Jesus Christ the problem isn’t if you have a GOOD landlord or a BAD landlord. It’s that you have two people, each paying 800/month for housing. One of them had the up front money to and the long term career/life stability to purchase a house, and one of them lacks at least one of those things. The first person builds equity in a home, further entrenching their financial status and the financial status of their family, and the second person pisses away 10k every year with nothing to show for it. Person A’s kids will eventually have a mid six figure windfall when Person A dies, and Person B’s kids will not. And on top of that, both of them are paying more than they need to for those houses because of countless landlords purchasing homes they don’t need, artificially driving up the price of housing. And on top of THAT we have way more houses just sitting empty than we have homeless people in this country.
It doesn’t have to be like that! Like, I don’t care if your landlord is really good about cutting you slack if you pay a week late sometimes or coming out to fix your dryer. That’s window dressing. We can keep the renting class and have rental properties managed by the government, or nonprofit land trusts. Or we can abolish the private ownership of housing that you don’t live in, and do things like provide closing cost/down payment free mortgages through the government to facilitate home ownership by everyone that isn’t contingent on down payments and career stability.
Instead we’re going to bend over backwards to come to the conclusion that the ONLY FUCKING WAY to provide housing to those without five figures of cash on hand (in a country where most people aren’t prepared for an emergency $1000 bill) is to have a landlord class who benevolently allow the poor to live in their houses in exchange for paying for those houses.
This is certainly possible, but I have trouble imagining how such a system would give us anything other than grim, utilitarian apartment buildings.
Your idea would go a long way towards ending homelessness and shelter insecurity (but so would just increasing the supply of habitable public housing), but I can’t imagine that most people in a capitalist society would accept this as their only options to rent.
What is stopping you from purchasing a home to live in here?
Like. I’m not trying to dismiss the idea of abolishing al private ownership of real property, but I don’t think that’s what anyone is talking about here.
Edit: I don’t think I have a problem with private commercial rentals. So if you want to rent out your bottom floor for office space or something, have at it.
Did people kill millions of Irish? You can see how the situation, while similar, isn’t the same at all. It probably depends on what the next sentence after “Using money to make money is immoral” is to really figure it out…
So if I have an extra bedroom in my home after my kids move out, I can’t rent the room to someone who can’t find an affordable apartment near where he wants to live?
Or are there always available, desirable, affordable apartments in your scenario?
P. S. I see you edited your answer. So, if I live there also I can rent out space (but only to a business?), but not if I want to hold that building but move elsewhere?
Stop it, this is not helpful and you’re the worst offender when it comes to this accusation toward me.
I have better shit to do with my life than come here and straight up troll people. I may use sarcasm, but I’m never being intentionally obtuse or posting in “bad faith.”
What Tom said doesn’t help because the entire point of this abolish the landlords sentiment seemed to be tied to evictions. Only in the past few posts have the goalposts been shifted to “well if we didn’t have landlords, rent would be 15% cheaper.”
That might be true, but that doesn’t address the “evictions are murder” point because X - 15% is only $0 if X = 0.
If we don’t evict people for non-payment, who in their right mind would pay? If you dismantle the concept of private property ownership to save 15% on rent, I don’t see how you can’t make the same argument for just about everything in society. So now this is less about landlords and just goes back to straight up communism, which if you haven’t noticed, doesn’t end well.
That’s an edge case that can be dealt with by local jurisdictions. We can see with Air BnB the unintended consequences of simple hypotheticals like that, let’s handle the big fish
first.
I’m still failing to see how reducing shelter insecurity couldn’t be accomplished with more public housing (or vouchers) combined with strong tenant protections codified by law.
If the answer comes back to “Like duh, landlording is evil,” then I think this topic of discussion has run its course.
That was what’s called an “analogy”. Wolfs don’t really rely on analogies very much in the wild, so it’s understandable that you might not be overly familiar with them. As background reading, here’s today’s Wikipedia regarding this shiz: Analogy.
Briefly, analogies are of this form: a:b :: c:d. An example would be “Knees (a) are to legs (b) as elbows (c ) are to arms (d)”. A common mistake for those who struggle with analogies, perhaps because they were schooled by canines, is that they imagine that an analogy is asserting something like a==c (or b==d). An example would be a response to the above example along the lines of “Gee, so you’re saying knees are the same as elbows? That don’t sound right to me”.