this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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We'd have a lot of empty houses and maybe cheaper houses.
Look. Personally, I love renting. Its fleksible.i can move whenever i want to and not think about selling. Also i can live in places where houses are practically unsellable and not worry that I can't sell once I want to live somewhere else
Also, I don't have to worry about repairing and maintaining the house. If I window breaks, I call the landlord. If a pipe breaks a leak, I call the landlord. For me, renting is great!
Here I'm responsible for all that. Renting is not so great... lol
Buying and selling houses is a nightmare to make you feel like rentals are necessary.
When my parents wanted to move as young adults it was easy for them to sell their property and use that money to buy a new one in the place they were moving to. That's now way more difficult just for the benefit of landlords.
When I was four (in 1986), my parents moved for my Dad's job (he was transferred), and ended up accepting the company offer to buy their house at not a great price because they couldn't find a market buyer. At least from my experience, buying and selling forty years ago was just as fraught as now.
Do you have examples of specific practices that have become common and make house sales more difficult?
Housing should not be a speculative asset in the first place. Houses are for living in- and before you tell me about how they are a valuable store of wealth, you shouldn't need to do that either to get by. Your net worth and therefore your class standing should not be a factor in whether you can have access to the basics of life. That's why it's called capital-ism, because everything revolves around capital. It's designed to self-perpetuate by exploiting the inequalities it produces. There are other ways of life, and they aren't as pie-in-the-sky as they would seem. You just have to get out of the capitalist frame of mind to understand how they work and what exactly is holding us back from achieving them.
I think the biggest issue is that the price of homes proportional to income isn't what it used to be. And that causes things to keep getting worse.
Homes cost more and people have less money so less homes are sold. This allows institutional investors to buy up larger portions of the available housing, and they prefer to rent those out.
So that along with other factors makes home prices keep going up causing less people to be able to buy. People being forced to pay a larger portion of their income to housing causes the spiral to get worse and creeps into other industries that people won't patronize if they need to save money.
Landlordss being allowed free reign historically does this to countries. It happend in England and China and probably a lot more countries i am ignorant about.
I'd be happy to rent if the value of houses didn't double every decade.
Here in Australia you really just work so you can pay your mortgage. The wealth you accrue through your life is mostly the value of your house rather than the money you save.
Of course. Why would we work so hard to keep jobs that most of us hate if we didn't have mortgages and rent to pay? This is how the machine keeps itself turning. If only there was a motor that wasn't so exploitative in nature...
@cosmicrookie @stabby_cicada you could still have rental houses in a system with no landlords
@cosmicrookie @stabby_cicada I mean for example with housing cooperatives
Okay, but then you still do need to worry about eating the loss of property with little to no value remaining. The Cooperative is a group of people living there and owning the homes via very large loans which do not disappear when you no longer wish to live there. Depending on the co-ops terms you might get straddled with debt even if you leave. In the worst case, if you're the last one out and the debt does transfer to remaining owners then you get stuck with many tens of thousands of dollars debt.
In examples like China, where they executed landlords en masse to forcefully redistribute land, ended up just falling back on the landlord property rental structure exactly the same as before.
Just imagine paying the half of it, for supporting local workers for maintenance and fixups instead of a random nobleman's holidays in paradise...
Government housing
Have you seen what that looks like in the US? It ain’t pretty or comfortable.
That’s like buying something that’s “military grade” thinking it’s good. It’s not.
Yeah lol why would anybody pay inflated prices for a house if government housing was just as good. It's not the government that's your problem, it's the owning class that makes the rules with a vested interest in making sure a) public resources don't compete with private profit and b) workers have to keep working to survive (which also generates private profit)
Look at the public housing in singapore. Shit's awesome. You're telling me the wealthiest nation on the planet can't pull that off? I call bullshit.
I grew up in a government subsidized co-op, and I loved it. It's still going, and some of the rents are as low as $8/mo.
Government/public housing can be good. You just need to protect it.
I already was born unlucky enough to not be rich. What are the chances of being lucky enough to get one of those subsidized co-op homes?
Where I live, affordable housing is distributed on a lottery system. So I mean literally, what are the chances one has to obtain such housing? I can't imagine there are enough homes for every applicant.
The earlier you apply the better your chances. Just call up your city and enquire about applying. If you qualify, they might get back to you next year, or in five years. But they'll definitely never get back to you if your name isn't on the list. Anyway, people move out all the time -- when their luck turns and they decide they want a house, or need to move for work. My parents moved out.
My parents were on the list for less than a year before we got in. We were poor as fuck. I'm talking trip to the steel dump for my birthday kind of poor. So your luck can turn around if you try sometimes.
Sounds a little ironic in a solarpunk sub but works as a measure in the economic system we live in today I suppose.
wow look at mister lives in the good part of town over here where landlords pick up the phone
I just add nuance to a point that all landlords should not exist.
We can have low-commitment apartments without landlords. Landlords are an unnecessary medium between you and a roof over your head. That doesn't mean you have to be responsible for the roof over your head, just that the landlord is milking you for more than the roof is worth.
One way is we could just have a system where you sign up for the type of housing you want and the government gives it to you when one such becomes available. If you want to live in a detached home with 3 bedrooms where you're more responsible for fixing stuff, you sign up for that. Maybe families are given priority for those. If you want to live in an apartment where you have to sign a waiver to put a nail in the wall, then you sign up for that. The landlord is only here to siphon money out of your pocket and into his. If the rent instead went to a country-wide pool that paid for house maintenance and new construction, rent would be significantly cheaper for everyone except maybe rural farms but that's a weird case where exceptions can be made because farmers work the land they live on so it's different.
The point is: your landlord is useless. It might seem like a good deal if you can't think beyond the systems we live in, now, but it isn't.
My brother in Christ you're the one paying for those repairs and more yourself, it's not like the landlord does it personally. Some might to save a buck, but you're still paying the bill.
Oh and all those repairs are tax deductible so they will pay less than you will on taxes usually.
Oh and if they would have to pay taxes, you're paying the taxes for them.
This is how everything you buy works. When you buy bread from the store you're paying more than it costs to make.
My point is, that I am willing to pay the landlord, to handle these responsibilities and risks
Edit: and inconvenience
Exactly, but the difference is that you don't buy anything from your landlord
These are basic principles dude. Just like you dont buy anything off a guy who mows your lawn or a taxi driver.
You buy a service. It doesn't mean that it is not worth the money
You want a superintendent, not a landlord. The house is owned in common, you live in it, and you pay someone to manage the property.
You're paying them for having had at the right time the capital to get hold of a limited resource that's required by people to live, which they now block you from getting or using unless you pay them.
You're paying a ransom, not buying a service.
If there were lots of houses available to buy at prices which were affordable to all and some people were landlords letting those who chose not to buy (for example because they were only somewhere temporarily) then, yeah, landlords would be providing an actual service, but that's not at all the system we have and plenty of people who want to buy in practice cannot, so have no other option in order to have a place to live than to pay the ransom to those who do have the capital to buy (or did, back when it was cheaper) and used it to capture that resource that's required by others.
That's why the supply has to increase.
Couldn't agree more.
Personally I'm a big fan of Public Housing as a way to pump up supply.
Somebody showed me this some time ago:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mietsh%C3%A4user_Syndikat
Somehow this needs to become more popular. It's easier to build privately than to organize a majority.
Literally renting a home is not a service. Service creates something of a value, and adds it to the world. What is the property rent's "service"? Did they replace furniture with gold in the recent years? Or given the rent hikes, did the gave you a blowjob or smthing, as a part of the "service"?
Look, I get the sentiment.
But conceptually, landlords do present a service.
There is time value in being able to call a singular person and say 'my stove is broken' and not have to do anything else.
Yes you can do it yourself if you have the time and skill, it is a hassle finding the right stove, at the right price, getting it delivered or picking it up, finding, hiring, and going under contract with individual people to do installation, managing warranties, etc.
A lot of people don't want to do that, a lot of people are also comfortable paying a premium to have someone do stuff that they don't want to do.
There is value in being a broker, and that is a landlords primary job, the maintenance and responsibilities are abstracted away to the renter.
I really hate to burst your bubble, but I am technically a landlord. I own a duplex, I rent out the other half to my brother and fiance, and we're all paying the same amount into the mortgage, but for all legal purposes I'm their landlord.
In my experience as a renter and a landlord, if we're talking about the convenience factor, it's still easier to be a landlord.
That "one phone call to fix a thing", assuming they bother to actually fix it, is one phone call for a landlord to just get some guy to do it. So that's the same amount of effort.
Landlords usually have to put in even less effort, because there's entire companies who's job it is to be property management, so most don't have to even make one phone call to fix anything.
As someone who owns a home now, it's less of a pain than renting. I have been putting work into the house to change it because I can and don't need permission from a landlord to do so. If something is broken I can have someone fix it without having to go through a landlord to decide whether or not to call someone.
So yeah, if there wasn't a homelessness problem and everyone had a house, and some people didn't want to bother with it, maybe I could see in that world a landlord existing like a hotel service or property manager for individuals, but when people are dying in the streets because some greedy corporations and selfish assholes keep all the housing and extort everyone who wants shelter, that's fucked up.
People's problem with landlords isn't about personal convenience, and you should maybe look beyond yourself. It doesn't matter if you find it more personally convenient, it's part of a problem that's killing people, and if you're still cool with that because you think it's slightly easier for you personally, you're a selfish, horrible person.
I'm going to write another comment, because I'm skeptical that you will actually read my original reply.
I think you should self reflect a bit. Your position here was to call me a 'selfish, horrible person' because I have found value in being able to rent a house. All the While you are a landlord yourself, deflecting your responsibility and putting me down, someone, who, for all you knew, was a renter them self (the very class whose necks you step on with your property owning foot).
Now, I'm only using language like that because you you have thrown the stone. But I encourage you to reflect.
Maybe you ought to reread what I said at the end of my comment, because if you are saying that I'm calling you a selfish horrible person, it's because you're admitting to being in favor of a system that systematically kills people because it's personally convenient for you. If you're not actually in favor of it, then there's no insult.
Firstly you don't know who I am, or my situation.
I know from actual experience (as I have been all three, renter, homeowner, and property manager/landlord) I still prefer renting in many cases. there is a lot of value in renting, including, the ability to be transient, and the lack of attention or care that one needs to keep
I think you are assuming that a landlord just calling a guy is the same as you just calling a guy, and sometimes it is, but when I rent, the value is that I don't need to care, at all, I just send a text message to the same guy I always send a message to and they come in fix it while I'm at work, and it's done. I don't need to make insurance claims, I don't need to sus out 15 different contractors to get the best price, I don't need to do the actual work myself, etc
Come back after you've owned that duplex for a decade (you evil selfish horrible property owner, as you describe them) and you need to replace the roof and the HVAC system and you will see that it isn't always the same scenario. Yea fun little house projects are great, and you get to hang pictures on the wall or whatever, but that isn't valuable to everyone.
Do you really think homelessness issues would be solved by getting rid of the ability to rent property? Have you ever actually worked with homeless people before? In many cases, homeless people don't want or need to own a house, they want the ability to be transient, to move to where work is, to incrementally improve. A physical house is a burden, it requires maintenance and attention that someone getting on their feet doesn't necessarily have the time or energy for. Short term living is essential for equitability. Forcing everyone into ownership schemes means forcing people into rigid structures that don't allow growth. I've moved from state to state to state, if I had to buy and sell houses Everytime I moved somewhere I would have lost more money than renting, thanks to economic crashes, closing costs, interest, etc.
I think the problem you have, seems to be extortion in a housing market, driven by large commercial interests, which is pretty different conceptually from the idea of short term leasing of a managed property as a whole. Missing the point and focusing on level of effort instead of looking at the abstract value proposition. I don't care how much effort something is for someone else if I'm paying them to do the thing, it's because I find value in it. The same way that doing an oil change is super easy for a mechanic, but I don't want to do it so I pay someone else. Or making. Sandwich, or whatever.
Unfair prices are not intrinsic to the concept. And I would wager your rage should likely be directed towards unchecked capitalism.
I don't see an effective system that has private ownership of property and no short term living schemes. I can only see that working with full state intervention, supplying housing for people as they need, which is such a fundamental shift in economic strategy that it isn't worth discussing. Unless your argument is for communism, in which case, sure, but any landlord discussion is basically useless as the core structure of ownership changes and responsibility changes.
But I dunno, you also seem to be a hypocritical property owner yourself, so i don't really get your position overall.
In fact I'd say you are the worst kind of property owner. You are using someone else to cover your mortgage, someone you know personally, and so instead of just co-owning the property, you rent to them? Why do you get the equity gains? Why are they paying your mortgage interest, helping your credit, etc.
You have the same energy as 'the only moral abortion, is my abortion'. Do you think you get a pass on subletting property because you feel you have a morally superior position? Do you think you are not still extracting value? If they are not owners of the property, then they are paying you for the privilege of living in your property, regardless of promises you may make to them or even if you pay them back, you were able to extract time value of money out of them. You are the person you are accusing me of being. But if you think they are getting value from the scenario, than I really have to question your stance as a whole, how do you reconcile this?
Why don't you sell the other half of the property to the people you think should rightfully own it or refi and add them to the mortgage? If you have an excuse, then maybe you should self reflect on your stance, since there are obviously scenarios, where there is some value in being a landlord.
Hey, guess what, you don't know me or my situation either. Like how you were claiming I've never worked with the homeless when hey, guess what, I've been homeless. Thrice.
And the alleged hypocrisy of me renting to them? It was their idea. If anything you should understand their position since you love renting so much.
As for Co ownership, they are being put on my will, so if I croak it's theirs. They know this and are fine with it. I'm taking on the debt instead of them that way if shit goes south I'm the one on the hook, not them.
As for selling it to them, at this point they would be paying way more for it because there was a huge hike in property values and taxes around here so they would probably still get screwed anyway.
And if there was a huge shift in the economic structure of my company and eliminating landlords as a function was a possibility, I'd fight for that. I don't want to be a landlord or anything, I just want a place to live and this setup was the best for everyone and again, their idea.
As for the accusations, I didn't accuse you of being a landlord leech or whatever, I said that if you're cool with this system that hurts people because it's convenient for you, you're an asshole. Which I'm pretty sure you are since you're giving a whole "but it's easy for meeeee" selfish attitude towards the whole landlord debate.
So let me ask you this, what would your ideal housing system look like?
Sure, there's a little time value in texting one guy to fix my stuff instead of calling separate people. That one guy is the building manager, not my landlord. I pay $1500 a month, and in 4+ years I've had the door hinges fixed, a heating element in the oven replaced, mouse traps installed, gaps in the walls patched to stop the mice getting in, some wasps exterminated, and a valve replaced in the baseboard heater. 3 were done by the building manager, 3 by pros he called for me. So that's 6 tasks, each taking less than an hour, at least 3 of which I could have figured out myself, for $70k.
If I could choose to call someone/do those things myself and get back my $70,000, I know what I'd pick. But I don't have a choice, because landlords own everything.
Do you think that the entire 70 grand is going towards that? Do you consider the occupation of the property to be valued at 0?
Taking your scenario, do the math
What is the cost for your to buy or mortgage the property and the difference of the rent.
That's where the value difference is. The maintenance is different than the cost to live there. I'm not arguing on fair pricing. But the maintenance side is not the entirety of your rent payment. Its also not the only value.
So you should look at it more like - what's the value proposition of being able to leave whenever I want, maintenance, etc, vs owning the property.
Either way you are spending a large sum of cash, it's not a scenario where if you had bought instead of renting you get all 70 grand back.
I think it's also disingenuous to exclude scenarios that occur outside of your renting scenario. Critical maintenance like utilities, HVAC, and structure usually aren't done while a tenant is living in the unit (unless there is a specific issue) but the cost is still there. As well vacancy, which is a premium a renter pays for high availability of properties. You can argue that certain costs should or shouldn't be swallowed, but it doesn't change the fact that they are there. A prime benefit to renting is that you can leave whenever, that isn't a physical value, but it exists (you can even break your lease or rent month to month in many cases) try leaving when you are upside down in your house by 100 grand and you got laid off from work. You are absolutely stuck. Maybe you short sell and completely tank your credit, maybe you just eat the cost and ruin your life savings, but unless you can sell your property (which has tons of costs associated with it) then you are SOL.
Slum lords exist yes, but that's not an intrinsic property of the value proposition at play.
It's not 70k for the person to change a lightbulb, it's x dollars to occupy the space, and y dollars to remove your responsibility. The $1500 you are paying is some combination of that. Similar to insurance, you pay a premium to remove a liability, the same applies to renting. I'm not arguing that pricing is fair and just. Just that, the idea of short term rentals have value.
That's property manager you're thinking of, not a landlord.
Tomato Tomato
Saying that you add nuance with that comment, is like saying anti-vaxers add nuance with their views.
It is proven time and time again that when something is done against landlords the normal people benefit. See Vienna for example, or the early ccp or the whole movement of and views of Henry George.
You can also see full video about the topic in Britain here
Sure. But no matter how many videos I watch or how many articles I read about how terrible landlords can be, it won't change the fact that I dont want to own a property and also that there are people who are unable to buy. There are also people who are not in that stage of life where they want to have ties to a house.
Its not black or white.
Hence nuanced
I might be in the wrong place, discussing and interesting topic though.
You are having a false dichotomy here, it is not either no landlords or no rental properties.
That is the whole point, you can have all the benefits and more without landlords.
You might be right. I can't see it though, besides public housing, which imo isn't a long term viable solution. At least not to me.
The thus is, that I live in a country where landlords have been strictly regulated and there are rules to how much rent they can take, how much they can raise it and over what period of time.
Why not? And also where is the line between heavily regulated private sector and a public one?