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Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
Krafty Kactus @sopuli.xyz

To everyone who hates the concepts of landlords and rent, what counts as being a landlord?

Does having an AirBNB setup make someone deserving of the guillotine or does that only apply to owners of multiple houses? What about apartments?

Please explain your reasoning as well.

298 comments

  • A landlord is a landlord, regardless of the particular lease terms. In general, they aren't automatically good or bad. They're just people acting as rationally as anyone else with respect to their material conditions and interests.

    If you're asking why they get a bad reputation, I think that's also pretty straight forward:

    • Almost everyone has had or knows someone who's had to deal with an especially neglectful or difficult landlord;
    • landlords have been engaging in notoriously greedy and abusive behavior since the industrial revolution;
    • landlords aren't doing themselves any favors they way some of them publicly brag and whine about being landlords;
    • and there's just something that isn't right about owning someone else's home and probably everyone has some faint sense of that.

    Personally, I don't think that landlords should be guillotined, but housing policy that's accommodating to them is bad policy. We should be strengthening tenant protections and building new housing to the point that private landlords become practically obsolete.

  • Billionaires have a completely different level of capital as the doctors, lawyers, engineers, and business owners who have $1-5 million in assets. I’m not going to fault somebody for being successful and using their money to buy capital to make more money. Billionaires are the only ones who should be named, shamed, and blamed. It’s an entirely different level of greed and exploitation, because it’s totally needless. It’s like you already won capitalism, but that’s not enough, no, you have to rig it so that nobody else ever wins like you did. Those people are so rich they can employ bot farms to throw fuel on the social media fires that keep us all hating each other instead of them. It’s pretty simple. Don’t trust anybody with a private jet.

  • Landlords are landlords. Rather than simply guillotine landlords forever, it's better to have publicly owned housing. It's not really a gray area, the system itself is fucked and should be abolished, but exists precisely because publicly owned housing isn't widespread yet.

    • Doesn't having publicly owned housing make the state a landlord effectively?

      • It can, but not necessarily. The issue with landlords is rent-seeking, if the state funnels all of the income towards maintenance, building new housing, or even lowering housing prices without taking profit, they have removed all issues with landlords.

        As a landlord, their goal is to make profit. As a state, their goal is to provide a service.

  • There's way too much money in the hands of the wealthy. What are they going to do with it all? Invest in the stock market. All the good investments are overvalued. All the bad investments are have been saturated too. What else can they do with all of that money. They gotta put it somewhere.

    So they put excess money into real estate. So the price of real estate has been driven up so much that it's over valued like any other avenue of investment.

    The stock prices being overvalued isn't good but isn't something that'll affect regular people. But their real estate investments being over valued? Well that real estate isn't an investment to someone that simply needs a place to live.

    And that's the problem, the price of housing is priced above what the people what people outside of the investor class can afford. And the investor class wants a return on their investment in the overprices real estate (that they collectively drove the price up on) so charge a lot for rent. Of course maybe if people moved to another area that would put downward pressure on the rent prices. But AirBnB is there so if this happens they can still get income from that when no one can afford the insanely high rent.

    So the overarching problem is the wealthy have wayyy too much money and are dumping their excess wealth into real estate and pricing people that just need a place to live out of the market. AirBnB isn't the cause of the problem but it makes the problem worse.

    One of many problems caused by the unwillingness to simply tax the wealthy.

  • The answer to this question is hugely region dependent, so you’ll probably get vastly different answers that are all still valid.

    Where I’m from, we’re in a housing crisis. There aren’t enough homes for everyone, property prices have ballooned well beyond reasonable year over year, to the point that anyone under 40 will not be able to buy their own home in their lifetime unless they have rich parents or work very very high paying jobs.

    In this climate, someone buying a house so they can charge an insanely high rent (because rents and property values are closely linked) is… I’m not sure what the word is, but they’re clearly more driven by personal gain than any sort of common good.

    Airbnb is the same issue when you have such limited housing supply. Someone else isn’t in a house because that house is off the market for people to live. There’s a reason why Airbnb is tightly restricted and banned in many cities.

    Now while your stereotype landlord might be a lazy, parasitic ghoul, the fact of the matter is people need to rent just as much as they need to own. If someone owns another piece of property and they rent it out and maintain it, it’s kind of difficult to complain too much about it.

    I know people who have had fantastic landlords that kept up the properties, did proactive upgrades, and seldom raised rents. I also know people whose landlords broke the law many times by refusing to deal with maintenance problems on a timely basis, increased rent by the maximum legally allowed amount every year, and were quick to evict the tenants because “family was moving into the home” (they didn’t). You get a great mix of shitheads and good people in any market.

    The people arguing at either far end of the spectrum can easily be ignored. At best they have an axe to grind and use every opportunity to engage in hyperbole to support their naive position. At worst they’re trying to manipulate public opinion for their own purposes. At any rate, the more extreme and absolute an opinion you read online, the more easily you should be willing to reject and ignore it.

    Ok, but all that nuance aside, if someone comes up to me and asks “Landlords. Guillotine or no?” then I’m going to say “guillotine!” because there wasn’t any room left for a conversation.

  • Deserving of the guillotine? What? This question doesn't feel sincere, and I wonder whether you're really going to be trying to understand other people's reasoning. I'll bite though. We have enough homes for everyone to have their own home, but a very large number of people rent or are homeless. Big corporations buy up all the property and convert it to rentals so even those who can afford to buy property have a very hard time finding anything, and what's available has jacked up prices. We're talking people like blackrock. THOSE people can burn in hell, those people are taking advantage of every single person who rents from them. It's a scale, you know. Blackrock is evil - my grandpa who rents out his old house is not, even if I disagree with the fact that he's renting at all. Charging someone enough to pay the mortgage and give you a paycheck is well... I mean it's demanding more money than what the property is worth from someone. They'd be better off without you there as a middle-man. At best you're taking advantage of a small number of people, at worst you're literally blackrock. There's no reason a single person should not have their own home, because we already have enough homes to go around.

    • even if I disagree with the fact that he’s renting at all

      Why do you disagree with this, out of curiosity? Having rental properties available is necessary. Not everyone can buy a home (not even taking the monetary reasons into account - think students, people on temporary work assignments, people who are in the country on a non-permanent visa, etc. - there's plenty of reasons why someone might want to rent even if they had the money to buy.) If your grandpa is taking care of the property and his tenants, and is charging a reasonable price, what's the problem?

      Charging someone enough to pay the mortgage and give you a paycheck is well… I mean it’s demanding more money than what the property is worth from someone.

      If the owner is on top of maintenance and home improvements and all that, and the difference between the mortgage and what they're charging isn't extreme, I'd argue that this isn't necessarily true. If the mortgage is $1000/mo and someone is charging $3000/mo in rent, that's excessive, but charging $1300 rent on a property with a $1000/mo mortgage isn't unreasonable. Again, see the above reasons for why someone might choose to rent who had the means to buy.

      It's OK to expect a return on an investment, even if that investment is property. It's not OK to take advantage of artificial scarcity to bleed people dry who have no other option, and to cut every corner that it's possible to cut while doing so. That's the distinction.

      • I take issue with the entire concept of renting, from the very core. A landlord is a middle-man between the person living in a building, and ownership of said building. The landlord having to to the maintenance doesn't make living in a rental a better experience, it just means more dealing with a middle man any time you need something fixed. It would be pretty nice if I could just call a plumber when my toilet has issues instead of hoping that the leasing office actually sends a repair-man this time. It's not fun having to pick up mail at the post office for ten months because the leasing office and the post office are arguing back and forth over who's responsible for fixing the apartment mailboxes after they were vandalized. Rentals will charge you money every month for a pool you don't want or use even though it's closed 9 months of the year. All renting has ever meant for me, has been a complete lack of control of what I'm allowed to do in my living space, and a constant fear of eviction should something go wrong, and landlords that do everything they can to never repair anything, or maintain the property at all. But onto the individuals that rent out a house or two, they still aren't adding value to living in a rental. All they do is sit in the middle and collect that extra cash on top. It's not that they're not doing any work at all, but being a landlord is not a job, and it's not doing the people living in that space any favors. People can't afford to buy because companies like blackrock are buying up all the property to make rentals, and upcharging all of the property. I'm not saying, either, that there shouldn't be options for temporary living, but our current rental model is so very clearly not it. Do you have any idea how much it costs to rent month buy month? My 700 square foot apartment is over $3,000 on that plan.

      • but charging $1300 rent on a property with a $1000/mo mortgage isn't unreasonable.

        No it's just stupid. With those $300 dollars difference a landlord would need to cover insurance, property taxes, regular maintenance like replacing roof every 30 years, unplanned maintenance like a pipe bursts or aircon breaks. On top of that someone needs to act as the property manager/handyman so either the landlord takes that phone call on a Friday evening for the pipe that is gushing, or is paying someone to do that.

        Tenant moves somewhere else and the place is empty for a couple of weeks, no income.

        Oh and when you are done with all the above, depending on the country, those $300 count as income and get taxed (rightly so) so it's not really $300.

        BTW I don't like landlords, I am not one. I rented most of my life until recently as a choice, been able to move to a new city or country at the drop of a hat. Haven't had to do maintenance and I'm only learning that now. Of course I paid for someone else doing all those things, and taking all the risks for me.

        But lemmy users seem to have a thing for over simplifying things and decide what is and isn't excessive based on somethig that comes out of their ass. $300 dollars in this case.

    • Deserving of the guillotine?

      It only took me about 15 seconds to find this comment so yeah:

  • It applies to anyone who has a property they only use to generate income via rent

    Hotels are a gray area as they provide some amount of service

  • Does having an airbnb bikeshed get the guillotine?

298 comments