Landlords do not provide housing
Landlords do not provide housing
ID: A Sophie Labelle 4 panel comic featuring Stephie in different poses, saying:
Landlords do not provide housing.
They buy and Hold more space than they need for themselves.
Then, they create a false scarcity and profit off of it.
What they're doing is literally the opposite of providing housing.
I honestly wouldn't be so upset about a "mom and pop" landlord that is renting their basement or garage (where I currently live...) if they weren't charging more than their fucking mortgage for it...
It's infuriating that I'm paying for their house but I have to live in a garage because I was late to the party and new loans/house prices are absolutely bat shit insane...
But but "the market!"
The market:
Alright but...there actually is a legitimate service that landlords provide. If someone does not want to own and maintain a property for a long period of time, or doesn't have enough money or means to satisfy a lender that they will be able to repay a very large loan on that property over a long time, a rental agreement is beneficial. Grad students, visa holders, travel nurses, etc probably don't want to purchase the property they're temporarily staying in.
Oh my god, tell me about it.
Even when you want to rent a place and can afford to do so, landlords make the situation really difficult because many of them put up places supposedly for rent, but make it as difficult as possible for someone to actually qualify to rent it, since they're only doing it to inflate their net worth and having someone living there apparently devalues it. It took me over a year to find a place that actually was willing to let me rent it because most others would cook up bullshit reasons to reject me (my personal favourite being one that got mad at me and put me in their blacklist for... asking too many questions about their property???).
Like... I have money. They are offering a good in exchange for money. I am willing to spend money in exchange for this good. It shouldn't be this hard.
Corporate landlords specifically.
Single Family Houses – The 5 Biggest Buyers In America
As SFH investors and property managers we may find ourselves bidding on the same property as a major fund. You might get a call from a fund that wants to buy your portfolio. You could end up partnering with a fund as its local operator. You never know.
Phoenix was the first city that had just about all the major private equity firms investing in single family houses. Private equity helped drive prices in Phoenix up by 34% as you can read about in this Bloomberg article here. The next city that attracted just about all the major private equity firms was Atlanta GA. Other popular markets are CA, Chicago and Florida. PE firms are looking for markets that have experienced the biggest bubbles that have resulted in the biggest swings in values.
We call those non-linear markets. The goal is to hold properties as rentals and wait for a housing recovery. These funds are averaging about an 8% return on investment where most major multi-family / apartment funds return about 5 or 6%. Linear markets like Tulsa OK, Louisville KY, Indianapolis IN, Fort Worth TX, Columbus OH, and Kansas City have been some what over looked by the biggest players. However, there are plenty of funds coming into the linear markets with up to $50 million (which is considered a small fund) to spend on houses.
There is a solution for landlords that we've known about for a long time.
And its doesn't involve the a massive, powerful state controlling where people can live.
Its a 100% tax on the value of land. It would stop the landowning class from unfairly stealing huge amounts of money from the poor in the form of rent. It could fund the government (allowing us to decrease taxes that hurt labor, like an income tax), or be redistributed as UBI.
Seriously, if you are at all interested in potential solutions to the housing crises and wealth inequality, please, please, google Land Value Tax and Georgism.
Landlords provide serfdom, and they are needed because of the serfdom the worst offenders impose on society.
If you live in a house long enough you should begin to have a claim on it. Most landlords add zero value to it, they only harvest it.
I don't really want to pay for a house and experience all the expenses that come with it. Owning a house involves paying out of pocket for maintenance whereas when renting, you can have the landlord take care of that for you, and it doesn't involve paying whoever comes to fix your stuff.
Additionally, owning a house would basically anchor me to one location, which gives me less flexibility as a digital nomad.
If you value home equity then buying a house is definitely ideal. But this isn't the case for everyone.
...oh, sorry. I forgot this is Lemmy and that you can't have a different opinion under any circumstance. My bad!
The main driving factor is this "down payment" shit. A person who has a bunch of money can just go get a house and not actually pay for it fully. They can still loose all that money, there's risk there if they can't pay. And that's the difference. Everyone else can't put down that much money. So they can pay a landlord more money than the landlord pays monthly, but they don't have 2 or $300,000 bucks at risk each and every day. I mean, the landlord is payed for the risk they incur.
So a renter only loses a small amount of money if they fail to keep paying rent. However, they pay more each month and also, they loose relatively more when they loose housing and become homeless. So the situation is fucked up. You could for example barely own a house and then stretch and buy a second house with not much left in savings. If you're in that situation, you're a different landlord than a bank who basically only incurs a monetary risk and not a loosing everything you got risk.
Because of this. Maybe we should bring down the "down payment" bar shit. I mean the house could be destroyed by a renter or an owner, but the house will still be there. Banks literally can only lose a little bit of time between ownerships. So if you could purchase a house with just $5000, for example, that would be pretty easy to do for most people who have a job. At least relatively much easier to $300k. You can sell your house to the bank and get yourself a new house. Literally nobody loses if the down payment level is lowered to something reasonable. Ultimately, the banks will always own houses. So why not just state it clearly....you don't own this house but if you had 3 lifetimes, you could. And bring down the payments accordingly to people's income. Keep it locked at 10%. If we did this, what would prevent you from owning a mansion? Okay limit housing to reasonable sizes? Control traffic by only allowing people to own near where they work? So you live 1 mile from work and then you find a new job, congratulations! Now you can be part of the people who can buy near that area.
I don't know nothing. I'm just posting some stupid ass ideas.
landl*rds
I don't understand how would a 100% land tax work? If you own a 300k house you'd have to pay 300k in taxes every year? So basically making housing unaffordable except for the ultra rich?
Also why would anyone build apartments if they weren't going to make a profit? What's the incentive? No one would do anything if they couldn't make money doing it.
If landlords are bad or too expensive why not move, another building another state another lower cost of living area? Agreed rents are super high but that's mostly in dense urban areas. You're paying a premium for location.
I'm really not seeing any honest answers here about how to fix this problem. Besides the government should provide everyone free housing? How would that work how would you decide who gets to live where? Who gets the apartment on the lake vs next to the airport/oil refinery?
Like I get it housing is expensive but I haven't seen anything here that would actually help fix that? Ironically more landlords and more apartments would probably help.
property management and real estate firms are an affront to humanity, but i would like to point out that not all of us come to own more property than we need through greedy schemes. my parents bought a lot of real estate in the 90's to be able to house their loved ones. my mother almost single-handedly provided housing for my grandmother, my aunts, my cousin, my step brothers, and myself even.
as they have passed on, i have either rented or sold that property to other friends and family at very reasonable prices. there is no single act that is inherently evil. there is no one size fits all label. our individual actions and intentions define us.
EDIT: just wanted to point out to the downvoter that she did this as a factory worker earning minimum wage. she was not then nor is she now rich by any metric. she still lives in a shitty neighborhood in MS. she sacrificed her luxury to help others she cared about.
EDIT 2: although i am pretty hard core leftist, i find my peers to be pretty insufferable. there is a reason that most centrists get turned off by you people. most of you would rather virtue signal than think critically.
Landlords do not create the false scarcity.
Government does, by constantly suppressing new construction.
Government does this via:
- Density zoning, which caps the number of units in places the market would support much more
- Making construction investment uncertain, by slowing permitting processes to a crawl
Having no landlords is not a viable option. There are a lot of reasons that people want or need to rent a house for a while. People who know they're only living in an area temporarily exist in pretty large numbers.
The problem is that there's too many people who have made it a business that have over 5 houses on companies with hundreds or more doing it. People having one or two rentals isn't an issue at all in my book. It's the ones who made it a million dollar business that are the issue.
If the landlords do not provide a service, you're welcome to go to the bank to approve your loan, buy or build a house, maintain it, pay back the loan and deal with delinquent renters and sell it when it's time for you to move out. None of which concerns you as a renter.
It is a massive PITA and it's a so-so store of value at best. That there are assholes who charge you through the nose for the rent doesn't mean it's a landlord problem. It's an asshole problem.