Reason I’m asking is because I have an aunt that owns like maybe 3 - 5 (not sure the exact amount) small townhouses around the city (well, when I say “city” think of like the areas around a city where theres no tall buildings, but only small 2-3 stories single family homes in the neighborhood) and have these houses up for rent, and honestly, my aunt and her husband doesn’t seem like a terrible people. They still work a normal job, and have to pay taxes like everyone else have to. They still have their own debts to pay. I’m not sure exactly how, but my parents say they did a combination of saving up money and taking loans from banks to be able to buy these properties, fix them, then put them up for rent. They don’t overcharge, and usually charge slightly below the market to retain tenants, and fix things (or hire people to fix things) when their tenants request them.
I mean, they are just trying to survive in this capitalistic world. They wanna save up for retirement, and fund their kids to college, and leave something for their kids, so they have less of stress in life. I don’t see them as bad people. I mean, its not like they own multiple apartment buildings, or doing excessive wealth hoarding.
Do leftists mean people like my aunt too? Or are they an exception to the “landlords are bad” sentinment?
Leftists don’t say that, advocates for the Chinese Dictatorship say that.
The only landlords I see that add any positive value to the world are those who run and maintain apartment complexes. If you own multiple single family homes to rent them out or hoard parcels of land just to try and sell for a higher price: you’re a parasite.
Alternatively, those apartment complexes could be cooperatively owned, cutting out the landlord without any loss.
big facts, also if you live in a densely populated area there may be one of these cooperative communities near you! you could in fact be the change you want to see in the world 💃
Don’t take it personally, but landlordism is fundamentally parasitism. It’s a matter of fact that private property, whether it’s a townhouse or a factory, enables its owners to extract value from working people. If people personally resent landlords like your aunt, it’s probably not so much because that’s where the theory guides them as it is that almost everyone has had a bad experience with a landlord or knows someone who did. Landlords have earned a bad reputation.
For most of my life I was not interested in owning a home. Owning meant I couldn’t pick up and move or travel when I got the urge, which I did several times. One time while in a foreign country for a stay of undetermined length, I was able to contact an old landlord and secure a place to stay when I learned my return date. How would I have had a place to stay if landlords did not exist?
That’s nice that you found a place to stay after traveling the world, that you found some personal benefit from a system that leaves more than half a million people without proper housing (at least in the US). What does that have to do with anything that I wrote?
Presumably because he/she is a person who wants to live somewhere without the hassle of having to own a house and that is impossible without landlords. And they are not the only one like that.
So your idea that all of it is parasitism has met someone, arguably you mean to help, who likes landlords. Because despite what some people think, a lot don’t want to sign on the immense debt for a house nor maintain it. Landlords provide a service in that case and why is it your right to deny renters and landlords that service?
That doesn’t mean there aren’t parasitic landlords because there very much are. But a blanket statement that it’s all bad seems foolish. Perhaps nuance is very much lost on people nowadays.
Landlordism is parasitism. That doesn’t mean that the only alternative is a system in which people can only acquire housing by way of long term mortgages.
and that is impossible without landlords
I reject this premise. It certainly is possible to establish a system that allows for what you describe, without undue burden on people who choose to “settle down”.
“Land Contracts” could replace “rental agreements”. In the short term (<1 year) they function identically to a typical, annual rental agreement: you agree to a fixed, monthly payment. If you break the contract and leave early, you pay a penalty.
In the medium term (1-3 years), the only difference is that your payment doesn’t change (or changes only per the terms established in the initial agreement). You don’t face a sudden, unexpected increase in your monthly payment.
The real difference between rent and a land contract is that after three years, the agreement converts to a private mortgage, in which your first three years of payments become the down payment. You continue to make monthly payments, but now, you have equity in the home: you are the owner; you are free to sell the home on your terms, you merely owe the outstanding balance on the loan.
Because equity (eventually) transfers to the tenant/buyer/borrower, the agreement is fundamentally less parasitical.
How do we switch to this model? Well, first you need to understand that the tenant/buyer/borrower is the “owner” of the home; the landlord/seller/lender is not the owner; they are a “lienholder”. The “owner” - not the lienholder - is responsible for the property taxes.
So, what we do is massively increase the property taxes on all residential properties, while allowing exemptions to owner-occupants. If you reside in the property, you qualify for the exemption. If you do not reside in the property, you owe the whole tax.
With that change, “rent” basically stops existing. Typical landlords will switch over to land contracts instead of rental agreements to avoid being hit with the exorbitant property tax. The only properties that will continue as actual rentals are those where the landlord lives on-site, (duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes) making them eligible for the owner-occupant credit.
“Land contract”.
A land contract starts out similar to a rental agreement. You make fixed monthly payments. If you stay in the home for 3 years, it automatically converts to a private mortgage, and the first three years of “rent” becomes your down payment. If you leave before a year, you forfeit your “security deposit”, just like renting. If you leave before 3 years, you gain no equity; again, just like renting.
If you ever do decide to settle down in one spot, you’re already well on your way to ownership.
I would solve the rental problem by creating a massive, punitively high tax rate on all residential properties, and issuing an equivalent tax exemption to owner-occupants. A land contract is recorded with the county, much like a deed or a lien, and the buyer/tenant would be considered the “owner” for tax purposes.
Is this actually a thing or are you saying it should be?
Land contracts are an actual “thing”. They are legal agreements, recorded in the county register like a deed or a lien. You can buy or sell a home through a land contract right now, if you want. Currently, they aren’t particularly common, but they aren’t unknown either.
I mentioned how I would like to eliminate rent entirely, by establishing exorbitant tax penalties for people who own multiple residential properties. Land Contracts are how I would meet the needs of people who need the flexibility of a rental arrangement, rather than just buying with a private mortgage.
There is an interesting method of “rent” in use in South Korea that is far less parasitical. I don’t know of it being used in the US, but we could adopt it if we wanted. "Jeonse or “Key Money” is where the tenant makes zero monthly payments. Instead, they put down a large deposit. The landlord invests their deposit (there are limitations on what they can invest in), and keeps any interest. At the end of the rental period (usually 2 years) the landlord returns the entire deposit to the tenant. The tenant is protected by taking out a lien against the property. If the landlord cannot or will not return the deposit, the tenant takes ownership of the property.
The Jeonse deposit is typically 50% to 80% of the purchase price of the house, but it can be externally financed if necessary.
You can only say that landlords extract value from working people if they take money without giving anything in return. But landlords provide housing, which is certainly of great value.
Emotional reasoning tells us this is parasitism in the following ways:
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we believe housing is a human right therefore no one can claim they provide it as a value - it’s something we are all entitled to.
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once a house exists it seems like the landlord doesn’t “do” anything in order to provide the housing, except sit there and own it. So this must be theft because they are getting something for nothing.
#1 I understand and if you feel this then work to have it enacted as law in your homeland, because until it is enshrined in the system, you can’t expect anyone to just give away housing.
#2 is somewhat naive, because owning a house has costs including (minimally) taxes, insurance, and maintenance. Owning housing always carries a large risk too - you could incur major damage from a flood, hurricane, earthquake. And those are incredibly expensive to recover from. Not for renters, though - they just move.
The most important question of all is: how does housing come into being? If we make housing something that cannot be offered as a value, who will build? The up front cost to build housing is enormous and it may take decades of “sitting there doing nothing” to collect enough rent to recoup that.
People make all the same arguments about lending money. It’s predatory and extracts value from the people. But without the ability to borrow money, no one could build or buy a home, or start a business.
Much could be done to improve how lending and landlording work, to make them more fair and less exploitative, but when people say that in their very essence they are evil I think they are just naive children seeing mustache twirling villains everywhere.
how does housing come into being?
Well one “simple” way is for all the builders to be rolled up into the civil service: the government pays them to do their job, i.e. build houses, which the government then owns and allows people to live in. This must necessarily be rent-free, otherwise the government becomes one massive landlord therefore not solving the problem, and also takes the bottom out of the mortgage market because why would anyone buy when they can just move into government-provided housing without a 25-year millstone tied round their necks. It also creates a ton of job security because it means you can just walk away from a shitty employer without fear of becoming homeless.
It also drops anyone with a mortgage into the worst possible negative equity problem, which will be a massive problem for a massive number of people, therefore has zero chance of ever being voted in. So for this to work there has to be a solution to the mortgage problem, e.g. the government buys all that housing stock for the current outstanding mortgage amount, but that’s a massive investment into something that now necessarily has zero value, which would likely crash the economy. IANAE so it’d be interesting to get a real economist’s view on how this might all work in practice.
It’s not emotional reasoning. The rental income that a landlord collects is not a wage based on any labor that they do. It is a dividend on a real estate investment. The crucial mechanism to a rental property investment is the license to withhold or take away housing from people. That’s what makes landlordism extractive and parasitic. Landlords simply do not provide housing. They capture it and extort people for temporary permission to live in it.
If you want some emotional reasoning as to why people resent landlords, here’s a short list I wrote from a similar thread:
- Almost everyone has had or knows someone who’s had to deal with an especially neglectful or difficult landlord;
- landlords have been engaging in notoriously greedy and abusive behavior since the industrial revolution;
- landlords aren’t doing themselves any favors they way some of them publicly brag and whine about being landlords;
- and there’s just something that isn’t right about owning someone else’s home and probably everyone has some faint sense of that.
You skipped the most important question, as all anti-landlord idealists do.
“How is house made?” You think landlords are necessary or helpful to housing production? How can that be if they are fundamentally parasitic?
Now you’re making faces and trying to discredit the most important question so you can avoid answering it. It won’t work.
The answer, which should be obvious, is that workers produce housing. How do you insert landlords into that process in a way that isn’t parasitic?
Who pays the workers and buys the materials? Whose land does this happen on?
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I don’t disagree that landlords are for the most part acting parasitically. However I would argue that in order for society to function “parasitism” is a requirement. I want to be clear and state that THIS form isn’t required, but some form is.
Let me explain my thinking. Nearly half of the population doesn’t work. The population of non workers can almost entirely fall within these categories: children, attending school, disabled (mentally or physically), or retired.
These populations need money even though they are not producing any. I would guess that most of the extracted profit that comes out of “mom and pop” rentals goes to providing for non-worker expenses.
Now I believe these expenses should be covered by taxations and redistribution of the factor income, but since we have a pathetic system of this in the US it’s hard for me to fault someone for using investment property to hedge against child care and/or retirement
What you’re talking about, I wouldn’t call parasitism.
The owner of a home has “freedom”. When you buy a home, you are free to do with it what you want. What makes landlords parasites is that the tenant is paying for that landlord’s “freedom”, but they are not receiving it themselves.
I am not as well read as I would like, but I don’t think Marxist theory really faults anyone for acting in their apparent self-interest. The point is to become aware that you belong to a class with common interests, likely the working class, and that you can team up with your fellow workers and tenants to build leverage and get a better deal. Eventually, you can stop surrendering the wealth you and your class create to the minority bourgeoisie class.
To your point, a landlord who also has to hold down a regular job is still part of the working class. However, they might fall into the subcategories of labor aristocracy or petit bourgeoisie. Because they have it a little better, they’re less reliable or even traitorous in the class struggle compared to regular workers, even though they rarely have the juice to make it into the bourgeoisie.
“Landlords provide housing like scalpers provide concert tickets.”
https://lifehacker.com/why-everyone-hates-landlords-now-1849100799
Or public housing
I’d say even your aunt is included in that. Don’t worry though, my mom is on the same list. They’re extracting wealth from someone else’s labor.
My grandfather was a landlord back in the 80s-90s. He owned several small homes and duplexes in a big city, and he did all the maintenance and upkeep on them himself. I saw him work his ass off, how would his tenants paying him rent not be compensating him for his labor?
I dunno about pricing back then but the issue is the amount of wealth that can be generated from a situation like that.
Like, hypothetically, let’s split your grandfather into two people. A landlord, and a maintenance guy hired to maintain those properties, getting paid a fair wage.
Would the landlord make money, after paying a mortgage and his maintenance man?
If the answer is no, then becoming a landlord isn’t financially beneficial, and your grandfather could’ve just been a handyman, and made a steadier income, his money not directly dependent on whether or not someone paid rent.
If the answer is yes, then your grandfather made more money than his labor was worth. While he earned money doing labor, the real issue is the money he earned by doing nothing. It’s likely your grandfather made quite a bit more money than his labor was worth, given the fact that property management companies live entirely off of the price difference from labor put into housing and the price they can charge.
Landlords are middlemen. They’re used car salesman for houses. Are there landlords that aren’t shitty? Yeah. My last landlord was awesome, he actually sold me the house I was renting, when I told him I was gonna buy a house and start my family. He was nice, reasonable, all those things. The total rent at the time (pre-covid, so a lot better than now, and split among 6 people) was 2250$, and my mortgage worked out to be 900$.
Did your grandfather put effort in? Yes. Did he make money doing nothing? Also yes, the difference between what his labor was worth and what he got paid.
That margin didn’t come from his labor or his smart investments, it came from other people trying to live, and potentially created hardships. If his tenants could’ve paid for the actual cost of housing instead of whatever your grandfather charged, that might mean another kid got to go to college, a father getting to retire earlier, a family that could’ve worked 1 job instead of 2.
Your grandfather is probably fine, he likely understood hardships and acted like a human being, but he still belonged to a class of people that are better off if they find ways to minimize the amount of money other people have. Some people judge others for taking what they don’t need.
I appreciate you breaking it down this way. It helps me understand the stance so many hold on landlords.
However, I think you’re missing a lot in your distillation that everything above mortgage + handyman salary is making money for nothing.
Owner also pays property taxes, insurance, all maintenance costs, all upgrades, and possibly utilities or yard care. The benefits for the renters include having a maintenance person on-call all the time, not needing to vet each tradesperson, not needing to get quotes, no expenses when an appliance breaks, no liability in case of a disaster, and more.
If I didn’t have a handy partner and the market was reasonable, I’d love to rent. I don’t want to deal with maintenance and I like having a consistent monthly fee rather than suddenly having to spend $2k on a new water heater like I did last month, or being afraid that our heat might die suddenly this winter because we weren’t ready to spend >$20k this summer to replace the air handler when it went out and needed a new part. Plus my partner took 3 half days off work to get 3 quotes for it. They each told us significantly different things that we needed to do, so we couldn’t decide if we were comfortable doing business with any of them. That shit is stressful! Having the assurance that I can call just one person and someone else will take care of it is worth a good price.
So the cost of owning some units is more than just the mortgage, and the benefits of renting are more than just a maintenance person’s salary. Distilling it to just those two things is an unjust comparison.
Should a person get stupidly rich off of being a landlord? No. That’s exploitative. The cost of renting should match the cost of the property and maintenance (as averaged out over time) plus the cost/savings of the additional benefits of renting. That’s all. But that’s a lot more than just mortgage + handyman salary divided out over however many units the landlord owns.
(Also this assumes the person is actually a good landlord, and we know there are many landlords out there who aren’t.)
Thank you for putting this so eloquently. Most reasonable line of thinking I’ve seen ITT
It’s not a coherent argument, people just don’t like paying rent so they lash out in frustration. If you can’t own you have to rent, if you have to rent you have to rent from someone. It’s just a fact of life. Just like food is also a requirement to live and you need to pay someone for that too if you’re not self sufficient. There’s good people selling food and bad people selling food. It would be dumb to consider all food merchants evil in principle just as it’s dumb to consider all landlords evil in principle.
I honestly feel like when this issue comes up, everyone saying stuff like this is an alien. Do you seriously not know how much work maintaining property is? You say it’s exploiting someone else’s labor as though the several times a year every household needs work is, what, either worthless, unmentionable, or something people are owed by divine right? My parents owned some apartments and sound similar to OPs aunt. If anything, they were exploited by the people they bought them from (that aspect is a long story).
They charged people under market rate, went out of their way all the time to be kind to people by doing things like driving half an hour to personally come pick up rent payments, letting people stay for a year without paying rent since they felt bad for them, went out to fix maintenance issues in the middle of the night, and the list goes on and on. They treated people better than any other landlord and worked their absolute asses off to make a profit (some years they took losses). It was only after a 20 year struggle, full of manual labor and dealing with difficult tenants, that they were able to sell the apartments and be free from the stress and be free of all of that manual labor. They basically cleaned toilets and replaced filthy carpet for people who would spit in their face for evicting them after a year of non payment.
According to you and this thread, the people doing the spitting weren’t morally bad or the lazy ones. Nope, it was my parents.
It’s literally propaganda straight out of the Chinese Communist Party’s playbook, and useful idiots repeat it for them.
you are aware that the KMT who opposed the CCPs land grab also chose an anti-profit driven land distrubition model through the Equalization of Land Rights as well right. As mentioned before, KMT were Georgism focused, and all profit should go back to the community, and any profit the owner gets is meant to go back to the building or land for improvements, none for profit. There is an effective 100% tax on any profit of land trade.
Perhaps, but doesn’t the US history of hobos, homeless, company towns, and housing crisis mean…regardless of how you feel about the various flavors of socialism/communism, that the criticism is correct even if you don’t like the solution?
Those buying up properties which prevent people from getting on the property ladder, not owning a couple. I’m left-wing; I bought land, built a small house (small as in the size of a one-bed apartment), current rent it out which pays for my rent in another place. The landlords I’ve had over the past few years have been great, they are also living in the same place they rent out, those people are good.
There is no exception to stealing housing from other people.
If you rent to house mates, is that stealing? Do you need to have joint ownership with everyone?
I don’t think rentals should exist. You could literally put a house anywhere a couple hundred years ago, and all you needed to do was build it. Now we have artificially stunted the supply of housing to make good little worker bees our of everyone. The threat of homelessness and starvation is a fantastic motivator to not rock the boat in society.
Well, not quite. You’d have to have rights to the land to do that. Else someone could ride up and just take it from you.
You could literally put a house anywhere a couple hundred years ago, and all you needed to do was build it.
I think you have to go back way more than a few hundred years for that.
In the US there were programs that kinda sounded like that but it was just the US government trying to get working class white people to displace native people.
In Europe wasn’t everything owned by nobles snd royals who demanded a cut of your labor? Could people just build a random house anywhere in ancient Rome or Greece?
My two cents—which is worthless (thanks inflation!):
Not unless you are taking advantage of them. It really is going to depend on the specific situation. But if you are renting to housemates you’re not really the landlord class most people are talking about.
But what is taking advantage of them? If someone owns a house outright, isn’t charging any rent charging more than you need to? At that point, they’re not contributing anything. I agree that’s not what most people are talking about, but I don’t see how it’s categorically different.
If you’re not charging them above what is required to cover their share of the mortgage, then that’s not immoral at all.
But you would be the one getting ownership from the mortgage, so I’d think charging less than the share of the mortgage would be fair. But that ratio depends on your and their particular time value of money, which is hard to pin down. And once you paid off the house, the rent should go to zero?
I agree, that sounds fair.
I suppose after the house is paid off, they could switch to pay the equivalent percentage they were paying for the mortgage, toward property taxes and utilities instead.
In order for there to be any rental property at all, someone has to own it and be the landlord. Unless they think it should be the state. Or unless they think that everyone should always own the property where they live.
I didn’t think there is much of a logical argument for having no landlords whatsoever.
Who owns a hotel? Isn’t that just another type of landlord?
In order for there to be any rental property at all, someone has to own it and be the landlord.
I mean yes, but all that means is there shouldn’t be rental properties
Unless they think it should be the state.
You mean ppl think that housing is a human right that should be provided for and administer by “We the People” for “We the People”.
I didn’t think there is much of a logical argument for having no landlords whatsoever.
What other kind of Lords do you think there isn’t a logical argument against?
Who owns a hotel? Isn’t that just another type of landlord?
Surely you understand the difference between a hotel and a home. They are prima facie not the same thing. Also, we call the owners of hotels…owners. The same thing we call owners of homes. Landlords are not the same thing.
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Housing being a human right has nothing to do with getting rid of rental properties. If anything, having to buy a house is a lot bigger barrier to housing than rent.
What we need is rent to be affordable, and landlords to do their job, i.e. maintain and fix the apartments. There are many ways to achieve this: government owned housing, legal regulation, tenant unions etc. Everybody buing a house or an apartment is not one of them.
I have read your comment more than a few times, trying to respond in good faith, but I am uncertain so I am going to ask before responding:
Are you arguing from a position that housing IS a human right but not related at all to property rights, and the government needs to make housing affordable enough to everyone.
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Are you arguing from a position that housing is NOT a human right, BUT “the rent is too damn high” and the government needs to fix it?
There is a lot of what you have to say that I think I agree with, but I keep reading your comment and I am not sure.
difference between a hotel and a home. They are prima facie not the same thing
Hey, not so fast. It’s easy to say that glibly, but the lines get kinda blurry when you consider long-term hotel stays and short-term rentals. What’s really the key difference between the apartment and the hotel when you’re staying at the former for a week at a time or the latter for a 3-month stint?
I’m not saying the Venn diagram is a circle, mind you, just that there’s definitely some overlap.
I do see what you mean, but I am not sure arguing all the edge cases does anything but muddy the water. I mean I would argue that a hotel (even long term) is a hotel. Honestly, I would argue that the way housing is working right now, landlords who do short-term rentals are even worse than your standard landlord. Some cities are outlawing or heavily regulating them because they are so much more damaging (to society) than the more normal longterm landlord.
I think it depends. If your mortgage payment is $1000 and you’re renting the space for $500 then you and your tenant are both sharing the financial burden, and I don’t really see it as parasitism like lots of other people.
If you’re renting for $1,200 then yeah everyone is going to hate you, no matter how few tenants you have. Even more so if that’s your only source of income. Why should someone else be living your paycheck to your paycheck?
There are lots of kinds of “leftisms” with lots of different attitudes toward landlords—but to take Georgism as a concrete example that exclusively focuses on land ownership:
Georgists would say that the portion of the rent equal to the market rent of the unimproved lot—including the value generated by the presence of the surrounding community and infrastructure—should go back to the community, but the portion of the rent contributed by the presence of buildings and other improvements should go to the owner of the improvements.
Based on the amount of vitriol I’ve personally received on this site for renting one property while I am temporarily relocated to attend school, the answer is yes.
For some reason everyone views being a landlord as easy money. But in reality returns on investment are worse than the stock market for being the landlord of a single family home.
For some reason everyone views being a landlord as easy money. But in reality returns on investment are worse than the stock market for being the landlord of a single family home.
Then sell it, and put your money into the market. Now you’re no longer a parasite, and you’re making more money. Win/Win.
If that’s not a reasonable option, then you are not counting the entire return on your investment?
Maybe I want to move back into it… And selling has a 10% cost after realtor fees and closing fees.
So then it’s not worse?
If you are operating rationally and you actually believe your ROI on the rental property is lower than the stock market, you would transfer your wealth to the market. Since you are not, you are either behaving irrationally, or you don’t actually believe your ROI is lower than the market.
Your ability to move back into the property is a return that you have not included in your evaluation. The 10% cost of selling is a sunk cost fallacy.
Yikes, what a nightmarishly unempathetic take on this situation
Emotionless is the better term. I am trying to focus on the argument. I am assuming the best intentions of the parent commenter.
Parent comment argued they were making less money from renting than they would from investing in the stock market. They could be making more money elsewhere. Think about that for a moment:
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They have the option of making $100 from the customers of a business. They could buy shares of a company making luxury products. Their return on their investment could come from people using disposable income to make discretionary purchases.
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Instead, they are making $90 from a tenant’s housing budget. (They are also creating extra demand on the housing market, inflating prices in that market, thus increasing costs for every person seeking housing, including their own tenant.)
Somehow, that actually seems worse to me. If money was the point, they’d choose the option with the higher return. If they are choosing a “rent” option, then that is either the option with the higher effective return, or they are acting irrationally, or they are paying for the privilege of exploiting a tenant.
Regardless, all three cases demonstrate the parasitical nature of landlording. The argument in the parent comment does not rebut a claim of parasitism.
Emotionless is the same thing as what I said. They are describing people struggling to make a living, you’re rejecting the human aspect and judging them
Unempathetic implies a certain disdain or malevolence toward the plight of the parent commenter.
Emotionless does not.
My judgment and contempt is reserved for the concept of renting, not the parent commenter’s condition or actions.
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Ideologies tend to sort people into a limited number of overly simplistic categories. This makes theorising easier but applying it to reality much harder.
Is there an ethical way to try and ensure that I will have food, shelter and medical care as I age? In the US we can’t depend on the government safety net. Everyone isn’t as able in their 60’s and 70’s as they were in their 30’s and 40’s, so assuming that I’ll be able to work and make a reasonable income the rest of my life is wildly optimistic. Anyone working at a job for 30+ years shouldn’t be stressed about survival but that’s not reality. Putting money in a savings account at a credit union is good but I don’t think that will move the needle. Any decent pension or retirement plan is gonna put money in the stock market. Even with passive investing in index funds, you’re on of the stock holders that fucks like that UHC CEO was trying to appease. Given the state of the economy in the US today, buying and renting a duplex, triplex or small apartment building might be less evil than owning random stocks.
I’d say the only ethical way to be a residential landlord is if you are renting out the only house you own because you aren’t in a position to use it as a house - say you’ve brought a house, but had to move somewhere for a few years for work and intend to move back at some point.
The moment you own 2 houses, you are profiting from a system that only works because of inelastic demand - you could have put your money into the stock market and made it do something productive, but instead you are collecting rent, making it harder for others to meet their own basic needs, and profiting from a speculative bubble
What’s the difference between profiting from stocks or profiting from rent? Either way, I’m increasing my spending power
If you buy stocks, you’re essentially just hoping to find something who is willing to pay more for the same thing. If you own property and rent it out, you’re providing a service to someone who needs it. In the latter case, you’re creating value.
As noted above, this isn’t completely true. You can also buy stocks for dividends.
Rental income is just a dividend on a real estate investment. Even if you own the house you live in, you get that dividend in the form of not having to pay rent to a landlord.
Your stocks do not deprive anyone else of an essential human need, while owning and renting out a house you do not personally use artificially deprives another of buying that house, which further raises housing prices, making an essential human need an investment vehicle.
Using a different analogy, if you lived in an area with scarce water resources, but happened to purchase land with a particularly abundant spring, you could then profit handsomely by selling that water to the thirsty at an extremely high rate, exploiting the human need for water, and depriving those who cannot afford it in exchange for your own enrichment.
People need a place to live, they don’t need stocks to live. By owning more properties than you need you are contributing to a scarcity and inflated pricing for a basic necessity.
If we lived in a dream where housing was somehow always provided, sure. But we don’t. So what to all the people who don’t have savings for a down payment do if the only option is to buy? Not live anywhere?
What about families that need a place but don’t want to buy? Like if I’m getting a job in a new area and needed to move but know I’ll be leaving in 1-5 years. I wouldn’t want to deal with the paperwork. I wouldn’t be mad to rent a house.
Ideally houses that aren’t used by anyone would be cared for collectively, and would be free for anyone to use for as much time as they need it.
That assumes that housing is a human right, and that adequate housing exists with a small surplus in most societies (and considering there are more empty homes than there are homeless in the US right now, that would be a feasible thing to achieve were capitalism not creating intense conflicts of interests).
Real question, do we have a surplus if we take out community housing options like apartments? Would everyone be able to have their own house?
Dense community housing would still be optimal for cities and towns, especially if housing was a human right, as it’s much more efficient and uses less resources. They would still exist as cooperative housing, where each tenant owns a share of the complex. Those already exist today quite successfully, they’re just not the norm as it doesn’t generate profit for a landlord or realestate investor.
Individual houses would likely still exist in the countryside, though I think it would be pethaps unreasonable to expect communal maintainence if they are remote, in which case it would likely just be up to the individual using it.
Putting money in the stock market isn’t making it do something productive. It’s not like your average person is able to participate in IPOs and fund some new venture. If I buy shares of company, the company already got the money years ago; I’m just speculating that someone else will want to buy my shares for more in the future. And then if I buy stock in Shell Oil or United Healthcare, that’s pretty evil. But I also don’t have the time and skills to actively manage a portfolio to meet some bare minimum ethical standards.
I’m just speculating that someone else will want to buy
No, not entirely. Lots of companies pay dividends. Buy stock in those, and you’re speculating that they’ll continue to be profitable enough to pay dividends.
don’t have the time and skills
I’m not sure I can agree on this point, either. The time, maybe. The skill? If you’re skilled enough to use Lemmy, you’re skilled enough to set up a brokerage account and click “buy” on whichever companies meet your criteria. It’s not actually any more complicated than online banking IMO.
I mean, the technical buying and selling is easy but knowing what to buy and sell and how to time it isn’t obvious. Automatically buying low cost index funds is super easy and generally yields the best outcome for most consumer investors. Managing a balanced portfolio of B corps and the like without taking on too much risk and ending up broke is not trivial.
Also, dividends don’t change the fact that buying stock isn’t investing in a business. Buying stocks is giving the previous owner of the stock some money and maintaining or increasing the value of the stock which impacts executive compensation.
No raindrop thinks itself responsible for the flood.
Quit exhaling! We have a climate crisis!
But this is my regulated breathing minute!
I’ve never heard this phrase before and I love it.
