Get rid of landlords...
Get rid of landlords...
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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.
Hotels exist for a reason, and they involve actual labour and upkeep
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.
Yes, but you don't pay a landlord and a cleaner and a plumber the same, why?
Because they derive value not from their labour but from supply and demand, thus those who own assets derive value primarily from the rarity of such assets. This pressure for increasing rarity is why capitalism is a failure where the overall trend is downward, where the few hoard assets they get off other assets, and the masses who trade in their labour have that labour become increasingly less and less valuable.
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?
No, all housing should be publicly owned to prevent landlordism and accumulation of capital, so where you will be moving from and moving to will all be owned socially regardless, the way you pick which housing you will use as your personal property for that period of time or any period of time does not have to change at all from how it is now: a website.
That's the ideal. For the time being, we should have more social housing and levy massive taxes on landlords, forcing them to either sell and turn that to social housing, taking it off the "market" permanently or pay enormous taxes that: 1) Fund socialized housing, 2) Make purchasing properties as investments unprofitable and 3) Fund building more (alongside nationalizing construction).
I used the words "socialize", "nationalized" and "publicly owned" interchangeably here. The answers differ on who you ask, but the above is what we should be doing, IMO.
So who builds the houses when an area expands? And how do you assign nicer houses in nicer areas to people?
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
I'll live in a soviet bloc flat and travel by cool green electric tram anytime over being a rentoid in some mcmansion in bumfuck nowhere and rent out a ford f-150 to go to my job at Walmart, lmao.
Ok, don't know about the rest, but with the electric public transport I totally agree
Lol
- Fund building more (alongside nationalizing construction).
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.
Lol you have fun with that. You're going to need a dictator to keep people in line.
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.
I am, you're the one who is being delusional and thinking people inherently will work together to provide for each other without any sort of reward system. You seem to be under the impression that we would need a whole new system of gov. To accomplish this. When it can be done today already but isn't happening because no one wants to do free labor for each other. You seem to think everyone who has something nowadays hasn't worked for it and has inherited it...
I see the temporarily embarrassed millionaires have logged in huh
Tankies gonna tank I guess.
Tankies? I don't see you posting any socdem or anarchist rhetoric, just neoliberal stuff and arguing against socialized housing which is as leftist unity as it gets.
The government awards construction contracts to those who can do it well in a tender, same way as social housing is built today in cities like Vienna?
Ok, and how do you pick who gets to live in these houses and who pays for it?
From each according to their ability to each according to their need. I.e. if you move to study at a university in a particular city, obviously you have more reason to live in the vicinity than someone who does not, same goes for work etc. It's really very simple.
Before you or some other poster ITT proceeds to go on about how this is limiting freedom and lack of personal choice, I will pre-emptively shut it down by pointing out that under capitalism most people have absolutely zero choice as to where to live, they can either afford it or they cannot, hence being "priced out" of even renting in cities if not entire areas of the country, and even if you argue that those people always have the freedom to switch to higher paid jobs, that leads to obvious societal problems where no one wants to work minimum wage jobs which are still valuable and need to be done, i.e. cleaners, teachers etc.
And lastly, I think that with all that idealistic theory in mind, the actual reality of the matter here in the UK for example is that there are more empty houses than people, and we could end homelessness tomorrow by simply letting people live there instead of having those be "lol line goes up" for Russian oligarchs to fund war.
I think that's a better use of assets, don't you? Hasn't capitalism failed us here?
Believe it or not, yes, this is what people used to do before the early 1900s
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.
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.
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.
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.