We did this upthread didn’t we? Maintenance and account keeping is valuable work that should be compensated. It is purposely mystifying that sometimes this work happens to be done by people who are also extracting extra value via violent extortion.
We did it really poorly upthread.
It’s a really bad argument absolutely guaranteed to never convince anyone. It’s just bad economics.
The goal is correct and there are really strong humanitarian arguments. It makes no sense to choose the bad arguments over the good ones if the goal is really to change minds.
I suppose we could find jobs that we agree create less value than a landlord (democratic politician, anyone? heyyyyy) but really, what value do landlords create? It seems that they add zero value to the system and instead extract value, though I’m not sure what to call it–something like “seeking of rent”
I think that you’re right “logically” but I personally don’t mind treating it as a special case of capitalism. First of all, there’s history. Like, all of history. For as long as civilizations have existed, land ownership as a concept has been a root cause of all manner of injustice. Secondly, even if we consider only the current zeitgeist the entire culture of home ownership and it’s place within the toxic consumer culture carries it’s own “special case” considerations. Owning a home, owning a big home, owning a big home filled with expensive stuff, etc etc is really foundational to a lot of toxic ideas about what it means to have lived a good life and to be a “good” person. I think that a lot of resistance to provocative discussions about landlords is rooted in this idea that land ownership means something about you as a person, and people are very wary to have their self images as successful land owning citizens challenged. People can sense that attacks on land lords are one degree of separation away from attacks on home ownership, and that’s part of their identity.
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We can name a million other ways people make money allocating capital and then extracting rent for management.
There is nothing unique about landlords other than the idea that housing should be a right, not something traded in a capitalist system.
This is why it seems like the actual problem we’re discussing is property ownership. If Person A owns a big property and Person B owns a big property, but Person B chooses to rent out some of their property to a Person C who would like to live there, I don’t see how that makes Person B a worse person than Person A.
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Sure. I think that without acknowledging the culture, history, and context the conversations will kind of miss the point. In my opinion, improperly regulated landlord/tenant relationships become a form of feudalism. That’s bad! I don’t see the problem with calling that out.
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Idk if this was intentional or not, but this is like the most charitable scenario and it doesn’t happen. It’s more like person B lives on a big property but also buys a few row homes on the poorer side of town and rents them out for 75% more than what the mortgage payment is to people who can’t qualify for a mortgage even though their entire life has been spent paying 75% more than the mortgage payments they can’t qualify for every single month.
But in any case it’s not that the landlords are necessarily bad people, it’s that the system of residential landlording is a bad system.
I also think it’s reinforcing. Being a landlord tends to provoke people into being less empathetic to poorer people. Again, this is bigger than landlords - in general, participating in processes that convert people into counterparties in a transaction will tend to make you less, well, human. To some extent these processes attract the worst people in the first place, but I also think that some people are made worse by these processes as well.
“Again, this is bigger than landlords - in general, participating in processes that convert people into counterparties in a transaction will tend to make you less, well, human.”
I’m sure sex workers would appreciate your view of them as being subhuman.
The concept of “owning” land is ridiculous.
And, the fact that simply being born means you have to do something. You can’t not participate, they’ll put you in jail. Public lands even limit how long you can camp in one place.
Saying landlords are evil doesn’t feel productive, but it’s not like I’ve got any answers there. The root solution is collective "ownership,"or rather stewardship. Samewith the rest of the economy. Housing is absolutely a fundamental right and @mosdef 's comparison to heath care seems effective.
And yet here we are with home ownership and landlords and whether or not they’re all “evil” I just don’t think it’s fundamentally/inherently wrong to rent property you “own.”
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Then she’s not a good writer, because she’s a douchebag who cheated her landlord out of his house.
The tweet is clearly a joke.
Putting that aside, do you not think it’s a problem if someone owns two properties, neither of which they’re able to afford without having a tenant pay for both of them?
No, but then I’m ok with capitalism.
Is it wrong to rent out something you don’t own?
(Possible I accidentally flagged your post while selecting text on my phone)
The problem is that there is no cap on what you can “own” or “charge” to people who want to live on the land you “own.”
It seems pretty simple, you can “own” a plot of land to live on. You can’t “own” a plot of land that you then charge others to live on that you yourself don’t live on.
The cap is finding a person willing to pay it.
99% of the talk about “evil” here is a something in the strawman family. People can do something wrong or unethical without being evil. Few if any are seriously suggesting all landlords are evil, yet many are acting as if they are.
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No you are the audience because you’re one of the very few people naive enough to be trolled by something so obviously trolling.
The problem is that owning land is ridiculous. There’s a finite amount of it. Aside from a few man made islands, none of us had a hand in creating it. The chain of title goes back to whoever took it by force. It can be shared and still have some economic benefit go to people who use it, but not sharing it is just hogging it, staking claims on what is not one’s own and based solely on who has the guns.
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