this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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I am a landlord and also have a full time job. I also spend my time fixing my units.
With the maintenance cost and taxes, I'm actually losing money or breaking even depending on the year.
My tenants are living in a house that they wouldn't be able to afford on their own in today's market. Being able to live near their work.
So why am I the bad guy?
Literally the hottest real estate market in history, after we just came out of the lowest interest rate market in history, and my man up here still can't even break even on a residence he is renting out to someone else out of the pure kindness of heart.
Maybe you are the rare, golden One Good Landlord, or maybe you're just some asshole on the internet posting utter bullshit. Who can say?
But I've never met any landlord like you IRL. Hell, I've never actually met a landlord who owned the property I rented. They always went through property management companies that do all the work for the owner and just forwarded on a chunk of my rental payment at the end of every month.
You're not a bad guy, you just fill a role that perpetuates a bad problem.
What is a better solution to the problem?
community land trusts, cooperative housing, limited equity housing coops, and municipal housing
All of that is currently available but it doesnt meet the need. As far as government supplied housing, that is a disaster at best.
You asked what other options there were, and I provided them.
We don't need landlords, we can safely eat them and be just OK 👌
Who then is going to provide housing at a supply that is sufficient?
You're confused: landlords don't provide housing, contractors do.
Who pays the contractors?
banks and community unions.
So then the banks will own the house, how is that any better? I don t know what a community union is.
You could use google, you shouldn't need me to tell you how home ownership works.
The homeowner owns the home, and puts the home up as collateral in case of default. It's better than landlording because the person living in the home owns it can manages it themselves. Landlords typically have mortgages anyway, they're just standing in the middle.
A community credit union is a community owned bank. They typically offer the best terms and interest rates of any financial institution, you should really look into banking with one. They're very common in smaller towns, but they're typically available even in larger cities.
I do all my banking with my local credit union and couldn't be happier.
The problem is that a lot of people dont want to or cant own homes because they dont make enough. Banks literally wont lend to many people because they are a bad bet and the bank will lose money. So you are just advocating for local landlords to be replaced by faceless corporations.
A credit union is not a "community union", its just called a credit union and is just the same thing as a bank. I also like credit unions but its the same idea.
Not true. They can't obtain a loan because they don't have the prerequisite capital for a downpayment, because they're already paying someone else's mortgage and aren't saving that money to buy their own. Market rate for rent is higher than the market rate for mortgage payments on the same property, because landlords pass on the cost of financing to their tenants so they can still make a profit.
For those who don't want a home, they can still 'rent' from coop housing or land trusts or municipal housing. Landlords are not necessary even for those who arbitrarily don't 'want' to own a home.
apologies for the confusion. credit unions are typically community owned, but you're right - they're not called community unions.
kinda, but the important difference is that the patrons are voting members for the management of funds and distribute profits democratically. Equity stays within the community and is better than a private bank that siphons wealth for private benefit. In the case of mortgage lending, if a homeowner defaults, the community (e.g. the credit union) takes possession of the asset and can resell or lease it to a new community member. The asset is still democratically managed and isn't subject to an outside private investor.
For every private institution that enables private ownership, there is a publicly managed counterpart that is more democratic. Private landlords are simply not necessary.
If we remove landlords from the picture, we get a bunch of housing on the market.
I own my own home now, but I've rented in the past. Eliminating rentals is an awful idea.
I moved a lot when I was younger: for education, jobs, etc. Buying a house every time I moved (knowing I was likely in an area temporarily) would have been a fucking nightmare -- rentals fill a legitimate need.
Sure: fix the problems of price gouging and profiteering. Put strong limits on the number of single family homes one can rent, and outright stop corporations from buying single family homes. Increase protections for tenents and drive slumlords and absentee landlords out of business. But the idea of "just buy a house, lol" is absurd.
Those people are able to live in the house you took off the market (thus driving up the price of housing) and pay off your mortgage.
Are we talking about eliminating renting altogether?
Cause that is what it sounds like in this thread. Folks wanting to completely eliminate renting and drive folks to buy a house Everytime they move.
This ignores things like closing costs, realtor fees, really high property taxes, expensive home repairs, and temporary work assignments.
Maybe you really need a job but don't want to straight up buy a house and instead rent something until you can find a job back in your local area or you decide it's time to take the plunge and move for good.
Sure there are many a-hole companies and landlords that try to squeeze their tenants for every dime and treat their tenants like crap (lord knows I've run into those), but on the other hand there are folks who need a place to live but haven't decided where they want to settle down and people who can rent their old property at a decent date based on the low interest they themselves were able to lock down.
Some are folks (like me) who moved but couldn't afford to keep their house empty for an extended period of time to put it on sale while they're paying rent or a mortgage in another state. So renting, even if you're barely breaking even, makes sense.
Better to rent your old house for barely above the costs for the property taxes, homeowners insurance, and mortgage interest, and maintenance costs than to take a 6-12 month hit where you have to pay the above while not living in the house because your new job is in a different state. And that is if you sell in 12 months and don't take a big hit on the sale.
If you're buying/selling a house every 3 years then you're really going to get screwed. I personally went from living in a home I owned (and paying a mortgage on) to renting for 3 years just to understand where I wanted to live in a new state, which areas had the best employers, and wait out on a low APR and decent buyers market.
If I had to buy a house instead of having the option to rent, then I would have ended up buying a house near that employer which would have been over an hour commute from the better job offers I got after I moved here.
I've asked this very question before on reddit in a genuine attempt to understand what alternative the anti-landlord crowd is advocating for. Aside from the onslaught of personal attacks on my character, the best I could decipher was some sort of system where a landlord could only rent at actual cost of their mortgage, taxes, insurance, maintenance, etc. No profit could be earned. I said no one would be a landlord for free, especially considering the risks of owning land (natural disasters not insured, market crash, etc).
Their "landlords shouldn't profit off of renters" argument fell apart when I asked profit for who? Was the bank allowed to make a profit on the home loan? Was the insurance company allowed to make a profit on the policy? Could the maintenance and repair folks earn a profit on their services? Could the home remodeling companies make a profit if the home needed updating? Or is every person and entity involved in home ownership allowed to profit from the rental except the landlord? They stopped responding.
Seeing the same thing here. Apparently I'm scum because I'm renting my previous home for -10%/+10% of: mortgage on the lower price I paid 10 years ago, plus property taxes, plus home owners insurance, plus repairs and maintenance.
Apparently I would no longer be scum if I stopped renting it and refused to renew my tenants lease, sold the house and made a huge profit now, and the next person will have to pay brand new closing costs plus a mortgage on double the home value and double the APR.
I'm guessing most folks down-voting the sane responses saying rentals aren't needed have never tried selling a house (and gone 6+ months paying the mortgage for a house you no longer live in) or don't know there's a "break even" calculation that tells you how many years you have to live in the same house before you're better off than having just rented (realtor fees to sell the house, closing costs, time to sell the home where you'll still be paying your mortgage + taxes + insurance, time to close, getting credit approval for a mortgage, etc).
Hell, I did the calculation when I had to move to a new state and I was able to rent a house for less than it would have cost me to pay for closing costs and realtor fees when I would have sold the house 3 years later. Not to mention the time to come up with 20% down payment.
But fuck me for not taking the easy way out, kicking out my tenants and cashing in on the current huge property values to sell my old home.
Again: nobody is saying you're scum, they're just saying it would be better if we didn't have landlords.
But if you like to play the victim go off I guess
Maybe follow the thread?
https://lemmy.world/comment/9580949
Edit:
Your question is literally answered in a sibling comment.
Housing should be socialised, with any profits being put back into expanding housing stock.
Whose profits? See my post above:
If your answer is "anyone and any entity making a profit", then that's about two or three dozen different industries (including banks, insurance agencies, title companies, all kinds of home builders, repair folks, etc.). Regardless of my opinion on that argument, your problem isn't with the landlord, it's with a huge swatch of industries who are all tied to and profit from renting.
It's only the profit derived from ownership that's of concern here, none of these other industries (aside from the bank, arguably) apply to the critique.
I'll just copy paste my response from above.
You still didn't answer the question. So get rid of the landlords means what exactly? You realize there's about two dozen or so industries whose entire commercial existence is tied to landlords and rental properties, right? Do we get rid of all of them? Or just some? Or just the landlord, who is one small cog in a very big capitalist renting wheel?
Everyone is so oddly and furiously fixated on the landlord as some sort of big bad, and therefore assert that getting rid of the landlord position entirely will just magically make everything awesome. It's odd to observe otherwise intelligent people stop so outrageously short of the complete picture.
Actually, I think I did, you just didn't understand it. What we mean by 'landlord' can be essentially boiled down to 'private ownership'. The problem with landlords as a class is that they exert complete control over a 'property' while having the least use of it. When Adam Smith wrote about 'rent extraction', he was specifically identifying a portion of an economy that was unproductive.
Landlords are defined by their ownership; they could also maintain the property, but what makes them 'landlords' and not 'maintinence workers' is their ownership over a property someone else is using and charging rent for that use. The other arrangements I listed in my previous comment address that inefficiency by democratizing the use of that asset, instead of allowing the monopoly of the landlord.
I would really have to agree.
No, you didn't. And the drivel you just wrote still didn't answer the question. At this point it's clear that it's intentional.
Tell me you have no idea how property ownership works without telling me you have no idea how property ownership works.
"No you". Nice one. Good luck friend, this back and forth is pointless.
Good luck yourself.
Nobody is saying to "get rid" of home rentals, but they are saying get rid of landlords.
Particularly for SFR homes, there's no reason for a person who is not living there to 'own' the property and extract rent. For those who are transient -as you described- there are community land trusts, cooperative housing, limited equity housing coops, and municipal housing that can all fill the role that would traditionally be done by private landlords. Those of us who advocate eliminating private home rental's for profit do so knowing it wouldn't happen by choice, and that alternate arrangements for housing would need to be established alongside any legislation that bans for-profit rentals.
Private landlords are systemically problematic because it inflates home values and locks an increasing portion of the population from the option of building equity (or benefiting from community equity, as it were). Nobody is saying you're a bad person, only that landlords (the category of private capital ownership that collects rent for the use of property) are perpetuating a huge problem and ought to be banned as a matter of benefiting society as a whole. Just like how towns or neighborhoods are democratically governed, homes should be too.
I knew I liked you.
Thanks for sharing alternatives to the status quo. See a lot of people complaining in this thread without proposing what the new system would look like. Guess it's easier to do that though
Fuck no, just the landlords. Housing should be socialised.
Its important to remember that in your example of "barely breaking even" some poor schmuck is paying off your mortgage. So it doesn't make you a martyr to barely break even, it still makes you a parasite.
Buying house for say 100k at 3% APR, renting it because you were laid off and cant afford moving expenses, rent in a different city, plus paying a mortgage on an empty house for 6 months to a year while it sells. Then years later you still keep it because, while you could sell it and cash in, with the low APR you got on it you can afford to rent it for less than the corporate scum suckers who try to monopolize housing = Parasite
Kicking out your renters and selling said house you bought at 100k for 200k to corporate scum suckers who will turn around and sell it at an even higher price or rent it at really high rates OR someone else who will end up paying way more than the rent I was asking for the place because interest rates are about double and the house has also doubled in price = internet hero
No room for nuance, got it.
If you move or can no longer afford your house, the property should be absorbed into a community coop (or sold to them) and leased back to the tenant or a new family. You keeping ownership of the home is not a requirement, it's actually a huge problem.
The only ones insisting on the alternate scenario you just described are landlords who think of themselves as martyrs.
Yes, but: why is the market in the state it's in? It couldn't be because a large supply of housing is locked up by landlords, thereby artificially curtailing supply and driving up prices...
I don't know which particular Market you're in, but in the majority of cases, especially around me, if a bank would just fucking approve me for a loan I would pay notably less per month then I pay a landlord for rent.
And it's not like I even have a bad credit I'm in the 740s but since the fake imaginary value of properties is skyrocketed to the point that even a piece of shit falling apart house is almost a million dollars I can't get the kind of down payment they want. So despite the fact that the mortgage would literally be cheaper per month I can't get one.
And that situation exists thanks to people snapping up properties especially large companies and turning them into investment rental properties
If you're losing money with your properties, why not just sell them to your tenants for an affordable price?