I’ve done both. Way more people could do landlording than construction work. This is quite insulting to construction work, which is absolutely towards the higher end of skilled work. Yeah, just about anyone physically capable of hauling dirt for 8 hours (not many people) could do something on a construction site, but that’s a small part of construction and building a house is more complicated than landlording by a lot.
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no it would be like a thread of abolishing all the insurance companies. landlords are much more comparable to the insurance companies than doctors - take all the profit and provide nothing of value in return.
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I agree with this.
It doesn’t, unless you want to abolish all landlords, then it does.
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No it doesn’t. It’s socializing a sector of the economy the same way socializing medicine is. It doesn’t mean you can’t still buy and sell computers or cars or financial services for profit.
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upkeep is baked into the price of renting, thats why renting is more expensive per month than owning.
put another way - if we socialized housing, properties would not all go to shit- they would still get upkept by construction/maintenance workers. They are the ones who are necessary- not landlords. Just as doctors would still be necessary in socialized medicine, but insurance companies would not be.
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Construction work and property management each require specific skills. I can do the latter well, whereas my “construction” skills are limited to very basic home repair.
I don’t know Zap well enough to know if she is being dismissive of construction skills or if she is implying that she had enough knowledge, physical strength, etc. to work construction.
Isn’t Capitalism based on private property? I suppose you could force multifamily dwellings to all be coops and set up in such a way that the rent is used to pay off the mortgage and cover upkeep of the building and what not. Dealing with people leaving would be tricky because you’d need to figure out how to buy them out or something.
Show me a single capitalist country that has abolished all private rentals.
The local authority pays them, the building supervisor (“the super”, employed by the LA) does all the rest.
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This is really irrelevant and it’s a derail. And this is not something I’m advocating I’m just stating what I think is obviously true that you can socialize one sector of an economy while leaving other sectors unsocialized. But, at least for a long time Singapore had something weird where all of their residential properties were actually owned by the government. People had leases and I’m not sure if they were allowed to sublet or not. The system is still largely in place and something like 80% of properties are owned by the government, but they may have liberalized it.
New thread please: Why capitalism is actually good and communism bad: thoughts of a landlord
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Every sensible person doesn’t have the capital to become a landlord.
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Varies in exact form, but taxation, basically. I’m not being snippy - do you not know this?
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They pretty much do. You can buy an apartment building from a bank often with no money down and no income using the rent to qualify.
No. For one thing, taxes are usually levied on the populace as a whole, with progressive taxation meaning that wealthier people pay a higher percentage, not just a greater absolute amount. So the contribution from a low-income person to a collective taxation pool is potentially significantly lower than the cost of their rent on the private market.
For another thing, social/public housing has no profit-motive element and can be provided at true cost or even at a ‘loss’ (that is, it is provided as a public good).
Mmm, yeah, I’m completely right about a bunch of other stuff, too, you should try it. This is embarrassing.
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So far, I’ve had to explain social housing, progressive taxation, public goods and, apparently, building supervisors. Moving you from “How can a landlord ever be replaced?” to “Ah, but nevertheless, transactions will still occur, so-” with a new Pikachu Face from you every step of the way.
What part of that is not embarrassing to you?
Indeed.
Government can’t “just decide” to no longer let landlords evict people. In Wisconsin, at least, the governor’s emergency order to temporarily ban foreclosures and evictions cites state law as justification for the order. That legislators at some point decided to allow for a scenario where such a thing could happen suggests that someone abstractly thought that it could be a possibility, even if they did not envision this specific situation.
It’s the government that evicts people. Courts and then police.