someguy3@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Yes. You shouldn’t be allowed to have a second house to rent out. The problem is limited supply in a given area, and if everyone buys a second, third, fourth house (or townhouse) then there is no supply left for people that want to actually buy to live in that house. Frankly I think it’s unethical. There are plenty of other ways to invest your money.
I also don’t think this position is limited to leftists, although yes the leftists here have a very dramatic take. I think anyone that thinks about this should see the problem.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Who is allowed to rent to the people who don’t want to buy?
Should the city own property just for that and run it as a non-profit?
Deceptichum@quokk.au 1 week ago
The community should have ownership of whatever rentals are necessary and it should be not for profit.
enbyecho@lemmy.world 1 week ago
How is “the community” defined and how is this ownership managed?
GuyFleegman@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Public housing is not a novel concept.
Lemming421@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yes. The ability to have a place to live should be a basic human right and therefore be affordable.
If that means the government* subsidises it for the low income families (as in owns them and rents them at below market value), so be it.
We used to have “council houses” in the UK for exactly this purpose, but in the 70s, Thatcher came up with a “right to buy” (at a decent discount) and then made two mistakes - there were no restrictions after buying to stop you selling to anyone else, and there was no building of replacement stock after they were sold. So the result 50 years later is that there are nowhere near enough council houses any more, and a lot of the old ones are privately owned and being rented out at market rates, which are (depending on the area) very expensive.
*local or national, I don’t really care which
m4xie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Those definitely weren’t mistakes.
Lemming421@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Hah. I meant socially, not that it happened by accident!
Don_alForno@feddit.org 1 week ago
Not everybody who doesn’t want to buy is low income. I’m too lazy / risk averse to maintain everything myself, so I happily pay my landlord a reasonable premium to bear the risk of shit burning down (or breaking in less dramatic ways) for me. I also like that I would be able to pack up and move without worrying about selling my old place. I might change my mind later on, but right now I’m good.
Why should governments subsidize the lifestyle choice I’m consciously making?
Lemming421@lemmy.world 1 week ago
To be clear, I wasn’t trying to say ALL rental housing should be subsidised, just that there should be a healthy supply available for local councils to make available to people who need it based on whatever criteria they set for that.
Even when I was renting, I’d earn too much to qualify. People with young children would take priory over single people. That sort of thing.
It’s not a perfect system, but it’s better than companies gaming the system to maximise profits at the expense of the most vulnerable.
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Yes, that’s ideal. In Germany (where there is a culture much more oriented towards renting than owning) there are a lot of state run landlords and they are great to rent from, reasonable rents, reasonable to deal with (in the local context), etc. And of course they have good laws to protect tenants to back it up. Not necessarily a perfect system but definitely one the rest of the world can learn from. Unfortunately things are still heading in the wrong direction there too right now.
jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
That’s not true in any big city. While the laws keep the landlord madness limited, real estate and rent prices are out of control because of speculation, and there are tons of horror stories to go around - and by experience, I would say they are even more common with individual landlords than with large companies, at least large companies don’t usually do anything obviously illegal and have less venues to make their tenants homeless.
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Yes, I’m talking about the state owned companies versus both private companies and individual landlords, rents with the state owned ones are like 20% or more lower than the others and they are usually more responsive to fixing problems, don’t play too many games
dragonfucker@lemmy.nz 1 week ago
Yes.
someguy3@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
For houses? Essentially no one, houses should not be for rent. Apartments in my mind are fine to rent because you can build a fuckton of apartments on a small amount of land.