Comment on Landlords are parasites
Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com 1 day agoPretending 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 that managed to abolish homelessness. As an example, by the 1970s rent in the Soviet Union costed about 3% of the monthly average income.
papertowels@mander.xyz 1 day ago
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.
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
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.
Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com 1 day ago
Thanks for your insightful responses to the replies of my comment, I won’t respond to them because you already perfectly explained it. Good work, comrade
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
Cheers :)
papertowels@mander.xyz 1 day ago
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.
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
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.
tankfox@midwest.social 1 day ago
You could manage it with some kind of benevolent Home Owners Association! That always works fantastically!
Zink@programming.dev 1 day ago
From the perspective of the MBAs and economists, small landlords being nice like that is just an inefficiency that the invisible hand of the market will eventually sweep away in favor of cold efficient corporate management.
It seems to be that a local landlord is basically just a mom and pop shop that hasn’t closed down yet because it only needs to find one customer to buy its one service.