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Y'all are missing something imo. Landlords are artificial demand - they drive up the housing prices for everyone, including home owners.
The argument that it costs to maintain a home blah blah is BS - if it wasn't profitable then the landlords sell it. They're not being charitable. They make a profit and it comes out of poor people's wages.
As Churchill put it...
Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains — all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is affected by the labor and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of these improvements does the land monopolist contribute, and yet, by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived…The unearned increment on the land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the disservice done.
Not usually a fan of Churchill, but that was great
This has come to the forefront in America since Covid and has become the reason why a lot of American's (younger Millenials and Gen Z) can't buy homes, beyond Gen Z being unable to find gainful employment (1/3 in unemployed). I think stating holes in their argument like "there are good landlords out there" or "what about this specific instance" is literally arguing against a rule with exceptions. That's not what this post is talking about. They are talking about the "corporations" who are just some rich older person or couple that are buying one, two, or three extra properties and renting them out. Frankly that's the biggest reason why housing costs have skyrocketed.
The US Federal Reserve is trying to curb this by keeping the Prime Lending Rate (PLR) high, but Trump is putting pressure on him because lowering the PLR would look good for him on paper because it would look like he did something immediate to alleviate the economic pressure we're feeling in America, directly because of him and his policies. BUT, that would be catastrophic to us "poor" (people making less that $240K/year; 90% of Americans), and I think you can see why. Yeah, if American's with large savings accounts (years ago the figure was (0% of Americans have less than $1000 in savings, so just imagine how it is now) all of a sudden saw that the mortgage on a house dropped from . . . lets just take the average cost of a "starter home" @$210K . . . $1,762.34/month to where it was prior to the pandemic at (~3%) $1,347.87, the rich Americans that were already buying those extra houses would just buy more extra houses and charge YOU, a poor American, that ~$1500/month and still charge you for any maintenance they have to do (depending on how your state renter laws are set up).
But even with all that, we still have the issue of how much houses cost. And because of the aforementioned "extra houses," we have seen a skyrocket in the cost of houses. I won't do a deep dive on it, but I will sum it up and link to a podcast you can listen to: an average home "should" cost ~$120K in today's money, but because of the MASSIVE bubble created, that home now costs ~$400K. Why? because of people buying extra homes, and those same people who don't have jobs being able to make it to zoning meetings to tell the planners they only want "big" homes in their areas to increase the selling price of their own home. That then has a cascading effect: let's say this happens somewhere in California like a suburb of San Fransico. That means that people no longer can afford to live there so they move to let's say Dallas. Now Dallas has less supply and more demand and the sellers jack up their prices arbitrarily because they want more profit. Then the buyer rents it out and keeps increasing rent prices so they can keep making more money.
This is what the X Poster is complaining about. Not an immigrant charging reasonable rent prices or "good" landlords, because the truth is, those aren't the type of people typically renting out houses to poor people who couldn't afford to buy it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bajyEFHK0M&t=1198s Here's another video that's kinda related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc
Why do you think it's been made so difficult to own a home? Long as you're paying rent, you're a cash cow. Also less likely to leave a crappy job.
I'm surprised so many people are running defence for landlords in the comments
Look I'll be honest, as a renter, I've not heard a realistic alternative that I like better. Do I think landlords should be better regulated? For sure. Do I think housing should be a right, and free, high quality housing should be available everywhere to anyone who wants it? Yes, please!
I like the option to rent a place that's even better than what the baseline option would be. I like that I can move around as I need to. I like that I can get a bigger, better, or just different, place when I have the funds. I like that I never have to deal with broken appliances or roof repairs and get to pick the type of place I want to live in.
Do it 1970s style. You own a home but pay less than half of what you do now. The extra savings go toward home maintenance and lifestyle improvement. You gain equity over time and actually get something for what you paid instead of lining someone else's pockets.
A lot of these people are likely tech folks. A lot of tech folks get high paying jobs. They used that pay to buy rental property.
A lot of these guys are landlords and are trying to convince people that the rent they charge is fair, market rate, and a favour because they're taking on "risk" while you pay for their mortgage.
Kids back in my day you used to be able to rent a house for like $400. It was much cheaper than owning a house and had several advantages. Sometime after 2012 that all changed. Now it’s as you said. There’s a place for rent and land lords, it’s just not the current system
The fact that there were profits to be made by owning a house and renting it out, even if those profits used to be smaller, is itself the problem. That $400 exceeded the cost of maintenance and property taxes (if any) that the landlord paid. That's profit a landlord is making for doing no work. You know what happens when you can accumulate money without putting in work? You can freely invest that money in more capital to make even more profits ad infinitum, and the rate at which you can do this isn't bound by the rate at which your labor power replenishes.
In total, that system creates a process where landlords and all others who own capital can have unbounded and relentless growth. It's not fundamentally different from the factors at play that allow an industrial entrepreneur to start a business expending coal, labor power, and thread to make textiles, turn a profit, and expand that business; over several hundred cycles of production that process culminates in that industrialist (or their heirs) amassing an incredible amount of wealth and even a monopoly.
In either case, it would be insufficient to look at the system 200 years in where the rot had already set in and say that the problem is the system in that instant. No, the problem existed before. There is no time and place for rent and landlords or capitalist exploitation of any kind.
I pretty much agree with this. The economy has grown up to be for parasites made by parasites. The value of work should be way higher that it currently is. The economy should work on people actually doing things rather needing to own to become prosperous.
Rent isn't theft. It's payment for a service. Whether or not that service is of value to you is a different story, but not everyone is interested in owning.
There are benefits to renting. You don't have to be financially responsible for repairs, you don't have to do maintenance or pay someone to do it for you, you have much less financial risk, and you can relocate much easier.
And not all landlords are rich people. I do agree that corporate ownership of residential property shouldn't be allowed, though.
Rent isn’t theft. It’s payment for a service.
What service does the land speculator provide to the tenant? The landlord doesn't develop the property, that's the builder. The landlord doesn't maintain the property, that's done by contractors. The landlord doesn't secure the property, that's done by the state. The landlord often doesn't even finance the property, as the property is inevitably mortgaged and underwritten by banks one step removed from the title holder.
Quite literally, the only thing landlords do is collect the check and transfer portions of it onward. They are, at best, payment processors. And even this job is routinely outsourced to a third party.
There are benefits to renting.
There are lower institutional barriers to renting than to owning, largely resulting from the artificial shortage of public land and public housing. Rents are the consequence of real estate monopolization and public malinvestment. Once the landlords themselves vanish, the "benefits" of renting vanish with them.
And not all landlords are rich people.
There's an old joke Donald Trump likes to tell, back in the 90s when he was underwater on his personal holdings. He's driving through Lower Manhattan in a limo with his daughter and he points out the window to a homeless man. Then he quips, "I'm $800M poorer than that man". To which his daughter replies, "If that's true why are we in a limo while he's out on the street?"
The key thing that the landlord handles is risk. If the roof is very expensive to fix, that is not the contractor's problem. If the property does not generate revenue, that is not the bank's problem. If the property is not worth the cost to build, that is not the builder's problem. If the property is unsafe to live in, that is not the renter's problem.
The landlord's financial risk in the property (should) provide an incentive to maintain and make use of that property.
I'm not saying there aren't other system of distribution people to homes, and I'm not saying that the capitalist system in the US is the best system to do it. I'm just pointing out that a core principle of capitalism is risk, and that is what the landlord provides, a single point buffer of risk for the other parties involved.
Can you agree it's at least exploitative?
It can be exploitative, but it's not automatically so. Both parties benefit from the agreement in different ways.
These days it is hard to own a house, its like the system is designed to cater to the burguoise - because it is. Regular people cant have their own personal ownership because capitalist leeches known as landlords exist.
The system feeds on the profiting of others misfortunes.
I can agree with some arguments about the rental market, or laws about rent protection / rights. But rent in itself is not theft. Somebody wanting to live in somebody else's property whether it's for the night, a week or a year has to pay for it, or go buy their own place to stay in.
I do not believe that which was created through collective labor should be able to be enclosed, so that the encloser can extort others for access.
The house was not built by its owner. It was erected, decorated, and furnished by innumerable workers--in the timber yard, the brick field, and the workshop, toiling for dear life at a minimum wage.
The money spent by the owner was not the product of his own toil. It was amassed, like all other riches, by paying the workers two-thirds or only a half of what was their due.
Moreover--and it is here that the enormity of the whole proceeding becomes most glaring--the house owes its actual value to the profit which the owner can make out of it. Now, this profit results from the fact that his house is built in a town possessing bridges, quays, and fine public buildings, and affording to its inhabitants a thousand comforts and conveniences unknown in villages; a town well paved, lighted with gas, in regular communication with other towns, and itself a centre of industry, commerce, science, and art; a town which the work of twenty or thirty generations has gone to render habitable, healthy, and beautiful.
A house in certain parts of Paris may be valued at thousands of pounds sterling, not because thousands of pounds' worth of labour have been expended on that particular house, but because it is in Paris; because for centuries workmen, artists, thinkers, and men of learning and letters have contributed to make Paris what it is to-day--a centre of industry, commerce, politics, art, and science; because Paris has a past; because, thanks to literature, the names of its streets are household words in foreign countries as well as at home; because it is the fruit of eighteen centuries of toil, the work of fifty generations of the whole French nation.
Who, then, can appropriate to himself the tiniest plot of ground, or the meanest building, without committing a flagrant injustice? Who, then, has the right to sell to any bidder the smallest portion of the common heritage?
Kropotkin
With all due respect, I can't agree with this. It's theft when a multi billion company buys home properties and then rents and manipulates the market. If someone buys a house and succeeds into buying himself another studio apartment for future kids and in the meanwhile rents it, that's not theft, pal.
When someone rents that apartment and they pay the landlord rent, the landlord is making money without working. The landlord isn't actually providing any value or service, they're only refraining from using the state to remove the person living in their property because that person is paying them.
If a person were to occupy the property without that landlord's consent or awareness, it would cost the landlord literally €0 barring damage to the property. If you factor in damage, the "fair" price of rent would be nonzero but negligible, in the order of several hundred euro a year.
Is there any reason why this landlord ought to receive payment for providing 0 value? Let alone enough payment to fully finance the property over the course of a couple of decades, during which time the tenants are effectively paying for the landlord's mortgage without receiving any stake themselves.
No property is free to own, at least in the USA. All property owes tax to the state, and 99% of dwelling units needs utilities and upkeep
If the concept of rent must exist, at least have it go to the government. It's obvious that in private hands it will eventually favor the most rich, and it should not be used as a means to speculate. Unfortunately, political leaders never learn, and if they see thing X that moves a lot of money that they can trickle down off of, fuck the consequences of thing X, that thing is going to be allowed. Crypto, AI, housing, cloud PCs, they will kneel away their autonomy bit by bit.
If the concept of rent must exist, at least have it go to the government.
Really depends, imo. Local municipalities? Sure, but that's a decade-long fight to make it widespread throughout the nation. Welcome to democracy where one party is more than happy to work across the aisle with fascists. Federal? I can just imagine the Trump executive order firing all workers and the terrible outcome that may ensue.
As a left-libertarian (I support personal freedoms and collective action under socialism), I think that taxation in general is NOT theft. In fact, rent is theft. Seriously!
Wait till you hear about loan interests and collateral. Maybe even covenants down the road.