this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
709 points (92.1% liked)
Memes
50208 readers
822 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What service do landlords offer? Every property I've ever rented myself or seen from my friends is falling apart and shitty for an insane amount of money each month. If landlords charged half as much as they do maybe you'd have a leg to stand on.
Landlords provide housing.
No they don’t, they charge people to live in property that they own. That’s not “providing” housing, that’s profiting off of someone else’s need.
Rental property owners charge for the service of providing housing. Home Depot charges for the service of renting their tools. The bouncy house places charge for the service of renting their bouncy houses.
shelter is a human necessity. It is wrong to hoard shelter while there are people who have none.
Rental property owners don't hoard shelter. The whole point is to provide housing to individuals and families.
hoard (verb.)
To accumulate money, food, or the like, in a hidden or carefully guarded place for preservation, future use, etc.
I might be inclined to agree with you if landlords took out the locks and made those empty rental properties into interim homeless shelters, but we both know they would never do it.
Rental properties aren't hidden. There's no cloak of invisibility spell surrounding them. So your definition doesn't apply.
Rental properties aren't empty except during renovation or between tenants. So your second assertion also doesn't apply.
https://unitedwaynca.org/blog/vacant-homes-vs-homelessness-by-city/
"There are currently 28 vacant homes for every one person experiencing homelessness in the U.S."
landlords dont provide shit, they hoard properties and make it harder for non-landlords to get housing, which drives up prices and forces more people to live on the streets.
they are a leech on society, making everything worse for the rest of us.
Again, there's no hoarding.
The article you linked is misleading. Houses are vacant for various reasons. Some are temporarily vacant:
Some are more permanently vacant because they're in such a state of disrepair that they can't be lived in.
Rental property owners rent out properties, which keeps people housed and off the streets. However there's been a lack of housing development over the past decade in the United States which leads to a housing shortage.
Gee, I wonder who's responsibility it was to make sure that didn't happen. ¯\(ツ)/¯
The homeowners who let their house rot because they couldn't afford to fix it or they just didn't care? There's been so many foreclosures that were blights on the neighborhood until investors bought them, fixed them up, and rented them to families who wanted a nice place to live.
providing and selling are 2 different things (renting is just selling the limited use of something)
"Providing" = making available for use
So every business is a provider in your eyes? You would say that McDonald's provides food for everyone? That's ridiculous and not the way anyone uses the word provide it's just been brought into landlording to make leeches feel better about themselves
No, McDonald's only provides food for those who choose to buy it. Not everyone eats at McDonald's.
Rental property owners aren't leeches. Leeches are the tenants who use the service the landlord provides and don't pay for it.
You aren't doing yourself any favors bringing home depot into this, the owners are also greedy cunts.
There's also a huge difference between something that protects you from the elements and renting a tool. There is no fundamental need for a tool, there is a fundamental need for shelter.
With how invested you are on your side, I wouldn't be surprised to see you admit that you're a landlord.
Home Depot is just one example. Any other example works.
People can grow their own food but choose to use the grocery store. The grocery store charges more for the food than they pay for it, because they're providing a service.
Pharmacies sell medication and people buy from them. They are providing a service of having all the medication in one place.
People trade money for goods OR services. That's how the economy operates.
So they're giving the housing to those in need for free, or at the very least at cost? That would be "providing" housing.
That's not the definition in the slightest. You don't seem to have an understanding of what a landlord does.
A land lord does fuck all.
A landlord provides housing.
FTFY
A landlord takes property off the market and provides housing that costs more than mortgage payments.
FTFY
A landlord does not take housing off the market. Rental housing is still on the market for families to live in.
Rent costs more than mortgage payments because it includes the payment for services to the owner. If you work a job you expect to get paid for your work and so does the landlord.
I said they take property off the market, not housing. By buying it and holding it indefinitely, that property is no longer available for purchasing.
Yes, services. Services that an owner could very well get done himself/herself without the bureaucratic overhead of having to use the landlord as an intermediary to a contractor.
The only landlords that could get things done faster than doing it yourself are those who have contractors and supplies on call. In other words, management companies or multiple-property landlords—the same ones who are in it solely to profit from the lack of available housing in urban areas.
The property is still available for families who want to rent it. You take all the rentals off the market and those who want to rent housing will have no choices.
There's still many properties available to purchases. Having a mixture of some properties for rent and some of sale gives people choices.
Many people don't have the skill or resources to manage their own property, let alone pay for large expenses all at once.
You're conflating "property" with "housing".
We can agree that the land and building is still available as housing, but it's not property. The renter has no stake in the real estate. They don't own it. It's not their property, and their privilege to stay in it is subject to the terms of the actual owner—the landlord.
Sure, if you can afford an $700k apartment with a down payment of jack-diddily-squat because most of your income went to paying off some other guy's mortgage and topping up their savings.
While we're at it, let's keep pretending that people purchasing property for the sole purpose of rental doesn't artificially increase demand and drive up pricing.
If you don't have the skill to Google the number of an electrician or other tradie, I don't know what to tell you.
That's what a mortgage is for.
And therefore don't have to incur the burden of large expenses such as replacing a roof, a sewer line, etc.
If you want to cherry pick an example of the most expensive areas of the country instead of the more reasonable examples of a $70k single family house. But then the person buying the property is responsible for all the repairs and maintenance.
The lack of housing development with increased demand creates a housing shortage. When there's a shortage, pricing goes up. The United States is at least a decade behind where they should be in housing development.
A mortgage just pays the bank for the loan. A mortgage payment does NOT pay for repairs on the property. If the furnace goes out in the middle of winter, it's up to the homeowner to come up with the money -- typically thousands of dollars all at once.
If someone bought a house without doing an inspection, that's their own fault. If it's a natural disaster, that's why you have insurance. If it's expected wear and tear, you would have emergency savings to cover it.
At least as a homeowner, I know I can actually get it fixed before freezing to death. Can't say the same when waiting for profit-driven landlords to go through the script of checking it out themselves, finding some reason to claim its not broken, and then eventually pestering them for long enough that they do their damn job and hire someone to fix it in a couple weeks.
The median price of houses in the country is $420k.
I'm sure I could build a nice doomsday-prepper shack in the woods somewhere for $70k, though.
And you don't see how landlords—who are buying more real estate than they actually use—create increased demand?
I refer back to my first point.
Not everyone who owns a house has emergency savings. Not everyone is good at saving money.
Not sure where you're getting that false narrative from.
Or a single family house in a Midwest city. The United States isn't just the coasts, you know. There's a huge portion of land in between.
People live in those properties, they're not "unused".
They buy all the houses and put them up on a subscription service that costs more than what the person would've paid for it and keep increasing the prices every month.
When someone is on a lease, the rent amount cannot increase during the lease period. At the end of the lease period, the person is free to move somewhere else.
If the mortgage payment is the SAME or MORE as the rent, you aren't providing shit.
That's incorrect. Houses need maintenance. They are not self healing. Things break, items need replacing, grass needs to be cut, light bulbs need to be changed, etc. Tenants also need to be managed.
Interesting that every rental I've been in is in some state of disrepair, if that's what you claim the extra is for. You're purposely avoiding the fact that rentals are there to make the landlord money, and nothing more.
Your experiences are not the experiences of everyone who rents.
No they steal housing and extort its use
There's no stealing and no extorting. The only ones who steal are tenants who don't pay rent.
Only two kinds say that, parasites and bootlickers, which are you?
Don't forget option three: "all of the above"
Neither.
No, you are a landlord, which is even worse.
No being a landlord is a good thing.
You say that like you're convincing yourself of it. I would need a way to cope too, if I were stealing from my own class.
I'm not "coping" with anything. I run a successful small business and I don't steal from anyone.
Your "success" is built on your selfishness and theft from your peers. I don't really count that as a small business, nor a success.
I have generosity, not selfishness. I don't commit theft. How do you cope with being so incorrect in every way?