When AirBNB first arrived, I think we thought it would be a tool to let people rent a spare room in their house short term to travelers, with a built in system for reviews and reputation building to ensure that it’s safe for both parties.
Turns out it’s a platform that enables wannabe real estate moguls to buy up housing and convert it into unlicensed hotels for a tidy profit.
I was joking in response to OP’s joke about guillotining everybody who had been a landlord? Even in China, where I think it was 4 million landlords got killed during the land reform movement, there wasn’t an intentional policy of just reprisal killing entire classes. (No really, read the history of the land reform movement, it was absurdly violent but even then it wasn’t “let’s guillotine every single landlord”) It’s a silly concept and I’m surprised it needs to be explained that murdering entire classes at a time isn’t actually the point of revolutionary violence, but hey, it’s Lemmy!
People extorting money due to the finite nature of land, for the sole reason of having been born with better access to capital.
It’s just making money, due to having money. They didn’t invent anything, they didnt discover and invest in an emerging company. They didn’t do anything innovative or clever. Anyone born to wealth could have done it. Which is why those are, by far and away, the vast majority of landlords.
Even a Conservative, union busting aristocrat like Churchill knew how bad landlordism was and landlords have been hated throughout all of human history. It’s only the current neoliberal plague who’ve attempted to moralise it with rich people worship and bootstrap paradoxes.
Not everyone who is a landlord is born into wealth. Someone born into poverty can also be a landlord.
By your logic, grocery stores are the same. They don’t grow the food. They don’t invent new food. There’s nothing wrong with grocery stores either.
The main reason landlords are hated is jealousy. People hate those who have something they don’t. Especially when landlords worked for what they have and the ones who are jealous didn’t – they want to be handed things for free without contributing. Look at the old parable of the ant and the grasshopper.
they can but they’re so few and far between that they don’t need mentioning. Loads will claim to have been born poor too but experience has left me unable to trust those claims. I even reference the fact that its not literally all off them, so I’m not sure why you needed to mention it again.
All landlords, I was very clear about that but people making money through simply being a middle person sucks too. Nothing close to landlords though which is why I didn’t mention them and they aren’t covered by what I said.
Ah yes, the old “bitter or a hypocrite” trope. It has to be one or the other, as the amoral people who throw it around can’t comprehend a moral objection to exploitation, usually due to poor empathy and even poorer social skills. The only people who want something for doing no work is landlords and shareholders. Its just astral level projection from people born to wealth, who even try to moralise their explanation by claiming everyone else, not born to their privilege and opportunity, must be lazy.
It turns out, they dont care about anyone being bitter or hypothetical, let alone the morality of just about anything. They just really don’t want people talking about inequality or exploitation.
a person or organization that owns a room, building, or piece of land that someone else pays rent to use
You can’t just make up you’re own definition of words. A landlord can outsource all of that to a management company and still be a landlord.
Maintenance is work and people should be paid for work. However, the landlord will get paid regardless of who does it. Thats because “landlord” isn’t work which is why “landlording” isn’t a verb.
“Landlording” is a word. It’s the act of performing the work of a landlord.
Anyone can pay someone else to do work. But the act of hiring others and making sure they’re doing their job is still work.
The majority of landlords are known as “mom and pop” which means they only have a few rentals. Many small landlords don’t hire a large team because there’s not enough money coming in from the rental to do so.
No, you can’t just make up words either. It’s deliberately misused slang, at best. Even then, I didn’t say it was or wasn’t a word. Please try and keep the sophistry to a minimum. I said it wasn’t a verb as “landlord” isn’t a job and “landlording” isn’t a doing word.
That’s recruitment, not being a landlord. Recruitment is work.
Regardless of what names they may or may not have, owning something, in of itself, isn’t a job.
You’re making this seem a lot harder than it actually is.
No, owning something, in of itself, isn’t a job. For example, you own the device on which you’re typing you’re utter nonsense. Is you owning your device a job?
Have you ever seen a job vacancy for “landlord”?
No, of course not. Thats why “landlord” isn’t a job.
Owning something isn’t a job, even if you stamp your feet and strop about it really hard. Thats why no definition of the word defines it as a job. Stop making up meanings for words, its pathetic.
Landlord
a person or organization that owns a building or an area of land and is paid by other people for the use of it:
Yeah, wrong place to expect a reasoned reply, buddy. Here it’s mostly extremists who claim they’re the good guys because their extreme is the good extreme.
A landlord is anyone that owns a property, and rents it out, whether it’s commercial or residential, short-term, long-term, or even leasing land to hunters.
Landlords aren’t a problem per se. Think, for instance, of student housing. When I moved to go to school, I needed a place to stay, but I didn’t intend to live there for a long period of time. It would have been entirely unreasonable to buy a house or condo in order to go to school. I couldn’t stay at home, because my parents lived a long way away from any university. (Dorms are utter hell, as are co-ops. I’ve only ever had one roommate that wasn’t a complete and utter bastard.) You have a number of people who have the expectation in their career that they’re going to be moving from city to city frequently, or will need to be working on-site for a period of months; it’s not reasonable to expect them to buy either.
Then there are businesses. Most businesses don’t want to buy, and can’t afford to do so. Commercial real estate is it’s own mess.
Taxing landlords won’t solve the problem; landlords simply raise rents to achieve the same income. Preventing landlords from incorporating–so that they’re personally liable for everything–might help. But it would also limit the ability to build new housing, since corporations have more access to capital than individuals. (Which makes sense; a bank that would loan me $5M to build a small housing complex would be likely to lose $5M.) Limiting ownership–so a person could only own or have an interest in X number of properties–might help, but would be challenging for Management companies are def. part of the problem in many cases, but are also a solution to handing maintenance issues that a single person might not be able to reasonably resolve.
Government ownership of property is nice in theory, but I’ve seen just how badly gov’t mismanaged public housing in Chicago. It was horrific. There’s very little way to directly hold a gov’t accountable, short of armed revolution.
I don’t think that it’s the simple problem that classical Marxists insist it is. It’s a problem for sure. I just don’t think that there’s an easy solution that doesn’t cause a lot of unintended problems.
Government ownership of property is nice in theory, but I’ve seen just how badly gov’t mismanaged public housing in Chicago. It was horrific. There’s very little way to directly hold a gov’t accountable, short of armed revolution.
Anything is bad if you do it badly. It’s ridiculous to dismiss an entire concept because you can name examples of when it was done wrong.
Bad drivers exist so no more cars. Bad laws exist so no more laws. Bad governments exists, so no more governments. It’s an asinine way of arguing.
Unless you can formulate clear arguments as to why government management of rentals cannot work as a concept, you should not dismiss it as a solution.
Unless you can formulate clear arguments as to why government management of rentals cannot work as a concept, you should not dismiss it as a solution.
It’s not that it cannot work as a concept, it just has not worked when it’s been done so far. Typically the issues come down to funding. Politicians have to be elected, and politicians control funding. In order to get elected, politicians cut taxes–because everyone wants lower taxes, right?–which means that they have to cut funding. Typically the funding cuts are to the most vulnerable populations. So you’d have to create a system where public housing couldn’t be systematically de- and underfunded. I don’t know that even a constitutional amendment would be sufficient (see also: the entire history of 2A, Ohio trying to block the amendment to their constitution re: reproductive freedoms, etc.)
I’m generally opposed to continuing to repeat the same mistakes and expecting different results. If gov’t funded housing has always resulted in shoddy, run-down, and unsafe (both in terms of structural integrity and in terms of crime) housing, then we need to fundamentally rethink how we’re going about it to ensure we aren’t repeating the same problems, rather than just throwing more money at it.
Big, BIG “citation needed” on that one chief. Just speaking from my own experience growing up in England, council housing schemes were fantastically effective at getting people into housing with reasonable rental costs. And similar schemes have been successful all across Europe. I’m told there are similar success stories in the US as well.
I think you’re just picking one or two bad examples and just treating that as the whole dataset because it fits your prior assumptions. It’s easy to do, because people complain when government efforts don’t work (and often they complain even when they do; there are plenty of “bad” government programs that are actually fantastically effective, people just moan about their imperfections to the point where everyone assumes they’re broken) but rarely celebrate the successes.
I can’t speak to every single city in the US, but in Chicago, Detroit, and near me in Atlanta–all areas that I’ve lived in–public housing has been badly underfunded, has been allowed to decay by the city, and is often so bad that the buildings end up being condemned. Most US cities seem to trend more towards public-private partnerships, where the private company mismanages the property, and the city fails to take enforcement action. One of the largest public housing projects in Atlanta has finally been condemned and seized after something like two decades of mismanagement and lack of care in enforcement from the city. (And yes, Atlanta is nominally a Democratic city, although I sincerely hope that Andre Dickens and the entire city council that’s supported Cop City all die in a fire.)
I don’t think that they necessarily are. I think that the issues are individuals and corporations owning significant portions of the real estate market, rather than–for instance–small landlords that rent out one or two units in a multi-family building that they also occupy. No one begrudges the maintenance man his wages; he earns them through repairs and upkeep. Similarly, a small landlord should be doing the same thing and providing value to the renters. OTOH, many places (landlords/management companies) are predatory; they allow the buildings to fall into disrepair and take all of the rent as profit.
The real problem with government housing in the US specifically stems from our worship of billionaires, which requires us to demonize the poor. If a rich man is selfmade due to his virtues then poor people must lack virtue. That worldview implies that no amount of help will redeem the poor. Thus safety net programs are half-assed at best, and cut to bare bones or cut entirely at the worst.
The narrative that government-run programs are useless just does not hold up to the evidence. Even the housing program you mentioned is an improvement over nothing. But take a look at some of our programs and imagine the horror of a private alternative: US Postal service (I can send a letter to the smallest town in Alaska with a single stamp), rural electricity, roads (my God could you imagine a private road system), public school. You need to remember that the alternative to any flawed government program is NOTHING.
The best alternative to government housing is no housing? Landlords run at market rate and that keeps a lot of people out, so for them that’s no housing.
Landlords run at market rate and that keeps a lot of people out, so for them that’s no housing.
That’s the worse than nothing option, because it also invites gentrification to the area, which drives up prices of everything else nearby. So now not only can people not afford a place to live, they also can’t even afford some food to eat, and are forced to migrate somewhere else. This is how you end up with homeless encampments.
I would argue it doesn’t include one group your definition includes: hotel owners. Property that’s purpose built for short term lodging often lacks what you’d want for long term residence and provides a valuable service
But yeah I agree with a lot of your points. I do think we have a solution though. The new deal skyrocketed homeownership rates. If instead of taxing landlords we subsidize ownership of personal residential properties and actively remove barriers so that the mass of commercial wealth doesn’t steamroll the residential buyer that has shown positive effects in the past. We can also use it to subsidize building newer more environmentally friendly housing and mid range housing
Hotel owners are absolutely landlords, IMO. Even though hotels may not usually be intended for long-term residence, there are plenty of long-term hotels, and very, very low-rent hotels that end up functioning as residences.
I do think that tax incentives, etc. for owner-occupied homes is probably a good step. I know that there are some pretty good deals for first time buyers, but that doesn’t help when the housing supply is so tight. And the supply is tight, in part, because it’s more profitable to pave farmland and build McMansions than it is to build high-density housing in the cities that people work in. I’m seeing that in my town and county; my town is poor as shit, and farms have been bought and turned into housing “starting in the low 500s!” for people that want to drive 90 minutes each way into Atlanta. The county I live in is one of the fastest growing, even though there are no jobs here. It’s just more sprawl.
It will never not boggle my mind how many people willingly deal with an hour and a half commute in Atlanta traffic. I’m on the west coast now but as soon as I had a full time job that could afford it I moved ITP. I know folks that would commute from fucking Rockmart to Buckhead on a daily basis
I work in real estate, but I don’t hate landlords or rent. I hate the idea that landlording is a job somehow.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of landlords.
My landlord is an old lady who owns a series of apartment complexes. I assume she is quite wealthy, but the reason I don’t take issue with the situation is because she keeps up the property instead of paying a property management firm to do it. She also isn’t hoarding complexes or single family homes, she owns a couple, and managing a couple of complexes with a few people under you is a full time job.
The other kind is the people I work with. Fuck them. The property owners we work with are billionaires. They own hundreds or thousands of complexes and god knows how many single family homes. They also don’t do anything. They buy a complex from a builder, then they pay a property management firm to run it. All they’re doing is skimming excess rent in exchange for assuming the liability of owning the complex. Except they’re not even doing that, because everything is insured.
The first kind of people are wealthy, yes, but they work for a living. The second kind do not actually do anything. If we killed them all tomorrow and gave the complexes they own to property management firms or individual managers, nothing would change.
Eh renting is something that people need, and some people prefer. At least a local woman owning a couple spots keeps the money in the community instead of an out of state owner paying an out of state management firm to pay some dude peanuts to live there and actually run it or whatever.
I might be biased because I am a landlord (renting out apartments in the same building I live in. All are the same size and standard I live in) and from a country with extremely strong renters protection. (You basically cannot cancel a contract unless you have a very good reason for it - only provable and reasonable personal use, massive non payment of rent over month or destruction of property counts) And I only became a Landlord a few years ago - before that I rented. And tbh,most of my small scale landlords were very pretty okay. Never had a rent increase, most repaired things pretty fast, had no issues when we moved.
We had two assholes, yes, but these at least left us in peace.
Now I try to follow the good examples. We rent out our apartments at slightly below “average market rate”(a legal definition published by the local government here) even though we would be legally allowed to go higher due to standard provided and location. But these 100€-200€ per month less I get gave me the opportunity to choose my renters much more carefully and rent out to young but very nice families-and they got something which is ideal for kids. (Big garden, playground literally opposite the house, nature reserve nearby). And they don’t bother me with ridiculous things(like “too much crying babies at night”…A friend had that )while I make sure things get fixed asap. (I generally react within 24h, fix it myself if it’s something small and have a list of handyman for more advanced things ready - they usually are on scene within 48h) I hope they are happy renters and stay happy - they are my neighbours after all and I would hate to see them leave. But maybe it’s just me,being as left leaning as I am…
While I can understand that people are anti Landlords I am more of a proponent to limit institutional landlords/big enterprises and especially to strengthen rental laws in favour of renters. For Germany: Give renters the legal means to force repairs and upkeep on landlords (while it is in theory possible here for a renter to simply contract a company and bill the landlord once the landlord has not reacted for a certain time it is a huge financial burden, we need to change that), make it a criminal offence to rent out apartments unsuitable for living, make it easier to persecute landlords which are intentionally endangering renters (e.g. badly maintained gas heating) and most importantly, limit the way companies can force their renters to pay ancillary costs. These are paid in addition to rent here and cover heating,upkeep of public spaces,etc. - While the renter has the right to get very detailed calculations and receipts, some bigger companies simply decided to create their own companies for these things - so the garden is maintained by the Landlord Garding Inc, the power is supplied by Landlord Power Inc., etc…This is outrageous and a scam,imho. As a landlord I only wish to get a better protection/option to evict people who intentionally lie on their applications and for fucks sake,make it a proper criminal offence if you intentionally structurally damage a apartment and then simply abandon it.(Friends had a renter rip out the copper wires and then abandon the apartment. They found out later that the renter did this to 12 other landlords as well)
And tax capital income fully,for fucks sake. I get taxed, as it does not count as “financial market income”. If I would sell the house to a company that I own and get my money from there? No problem then.
(BTW: My renters pay their power directly to the power company of their choice, heating is simply paid by actual use, for common electricity I can supply them below market rate as I am part of an energy collective and that’s it.)
If you have an beach house that you uses every year, and rents it when it’s not using or you have one second house that you got from a deceased family member… If you need to work to maintain this second house…
That’s fine. It will not cause a inflation on the house market, it’s not just an investment.
In my city (not in US), there are a booming market of very small apartments that rich people buy just to protect their money from inflation. As result, higher prices, less units available for the general public, and the new units that are available are terrible.
Capital gains shows up when you sell. Rental income is taxed as income. Anyone who sells a home, primary residence included, will pay capital gains on any increase in value (deprecation aside) depending on how long they’ve owned the property.
If you just go after capital gains as income, you’re also going after people’s savings and retirement accounts. Not good.
So yeah, people pay taxes on income from and selling a rental.
You’re not going to get what you want by going this direction, and it’s not a good idea.
You need to prevent corporate ownership of and squatting on residential properties. These giant corps create artificial scarcity and fix rent prices, and because they’re corporations, can avoid much of the taxation you and I see. That’s the real issue. Not some guy who owns a couple houses and rents one out.
I would be interested to see data on how much capital gains tax is paid by people in whichever (income) tax bracket, or how people’s proportion of income tax vs capital gains tax lines up.
Savings interest and such is already taxed as income, no?
Hitting retirement accounts would make investing enough to retire harder, but tax brackets could be set so as to limit this effect (which, again, wouldn’t happen) while still capturing an awful lot of real estate sale income. Almost any house in my city has gone up by enough to immediately put you in upper-middle-class range for your income by itself if you bought it even just a handful of years ago, so selling/trading/working in addition to that would tax the sale significantly.
I get that there would be a burden to “common folk” but I would really love to see how much, compared to closing the easy out for richer folk.
If you just go after capital gains as income, you’re also going after people’s savings and retirement accounts. Not good.
Unless you just make the tax progressive, like any sane system. It can start at 0 for the average retirement savings amount of capital gains and just go up once you start reaching crazy amounts of wealth
Capital gains IS progressive. Short term capital gains are taxed as ordinary income. Long term capital gains are taxed according to income bracket and range from 0% to 20%. This year to qualify for the 0% tax bracket a single person would have to make less than approximately $47k. Hardly rich.
This is the key problem of the housing market. For generations we’ve been told the only way to wealth is home ownership - so nobody will ever support more housing because you don’t live in a house, or a neighborhood, you live in an investment and you’ve put all your retirement eggs into this single investment instead of diversifying. So, if new housing pushes value down you don’t see “Hey new neighbors” you see “there goes my retirement.”
Now, of course, institutional investors are involved and we’re just all fucked.
The bottom line. We devised a system (note, it’s not some natural system, people made this) that allows a finite resource to be claimed indefinitely.
A developer comes and builds an apt complex, then collects rent on it FOREVER. The initial value they added to housing flexibility and additional housing expires, but the value they extract does not.
As available land disappears over time (which all finite resources do when being consumed), wealth inevitably coalesces to the owners. It seems fair at first, but it ignores what makes an economy work. It allows people to not work and extract value from others over time. It is not sustainable.
You can own an entire forest just so you can enjoy a stroll by yourself, while an entire group of people are left on the outside owning nothing. If you can’t use your land and block access, you’re hurting society more than helping.
It’s somewhat like an insidious monopoly growing slowly. Rent to own as an option is a much better system.
I didn’t think about how much rent-to-own helps this situation. Current rent prices would basically expedite the process and many more would have ownership much sooner. I like this idea.
Billionaires have a completely different level of capital as the doctors, lawyers, engineers, and business owners who have $1-5 million in assets. I’m not going to fault somebody for being successful and using their money to buy capital to make more money. Billionaires are the only ones who should be named, shamed, and blamed. It’s an entirely different level of greed and exploitation, because it’s totally needless. It’s like you already won capitalism, but that’s not enough, no, you have to rig it so that nobody else ever wins like you did. Those people are so rich they can employ bot farms to throw fuel on the social media fires that keep us all hating each other instead of them. It’s pretty simple. Don’t trust anybody with a private jet.
AirBnB is horrible for local housing prices, because it removes long-term housing from the supply in exchange for more expensive short-term rentals. Guillotines are too nice for AirBnB owners; They should be thrown feet-first into a wood chipper.
I’ve always appreciated people who rent out rooms or expand their homes to let people rent a private space with airbnb.
I also don’t think VRBO, home away, house trip, and other companies that support this business model get enough visibility in the criticism against the model.
Which was the original stated intent of AirBnB. Going out of town for a day or two? Let someone stay for a day or two while they’re in town. Your place is watched while you’re out of town, it helps pay for your hotel while you’re gone, and everyone is happy.
But in practice, people buy houses for the sole purpose of listing them on AirBnB for 30% of the mortgage payment. They don’t care if it sits vacant for 80% of the month, because the four or five days it’s in use pays for the mortgage.
I don’t think the Airbnb we stayed at in Charleston which was just this lovely lady’s extra bedroom in her house really affected the local housing market. She doesn’t want to rent long term and have to have roommates, she likes having guests and showing them around her city, and we’re still friends several years later, so no housing is being lost, and it’s actually a good experience. A single bedroom rental isn’t a big deal to me.
I’m middling about the other Airbnb we stayed at, it was a sort of apartment, but I don’t know who would have wanted to live there full time, the bedroom was only large enough to get a double bed in, let alone a dresser or anything, and we slept terribly, and while the kitchen and living room and bathroom were nice enough, there was no storage and a million stairs. The guy who owns it is a friend who owns the restaurant it’s above and said he never has much luck with long term renters wanting it, as it is also noisy because of the location and smells of food all the time. I think a place such as that fares better as an Airbnb too. Short term rentals should not displace housing for sure, but I’m not sure they’re all bad.
They’re all bad. Full stop. You’re rationalizing with “just”. That lovely lady would’ve downsized or eventually would’ve had a full-time resident (even a friend or family), there is absolutely zero incentive while she’s able to take advantage of the situation. Is she a registered business and paying taxes like all the other short term stay? That second guy, come on, you’re really not that blind right? No one is willing to PAY what he wants for that rental. He can get that price point he wants with short term rentals.
I hate the housing narrative because everyone plays real fucking coy when it comes to their scenario. Do we have a housing shortage crisis or not? Do we have housing for all immigrants or for refugees across the world? Is rent and housing prices sky rocketing because of demand? Like wtf, any defense is just a pity story “think about the rich people with their easy life, we might be them one day!” Every single fucker in here defending renting just wants an easy scam to get rich and hates to see their future “dream” squashed like that.
Man there’s so much indiscriminate hate in here. I rent out an apartment to some tenants, and I rent myself, elsewhere. So I’m both a landlord and a tenant.
The rent I receive doesn’t even cover the cost of the apartment. I’m losing money on it every year. So I’m subsidising someone’s housing.
So why all the hate?
I like moving around so I’m not going sell and buy every couple of years.
I made this point in another comment but it’s because you’re forced to rent, even if it doesn’t make sense for you. Corporate landlords have bought out all the housing and commodified it, pricing out normal people who just want to live. It’s either play their game or die on the streets.
Nobody would give a shit about renting if it were just a convenience thing, or a viable alternative to home ownership.
According to a quick search it seems home ownership is even lower in the down under than they are in the Americas, a region deeply oppressed by rampant landlordism. There’s a not-insignificant chance you’re currently paying rent to a corporation and not even know it. (or more likely to your parents, this is Lemmy after all)
Because landlording, as a practice, is a fundamental flaw in the system we live in.
That doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person, but it makes you a part of a bad system.
To some degree, we’re all part of a bad system. Every time we buy a latte, or a smartphone, we’re participating in a broken system that causes unimaginable harm. Half the shit you own was probably made with slave labour.
That’s what “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” means. It’s not saying “don’t consume”, it’s saying the idea of living a morally pure life in a morally defunct system is impossible.
We don’t yet know what a future post-capitalist housing system will look like. Maybe your particular scenario is one that will eventually be seen as perfectly acceptable.
For now, if you feel what you’re doing is completely justified then you can simply assume that the hate isn’t directed at you. You don’t have to jump in and justify yourself at every turn. That’s no different than being the guy who has to yell “I’m not like that” every time a woman talks about how shitty her interactions with men are.
And even if what you’re doing isn’t a moral good in the world, it may simply be that it’s the best you can do in a bad system. We’re all just trying to survive, and capitalism demands that we be morally impure in order to live, because there are no morally pure ways left to live. Again, you don’t need to justify that. We’re trying to fix a broken system. No one here called you out personally by name.
It’s indiscriminate hate without proposing a better system. It’s just lazy. It’s not that I feel personally attacked. It’s that I think the criticism is lazy and I’m using my situation to demonstrate my point.
Just because you can find one example of a good use of a bad system, doesn’t make it a good system. That’s like saying that monarchy was good actually because you can name some good kings.
First off, let’s assess the purpose of this question. If you’re implying that an argument against a system is invalid without a fully thought out proposal to replace it, you’re engaging in pointless sophistry. If someone says “I think my leg is broken” you don’t ask them to tell you exactly how they think it should be fixed before you believe them. We don’t have to know the solution in order to realise we have a problem.
With that caveat out of the way, I’m personally a big advocate for getting private capital out of rental markets. I know a lot of people just want to eliminate renting altogether, but I agree that this is short sighted. It either relies on the idea that everyone owns their home, which isn’t always practical, or that people simply have homes provided at no cost, which opens up its own complications. Basically, while I am in favour of the total destruction of capitalism, I don’t think that has to mean getting rid of money. Money is a very useful way of tokenising resources so that they can easily be exchanged. This allows for more efficient distribution of the correct resources to the people who most need them.
What I want to see is rentals at a price that everyone can afford l. Obviously, in an ideal scenario this would be paired with UBI to ensure that no one ever goes unhoused, but we’ll focus on the housing side for now.
If given total power over my country’s political system, I would look to implement a scheme that would ultimately result in rentals being handled only by Crown corporations (not-for-profit entities operating at arm’s length from the government) created with a mandate to provide affordable rental properties. These corporations would invest building and buying housing in their area in order to fulfill this mandate. They would also be required to offer rent to own schemes. Rental rates would be set by a formula that would account for factors affecting the desirability of a property such as location, square footage and amenities. Conflicts would be solved by waiting lists.
Private rentals would be outlawed (with possible carve-outs for situations like a property owner who is temporarily away from their primary residence - even in these situations, the rental would be handled by the Crown corp with the collected rents passing to the property owner, minus a handling fee). Most likely this scheme would be phased in over time, allowing investment property owners to sell off their properties to the Crown corps. Investors would take a hit on this, but any economic downsides will be more than offset by the upside of the vast majority of the populace becoming, in effect, significantly wealthier (in GDP terms the economy would certainly shrink, but GDP is a terrible measure of economic health).
Unfortunately necessary disclaimer: This is the rough outline of a proposal. Were I actually in a position to implement it, a LOT of details would be worked out in committee, with advice from respected experts. This disclaimer shall be henceforth known as “The Sign”. Do not make me tap “The Sign.”
Thanks for your detailed reply. I mostly agree with you.
Would rents increase if an area becomes more desirable? For example if I rent a house on a large block of land and the population grows significantly and we now need higher density, would I be encouraged or forced to move? That seems to be a problem where I live. When we had a smaller population, big blocks were fine. Now we need higher density but people don’t want to move and don’t want apartment buildings near them.
To be decided by committee. We’d have to study both options and examine the potential negative and positive impacts.
In general the goal of the rent formula would be to keep average rents at a low percentage of average incomes. That means a typical two person apartment should clock in at, say for arguments sake, around 20% of monthly minimum wage. So even if there was some flex in rental prices, it should basically be impossible for anyone to struggle to make rent.
That said, I think it would definitely be important to ensure that an increase in desirability in an area doesn’t end up punishing the existing inhabitants. That way lies gentrification. This would tend to argue against factoring in desirability. A waiting list system will naturally push people away from areas that are highly desirable, since no one will want to wait that long for somewhere to live. I suspect that alone would be a sufficient solution, but again, I’d like to see it studied.
Obviously, there are problems this can’t solve, but they need their own solutions. More walkable neighbourhoods, better public transit, these are the kind of factors that would help reduce housing pressure on specific areas by making everywhere more desirable to live. Same goes for ensuring fair distribution of resources to schools and other public amenities, and so on.
Also I think things can only be bad in comparison to something “good”. In your broken leg example, we know what an unbroken leg is, so that’s obviously the desired state. With the landlord criticism, there’s no obvious desired state.
I’d argue that the obvious desired state is simple; people should not struggle to afford housing. Every other consideration is secondary to that. The question is just how to get there.
The rent I receive doesn’t even cover the cost of the apartment. I’m losing money on it every year. So I’m subsidising someone’s housing.
The third statement might be true, but it does not follow from the first two. Are the two houses of equal size? Are they in equally desirable locations? Also, is the market price of the house you are renting out increasing? You need to account for these.
Sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear. I meant the rent I receive from my tenant doesn’t cover the interest on the loan for that place. I don’t own the apartment outright. I have a mortgage with a bank. That bank charges me interest on the loan. There are also other costs of owning.
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