People aren’t defending landlords per se. People are defending the opportunities afforded by having extra space and letting someone else pay what it costs to live there.
Renting as a concept goes back to antiquity, and this is an absolutist stupid take that makes it sound like OP doesn’t understand how real life works.
Not everywhere is a large city. Not all renters live in the same place for 20 years. Not all landlords are evil shitbags or faceless corporations. Sure, plenty are. Some are just families that are lucky to not have to sell their house if they move for work that lasts only a couple years.
I end up moving every couple of years, and so I’ve had to sublet the last part of a lease I’ve had, and gladly rented places from friends, random people on Craigslist, whatever, for weeks or months at a time. So I’m a thief because I sublet an apartment for 3 months? So dumb.
Long-term renting is really more the issue as landlords do just sit and leech and renters get nothing to show for it. But the fact remains that renting a room or an apartment is something that has since literally ancient times made more sense than huge amounts of unused housing you aren’t allowed to use. So this is actually a nuanced argument against a particular class of people and corporations. Meaning that the premise is flawed enough for most people to roll their eyes and ignore it.
The whole “rent is theft!” trope doesn’t even make sense from a political messaging viewpoint. What’s your suggested alternative? That’s not apparent at all. So this ends up sounding like saying “I want hot spaghetti for dinner!” and just expecting it to happen.
Also, a rather large number of people have rented something out, rented a room out, etc. thanks to AirBnB that this messaging makes enemies out of a whole lot of normal people by using absolute terms. People like me ask “Did my friends that helped me out steal from me? Of course not.”
If you think that anyone who thinks a reasonable exchange of a service for an agreed up on fee are committing theft, then you’ve alienated 98% of people with the premise alone by calling them criminals.
Six paragraphs of you not understanding the issue: the problem is not the concept of renting a living space for a given time, the problem is private rent, i.e. rent for the landowner’s profit.
Every single problem with current rent could be solved by socializing housing and making it available to rent at production+maintenance prices, and people could still move freely without being tied to a house in particular, without the risk of being evicted, would be able to paint the walls and have pets…
thanks for the detailed and explanatory response. love to see more of this commentary on lemmy rather than the ‘rent is evil’ crap that goes on around here.
it’s about as informed and reasonable as ‘taxation is theft!’ crap. It’s just the left-wing warcry equivalent to that.
and all the ‘rent is evil’ idiots i know in real life… took mommy and daddy’s money and became landlords themselves and now they complain about how taxes are evil… it’s almost as if people are selfish jerks who just like to complain about obligatory costs…
and all the ‘rent is evil’ idiots i know in real life… took mommy and daddy’s money and became landlords themselves and now they complain about how taxes are evil
Yeah, the turn that the Trustifarians take is always so fast. Like you can not see them for a few weeks and suddenly the locks are gone, toes confined to shoes, and they’re already clamoring for trappings as a totem of having forsaken their “sordid past.” All the whiplash from suddenly realizing that your paths in life end in the same few places, simply because your ideals force others to push you away.
It’s really not too dissimilar from Flat Earthers - outrageous ideas that at first put you in a fun and weird community, but long term are the thing that makes everyone your enemy. Though, since Flat Earthers don’t specifically reject economic methods are part of their idealism, they can fare well for longer it seems. Though I don’t have data to back that up.
A lot of these people are likely tech folks. A lot of tech folks get high paying jobs. They used that pay to buy rental property.
A lot of these guys are landlords and are trying to convince people that the rent they charge is fair, market rate, and a favour because they’re taking on “risk” while you pay for their mortgage.
a lot of tech folks don’t have great high paying jobs. only a small subset of them do, most of whom, were already rich before they got those jobs because they came from wealthy families.
i have rented out a room before of my condo. so have several of my friends until they had kids. are we all ‘evil’ landlords? or are we only evil if we buy units we don’t live in? was I evil when I charged 1200/mo for the bedroom, despite the market rent in my area being closer to 1500? or was I supposed to rent it out at $500 a month or something?
or how about when I had a shitty tenant who was late with the rent, damaged my floors/walls, threatened me and my dog, and I kicked them out and kept their deposit because it cost me like $800 to repair all the shit they did? and because of that experience I no longer rent out my spare bedroom, therefore reducing units and driving up rent further in my area, where today a bedroom is now almost 1800/mo?
Look I’ll be honest, as a renter, I’ve not heard a realistic alternative that I like better. Do I think landlords should be better regulated? For sure. Do I think housing should be a right, and free, high quality housing should be available everywhere to anyone who wants it? Yes, please!
I like the option to rent a place that’s even better than what the baseline option would be. I like that I can move around as I need to. I like that I can get a bigger, better, or just different, place when I have the funds. I like that I never have to deal with broken appliances or roof repairs and get to pick the type of place I want to live in.
It’s the result of the power imbalance that creates the problems. Specifically that property owners hold all the power and have structured society in such a way that housing is artificially scarce and more difficult to build than it should be, which has led to inflated prices
I like the option to rent a place that’s even better than what the baseline option would be. I like that I can move around as I need to. I like that I can get a bigger, better, or just different, place when I have the funds. I like that I never have to deal with broken appliances or roof repairs and get to pick the type of place I want to live in.
You are describing either a “land contract” or a “condominium”. With either, you gain equity in the property.
Do it 1970s style. You own a home but pay less than half of what you do now. The extra savings go toward home maintenance and lifestyle improvement. You gain equity over time and actually get something for what you paid instead of lining someone else’s pockets.
It really depends on how often he is really using that “I want to move” option.
Various fees associated with the purchase of a houae will blow away likely equity gains over a year or two. Over a short time period housing can actually go down, and you sell for less than you paid. Selling the house is a potential exposure that may leave you stuck for months with it, and if you needed to immediately move, you have to own two properties and the associated taxes, insurance, and likely loan payment. If you had to borrow and moved within a year. The interest owed probably outpaced your theoretical equity gains.
So if you are only staying in one place for say 4 years or less, renting may actually make sense. If you are planning longer than that, purchasing almost always makes more sense.
The time cost, too. Huge hassle to buy, move, sell. Inspections, agents, viewings… big pressure end to end.
purchasing almost always makes more sense.
I remember the San Francisco Bay Area threw this old truism off when purchasing became so expensive, it was just about a wash whether you wanted to rent or buy.
These tiny little homes starting at a million bucks or something…
buying doesn’t make sense unless you live in a place for 5-10 years.
i am now 5-6 years into my place. it is just starting to ‘profit’ in terms of equity vs costs.
renting is cheaper and better and has far fewer opportunity costs. i had way more disposable income as a renter and a lot more free time. i see no ‘shame’ in being a renter, but there is a lot of dumbass cultural bias that ‘owning’ is always better than renting.
same is true for cars. but people love to flip out at you for how ‘stupid’ leases are. cars are deprecating assets… which makes it an even stupider argument. but leases can be really great if you know what you are doing and your circumstances. leasing worked out great for me and i ended up buying my car out and making a hefty profit off it. some leasing deals are actually far better than owning the car, too.
most people just look at upfront costs and end costs. they don’t see all the costs in the middle. hence why they buy a crappy car like a Jeep, when they should lease it… and end up boned from all the maintenance bills. a house is a lot more than the cost of buying it and the cost of selling it.
I will say that as an owner, I have a lot more disposable income and pretty much all the free time I had as a renter.
I paid of my mortgage early, so now that’s just on the ground.
House maintenance is a thing, but it’s not as scary as people sometimes act like it is. Cleaning is far more work than maintenance/repairs and I had to do that either way. I have had three relatively big repair bills that I had to pay for, but that’s over decades, and I could have paid a company some monthly fee if I wanted more predictability (though the home warranty companies tend to be scammy). I have a lawn to mow, but that’s more a function of detached housing rather than renting/owning, renters of detached housing have to mow their lawn too, and a friend who owns a townhouse doesn’t mow but has to pay big HOA fees that include landscaping services.
But absolutely, between closing costs and interest rates and risk of the housing market having a short-term dip, you aren’t going to reliably and meaningfully gain equity in under 5 or 4 years. One could make a persuasive argument that a different system wouldn’t have that much overhead to a purchase, but within the system we have, that’s the timeframe where owning doesn’t make any sense.
Of course, that said, there needs to be healthy choice in the market, so that people aren’t stuck renting when it doesn’t make sense for their situation.
do you want all the negative externalizes of 1970s too? like leaded gasoline? a much more racist and sexist and hateful society? only 3 major tv stations and no internet?
Why would you prefer a landlord to just you save that money yourself? Like at best its probably a third of your income if youre working class? At worst its probably 60% or more. If you’re on any kind of social assistance rent is probably almost all of your income. Hurray! No food for you mister, the poor landlord needs that pittance you receive.
You would have effectively 133%-180% of the income you do now. For me that’s an increase of over a thousand dollars a month. I could afford all the appliances and roof repairs in the world with that kind of money. I would still walk away with so much extra money its a joke. You have been entirely misled about how much rent takes out of your income. They will steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from you over your life time, maybe even more depending on what you pay.
Renting exists because renters cannot advocate for themselves. It exists because people who become land owners escape the renting class and pretty much immediately turn their backs on it. No longer their problem. Because propaganda has taught them to not have solidarity with their fellow workers. Homelessness is an entirely preventable issue and is inseparable from the problem of landlords.
This is a comment by someone who went off the deep end, have you ever used a rent vs buy calculator in your life? If I had to bet my life on it, i’d say no.
Renting exists because renters cannot advocate for themselves.
That’s the condescending attitude that makes people hate leftists, I despise what you stand for, you make us look bad.
I am a homeowner and you know what, I do often consider switching to renting.
I know this will be an entirely new dimension opening up to you, but not everyone wants to own their own home.
In fact, I not only have an apartment I have an older house on a bigger lot and you know what? The idea that I become slave to my house and garden upkeep that I would have to cut grass during the weekends instead of having the freedom to do whatever I want frightens the fuck out of me.
You can pay people for maintenance and upkeep. Like everything what you have to be careful of scammy companies, but you also have to be wary of scammy landlords.
I think if you are staying for a long time in one residence, you really are better off owning it, and buying services for it. Hell you can hire the exact same maintenance service that a landlord uses, that they pay for out of your rent.
If you have temporary need though, renting is certainly the best option.
This comment illustrates very clearly that you are not a renter 😊 we do not have a choice! I cant just decide whether or not to own my own shelter. I am literally not given the choice. That is not how the system is designed. If youre disabled, youre screwed. If you cant afford a higher education, youre screwed. If you have debts, mental health issues, if youre a minority, youre absolutely screwed. You will rent for the rest of your life and it will almost entirely be spent paycheck to paycheck, certainly nowhere even close to daydreaming about owning any kind of home.
All the benefits youre ascribing to renting count for just owning the apartment or condo you live in. Bam. Done. Couldn’t give less of a fuck about grass. I can barely afford food! Think about how insane it is for you to complain about having to cut the grass when renters have to pick between fucking eating and having a place to sleep. Youre not a leftist, youre a bog standard liberal.
some people have to rent forever, yes. some people are ok with renting forever. If you want to not rent forever you need to make lifestyle or career changes such that you are on an economic path to doing so. That might involve some short term difficulty.
You had choices. You made them. I grew up in a poor town, with working class parents. I choose to go to college, by studying my ass off and getting scholarships and loans. Then I chose to pay back those loans as fast as I could once I got a job after graduating. By 30 I was debt-free. by 35 I was able to buy a modest place. I did not choose high-paying job either, I work in non-profit research where my salary is about half what it might be if i worked for a corporation.
Not everyone chose that. I have had many friends who choose otherwise, and are now 40+ with mountains of debt and will rent forever and are bitter about it. But they also used to tell me what a loser i was for not traveling partying and ‘living it up’. And they are still doing that. One person I know makes 40K a year working in a bicycle shop, and yet they spend 5-8K traveling each yeah, and they feel like someone should just give them an house and are super angry at the world. if you dare suggest maybe they stop working in a bike shop and get a better career, they tell you you are a hateful fascist.
and on the flip side I know people making 500K+ a year who also say they can’t afford to buy a house, because they have delusional expectations. and refuse to ‘lower’ themselves by buying something in their price range.
Man FUCK YOU as someone who does alright now but struggled you really just love the smell of your own shit and pulling up the ladder behind you. Fuck you how about you just shut the fuck up instead of posting this absolute drivel
I do not live in the USA. Housing is a human right and should be free everywhere. It should not be a market. No one should have to pay anything for housing. You have been fed a lifetime of propaganda to make you believe this is fair. It is not. It is one of the major things that contributes to lifelong stress and shortens lifespans. It is one of the major things that keeps people in poverty, having to pay half their income in rent that they never get back.
In fact, I not only have an apartment I have an older house on a bigger lot and you know what? The idea that I become slave to my house and garden upkeep that I would have to cut grass during the weekends instead of having the freedom to do whatever I want frightens the fuck out of me.
You know what’s worse than “becoming a slave to [your] house”? Having to work as to not become homeless.
It intrigues me now, how you would “fix” this and make it so that people don’t have to work to have housing?
I mean as I said in a different comment, we already have social housing in my country.
We have universal healthcare, we have a bunch of social programs for people in need and we have automatic unemployment paid from social insurance. People on disability don’t work, people’s pension is covered by the state.
What measures should we add to make it so you don’t have to work for your home?
I mean I am all for banning private residences being owned by companies, that is something we need to address and if the election goes my preferred parties way, it will be fixed in the next cycle.
However all these things are being paid for, concrete doesn’t pour itself, steel doesn’t manufacture itself, building don’t build themselves, so how do you propose we make it so that we don’t have to pay for our homes?
If I an able bodied person refuse to work I will lose my home and become homeless is that so unfair?
It intrigues me now, how you would “fix” this and make it so that people don’t have to work to have housing?
First things first: there are already a bunch of people who don’t have to work for their housing. A big part of those may have to work for an income so that they can pay for upkeep. But get rich enough and that can get payed by dividends. Or they’re landlords who get enough income from rent. Those rich people don’t have to work at all for their housing.
we already have social housing in my country.
That’s cool for the people who get it. But I’d be surprised if your home country has no homeless people and vacant housing at the same time.
We have universal healthcare, we have a bunch of social programs for people in need and we have automatic unemployment paid from social insurance. People on disability don’t work, people’s pension is covered by the state.
Do those people on social programs actually have a comfortable life, though? Or is it rather “too little to live, too much to die”? I’m quite sure that landlords still make a lot of profit from rent in that country.
What measures should we add to make it so you don’t have to work for your home?
Introduce a usufruct model of owning, where the people who live in a home actually own it (either as a family home, or multiple homes owned by a coop). The important bit is that rent-seeking is abolished in housing. Then you might still need to work for upkeep, but that’s a diminishino part of what people need to pay for rent, nowadays.
and if the election goes my preferred parties way, it will be fixed in the next cycle.
If your country is capitalist, I highly doubt that they will implement this. Profits are still required by capitalist states.
However all these things are being paid for, concrete doesn’t pour itself, steel doesn’t manufacture itself, building don’t build themselves, so how do you propose we make it so that we don’t have to pay for our homes?
I said “work as to not go homeless”. You’re bringing “paying” into it. There’s already a lot of place to live. Ideally, I’d see a communist society where this kind of stuff is planned on the basis of needs, rather than being speculated on in markets for profit
Housing is a human right. We already have gigantic amounts of housing that sits empty, new building projects are not the priority.
The government should be in charge of constructing new housing developments to meet the needs of the community. People can also pool resources together to build those things, in the absence of rent and mortgages people would have substantially higher incomes. Over time this would balance out, but would still be doable in the long term.
No one should be homeless. Even if you are able bodied and refuse to work. The amount of people who are able bodied and refuse to work is microscopic. You have been misled by conservative propaganda to believe that welfare recipients are lazy. Welfare recipients are people who for one reason or another are unable to work. This is almost exclusively people with disabilities.
But yes, I think even if you decide to do literally nothing just cause you dont want to, you should still have shelter. Shelter is a human right; housing is a human right. It is a crime against humanity to deny people housing. And if youre that contrarian, to literally be like har har I wanna make a point about how dumb free housing is so ill do literally nothing, you probably have some problems you should sort through in therapy.
What kind of childish ass logic is that? Almost everyone has to work to not become homeless… even if you own 100% of your home and don’t have a mortgage you know you pay property taxes, electricity, water, gas, sewage, trash. those things don’t just magically appear in your house and disappear from them.
You could get rid of housing being a means for landlords to profit from and hold housing in a usufruct property relation, and/or in common. Building and maintaining housing can be managed by the community (or be payed for by the community).
I heard about your coma and recent miraculous recovery after being kicked in the head while fucking a sheep. My sympathy goes out to your family and I wish ewe well.
Yeah, anarchists don’t like capitalism and rent-seeking behavior either. See this comment by another user quoting anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread (this is “the Bread Book”, and where “breadtube” gets its name from). (Kropotkin is not the first anarchist to come to the anti-property conclusion, and in fact it has been a staple of anarchist theory since Proudhon.)
Hey I’m not really worried, my landlord is actually really cool. The place I live in is actually better than the place he lives in. My rent is well well below market rate for what I should be paying. I lived in the same place for the past 11 years and he’s only raised my rent twice for less than $200 total. Not all landlords are bad, not all of them are in it just to get rich. And not all of us would be able to buy a house regardless of paying rent or not. And I’d much rather pay rent to somebody for a nice place to live then be living in a tent by the river.
Damn, you’re right. It’s like how I’m not worried about wealth inequality because I lucked out and have a steady 60k a year job with a nice employer. Not all employers are bad.
Or how I don’t give a shit about abortion because I made the stone-cold choice to not be a woman.
When things aren’t affecting me they don’t matter so why are people making a big deal about it?
Think the point being it’s nuanced, there are valid rental scenarios. So when someone sees renting shouldn’t be a thing at all, they can be understandable put off, exactly the same way you are put off by someone saying they actually have a good renting scenario.
Renting should be an option, but housing stock shouldn’t be slurped up by big firm either. There needs to be reasonable path to ownership as well as choices to rent. Depending on the area, the balance is of off one way or the other.
Going from a safe place to live, to a steady income, to abortion. Dude you’re an idiot. Fuck off out of this conversation. What are you, 13? Get real dumbass.
Nope, gotta kill your landlord and then get in a shootout with the cops when they come to his your house, you heard the tankies. Time to die for their utopia soldier!
Yes that’s absolutely correct. You are a parasite because you expect other people to work so you can have money you didn’t earn. That is a literal description of the financial relationship.
My initial reaction was the same, to call OP a baby, etc. The problem isn’t rent. It’s landlord leeches.
I have an apartment in one country but moved to a different country, where I’m renting myself. I had two choices - either rent my first apartment to someone, or sell it. If I sold it, it would go not to a family in need, but to a BnB company or an “investor” (that’s the reality in my home country).
Instead I’m renting it to a family of Ukrainian refugees. They basically pay off my mortgage so that I’m not actively losing money on the whole thing.
They also pay rent to the housing association. This money goes to things like trash removal, hot/cold water, taking care of the green areas in the neighbourhood, cleaning the staircases, etc., etc.
I’m renting it to a family of Ukrainian refugees. They basically pay off my mortgage
Holy fuck, my sides. How can you be this BLIND to reality? You fucking said yourself that you have A FAMILY OF WAR REFUGEES PAYING OFF YOUR MORTGAGE. In 30 years time, you’ll own a house and those refugees will own what exactly?
For reference, when the war broke out I was a tenant in Germany. You know what I did? I HOUSED a Ukrainian refugee in MY OWN DAMN HOME for NO COST, because I’m not a piece of shit
Instead I’m renting it to a family of Ukrainian refugees.
You are actively exploiting refugees.
You are no different than the BnB or the investors. You are on the supply side of the problem. Rent is, indeed, the problem.
You could offer to sell your property to those tenants. You could act as a private lender, allowing them to pay you instead of a commercial bank. You could offer them a “land contract”, which is a rent-to-own arrangement. If they choose to leave your property in the next three years, it was no different than a rental. If they choose to stay beyond three years, it automatically converts to a private mortgage, and they begin earning equity.
They basically pay off my mortgage so that I’m not actively losing money on the whole thing.
Leaving it vacant and just paying the mortgage yourself, you are gaining equity in exchange for your money. You are not losing anything. Renting, you are gaining that equity without paying for it.
The only way renting isn’t a problem is if the rent is far less than a mortgage payment on the same property.
indeed. i frequently see people confusing cash flow and equity in these conversations. landlords claim if they are cash flow negative they’re ‘losing’ money, completely ignoring the equity they’re gaining.
What about cases where the move is only temporary? Should people sell every time and hope there is a place to live when they return?
In the private lender case, do you see that as different from someone who starts their own company and manages the property themselves while the renter pays them directly?
The earning equity piece isn’t necessarily incorrect, what the owner is losing is potentially the opportunity to move at all. This assumes they can afford a mortgage + whatever it costs to live somewhere else.
What about cases where the move is only temporary?
In their initial phase, land contracts are, effectively, a rental agreement, including for short-term. (With one difference: the payment is fixed for the life of the agreement; it doesn’t increase year over year) When “temporary” turns into “long term”, (as it so often does) a land contract already has you covered, by locking rent through the initial phase, then gaining you equity through the final phase.
In the private lender case, do you see that as different from someone who starts their own company and manages the property themselves while the renter pays them directly?
Vastly. One includes conveyance of equity; the other does not.
The landlord/property manager retains 100% equity throughout the life of the rental agreement. The private lender retains only the value of the loan. With a land contract, the seller/lender retains 100% of the equity for a couple years, before the agreement automatically converts to a private mortgage.
The earning equity piece isn’t necessarily incorrect, what the owner is losing is potentially the opportunity to move at all.
Completely false. Absolute worse case scenario, they abandon their equity and return title to the lender/seller. Terminating the loan/purchase agreement in this absolute worse case scenario is functionally identical to renting. At its best, renting gives you this outcome, and creates new, worst-case possibilities: where the landlord absconds with security deposits and charges additional fees.
I also wondered about doing that when I ever get rich. Like buy houses in a coveted neighborhood, rent it out to low and middle income people at social housing rates and then convert the lease to a mortgage after a few years and sell the home below market value to the tenants. But how do you prevent them from selling it to an investor above market rates for profit within a few years. Like sure they have equity now but the home is also lost to an investor who will rent it out at a premium to an expat or tourist.
Many options available. At the “ownership” level, you can establish deed restrictions and covenants requiring owner-occupancy. At the local level, you can establish zoning requirements. At the tax assessment level, you can enact punitively-high tax rates that are exempted for owner-occupants. If anyone tries renting these properties, they will face the full tax rate; these properties can only be feasibly owned by people who will occupy them.
I actually know a landlord who owns a farm and rents it out, and does so precisely for the reasons you state. They don’t want the land to go to some soulless big company
They charge a pittance in rent, enough to cover insurance and taxes. The farmer would pay about the same if they owned the property.
They got contacted by a company wanting to build a datacenter, and got to say “hell no”.
Yes, absolutely. Easy to turn viable farmland to bullshit data center, almost impossible to do the former. The datacenter boom causes us to act against our collective interests.
A house gets inherited. The person receiving the house has a child who wants to live there, but the child is about 5 years away from moving out. So they want to rent the house out rather than trying to leave it unoccupied. The tenant knows up front it is a limited time arrangement.
Note this is an unusual circumstance, but there are folks who find themselves in need of temporary housing and people who have an upcoming need, but not current need for a property.
In his case, if he had said he was renting for an overseas assignment but was going to move back, then I would have thought it was a slam dunk. I suppose if the refugees had explicitly stated they wanted to move back home in a couple of years, similar situation.
Let’s start from the beginning: a mortgage is a neutral agreement. Effectively, the lender conveys equity to the borrower over time. Equity is the right to permanent, unlimited use of the property.
A rental agreement conveys no equity. What the tenant gains is a short-term, limited use of the property. “Temporary” is considerably less valuable than “permanent”, so a fair value for “rent” is considerably less than a fair value for a mortgage.
Rent prices don’t reflect this. Even after including a maintenance expense, (that the owner would have to pay regardless of who is living in the property), fair rent for that temporary privilege is still far less than the mortgage for the permanent right.
And yet, the market has been manipulated to the point that rent prices are well above mortgages. In a fair market, people seeking housing would generally choose the better option. If a mortgage is cheaper than rent, they would choose a mortgage. The laws of supply and demand would react to this choice by increasing the price of a mortgage, and decreasing the price of rent.
Since this isn’t happening, we know that the market is being manipulated, and tenants are being exploited. “Fair rent” does not exist: tenants are paying far more than the cost of a mortgage, yet they are not receiving the value of a mortgage.
That is even less helpful than renting it out.
You would have a point if “fair rent” existed, but it does not. In the absence of “fair rent”, we are left with the perverse position that a vacant home does, indeed, cause less harm than a rented home.
A house gets inherited.
The full context of that scenario includes the manipulated market. The scenario you present is only reasonable in a fair market.
In his case, if he had said he was renting for an overseas assignment but was going to move back
Same thing: the scenario for renting is only reasonable in a fair market, but the underlying context of your scenario is the manipulated market where the value of a temporary privilege is modeled greater than the value of a permanent right.
The economists’ answer is that renting exists for the people in this situation. You may be moving to another country for a year or two. Are you going to buy a new house every time you move? Renting gives flexibility in that regard.
Likewise for refugees, putting them up in a rental is a more efficient solution than building new housing for each family.
That said, the model provides an inherently exploitative market and needs some kind of overlay to function efficiently, which in most US cities it doesn’t at all.
While you are undoubtedly better than what I’m about to say… I still wouldn’t say you’re a good guy in this instance.
But, the real massive issue I see here is that big companies and rich douchebags use owning land and housing solely for profit.
THAT should be illegal.
Renting out property between individuals should pe perfectly legal though, as long as some now-inexistent laws are followed, like not being able to hoard housing for rent money.
Renting solely for profit should be illegal.
Renting just to be able to keep a property that you may need in the future should be legal.
Renting out property between individuals should pe perfectly legal though, as long as some now-inexistent laws are followed, like not being able to hoard housing for rent money.
I’m surprised so many people are running defence for landlords in the comments
People aren’t defending landlords per se. People are defending the opportunities afforded by having extra space and letting someone else pay what it costs to live there.
Renting as a concept goes back to antiquity, and this is an absolutist stupid take that makes it sound like OP doesn’t understand how real life works.
Not everywhere is a large city. Not all renters live in the same place for 20 years. Not all landlords are evil shitbags or faceless corporations. Sure, plenty are. Some are just families that are lucky to not have to sell their house if they move for work that lasts only a couple years.
I end up moving every couple of years, and so I’ve had to sublet the last part of a lease I’ve had, and gladly rented places from friends, random people on Craigslist, whatever, for weeks or months at a time. So I’m a thief because I sublet an apartment for 3 months? So dumb.
Long-term renting is really more the issue as landlords do just sit and leech and renters get nothing to show for it. But the fact remains that renting a room or an apartment is something that has since literally ancient times made more sense than huge amounts of unused housing you aren’t allowed to use. So this is actually a nuanced argument against a particular class of people and corporations. Meaning that the premise is flawed enough for most people to roll their eyes and ignore it.
The whole “rent is theft!” trope doesn’t even make sense from a political messaging viewpoint. What’s your suggested alternative? That’s not apparent at all. So this ends up sounding like saying “I want hot spaghetti for dinner!” and just expecting it to happen.
Also, a rather large number of people have rented something out, rented a room out, etc. thanks to AirBnB that this messaging makes enemies out of a whole lot of normal people by using absolute terms. People like me ask “Did my friends that helped me out steal from me? Of course not.”
If you think that anyone who thinks a reasonable exchange of a service for an agreed up on fee are committing theft, then you’ve alienated 98% of people with the premise alone by calling them criminals.
Six paragraphs of you not understanding the issue: the problem is not the concept of renting a living space for a given time, the problem is private rent, i.e. rent for the landowner’s profit.
Every single problem with current rent could be solved by socializing housing and making it available to rent at production+maintenance prices, and people could still move freely without being tied to a house in particular, without the risk of being evicted, would be able to paint the walls and have pets…
thanks for the detailed and explanatory response. love to see more of this commentary on lemmy rather than the ‘rent is evil’ crap that goes on around here.
it’s about as informed and reasonable as ‘taxation is theft!’ crap. It’s just the left-wing warcry equivalent to that.
and all the ‘rent is evil’ idiots i know in real life… took mommy and daddy’s money and became landlords themselves and now they complain about how taxes are evil… it’s almost as if people are selfish jerks who just like to complain about obligatory costs…
Yeah, the turn that the Trustifarians take is always so fast. Like you can not see them for a few weeks and suddenly the locks are gone, toes confined to shoes, and they’re already clamoring for trappings as a totem of having forsaken their “sordid past.” All the whiplash from suddenly realizing that your paths in life end in the same few places, simply because your ideals force others to push you away.
It’s really not too dissimilar from Flat Earthers - outrageous ideas that at first put you in a fun and weird community, but long term are the thing that makes everyone your enemy. Though, since Flat Earthers don’t specifically reject economic methods are part of their idealism, they can fare well for longer it seems. Though I don’t have data to back that up.
A lot of these people are likely tech folks. A lot of tech folks get high paying jobs. They used that pay to buy rental property.
A lot of these guys are landlords and are trying to convince people that the rent they charge is fair, market rate, and a favour because they’re taking on “risk” while you pay for their mortgage.
a lot of tech folks don’t have great high paying jobs. only a small subset of them do, most of whom, were already rich before they got those jobs because they came from wealthy families.
i have rented out a room before of my condo. so have several of my friends until they had kids. are we all ‘evil’ landlords? or are we only evil if we buy units we don’t live in? was I evil when I charged 1200/mo for the bedroom, despite the market rent in my area being closer to 1500? or was I supposed to rent it out at $500 a month or something?
or how about when I had a shitty tenant who was late with the rent, damaged my floors/walls, threatened me and my dog, and I kicked them out and kept their deposit because it cost me like $800 to repair all the shit they did? and because of that experience I no longer rent out my spare bedroom, therefore reducing units and driving up rent further in my area, where today a bedroom is now almost 1800/mo?
I’m sure your specific instance is justified and in doing so, you don’t need a random internet stranger like myself to tell you it’s okay.
Look I’ll be honest, as a renter, I’ve not heard a realistic alternative that I like better. Do I think landlords should be better regulated? For sure. Do I think housing should be a right, and free, high quality housing should be available everywhere to anyone who wants it? Yes, please!
I like the option to rent a place that’s even better than what the baseline option would be. I like that I can move around as I need to. I like that I can get a bigger, better, or just different, place when I have the funds. I like that I never have to deal with broken appliances or roof repairs and get to pick the type of place I want to live in.
The renter system is fine in my opinion
It’s the result of the power imbalance that creates the problems. Specifically that property owners hold all the power and have structured society in such a way that housing is artificially scarce and more difficult to build than it should be, which has led to inflated prices
Vienna social housing model is what we need. Nearly 60% lives in public housing there.
https://youtu.be/MxuACFQBwxs
Paying half if not more of your monthly salary for a shitty place to live is horse shit
You are describing either a “land contract” or a “condominium”. With either, you gain equity in the property.
that’s what everyone wants.
that’s also why housing is so expensive. people are willing to pay a lot of money to live in high quality housing. you are too.
and people who can’t afford the high quality housing have to live in the places with broken/old appliances.
if you want those things, you have to get enough money to be able to afford them.
Do it 1970s style. You own a home but pay less than half of what you do now. The extra savings go toward home maintenance and lifestyle improvement. You gain equity over time and actually get something for what you paid instead of lining someone else’s pockets.
It really depends on how often he is really using that “I want to move” option.
Various fees associated with the purchase of a houae will blow away likely equity gains over a year or two. Over a short time period housing can actually go down, and you sell for less than you paid. Selling the house is a potential exposure that may leave you stuck for months with it, and if you needed to immediately move, you have to own two properties and the associated taxes, insurance, and likely loan payment. If you had to borrow and moved within a year. The interest owed probably outpaced your theoretical equity gains.
So if you are only staying in one place for say 4 years or less, renting may actually make sense. If you are planning longer than that, purchasing almost always makes more sense.
The time cost, too. Huge hassle to buy, move, sell. Inspections, agents, viewings… big pressure end to end.
I remember the San Francisco Bay Area threw this old truism off when purchasing became so expensive, it was just about a wash whether you wanted to rent or buy.
These tiny little homes starting at a million bucks or something…
buying doesn’t make sense unless you live in a place for 5-10 years.
i am now 5-6 years into my place. it is just starting to ‘profit’ in terms of equity vs costs.
renting is cheaper and better and has far fewer opportunity costs. i had way more disposable income as a renter and a lot more free time. i see no ‘shame’ in being a renter, but there is a lot of dumbass cultural bias that ‘owning’ is always better than renting.
same is true for cars. but people love to flip out at you for how ‘stupid’ leases are. cars are deprecating assets… which makes it an even stupider argument. but leases can be really great if you know what you are doing and your circumstances. leasing worked out great for me and i ended up buying my car out and making a hefty profit off it. some leasing deals are actually far better than owning the car, too.
most people just look at upfront costs and end costs. they don’t see all the costs in the middle. hence why they buy a crappy car like a Jeep, when they should lease it… and end up boned from all the maintenance bills. a house is a lot more than the cost of buying it and the cost of selling it.
I will say that as an owner, I have a lot more disposable income and pretty much all the free time I had as a renter.
I paid of my mortgage early, so now that’s just on the ground.
House maintenance is a thing, but it’s not as scary as people sometimes act like it is. Cleaning is far more work than maintenance/repairs and I had to do that either way. I have had three relatively big repair bills that I had to pay for, but that’s over decades, and I could have paid a company some monthly fee if I wanted more predictability (though the home warranty companies tend to be scammy). I have a lawn to mow, but that’s more a function of detached housing rather than renting/owning, renters of detached housing have to mow their lawn too, and a friend who owns a townhouse doesn’t mow but has to pay big HOA fees that include landscaping services.
But absolutely, between closing costs and interest rates and risk of the housing market having a short-term dip, you aren’t going to reliably and meaningfully gain equity in under 5 or 4 years. One could make a persuasive argument that a different system wouldn’t have that much overhead to a purchase, but within the system we have, that’s the timeframe where owning doesn’t make any sense.
Of course, that said, there needs to be healthy choice in the market, so that people aren’t stuck renting when it doesn’t make sense for their situation.
do you want all the negative externalizes of 1970s too? like leaded gasoline? a much more racist and sexist and hateful society? only 3 major tv stations and no internet?
What does that have to do with affordable housing?
Why would you prefer a landlord to just you save that money yourself? Like at best its probably a third of your income if youre working class? At worst its probably 60% or more. If you’re on any kind of social assistance rent is probably almost all of your income. Hurray! No food for you mister, the poor landlord needs that pittance you receive.
You would have effectively 133%-180% of the income you do now. For me that’s an increase of over a thousand dollars a month. I could afford all the appliances and roof repairs in the world with that kind of money. I would still walk away with so much extra money its a joke. You have been entirely misled about how much rent takes out of your income. They will steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from you over your life time, maybe even more depending on what you pay.
Renting exists because renters cannot advocate for themselves. It exists because people who become land owners escape the renting class and pretty much immediately turn their backs on it. No longer their problem. Because propaganda has taught them to not have solidarity with their fellow workers. Homelessness is an entirely preventable issue and is inseparable from the problem of landlords.
This is a comment by someone who went off the deep end, have you ever used a rent vs buy calculator in your life? If I had to bet my life on it, i’d say no.
That’s the condescending attitude that makes people hate leftists, I despise what you stand for, you make us look bad.
I am a homeowner and you know what, I do often consider switching to renting.
I know this will be an entirely new dimension opening up to you, but not everyone wants to own their own home.
In fact, I not only have an apartment I have an older house on a bigger lot and you know what? The idea that I become slave to my house and garden upkeep that I would have to cut grass during the weekends instead of having the freedom to do whatever I want frightens the fuck out of me.
You can pay people for maintenance and upkeep. Like everything what you have to be careful of scammy companies, but you also have to be wary of scammy landlords.
I think if you are staying for a long time in one residence, you really are better off owning it, and buying services for it. Hell you can hire the exact same maintenance service that a landlord uses, that they pay for out of your rent.
If you have temporary need though, renting is certainly the best option.
This comment illustrates very clearly that you are not a renter 😊 we do not have a choice! I cant just decide whether or not to own my own shelter. I am literally not given the choice. That is not how the system is designed. If youre disabled, youre screwed. If you cant afford a higher education, youre screwed. If you have debts, mental health issues, if youre a minority, youre absolutely screwed. You will rent for the rest of your life and it will almost entirely be spent paycheck to paycheck, certainly nowhere even close to daydreaming about owning any kind of home.
All the benefits youre ascribing to renting count for just owning the apartment or condo you live in. Bam. Done. Couldn’t give less of a fuck about grass. I can barely afford food! Think about how insane it is for you to complain about having to cut the grass when renters have to pick between fucking eating and having a place to sleep. Youre not a leftist, youre a bog standard liberal.
life isn’t fair.
some people have to rent forever, yes. some people are ok with renting forever. If you want to not rent forever you need to make lifestyle or career changes such that you are on an economic path to doing so. That might involve some short term difficulty.
You had choices. You made them. I grew up in a poor town, with working class parents. I choose to go to college, by studying my ass off and getting scholarships and loans. Then I chose to pay back those loans as fast as I could once I got a job after graduating. By 30 I was debt-free. by 35 I was able to buy a modest place. I did not choose high-paying job either, I work in non-profit research where my salary is about half what it might be if i worked for a corporation.
Not everyone chose that. I have had many friends who choose otherwise, and are now 40+ with mountains of debt and will rent forever and are bitter about it. But they also used to tell me what a loser i was for not traveling partying and ‘living it up’. And they are still doing that. One person I know makes 40K a year working in a bicycle shop, and yet they spend 5-8K traveling each yeah, and they feel like someone should just give them an house and are super angry at the world. if you dare suggest maybe they stop working in a bike shop and get a better career, they tell you you are a hateful fascist.
and on the flip side I know people making 500K+ a year who also say they can’t afford to buy a house, because they have delusional expectations. and refuse to ‘lower’ themselves by buying something in their price range.
Man FUCK YOU as someone who does alright now but struggled you really just love the smell of your own shit and pulling up the ladder behind you. Fuck you how about you just shut the fuck up instead of posting this absolute drivel
No i just live in a country that’s less batshit insane than the land of the “free” that is the USA…
Here you can actually get social housing, you know what they pay for rent? Like 30 euros.
It’s not my fault your country went to shit, doesn’t mean there aren’t other viewpoints than yours…
I do not live in the USA. Housing is a human right and should be free everywhere. It should not be a market. No one should have to pay anything for housing. You have been fed a lifetime of propaganda to make you believe this is fair. It is not. It is one of the major things that contributes to lifelong stress and shortens lifespans. It is one of the major things that keeps people in poverty, having to pay half their income in rent that they never get back.
You know what’s worse than “becoming a slave to [your] house”? Having to work as to not become homeless.
It intrigues me now, how you would “fix” this and make it so that people don’t have to work to have housing?
I mean as I said in a different comment, we already have social housing in my country.
We have universal healthcare, we have a bunch of social programs for people in need and we have automatic unemployment paid from social insurance. People on disability don’t work, people’s pension is covered by the state.
What measures should we add to make it so you don’t have to work for your home?
I mean I am all for banning private residences being owned by companies, that is something we need to address and if the election goes my preferred parties way, it will be fixed in the next cycle.
However all these things are being paid for, concrete doesn’t pour itself, steel doesn’t manufacture itself, building don’t build themselves, so how do you propose we make it so that we don’t have to pay for our homes?
If I an able bodied person refuse to work I will lose my home and become homeless is that so unfair?
First things first: there are already a bunch of people who don’t have to work for their housing. A big part of those may have to work for an income so that they can pay for upkeep. But get rich enough and that can get payed by dividends. Or they’re landlords who get enough income from rent. Those rich people don’t have to work at all for their housing.
That’s cool for the people who get it. But I’d be surprised if your home country has no homeless people and vacant housing at the same time.
Do those people on social programs actually have a comfortable life, though? Or is it rather “too little to live, too much to die”? I’m quite sure that landlords still make a lot of profit from rent in that country.
Introduce a usufruct model of owning, where the people who live in a home actually own it (either as a family home, or multiple homes owned by a coop). The important bit is that rent-seeking is abolished in housing. Then you might still need to work for upkeep, but that’s a diminishino part of what people need to pay for rent, nowadays.
If your country is capitalist, I highly doubt that they will implement this. Profits are still required by capitalist states.
I said “work as to not go homeless”. You’re bringing “paying” into it. There’s already a lot of place to live. Ideally, I’d see a communist society where this kind of stuff is planned on the basis of needs, rather than being speculated on in markets for profit
Housing is a human right. We already have gigantic amounts of housing that sits empty, new building projects are not the priority.
The government should be in charge of constructing new housing developments to meet the needs of the community. People can also pool resources together to build those things, in the absence of rent and mortgages people would have substantially higher incomes. Over time this would balance out, but would still be doable in the long term.
No one should be homeless. Even if you are able bodied and refuse to work. The amount of people who are able bodied and refuse to work is microscopic. You have been misled by conservative propaganda to believe that welfare recipients are lazy. Welfare recipients are people who for one reason or another are unable to work. This is almost exclusively people with disabilities.
But yes, I think even if you decide to do literally nothing just cause you dont want to, you should still have shelter. Shelter is a human right; housing is a human right. It is a crime against humanity to deny people housing. And if youre that contrarian, to literally be like har har I wanna make a point about how dumb free housing is so ill do literally nothing, you probably have some problems you should sort through in therapy.
What kind of childish ass logic is that? Almost everyone has to work to not become homeless… even if you own 100% of your home and don’t have a mortgage you know you pay property taxes, electricity, water, gas, sewage, trash. those things don’t just magically appear in your house and disappear from them.
dude, people like this don’t think those things exist, because they have never had to pay for them.
they also don’t understand what a payroll tax is. because if they don’t pay it, it must not exist and is just some made up thing!
That’s true. Let’s fix that.
And still: Do you pay 30 to 50% of your income in your own home for that?
How to ‘fix’ that? Someone has to do the work to build and maintain housing? Should they do it for free?
You could get rid of housing being a means for landlords to profit from and hold housing in a usufruct property relation, and/or in common. Building and maintaining housing can be managed by the community (or be payed for by the community).
Between the mortgages and everything? Yeah I do.
Go ahead
I’m not lol. .world is basically Reddit 2.0, warts and capitalists included 😆
You Tankies live outside of reality.
Apparently not liking capitalism lumps you in with the tankies.
Do you even know what tankie means?
I also make up things about people.
I heard about your coma and recent miraculous recovery after being kicked in the head while fucking a sheep. My sympathy goes out to your family and I wish ewe well.
I’m an outspoken anarchist but go off king
Oh
Yeah, anarchists don’t like capitalism and rent-seeking behavior either. See this comment by another user quoting anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread (this is “the Bread Book”, and where “breadtube” gets its name from). (Kropotkin is not the first anarchist to come to the anti-property conclusion, and in fact it has been a staple of anarchist theory since Proudhon.)
Bugger off liberal swine. There’s other boots to be licked, hop to it.
Hey I’m not really worried, my landlord is actually really cool. The place I live in is actually better than the place he lives in. My rent is well well below market rate for what I should be paying. I lived in the same place for the past 11 years and he’s only raised my rent twice for less than $200 total. Not all landlords are bad, not all of them are in it just to get rich. And not all of us would be able to buy a house regardless of paying rent or not. And I’d much rather pay rent to somebody for a nice place to live then be living in a tent by the river.
Damn, you’re right. It’s like how I’m not worried about wealth inequality because I lucked out and have a steady 60k a year job with a nice employer. Not all employers are bad.
Or how I don’t give a shit about abortion because I made the stone-cold choice to not be a woman.
When things aren’t affecting me they don’t matter so why are people making a big deal about it?
Think the point being it’s nuanced, there are valid rental scenarios. So when someone sees renting shouldn’t be a thing at all, they can be understandable put off, exactly the same way you are put off by someone saying they actually have a good renting scenario.
Renting should be an option, but housing stock shouldn’t be slurped up by big firm either. There needs to be reasonable path to ownership as well as choices to rent. Depending on the area, the balance is of off one way or the other.
Going from a safe place to live, to a steady income, to abortion. Dude you’re an idiot. Fuck off out of this conversation. What are you, 13? Get real dumbass.
Their point went over your head because you keep your eyes cast downward
Or their anger at what their life is blinded them.
“I didn’t get their point”
“I did”
“Well maybe they’re just angry!”
Nope, gotta kill your landlord and then get in a shootout with the cops when they come to
hisyour house, you heard the tankies. Time to die for their utopia soldier!we don’t have this fundamentalist religious idea that rent is usury
more conformation of the religious nature of the commies
Being a worthless parasite that doesn’t have to produce effort in life sure does make people fucking stupid doesn’t it?
Felt confident enough in yourself that you didn’t bother looking up the word, did ya?
Who’s the worthless parasite? The person who feels they shouldn’t have to work and pay for their shelter?
Yes that’s absolutely correct. You are a parasite because you expect other people to work so you can have money you didn’t earn. That is a literal description of the financial relationship.
how do you know you aren’t the parasite?
My initial reaction was the same, to call OP a baby, etc. The problem isn’t rent. It’s landlord leeches.
I have an apartment in one country but moved to a different country, where I’m renting myself. I had two choices - either rent my first apartment to someone, or sell it. If I sold it, it would go not to a family in need, but to a BnB company or an “investor” (that’s the reality in my home country).
Instead I’m renting it to a family of Ukrainian refugees. They basically pay off my mortgage so that I’m not actively losing money on the whole thing.
They also pay rent to the housing association. This money goes to things like trash removal, hot/cold water, taking care of the green areas in the neighbourhood, cleaning the staircases, etc., etc.
Is this so bad and horrible?
Holy fuck, my sides. How can you be this BLIND to reality? You fucking said yourself that you have A FAMILY OF WAR REFUGEES PAYING OFF YOUR MORTGAGE. In 30 years time, you’ll own a house and those refugees will own what exactly?
For reference, when the war broke out I was a tenant in Germany. You know what I did? I HOUSED a Ukrainian refugee in MY OWN DAMN HOME for NO COST, because I’m not a piece of shit
Yes.
You are actively exploiting refugees.
You are no different than the BnB or the investors. You are on the supply side of the problem. Rent is, indeed, the problem.
You could offer to sell your property to those tenants. You could act as a private lender, allowing them to pay you instead of a commercial bank. You could offer them a “land contract”, which is a rent-to-own arrangement. If they choose to leave your property in the next three years, it was no different than a rental. If they choose to stay beyond three years, it automatically converts to a private mortgage, and they begin earning equity.
Leaving it vacant and just paying the mortgage yourself, you are gaining equity in exchange for your money. You are not losing anything. Renting, you are gaining that equity without paying for it.
The only way renting isn’t a problem is if the rent is far less than a mortgage payment on the same property.
indeed. i frequently see people confusing cash flow and equity in these conversations. landlords claim if they are cash flow negative they’re ‘losing’ money, completely ignoring the equity they’re gaining.
What about cases where the move is only temporary? Should people sell every time and hope there is a place to live when they return?
In the private lender case, do you see that as different from someone who starts their own company and manages the property themselves while the renter pays them directly?
The earning equity piece isn’t necessarily incorrect, what the owner is losing is potentially the opportunity to move at all. This assumes they can afford a mortgage + whatever it costs to live somewhere else.
In their initial phase, land contracts are, effectively, a rental agreement, including for short-term. (With one difference: the payment is fixed for the life of the agreement; it doesn’t increase year over year) When “temporary” turns into “long term”, (as it so often does) a land contract already has you covered, by locking rent through the initial phase, then gaining you equity through the final phase.
Vastly. One includes conveyance of equity; the other does not.
The landlord/property manager retains 100% equity throughout the life of the rental agreement. The private lender retains only the value of the loan. With a land contract, the seller/lender retains 100% of the equity for a couple years, before the agreement automatically converts to a private mortgage.
Completely false. Absolute worse case scenario, they abandon their equity and return title to the lender/seller. Terminating the loan/purchase agreement in this absolute worse case scenario is functionally identical to renting. At its best, renting gives you this outcome, and creates new, worst-case possibilities: where the landlord absconds with security deposits and charges additional fees.
I also wondered about doing that when I ever get rich. Like buy houses in a coveted neighborhood, rent it out to low and middle income people at social housing rates and then convert the lease to a mortgage after a few years and sell the home below market value to the tenants. But how do you prevent them from selling it to an investor above market rates for profit within a few years. Like sure they have equity now but the home is also lost to an investor who will rent it out at a premium to an expat or tourist.
Many options available. At the “ownership” level, you can establish deed restrictions and covenants requiring owner-occupancy. At the local level, you can establish zoning requirements. At the tax assessment level, you can enact punitively-high tax rates that are exempted for owner-occupants. If anyone tries renting these properties, they will face the full tax rate; these properties can only be feasibly owned by people who will occupy them.
I actually know a landlord who owns a farm and rents it out, and does so precisely for the reasons you state. They don’t want the land to go to some soulless big company
They charge a pittance in rent, enough to cover insurance and taxes. The farmer would pay about the same if they owned the property.
They got contacted by a company wanting to build a datacenter, and got to say “hell no”.
This is mental that we sell arable land to build expensive, low quality condos or big buildings like a data center.
Yes, absolutely. Easy to turn viable farmland to bullshit data center, almost impossible to do the former. The datacenter boom causes us to act against our collective interests.
I’ll give you another scenario.
A house gets inherited. The person receiving the house has a child who wants to live there, but the child is about 5 years away from moving out. So they want to rent the house out rather than trying to leave it unoccupied. The tenant knows up front it is a limited time arrangement.
Note this is an unusual circumstance, but there are folks who find themselves in need of temporary housing and people who have an upcoming need, but not current need for a property.
In his case, if he had said he was renting for an overseas assignment but was going to move back, then I would have thought it was a slam dunk. I suppose if the refugees had explicitly stated they wanted to move back home in a couple of years, similar situation.
That is even less helpful than renting it out.
Let’s start from the beginning: a mortgage is a neutral agreement. Effectively, the lender conveys equity to the borrower over time. Equity is the right to permanent, unlimited use of the property.
A rental agreement conveys no equity. What the tenant gains is a short-term, limited use of the property. “Temporary” is considerably less valuable than “permanent”, so a fair value for “rent” is considerably less than a fair value for a mortgage.
Rent prices don’t reflect this. Even after including a maintenance expense, (that the owner would have to pay regardless of who is living in the property), fair rent for that temporary privilege is still far less than the mortgage for the permanent right.
And yet, the market has been manipulated to the point that rent prices are well above mortgages. In a fair market, people seeking housing would generally choose the better option. If a mortgage is cheaper than rent, they would choose a mortgage. The laws of supply and demand would react to this choice by increasing the price of a mortgage, and decreasing the price of rent.
Since this isn’t happening, we know that the market is being manipulated, and tenants are being exploited. “Fair rent” does not exist: tenants are paying far more than the cost of a mortgage, yet they are not receiving the value of a mortgage.
You would have a point if “fair rent” existed, but it does not. In the absence of “fair rent”, we are left with the perverse position that a vacant home does, indeed, cause less harm than a rented home.
The full context of that scenario includes the manipulated market. The scenario you present is only reasonable in a fair market.
Same thing: the scenario for renting is only reasonable in a fair market, but the underlying context of your scenario is the manipulated market where the value of a temporary privilege is modeled greater than the value of a permanent right.
The economists’ answer is that renting exists for the people in this situation. You may be moving to another country for a year or two. Are you going to buy a new house every time you move? Renting gives flexibility in that regard.
Likewise for refugees, putting them up in a rental is a more efficient solution than building new housing for each family.
That said, the model provides an inherently exploitative market and needs some kind of overlay to function efficiently, which in most US cities it doesn’t at all.
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While you are undoubtedly better than what I’m about to say… I still wouldn’t say you’re a good guy in this instance.
But, the real massive issue I see here is that big companies and rich douchebags use owning land and housing solely for profit. THAT should be illegal.
Renting out property between individuals should pe perfectly legal though, as long as some now-inexistent laws are followed, like not being able to hoard housing for rent money.
Renting solely for profit should be illegal.
Renting just to be able to keep a property that you may need in the future should be legal.
Vampires are legal they just can’t bottle it
“But if I wasn’t a parasite someone else would be so that makes me good”
Said the nazi taking over the Jewish bakery. Said the zionist taking the Palestinian home.
How generous of you!