this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Wait so is... uhhh how? Like you're literally not allowed to live somewhere unless you own it?? What about short term rentals and vacations? Or is the idea that we live in some kinda socialist utopia where homes are just idk assigned to people via lottery?
There are plenty of mechanisms that can be employed (as there already are in many countries) to ensure profit is not made from essential living. You either own or have strict rent control which tends to mean many properties are publicly owned. Recreational stay is different, it is part of a hospitality industry which provides an additional service on top of what fundamental housing provides.
In theory the same is true for a landlord who is expected to maintain the homes they are renting out.
The thought that homes don’t require upkeep is insane. I’ve lived in my home for just five years and have spent tens of thousands in just maintenance alone.
That would probably mean that the pay is much less unless the maintenance is required every other day
So is someone supposed to rent a hotel room for 3 years when they move away from their home town to go to college?
Well, obviously you assign nicer properties to those who did you favours in the past
Also, you can make all the houses equally undesired so that a true equality is achieved
Ok, don't know about the rest, but with the electric public transport I totally agree
Fancy houses will still cost money as long as money exists, after communism it would likely be lottery or waitlists. The 8 bedroom with a coastal city view is probably turned into a short term vacation spot rather than a personal residence.
OoooOOOoooo democratic management of property is sooo tyrannical. The people who would have otherwise inherited a car dealership are going to have to enact a vengeful counterrevolution against the masses.
Sorry for pretending you were engaging in good faith at first.
Believe it or not, yes, this is what people used to do before the early 1900s
We call it a "dormitory" instead of a "hotel", but yes.
Alternatively, they can buy a house, or a share of a house, and sell that house/share when they leave.
The idea would be that you don't get to own somebody else's home. Why on earth do you equate that with not getting to exist somewhere on vacation?
Instead of looking for gotchas, why not imagine how that would work without someone at the top demanding a passive income?
Okay, I'll bite. I own a house. Now suppose I buy another house. It's empty. It's not someone else's home. Under the proposed rule ("you don’t get to own somebody else’s home"), I can't rent the house-shaped building to someone as a residence. So now instead, I'm turning the second house into a pig farm and hiring laborers to raise and slaughter pigs on it, because the state insists that I have to put the land to work. [That's what property tax is.]
I'm still profiting off of someone else's labor, the would-be tenant is homeless, and I'm destroying a neighborhood. Somehow this doesn't seem like a win to me--for anyone.
I am strongly in favor of protections for tenants: no one should be constructively evicted, rents should be controlled everywhere, and price-fixing by landlord cartels should result in prison sentences. BUT rental residences arise as a natural consequence of the freedom to contract. The solution to slumlords who fund entire generations of descendents by lucking into a valuable tower at the turn of the century is not "getting rid of landlords." It's just tax.
Full disclosure: I'm not a landlord, but I've both rented and am fortunate enough to own my own home now. I have also litigated both sides of evictions. I've seen bad landlords put the screws to impoverished tenants, and I've also seen spiteful tenants utterly destroy properties with essentially no recourse. This is not a problem you solve with magical thinking.
I'd imagine zoning would restrict this scenario in many cases.
Yeah, you'd think.
"Many" is the operative word there. It's not all--not by a manure-covered mile. If you ever want to do a deep dive down a fun legislative rabbit-hole, dig into right-to-farm law, agricultural zoning, and the history of nuisance litigation. I might not be able to put a hog farm next to a tenement building downtown in a major metropolitan (or I might be surprised to find that, in fact, I can, if I'm willing to pony up for the land), but there are plenty of places where I could.
In any event, the example is ultimately hypothetical. The point is that trying to exterminate landlords can have disastrous knock-on effects, foreseen or otherwise.
Rant warning (that's the end of the response; the rest is just venting about inequality).
It's no accident that the American Dream is about owning land. Land ownership is central to our national identity, born as we are out of generations of homesteaders, tenant-farmers, explorers, slaves, and frontiersmen who rightly made no distinction between the tyranny of the plantation and that of the feudal lord (and that of the modern slumlord). Everyone wants land, and who can blame them? For a hundred-thousand years, owning land has been the best, most reliable route to prosperity and, ultimately, generational wealth.
The problem isn't that landlords exist. It's that landlords are rich. And notably, it's absolutely not all of them. I don't really have any beef with a professional who does well, retires, and buys a little summer house he rents out to vacationers eight months out of the year. The fact that it's a profitable undertaking doesn't really unravel the social fabric, since the profit motive is the only reason vacation homes exist for people (like me) who want them and have yet to save up enough to buy one outright.
Ultimately the problem is, as always, wealth disparity. A vacation home isn't a big deal. A monopoly on an entire vacation community, however, is a different matter, because with it comes price fixing, capture of the local government, corruption, abuse, and all the worst consequences of gentrification--you know, capitalism. And again, it's a problem you solve by taxing hoards of wealth, whether they're in any individual's pocket or hidden in a corporate offshore vault or securities labyrinth. It's a problem we already solved a generation or two ago: Accumulate more wealth, pay more taxes, and continue to pay progressively more taxes until the profit motive is completely overshadowed by the societal benefit (via tax) of the new wealth generated. If you own a building in midtown Manhattan, you should get to pocket only the tiniest fraction of the rents it brings in. Not profitable enough? Then sell it. Plenty of the rest of us will stand in line to take it off your hands. Your corporation that hoovers up neighborhoods all over the country is suddenly in the red because a society-serving tax regime punishes you for said hoovering? Guess you better sell off some homes and watch the market correct itself.
All of that is to say that landlords serve an important function in an ordered society--providing the temporary use of otherwise unused land to persons who have not yet accumulated enough wealth to own their own land outright. We should not aspire to do away with that function, but rather simply to tax rent-seeking at a level that serves the society at large. It should be profitable to own a vacation home. It should never be profitable to own six.
That's why hotels exist
Homes could just be part of the commons.
Or coop based housing.
If we lived in a socialist utopia we wouldn't have to criticise landlords. Your arguement doesn't even rise to the level of sophistry.
State-owned housing, or housing cooperatives.
Even in a Socialist system, it would not be "utopia" or other such idealistic nonsense. It would be similar to current housing markets, just without a profit motive and thus a desire to satisfy needs over gaining income. Much lower rent costs (maintenance and building new housing), but you still apply for housing based on availability.
Don’t let the fire get too close to your straw man, there.
Even without going full 'free housing for everyone' utopia, it would be nice if the rent students currently pay to landlords was recoverable when the space is no longer needed. The same way people paying mortgages can just sell their house even before it is fully paid off. We wouldn't need to drastically reshape society in order to allow people to invest in their own futures rather than shovelling most of what they have into a landlord's pocket.