Comment on Landlords are parasites
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 2 days ago-
Shelter is a necessity. A hotel isn’t.
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Property is a limited resource. When people scalp concert tickets they get vilified. When they do the same thing for something necessary for survival people like you defend it with “well there are pros and cons…”
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 2 days ago
But this is a fundamentally flawed analogy. Renting is not scalping. If you want to criticize specific practices like predatory leases or speculative hoarding, that is a fair and nuanced position. But claiming that renting itself is inherently exploitative ignores how markets function.
Just because something is a necessity does not mean it can be free. Food, water, electricity, heating, and medicine are all essential, yet we still pay for them. Not because we should, but because we have to. These goods and services come from complex systems that require capital, labor, infrastructure, and logistics. Every step costs money. To keep these systems running, consumers have to pay enough to cover those costs and allow for future investment. That payment can come through taxes in public systems or through private transactions in the market. Either way, the cost is real and unavoidable.
Housing is no different. Building homes is expensive. It requires land, materials, skilled labor, permits, and time. Buying a home is a major investment, and renting exists as a practical alternative. Not everyone can or wants to buy, and renting provides access to housing without the upfront burden of ownership. There’s a huge luxury rental market for wealthy people, even though they have the means to buy houses. This means that there are real advantages to renting that go beyond just not being able to buy a house.
Like any market, housing is shaped by supply and demand. When supply is low and demand is high, prices rise. That is not exploitation. It is basic economics. If you want to make housing more affordable, the solution is not to vilify landlords or pretend rent is evil. The solution is to increase supply. Build more homes. Reform zoning laws. Encourage development. More housing means more competition, and more competition drives prices down. We know this formula works. We’ve seen it work countless times. Actually we’re seeing it work right now. Take a look at Austin and how they’re rental and housing prices have been dropping considerable over the years. That is how you fix the imbalance. Not by attacking the existence of rent, but by addressing the root cause of scarcity.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
And yet it not very long ago it was feasible for a single income earner on minimum wage to not only be able to afford a home, but do so while supporting a family. So what has ballooned in price to make that out of reach for the vast majority of people? The land, materials, skilled labor, permits, or the house itself due to it being used as an investment?
There are many viable houses sitting vacant because the landlords would rather wait for someone that can afford the absurdly high rent than risk lowering the market value of rent for their other properties.
If the first person in line to a concert purchases every ticket then resells them for 10x the cost the solution is not “make more tickets available”. The scalper will just buy them as well.
tankfox@midwest.social 2 days ago
Could that person be a woman? Was that by any chance directly after a major war that significantly reduced the male population? If you want to focus on the nice part that affected a single slender class of people and ignore all the bad parts stacked on to everyone else that made the conjunction possible there’s a political party made just for you.
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 2 days ago
You’re correct, but at the same time, buying a house was still a very expensive back then as well. It was major purchase for most people, just not to the same extant relative to today.
All of the above, but also, by far the single biggest reason why house prices have gone up is because we haven’t been building enough houses to meet demand. If you look up the US housing inventory over time, you’ll basically see that it has basically collapsed since the great recession to near all time lows. In the meantime, this country’s population has grown quite a bit since then, we’ve added well over 20 million people since 2010. So there you have it, that’s the root cause. If we built houses as the same rates as we have in decades past, we would be an experiencing a housing boom right now reverse the current seller’s market into a buyer’s market.
It’s actually more nuanced than that. The majority of the houses that are vacant are either seasonal houses in states like Maine, Florida, or West Virginia or they’re undergoing renovations ((source)[www.realtor.com/…/states-with-most-vacant-homes/]). There is still a decent portion that are being held as investments, but the number of actually vacant units are smaller than a lot of people think. As for the ones that being held for investment, it’s not your mom and pop landlords who are doing that, it’s massive corporations like Blackrock or JP Morgan Chase who actually have the means to sit on empty properties, pay the taxes, and play long manipulative game.
If you want to make the argument that corporations should be banned or greatly limited to buying residential housing, then I agree with you. However, that is a different discussion than saying that rent is inherently bad.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Okay, so we agree that there is a problem then. It was feasible in the past and basically impossible now. If housing prices were relatively the same as they were when I was a child I wouldn’t be upset about landlords, but we are in a housing crises now and something has to change.
You mean vacation homes. People who own multiple properties so that can sit vacant the majority of the year. Boo-fucking-hoo if people have to sell their vacation home to someone who actually needs a place to live.
The only thing your source says is “Some are seasonal homes, some are undergoing renovations, and others are simply being held as investments.” it does not provide a number or a link. 2 houses undergoing renovations counts as “some”.
That’s exactly the fucking problem. Yes.
So we agree that the majority of rental properties are owned by a landlord that is making life objectively worse for people? Then we should do something about that instead of clutching pearls about the 1% of houses owned by “mom and pop landlord”.
And speaking of, can we stop with the “mom and pop landlord” bullshit? I have family members who are exactly the type of people you are talking about. They own a rental property and take care of it and their renters. If suddenly they couldn’t do that anymore they would be fine. The property is not their livelihood, it’s an investment. They would just invest in something else. These are people that can afford multiple properties in the current market (which we already agreed is much too expensive).
Property can be affordable or be an investment, not both. I’m arguing that it should be affordable (being a basic requirement for survival and all). People using it as an investment can go invest somewhere else.