You ran with it, though.
Careful now.
This is everything the leftist college kids who read a book once itt donât get.
Cooperative housing does make sense. My explanation for why it doesnât happen much, based on my efforts to try to get people to do things cooperatively (like run a forum for example) is that few people want to take initiative and responsibility.
I think/hope that thatâs a bit of a cultural problem and something that people can change.
Thereâs a wide gulf between unfettered capitalism and communism or some other form of anti-capitalism. While I wouldnât say that I am capitalist to my bones, I would say that I currently prefer regulated capitalism to democratic socialism.
Iâm not going to say there should never be landlords and Iâm not suggesting that we replace private landlords with government landlords. I would say that there shouldnât be slumlords and maybe there shouldnât be absentee landlords or corporate landlords beyond a certain size. I deny the libertarian notion of society as an aggregate of voluntary transactions which blames tenants for not negotiating better if they find themselves in a bad deal.
We are a much more complex society than long ago when there was the Jeffersonian ideal of the self-sufficient yeoman farmer. We are more specialized and interdependent. One of the ways we have become more specialized and less self-sufficient is in housing. Mutli-family dwellings are just much more efficient when people arenât growing their own food.
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Iâm not sure what you mean, or are getting at, when you say ânecessaryâ. Abolishing Landlordism is necessary to abolish Landlordism, the topic of this thread. Otherwise, weâre left with âNecessary for ____?â. Anyways, leavings aside considerations of the ânecessaryââŚ
IDK if a strategy of, say, mass targeted savings accrued over multiple generations, and slowly, over several lifespans, buying ourselves out of Landlordism is actually a viable strategy. I canât imagine that it is. But even if it was, I gotta figure itâs an incredibly poor choice compared to other available strategies.
-vs-
The strategy I outlined above that would work, would work much much faster, and wouldnât guarantee to prolong the horrific ills of Landlordism for generations.
The cultural problem is that we are too individualistic.
The best hope for creating cooperative housing is probably to organize it along religious lines.
Definitely not the prosperity gospel version of Christianity thatâs popular in the US.
Maybe some South and Central American style liberation theology.
OK so now youâve abolished landlords. Wonderful. So in this post landlord world, letâs say there needs to be an apartment building built. Who builds the building? Apartment builders, obviously. Great. Who pays the apartment builders to build the needed apartment building?
Yeah I bet you know a ton of cops calling for landlord abolition GTFO.
Iâm not 100% on board with liberation theology, but I would say that I am strongly influenced by concepts such as the preferential option for the poor.
And maybe Iâm not 100% on board with abolishing landlords, but itâs an idea worth thinking about and not one that I immediately dismiss. I think the wrong question to ask is: are landlords bad? An argument between people who say we need to get rid of landlords because they are bad and people who say that landlords are necessary is misguided.
Shelter is a basic need and one which can be tenuous for the bottom quartile or decile of society. We should be asking if landlords increase the ability of these people, the poorest and least powerful, to have housing that is safe, secure, and affordable. And we should be willing to redistribute wealth from the rich but also from the middle classes to make life better for those at the bottom. Do landlords help with this goal? If not, can they be regulated in a way that helps or is it better to just get rid of them?
The government, ldo.
There are plenty of unused open spaces where I would build a perfectly cromulent house if the police wouldnât shoot me for doing it. The only place I know where I could maybe get away with it is routinely 120 degrees. (Slab City)
Youâre doing that thingee again.
- I canât predict the future in hypothetical land. 2. Itâs a false dichotomy to imagine there is only two options, Landlordism and, i guess, Not-Landlordism. 3. Shelter existed before the rise of Landlordism. 4. If people still exist, shelter will exist after the over-throw of Landlordism. 5. Historically there are all sorts of alternatives -vs- Landlordism. 6. Today, there are all sorts of alternatives too. 7. This whole series of Qs is really just a stupid, stupid, stupid attempt at the TINA (there is no alternative) so-called argument for Landlordism.
Now, there could be a possibly interesting compare-and-contrast conversation comparing Landlordism -vs- say Georgism. As in which of these alternate systems would the renting class choice if they were given that choice.
Do you want to chat about this instead?
Yeah, Iâm doing that thingee where I ask you to articulate what the society youâre advocating would look like, even in the most general terms, and youâre unable to even begin to do so.
I think Keeedâs point is that there would be less housing if landlordism were overthrown and Dr. Chesspainâs is that more housing would be in bad shape.
They are not obviously wrong imo. I wish they were obviously wrong and it were clear that people would work together to build and maintain as much housing as needed - and I think that may be possible (see that city in Spain) but it seems more likely than not to me that, absent significant cultural changes, they are right.
There is too much housing in the US though - too many empty properties and properties that are too large - so, living with less is definitely possible.
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It doesnât matter, because like the Post Office, they get to write it off.
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My point was that the people who want the housing built are going to have to pay for building the housing. I mean Iâm sure the house builders are nice guys and everything but they probably want something in exchange for building a house. So what the hell does abolishing landlords even accomplish? You can pay house builders to build you a house right now. But no one is going to build a house for someone with no money in a world where no one can be evicted.
It seizes the existing rental properties.
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Right. Iâm asking what happens five years after that.