Well, are you asking me personally? Or are you asking me to make with the ‘vigorous debate’ regarding freeholder -vs- public option? Or is your point more along the lines of this: the best way to achieve effective freeholder status today, given the constraints of working within our current legal system, is a system of leasehold tenancy with title held nominal in trust by a government?
I’d answer the goal is as always: direct resident control of their own housing, analogues to direct worker control of their means of production.
Now, how the wonky details of how this is shoehorned into the existing legalities work out, and how uncomfortable the cramming of that shoe up the landlords asses might be to them, are not really my #1 concerns.
But to answer the wonky Q: yes, from my very limited understanding of WTF they are doing in Singapore, the approach of leasehold tenancy seems to work very well in today’s real world.
I was actually not specifically referring to Singapore.
To be honest, the concept of freeholding is one that I have had to research because of this thread. The idea of converting all land ownership into leaseholds instead of freeholds was something that I have thought about while looking things up.
In a way, this is how eminent domain works. All private land could be viewed as a leasehold in perpetuity where the lease can only be broken under very specific rules governed by concepts such as eminent domain and civil forfeiture.
I guess I am asking you personally (and I am satisfied with your answer), but also asking about the possible variations in the “abolish landlords” position and seeing if I can restate things so that others in this thread can see a different angle so that this doesn’t get caught up in a repetitive cycle.
The revenue can allow the reduction or elimination of taxes, greater public investment/spending, or the direct distribution of funds to citizens as a pension or basic income/citizen’s dividend.[33][61][62]
Henry George says your pony is over 100 years slow. But very welcome !!!1!
There are a lot of people in the UBI movement (myself included) who prefer a LVT vs VAT to fund UBI. In practice it will take a combination of both probably.
I was probably more inspired by the Australian Capital Territory, which I understand to be 100% leasehold in a system that was directly inspired by Henry George.
One problem, and it’s a general problem, is that we all have an ingrained transactional viewpoint of the world, which is just a fundamentally flawed way of looking at things. People are going to fixate on formal sounding rules and on individualized transactions, instead of looking to the wildly differing real world contexts that all transactions are necessarily made in, and appreciating that all this transacting is only a part, one of many, of what makes up life.
This real life example(unlike danby’s fantasy hypothetical) is based in the beautiful state of Arkansas.(The Landlord lives in SoCal).
Before I break down the numbers, take a moment to consider the families who would be renting a 3BR SFR in Arkansas for $800. What kind of low paying, no-benefits having jobs are they most likely to have? What kinds of educational, health, and personal growth opportunities would you expect are available to that family and their children? These are the kinds of homes that my sister(a single mom) lived in and raised her kids in while working 2 or 3 jobs at a time.
This is Landlordism in real life:
Landlord used $15k out of pocket for down payment and closing costs. Purchased home in 2015.
Monthly rent is $800.
Total monthly expenses(Mortgage+Maintanence+Property Manager+Insurance+Property tax) = $560.
Net net cash flow to the Landlord= +$240/mo.(I was really hoping it would come out to ~$350) Or $2,880/yr
Cash-on-cash return to the Landlord= 19.2%!!! That’s Ponzi scheme levels of return.
Bear in mind the Landlord has never been to Arkansas, the property manager does all of management work, and all the money that goes towards Mortgage, Tax, Insurance, Maint, etc all comes from the money that renter pays. All my friend does is cash checks. Unnecessary middleman? You decide…
My friend has 6 of these rentals, and his buddy’s family own ~150, so imagine what the REITs are doing in this space. Yikes!
This is the Landlording system that has produced upstanding citizens such as: Donald Trump, Donald Trump’s father, Donald Trump’s kids, Donald Sterling, and many more! Who wouldn’t want to spend their internet forum posting time carrying water for this beautiful system.
Both sidesing here, you know those are like best case numbers. When you look at appreciation the numbers are quite different, but average cash flow is not nearly that good.
Well my friend did choose to slumlord/landlord because the ROR is much better when exploiting poor people in Arkansas than just about anything he could buy in SoCal.
When he was looking to purchase it, he asked me for advice. (I’ve been licensed in RE in California for 20 years and am way better at math than he is). I advised him to use even more leverage, but he didn’t want to. He could have done this deal with even less money up front, but he chose not to.
Yeah, the highest rate of profit extraction is always from the poorest of folk. See: payday loans. See: low paying shit jerbs. In housing, nothing makes more $$$/$$$ than tenements.
I’m trying to fit this into my greater crusade of opposing libertarians. In my view, libertarians give too much importance to property rights. I already decline to use the idea of the body as self-property as the source of individual rights.
I don’t feel like I am quite on anyone’s side in this debate.
The Landlord has never been to Arkansas, the property manager does all of management work, and all the money that goes towards Mortgage, Tax, Insurance, Maint, etc all comes from the money that renter pays. All my friend does is cash checks. Unnecessary middleman? You decide…
You weren’t around during the ACer daze over on 2+2? Yeah, libertarian-types are all ass-clowns. However, they seem to have pretty much died out with the fading away of scam master Ron Paul, and ascendance of the Evil Toxic Waste Container.
Anyways, there’s a good libertarian-type argument to be made that evictions were, back bad old days when they happened, subsidized by the taxpayers to a shocking degree. And that if civil society is going to be forced down and backwards, and evictions make a come back… that they should be performed at cost.
How are evictions subsidized by the taxpayers to a shocking degree? Two ways…
Access. Let’s say a landlord wrecks a renting folk’s car after violently extorting rent. The renting folk misses work and is fired. But he finds a lawyer to sue the landlord pro-bono for property damage. First of the month, the renting folk misses rent, and the landlord sues her ass for unlawful attainder. Who get’s their day in court first?
A: There’s a whole special setup down at the courthouse, different clerks, offices, and often courts are set aside exclusively for the landlords. Special laws too: the landlord’s are fast tracked with 3-day notices. Everyone else get’s in line, and AFAIK the wait is still ~6mo in CA Superior Court.
So 3 days -vs- !6 months access.
To file an eviction in CA costs ~$350. I’m going to guess that’s real, real high for the US (because of Prop 13, CA has by far the highest court costs in the US). For that price (and some other misc and nominal costs) the entire might of the State of CA will be employed if necessary, up to and including the CA National Guard.
Contrast that to having a wedding reception on the beach. Which you can do in dago by permit, alcohol and all. But… you need to hire some SDPD officers to chaperone. That costs ~$5000. If the wedding reception gets out of hand, and the SDPD officers actually have to intervene… you’ll get an extra bonus bill. Cops don’t work cheap.
So…
Would our pro-eviction fan-boys be in favor of (a) no more 3-day shortcuts, and the landlords getting in the same line as everyone else down at the court house?, and (b) filing for evictions cost ~$5000, while sending in the robocops was billed at cost to the landlords by the police?
