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i think the “who is getting the guillotine?” is malicious framing. i assume u just worded it that way because it sounds funny but it still has effect of making ppl more reluctant to voice criticism.
no landlords should be killed. their private property should be transfered to a public ownership model and portions of their financial wealth should potentially be seized. ideally all housing would be made public but as a transitionary step, at least private housing should be.
for your examples, since we currently dont have good options for simply making those houses into public property, with the peopl who previosly owned them getting dibs on living there, its fair for them to keep the houses as private property for a while, without living there. letting other people live there for the meantime is also a good idea. just let them live there for free, under the condition of keeping the house livable and paying for upcomming costs. maybe offer yourself as a hireable manager for the house, if you want to get moeny out of it. why should people have to pay you for using something you dont need, if thats not reducing the value?
and yes, i am aware that being ethical with ones private property is hard, because its discouraged by current policies and public mentalities, but that doesnt mean its something we shouldnt strive for, on an individual and grander social level.
I have literally seen multiple people here within the past few days making jokes about killing all landlords.
Jokes != policy.
I don’t think private landlords are really that bad. Renting out your dead nan’s house or buying a duplex to letting the other half is fine as long as you charge appropriate rent and treat your tenants well. In an ideal world, houses would not be investments but rather something that everyone can own and live in, but we’re not going to get that by going cold turkey as some people are suggesting. Reform is slow and boring but usually works out better than trying to tear everything down at once.
The real problem is companies buying up an absurd number of units and hoarding the available housing stock while squeezing tenants and generally just being miserable landlords.
Imo if you own more than the house you personally reside in, you can go to hell.
No second helpings until everyone has grabbed a plate policy.
What if I find myself in a situation when I have 2 houses? How can I become a better person?
As an example of the problem, no one in my entire social circle has any hope of ever owning property, and many of us are just barely skirting homelessness. Unfortunately this is extremely common in the same world where some people own multiple homes. If you found yourself in that situation, I imagine the best course of action depends on where you live, but a good choice might be to convert your property into a non-equity low-income housing cooperative. There are lots of other options though, the main thing is just to get it into the hands of people who need it.
The only hope I ever have of owning property is my mum dying :(
And even then, she currently owns the property, not the land, so there’s still land rent
Sell the house
To whom? Greedy renting corp.?
What if it’s a new couple of two homeowners who move in together, should they sell one property before the relationship solidifies?
What if the grandchildren are in secondary school when Nana dies, is the family allowed to hold on to this second property for the few years until the kids move out/in?
What if you accept a contract position in another town, should you be forced to sell and buy, or is it okay to rent out the home you have and rent another elsewhere?
My point is that there is nuance at the lower end of the scale, and the enemy is big corporations and landlords of massive portfolios.
Pretty sad to see this kind of attitude. The problem IMO is buying with the intent to rent, and companies owning too much property. I rent, but I don’t think that if you inherit something you’re immediately a bad person until you sell it. Or if you bought something while single, once you move in with a significant other you’re a bad person. I wouldn’t have a problem renting from people like this either. There needs to be % cap on company rentals, and there needs to be a cap on private properties owned, but I don’t personally think the number has to be 1.
Owning more property and being richer than me doesn’t make someone automatically a bad person. People nowadays can only see black and white. We’re so frustrated and tired of dealing with shit that we can’t empathize with fellow human beings. Not everyone is a “real estate investment firm”.
establish 👏 tenant 👏 owned 👏 cooperatives 👏
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Depends on your region, but in general if you can find at least 3 people you want to live with, you can apply to establish a cooperative.
Do note that securing a mortgage would probably be a bit harder than buying on your own, but with more people you can acquire a larger space and split the costs that way.
Fundamentally, it’s unlikely it will be cheaper than buying outright - however you’ll have a community of people to rely on if at any point you become temporarily unable to pay your installments, which can make it safer than self-ownership.
But the biggest plus comes when the mortgage is paid off, as then the coop can decide if you’d rather slash prices to include just bills, or keep the same monthly amount but put the extra towards a shared coop fund that can be used to convert more landlord owned properties into cooperative housing.
In my area - non-mortgaged coop properties have about 40% lower monthly payments.
I think its a weird argument to say all landlords are evil because even if they were forced to sell their real estate properties, they would just put their wealth elsewhere. They would instead become shareholders or creditors.
The problem is more so in general with people that have a lot of wealth, regardless of how they choose to hold it.
And furthermore, the problem isn’t even with people that have a bit of wealth, it’s with billionaires. If we taxed those assholes properly then governments could just afford to build high rises which would drive real estate prices down.
Landlords are unique in that they are entirely rent-seeking, ie they create no new value at all and seek to eternally gain income without losing any amount of ownership.
Billionaires are certainly the most excessive, but all Capitalists work against the Proletariat.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent
I really want more people to engage with the idea that the utter worst thing a person can do in a economic sense is “rent-seek”. The IDEA of turn key businesses, investment properties, money for nothing means you are taking from someone else.
They’ve attempted to expand this downward into welfare, but that’s a ridiculous canard that doesn’t examine just how much money is being siphoned from the working class by people who leverage capital against them.
Thanks for the links. I understand these concepts better now.
By that definition shareholders are rent seekers too. They extract way more value from the company than they add to it. Except instead of making money through leasing, it’s through dividend collection, capital gains and share buybacks.
As for loan givers, you could argue their existence provides value because it gives people access to funds they wouldn’t otherwise have had, allowing them to purchase goods they wouldn’t have been able to. However, when the whole system is set up such that going into debt is a requirement then the service offered by the loan giver doesn’t really add that much value to society.
In fact, if loans weren’t so tolerated, the market or government would have been forced, at an earlier point in time, to do something to reduce the costs of things we purchase with loans like real estate, cars and education (in places where it isn’t free/cheap).
Instead, loans artificially increase the cost of things to the point where buying them without getting a loan becomes impossible. For instance, by increasing the amortization period of mortgages from 10 years to 20 years to 30 years, the price of a home increased such that now it is completely out of reach to people looking to buy property without a loan.
