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Comment on When leftists say "landlord are parasites" or similar dislike of landlords, do they also mean the people that own like a couple of houses as an investment, or only the big landlords?

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Lemming421@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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

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m4xie@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Those definitely weren’t mistakes.

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- Lemming421@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Hah. I meant socially, not that it happened by accident!
  
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  - m4xie@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I know, lol
    
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Don_alForno@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

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.

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?

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- Lemming421@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.
  
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