’t see any ethical issues at all with this.
I actually find myself in a similar situation, as my friend just left her partner, and, well, I had a spare room. She kicks me a little money to help with the bills, and I keep a roof over her head until she has somewhere better to go. In my mind, that’s different than looking at landlording as a job, or worse, an investment to generate passive income.
What I’m saying is that intent matters.
You’re charging somebody money to live in a space that you own? You’re an unethical horrible human being. You should have them live there for free and you need to eat all the cost of maintaining the building.
A weaponized apathy PSA
I like that, can we get more of those?
I’d really like to get Dale Earnhardt’s take on this before committing.
Landlords are lords for a reason😎
As long as it’s sex work im fine. It’s just that most “sex workerks” (people on onlyfans) do not sell “sex”/porn but a virtual sexual/intimate relationship to easily exploitable, lonely people. Which is just sad.
because it’s not supposed to be a job, it’s an investment
Housing is a human right, not an investment.
People who play “number go up” games with basic human needs can eat shit.
well it’s capitalism. you can play the “number games” with literally every single type of asset, and if you want your basic human needs met, in the end you’ll have to go pay someone. be it food, living space, whatever. they’re all tradable assets.
While everything you said is true, it’s still disgusting. There are some things I’m cool with having scarcity, only those who can afford to buy can have. Basic requirements for survival should exist outside of that.
The truth of the matter is we have enough housing for literally every homeless person to be housed as is. The only reason we don’t house then is because housing is an investment, the supply has to be kept artificially short to pump the prices up.
Fuck capitalism.
Land is a very scarce resource, not well suited for the free market. Also i find it “funny” that at least in my country paying a mortgage is actually cheaper than paying rent. It’s just that banks have very strict requirements for financing people and so the problem is not that you can’t afford the mortgage with your job income, but that you lack the initial capital to invest. Which feels honestly unjust and allows wealthy people to purchase all land and set whatever prices they want.
The barrier to entry for the market is too hig. Thus It’s a market that’s way too prone to monopolies and needs a strong regulation.
Also. Take the exact same apartment in the city center and take another one in a remote place. The rent for second one will be a lot cheaper even though the value of the materials of the building is the same, the costs of building up the apartment are the same etc. So called essential workers, who work near the city centre will not be able to afford an apartment close to where they work and will have to sustain additional costs for commuting, increasing their burden on society (infrastructure) and the environment, which is inefficient. And they will have a lower standard of life. This is shittier for everyone but the landlords.
Then no manufactured scarcity for basic human needs.
how do you expect houses to get built when there’s no money to be made at all by it, especially when there’s an immense amount of financial risk and work involved in maintaining a building and dealing with issues that come up, especially tenants who abuse the place and/or surrounding property
You build the house, and then you sell it to somebody that lives in it.
Novel concept, I know. May need some workshopping.
I don’t have $250k+ to buy a house outright, but some guy is letting me stay at his place for a few hundred bucks a month while I save up. I might be onto something…
Grounds keeping, maintenance, accounting, etc…
It’s supposed to be a lot of work, when it’s not then it’s a bad landlord
That is work for the grounds keeper, the maintenance technician and the accountant. Which get paid by the landowner, who “earns” money for doing absolutely nothing but own something.
How much rent are you paying?
A good needed for survival should never be seen as an investment.
It is like investing in air.
Something something bad dragon
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I disagree. Creating a legitimate marketplace creates room for regulations and law enforcement and kills black markets.
Human traffickers get a lot easier to catch if the trafficked can turn their traffickers in without fear of being arrested themselves for the things they were forced to do.
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I have not read that and don’t intend to at present, so let’s give you that argument.
I’d propose a simple reason for this. I would imagine a lot of the inflow is from other countries where prostitution is still illegal. Traffickers move them to legal countries, possibly even legal brothels, and coerce the person to stay quiet. Johns don’t have any reason to suspect, because it’s legal, so it may provide safety to the traffickers, in a hiding in plain site way.
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, or if the article addresses this in some way. I’ll read it a bit later.
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Sure, there’s a validity in it regardless of anything else, but the mechanism is important. If it’s not a clear causal relationship, if it’s instead just correlative, then it doesn’t make any sense to base policy decisions on it, though. Murder rates go up at the same time ice cream sales do, but we’re not banning ice cream.
Wouldn’t that be because they can actually measure their inflow since all of it is above board?
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It’s the same argument with drug dealers. Legalizing drugs will just let them operate in the open! Or, it’ll kill an industry that only exists because it’s illegal, and as soon as you open the legality up, people can operate more independently and with more protection.
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It’s not about the crimes, it’s about the criminals. They all work the same. If the illegal industry they’re operating in becomes legal, suddenly they lose a lot of their leverage. They’re no longer the only supplier in town. Their buyers are no longer operating in the dark. This takes a TON of power from them.
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I don’t think anything Epstein did would be considered legal with prostitution being legalized. Underage prostitution would still absolutely be a crime, and human trafficking would still be a crime, both of which I’m pretty sure were the bigger issues with what was going on with him.
You also keep saying little girl. If there are little girls involved, it’s a problem regardless of the legality of prostitution. I don’t think anyone ever has made the argument that THAT Should be legal. Unless you’re saying this will happen with more little girls if it was legalized in which case… I mean, we already had Epstein. Legality didn’t do shit for those girls.
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And you came this far from getting mine, at least with how you quoted my post. The point was, when I said “legalized didn’t do anything” that it was still illegal where he was, and it still happened. I suppose I should have said illegality didn’t do anything for them.
As I said in another post, even giving that sex trafficking increases in countries that have legal prostitution, what’s the WHY? Is it only because it’s legal there now? Or is there a deeper thing going on?
Licensing fixes that
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Sex work does involve daily activities in a dangerous workplace
Based Godzilla
