Read this without getting incensed and/or disgusted, I dare you
Really fucking gross article from Wapo. Sorry for the paywall.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/18/idaho-housing-market/
âŚbut wasnât that the answer to the lord question though?
Interesting that they chose to chart ârental propertiesâ rather than ârental unitsâ
From the linked article:
The Census Bureau counted nearly 20 million rental properties, with 48.2 million individual units, in its 2018 Rental Housing Finance Survey, the most recent one conducted. Individual investors owned nearly 14.3 million of those properties (71.6%), comprising almost 19.9 million units (41.2%). For-profit businesses of various sorts owned 3.7 million properties, or 18.8%, but their holdings totaled 21.7 million units, or 45% of the total.
Those 105k â25 units or moreâ properties are doing a ton of work
Still, thatâs a much higher number of âindividual investorâ properties than I would have guessed. Do we have historical information on that? I wonder what that looked like 20 or 30 years ago.
Are they considering single member LLCs to be âindividual investorsâ?
And when they say those investors typically own only one or two properties, Iâd like to see the breakdown of that data too.
Shitâs gonna keep getting worse
Soon, weâre gonna be the people from Itâs A Wonderful Life living in Pottersville. I mean itâs not like Europe is immune from this.
I think itâs going to be more RoboCop than its a wonderful life.
Or Brazil (the film).
How many properties are you allowed to own and rent out before youâre evil? More than 3, right?
0 sounds about right
You are the exact audience for this tweet.
Whatâs the difference between hotels,vacation rentals, and being a landlord?
I sit here and think, âAre all landlords evil? If I rent out my house, am I evil? is vrbo evil? Hotels? Is it evil to purchase land as an asset?â
The answer, of course, is âit dependsâ. But thatâs not a very satisfactory answer for political debate.
Having said that I can kind of see the argument against landlords. Millions of people on the left of coalesced around the idea that health care is a right and shouldnt be subject to the forces of the market. Itâs pretty hard to believe that, then also think that basic shelter is somehow totally different and the profit motive makes a lot of sense there and an organizing principle for how a society should deliver housing.
Evil is completely subjective. But a situation where we allow people to extract value directly from their fellow humans parasitically without any effort or value creation just because the guns of the state say that a random piece of paper means they âownâ a particular part of the planet seems odd when you actually think about it. Obviously âthats capitalism babyâ but usually there is at least the smoke screen of generating value and of âmutually beneficial tradesâ here the trade is âgive me surplus value merely for existing on land that a piece of paper says is mine or these guys will shoot youâ. Itâs pure extortion shorn of any pretence.
Seems like this makes property ownership in itself roughly equivalent on the evil scale to renting out oneâs property.
One problem at a time.
I would be interested if someone can explain how being a landlord creates less value than a million other jobs.
This whole thread seems to be a huge conflation between the justifiable idea that housing should be a right and then trying to make a bunch of really weak arguments that landlords are some special class in capitalism to justify the first idea.
The first idea can be justified on a humanitarian basis. It doesnât need poor economic arguments.