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.
If you own housing that you rent out more than you use it yourself, you’re a landlord.
If you rent out your house or apartment while you’re on vacation, I wouldn’t call you a landlord. But if you have a house or apartment that you only ever offer on AirBNB without ever using it yourself, you’re a landlord.
Btw, I don’t agree that being a landlord makes you deserving of a guillotine, but I do agree that we should limit the ownership of housing to natural persons, with a limit on how much space a person can own.
I appreciate a sane viewpoint.
Buy a second house, fix it up, then sell it OR rent it to help cover the debt and maybe generate enough income to retire early. It’s one of not very many ways regular(ish) people can reliably climb the financial ladder or not work until 75.
Nobody needs 40 properties, but I don’t see anything wrong with one or two. I’m not a landlord myself, but I’ve rented and owned and can see the appeal of a second property.
I can say that having only one rental… is not enough. We have started the process to sell our rental as we were only making < $1500/year on it. It just wasn’t worth it. But if we had had around 3-ish rentals then maybe it would’ve been better as they could better support one another. We charged a lot for rent, but, after taxes, insurance, near constant repairs, and now the threat of not being able to secure insurance (due to companies leaving the higher risk area that we were in,) it just isn’t worth the hassle for a single home rental unless it is next door to your own house, and you are doing the repairs.
My take is that 1-2 houses still isn’t enough. Especially if you’re trying to replace active income generation (jobs and such). Nobody needs 40 units (that would be it’s own property mgmt. job), but one or two is most certainly not enough. I could probably get by with the income of ~10 if a property mgmt company was supporting me.
The problem isn’t that people are trying to make money off of rentals, it’s that people are trying to make too much money off rentals by raising monthly rates to rent-trap level, and low-to-non-existent repair-rates.
Yeah I kinda figured that was the case but I didn’t want to sound like some rich prick that people here in the comments would like to eat lol. As I understand it, you’re just better off taking the interest off your bank accounts vs trying to swing a single rental. Flipping can work but it requires an amount of skill that not everybody has, especially if you have to hire contractors to do the work for you. But yeah if I were to do it, I would probably run straight to a management company.
It seems to me that the average “slightly above average Joe” could afford a second property; my parents are not wealthy (they are semi retired and generally gross less than 20k/year, but own all their stuff outright) but found a house to rent to my brother and I while we were in college and it was a huge boon for everyone involved. My family income is significantly higher, but we don’t have a pool full of money to swim in. From the outside it looks like real estate is an attractive, stable way to grow an investment as opposed to stock market dabbles.
As an aside, and this is all an incredibly “first world” kind of a situation, but I’m not sure how you address the bitterness of some circles (like maybe this thread?) toward the layer of people who got ROI on hard work: I’d also be a proponent of limiting legacy wealth and eating billionaires. I was in college for 15 years at a state school and worked 10 at a university before I made big boy money and got stuff on my own. Not everybody who has some extra money got it by lucky birth or by exploiting the masses and I’ve still got loans to pay, why not own some houses for people like past-me to rent and make a little extra for the effort? I guess it’s easier to see it this way from this side of the problem.
As an aside, and this is all an incredibly “first world” kind of a situation, but I’m not sure how you address the bitterness of some circles (like maybe this thread?) toward the layer of people who got ROI on hard work: I’d also be a proponent of limiting legacy wealth and eating billionaires. I was in college for 15 years at a state school and worked 10 at a university before I made big boy money and got stuff on my own. Not everybody who has some extra money got it by lucky birth or by exploiting the masses and I’ve still got loans to pay, why not own some houses for people like past-me to rent and make a little extra for the effort? I guess it’s easier to see it this way from this side of the problem.
I usually handle this by reminding people-at-large that landlords are not the problem. “Rent-seeking” landlords are the problem. I’d imagine that given the ARR-mindset of some of the larger players also contributes to the negative stereotype. Where the goal is not “Providing a Service”, but instead it is “Building Capital”, that’s where I start to lose interest.
I too, feel that if your annual income is greater than 8 zeros, then you should get a plaque from the IRS saying “Congratulations, you’ve beaten capitalism this year, now go outside and touch grass.” and everything above that is used to actually better society. This is what progressive taxes that were reduced 40 years ago were intended to do (Source: Effects of Reaganomics).
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Landlords aren’t inherently evil - it’s a useful job… a good landlord will make sure that units are well maintained and appliances are functional. A good landlord is also a property manager.
Landlords get a bad name because passive income is a bullshit lie. If you’re earning “passive income” you’re stealing someone else’s income - there’s no such thing as money for nothing, if you’re getting money and doing nothing it’s because someone else isn’t being properly paid for their work.
How many landlords actually do it as a job? And how many just collect the checks and hire bottom of the barrel contractors for anything that involves work? In my experience it’s been the latter.
I think most of the older landlords were like this but their renters are very reluctant to move. The landlords that suck have high turn overs - and recently there’s been a wave of idiots buying apartments to park their money and get “free” income - so the environment is actively getting worse.
I have never had a single landlord where this isn’t the case, except in instances where they are too cheap to even hire professionals to do things that they don’t have the skill to do, and they get their dipshit son to “fix” the sink that fell clean out of the kitchen counter with a lumpy bead of clear silicone and a 1’ piece of 2x4 wedged underneath.
Another thing that pisses me off is that I’m literally paying >100% of the cost of the property over time, yet they retain full ownership. It’s an investment with essentially zero risk, if you have a tenant that isn’t a racoon.
Not sure I have a good solution for that issue, honestly, but the idea of it irks me.
My overall position boils down to: Housing should never generate profit. A landlord can take pay for the work they do, and put money aside for maintenance, but there should never be a profit made on rent.
This was less of an issue before as we could save to buy property. Now we must inherit
So basically, a good landlord doesn’t make any actually passive income? That makes sense. I just see a lot of people on here saying things like “we should kill all landlords” and they just sound ridiculous to me.
People speak in absolutes as it gets the point across. Also socialism is pretty hot here I myself am a democratic socialist and I have said “kill landlords/rich/owner class” but in reality when the socialist party get in the owner class wont be murder but forced to pay more taxes, slowly forgo they’re business and property.
So who’s to say that’s how it’s going to go?
Because fundamentally there’s nothing wrong with landlords as people. They live in an unfair system and they’re doing what’s best for them. That’s true of the vast majority of people. Change the system, create one where doing pro social things are rewarded, and landlords will become beneficial actors. Honestly, this is true for the vast majority of people. Very few people really need “the wall”
it may not but as a guess, society tends to move inline with bettering the human condition capitalism was better than mercantilism but still leaves many to suffer, so socialism is the natural direction unless something comes up that we haven’t thought of yet.
Lemmy is filled with a lot of extremists. Nuanced thinking is in short supply here.
The internet is filled with a lot of extremists. Nuanced thinking is in short supply here.
And if you have any nuanced opinion on anything, you get called an enlightened centrist who only wants half a genocide.
Lemmy is particularly bad when it comes to topic like landlords
The fact that this comment and the replies to it are all evenly upvoted and downvoted definitely helps your point lol
I do live in amazement that my original comment about landlords not being inherently evil wasn’t downvoted into the ground.
To emphasize this, I’ve had both types of landlords:
One apartment I moved into was available because it was the owners residence, but he had to move away for two years because of his job. He wanted to move back afterwards, so he put some money into refurbishing an already decent place, and rented it out to me at a price that mostly just covered mortgage, maintenance, and wear & tear. Best landlord I ever had.
Afterwards I spent two years in a typical predatory unit that was a normal house, but had been, as cheaply as possible, been renovated/converted into a place meant for packing as many renters as possible. It was expensive, there was always something wrong, it took ages to get anything fixed, and it was obvious that the owner who lived elsewhere only used the peiperty as passive income. The only reason why I stayed that long was economic desperation, and a housing market that was awful.
So basically, a good landlord doesn’t make any actually passive income? That makes sense. I just see a lot of people on here saying things like “we should kill all landlords” and they just sound ridiculous to me.
There’s a lot of teenage edgelords on here. Or at least people with that level of maturity.
People have some myth of passive income. I sold all my rentals because they were taking to much time. I never turned a profit but it was good for my taxes. If you want to slum lord you can turn a profit but even I dislike those people.
Market rent is basically set by current home costs. Any long term owners who have 15+ year old tax base essentially get to pocket the difference due to lower property taxes. Any newer buyer who is renting can only cover costs.
That is incorrect. I can tell you’ve never rented to people rent is set by the market. Supply and demand.
It doesn’t matter if the house cost 800k. If the market rent is 2k a month. That’s all you’ll get.
In the area where I had my rentals, the houses are 500k but the rent is only 1k. Now I bought in 2008 and only paid 120k. So only lost some money but I made it up in tax benefits.
People really don’t understand the economics of landlords. They think it’s all money in the pocket. It’s not. It’s a very thin profit margin with most the benefit being taxes.
I can tell at a glance you’re really bad at math. 🤦♂️
I am very good at math but thanks for the worthless reply.
Maybe you should just give up
Ah the creepy stalker again. Creepy.
If you are owning houses just to use them as AIRBNBs, yes. Profiting off of artificial scarcity and already having money is bad. Being wealthy doesn’t mean you deserve to be more wealthy.
Landlords aren’t profiting off of scarcity. They’re profiting off of having the means to do something that renters won’t: Buy a house with a 30yr mortgage, and leverage that money for something useful.
You too can buy a house. But everyone who shits on landlords, always spits out excuses why buying a house isn’t “feasible” or would “lock them down too much”, etc etc.
If you can buy 30k worth of tractor equipment, you can run it and make the money back you spent on it. That’s all landlords are doing - they’re buying when you won’t (not can’t…won’t) and then selling it back to you in trade for your “economic freedom” to move every 1-2 years and bitch about it.
Then we have the whole “fuckcars” movement, who wants everyone crammed into a shared-wall sardine can and nobody to own a house of their own ever; for the sake of population density so they can bike everywhere.
I’m lucky enough to have been financially able to buy a home. I had help making the down payment, but we’ve now got a 30 year mortgage. My monthly payments are less than what I was paying for rent, less than the average rent in the city by almost a third. I got this place with two above-average incomes, and had the good fortune to get it during the COVID housing and interest rate dip, and I still needed extra help.
If someone is stuck with renting, they’re likely paying more than they would for a mortgage. They can’t save up the money because they’re already lagging behind, and the housing market isn’t coming down in price, and wages absolutely aren’t keeping pace. No one is saying a house would “lock them down,” they’re pointing out they can never afford it because they can’t even come up with the money to show the bank they can save because they’re already paying above the potential mortgage payments every month.
But you’re saying they won’t, not can’t, so what should they do to come up with the money? Start selling kidneys? 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and that same link shows 71% have less than $2000 in their savings. So where exactly are people supposed to shit out your hypothetical $30,000?
Fellow home-owner, not a landlord. Not in the US but I think things are comparable.
Your mortgage repayments are less than what you were paying in rent, okay. However, do you feel that is a reasonable comparison?
Do you pay some sort of insurance? Property and or council taxes, rubbish removal, water and other things that you probably didn’t even know existed before becoming a home owner?
Do you know that your roof has and average life span of 30 years? Unless yours is new, you’ll need to start thinking about it at some point, and it can be pricey, together with all the rest of planned and unplanned maintenance that comes with owning a place.
Not really defending everything the person you are replying to said, but I think this topic too often gets simplified to monthly rent vs monthly mortgage repayments.
Rent has to account for all of that too, plus labour costs and profit for the landlord. Unless the landlord is charitably handing out free money, there’s no world in which owning is more expensive than renting on average for an equivalent property.
Even with the added costs of owning the home and upkeep, it’s only equivalent or just above rent, and that’s with the condo association fees and insurance. Even while renting I was stuck paying for utilities. And I’m highly aware that the roof needs replacing, given that we’ve got to replace ours within 5 years.
But if your point is “owning a home is more expensive than renting when you factor in all extra costs,” I want to again point out that most people are barely able to stay afloat. His point was that anyone can buy a house. Mine is that the money he thinks grows on trees literally does not exist for the majority of people.
Fair enough, my point was more that people that just assume that mortgage payment is X and is less than rent therefore I’m am being robbed aren’t looking at the whole picture, or aren’t being honest.
Except the mortgage payment ends after 30 years, and what you pay into the house is yours afterwards. Sure, the insurance and other taxes continue - but once the house is paid off, it’s done. I paid my mortgage off in 5 years by dumping every last dime I had into it and living off of nothing but scraps.
You can show the bank that you’ve never missed a rent payment, yet still be unable to get a mortgage whose monthly payments are less than rent because you don’t have enough saved for a downpayment. That’s a “can’t”, not a “won’t”.
We had a solution to this problem and the banks went and fucked it up and with it our economy.
Then we have the whole “fuckcars” movement, who wants everyone crammed into a shared-wall sardine can and nobody to own a house of their own ever; for the sake of population density so they can bike everywhere.
Lol what?
I’m pro fuckcars despite the fact that I know they have a place.
It has nothing at all to do with not owning a house or a home. As well, not everyone has to live in the city. But cities should be made with people in mind and the infrastructure should be there for people to get around cities without the need for everyone to own a car.
Besides. Less car-centric design also means less traffic!
Not everyone can buy a house, because of greedy people using housing as a driver of profits. There are a growing mass of people out there that will simply never make enough to own a property where they live. For some people, renting is not a choice - its the only option.
Also: you are completely and utterly missing the entire point of c/fuckcars.
Living in a house share 4 years ago giving my god awful landlord over half my paycheck from full time employment as a cafe manager meant I was unable to save.
Your out of touch
always spits out excuses why buying a house isn’t “feasible” or would “lock them down too much”, etc etc.
Like not being a POS?
What miserable view of the world you have…
Do you own a residential home for a purpose other than you or your family living in it? You’re a landlord.
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.
and there’s just something that isn’t right about owning someone else’s home and probably everyone has some faint sense of that.
That’s kind of an interesting point. To homo economicus a house would be no different than a cargo trailer or a storefront, and could be rented just the same. To homo sapiens there might be some ancient territoriality at play, and you see things like the castle doctrine where trespassing is equated to a physical assault.
If you are engaging with housing as an investment vehicle, you are part of the reason why there is a global housing crisis.
Housing is a human right and should be legislated as such.
I own a flat that I rent out to people who make similar amounts of money as I do.
That allows me to take a lower paid job that allows me to do more open source work.
I agree with your second paragraph.
This is lemmy. You are no better than musk or bezos for doing that you filthy capitalist.
You should do you open source work hungry, naked and in the cold while someone is whipping you. Like all the virtuous 14yo tankies that are downvoting you certainly do.
/s in case it’s needed
And coal plants provide power and heat to millions of people, that doesn’t make it right. The ends do not justify the means.
I’m renting to people who rent as a convenience, not because they can’t afford to buy a flat. I offered them decreased rent during COVID and they declined.
No no no you don’t understand you are just stealing from them even if they don’t want to buy. Everyone must have a house, there should be no landlords nor renters. /s
You are forming your opinion on a statistical anomaly worth of experiences. The reality is rent is priced fixed by very few algorithms - all of which by their nature drive the prices higher every year.
You are renting to people who choose to rent, the vast majority don’t get to choose. And even if they choose to rent, that’s because owning is too expensive in their eyes (money or time or paperwork or otherwise) - it does not mean they wouldn’t want to own if the cost was lower.
I can’t imagine anyone declining reduced costs unless phrased poorly or out of guilt.
I think the situation is different in different countries.
The assumption in your last last paragraph is very likely incorrect, I asked them outright if they wanted one and they said no, they’re software developers and warming pretty well in their cushy home office, thank you very much.
I think the scenario I described applies to most Western countries.
Congrats on having rich renters then. If they’re wealthy enough to not take reduced rent then they are likely not your countries average renter.
They’re probably not. They might be pretty average for the region though.
The electronic device you used for typing all that crap? Probably slave labour. That’s before looking at the power you wasted to do so, and it’s origin. Virtue signalling much?
Haha I would really like the thought process of the person who downvoted you. Maybe “since I’m forced to live in an immoral system, I can’t live a perfectly moral life and having a phone is OK. But going one iota beyond what I do is immoral”
IDK. I wouldn’t have posted if I wouldn’t have wanted to read people disagreeing with my assessment of the morality of what I do. But I was probably wrong to hope for a more nuanced criticism that actually tries to engage with my arguments instead of just knee-jerk downvoting.
There are a few hot topics on lemmy and this is one of them. I think you did a good thing, I found that interesting and that’s what I came to this thread for.
I dislike speculation on housing but appreciate there are many reasons why someone becomes a land lord, and I have been the person renting from someone like you when I could afford to buy. I just knew I wasn’t going to stay in that city, I was getting a good service and am happy for what I paid for. And for how carefree that period of my life was.
Tankies are not known for appreciating nuances tho.
I think it’s hard to morally judge if it’s good or not. I don’t know who would have bought it if not for me: some faceless rent extraction company who keep increasing rent at the maximum legal rate? Or (unlikely in that spot, but possible) a couple who would live there?
As it is now, there’s a couple living there. Software engineers who already said they’ll move on soonish because they think Berlin is cooler. They pay below average rent and the one time something broke, I simply sent a repair person ASAP. Not really people I feel I’m taking advantage of.
I think there can be some middle ground. Obviously speculation is pushing up both rent prices and the cost/availability of houses to buy. There are some interesting options, I like the idea to only allow residential property to be bought by physical persons - regardless of whether that’s for living in it or as an investment it would put a damper on prices sky-rocketing.
Corporations trust funds and so on can still go mad on commercial property. Offices, malls and warehouse are not a necessity and let the market decide, I think that could be a win win. Feasibility of this in various countries would obviously vary but I’m sure something can be done.
I’ve also seen suggestions aroud limiting the number of properties one can buy/own. Interesting but more complicated to enforce and IMO not needed.
So you’re not working and collecting money for it so that you have more free time to yourself that you use for your own personal interests.
You then make sure the people you rent to don’t have that free time, and raise the overall property prices by taking an available unit off the market.
Got it.
Nope, that’s very much not correct lol. I’m working. It’s just that you don’t find jobs that pay super much for open source work.
And the people renting my apartment are DINKs, they have a lot of choice about how much free time they have.
No idea about the market price thing. But I’m going to assume you got that wrong too, since the rest of your comment was baseless speculation.
That’s nice you rationalize it. The damage you’re doing is minimal, so don’t worry about the avalanche snowflake.
I understand you’re working, but you’re not working as much as the people you rent to (at a minimum to make up for the rent). They may have the means and not feel the impact, but that doesn’t change the math.
The market is based on supply and demand. You reduce supply, therefore increase demand. More demand equals higher prices.
Seeing as how you lack the basic understanding of these concepts, yet respond with arrogance, I won’t bother replying anymore.
I am working as much as the people I rent to. I’m just working a job that generates more value for the public and less value for the company than a comparable job that I could get elsewhere. Therefore they pay me less than if I would work exclusively for some company’s bottom line.
Fine, I’ll bite.
I’m one of the privileged who own a home which doubled in value over the last three years. I have enough free cash flow to buy a second or third rental property. I’ve contemplated it, and even though me and my family would be better off because of it, I refuse to.
I have friends who do so, and I’m not running to chop off their heads. People are born into this system and personally benefit from it, so they don’t question it.
The housing system is a wealth cheat code that needs reform. We’re heading towards something similar to the Chinese ghost cities where wealthy individuals use land as a bank due to the volatility of other financial instruments. Look at the occupancy rate of the numerous NYC skyscrapers that all popped up at lightning speed before this whole market was projected to inflate in value. People own these and other “investments” completely empty to hold value. Most are unrented.
It boils down to the personal freedom that wealth affords. You have more freedom to accept less compensation because you own land. You support public infrastructure, which is commendable, but you have that privilege on the backs of others. You’re not alone, and the law promotes this behavior. It’s like you’ve drilled another hole in society’s boat, but you bucket back the water to compensate. The boat is still sinking on the whole as not everyone uses their time generously.
There are other ways to add value to society that provide passive income that don’t have the same negative consequences (that we’ve identified anyway). You’re acting as a rational actor playing by the rules; those rules just happen to be broken.
Thanks for contributing to the record of public code that will benefit society. I just hope we won’t need these harmful wealth loopholes in the future to afford you (or anyone else) that comfort.
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My landlord is actually a community nonprofit group that owns several units in our neighborhood. They do rent for the most part based on income. I forget the exact breakdowns but iirc it’s capped on the upper end at an actually reasonable percentage of your income so you’re not paying most of your paycheck to rent. Then my wife and I are on the low end because we’re on a fixed income. Before we got approved for section 8 we paid their lowest flat rate which is basically just enough to cover property taxes and maintenance which iirc percentage wise was a higher percentage of our income than their normal rate is but it still wasn’t crazy for us.
Then they use the excess to do things like update the units to make them more energy efficient, community organizing, etc. They’ve also bought out a couple of abandoned houses in the area and redeveloped them so people can actually live in them.
I personally don’t have a problem with landlords per se. Not everybody wants to own a home and deal with all of the maintenance and things that go along with it. I don’t even necessarily have a problem with them getting paid to deal those things. What I personally have a problem with is housing being used as
passive incomea free money cheat.Your last paragraph was pretty much where I was a couple years ago. I don’t remember who helped clarify this for me, but housing maintenance is very much a real job and deserves the same respect and compensation as any real job, but it can very easily be disjoint from being a landlord. Making money from owning the housing other people live in is distinct from maintaining that housing, and just because several people do both things doesn’t mean that we should treat them as the same job.
Yeah I feel like that puts it into better words than I was able to.
That sounds exactly like a housing co-op, you’re usually part landlord in that situation as a member of that community (much like electric co-ops and worker owned business co-ops). They are by far the best type of situation for people who don’t want to take on the full responsibility of “owning” the house themselves as it’s spread out between all the members and the “agreement” usually is a 100 year contract. If it’s through the government strictly with subsidies etc I guess it’s more of socialized housing, either way those two don’t fit the description of a profit driven landlord that OP was suggesting above.
The only other form of housing that I think is legitimate in our dystopian future is Rent to Own where all rent is collected into an account which will purchase the house at a contracted set price (maybe add negotiations for remodeling etc but with outside mediators so no one is getting bamboozled). If you don’t want to help someone get into permanent housing, then don’t buy additional properties.
I don’t know if it qualifies as a cooperative. I know they’re a nonprofit and they’ve got a board that we can just join for some fairly cheap dues even for our fixed income. My wife was actually on it for a while before our twins were born.
It’s a really easy definition for me. Do you acquire recurring income from a residential location that you don’t personally live at? You get the French haircut.
Owning a home and having roommates that share the mortgage is fine. Putting your guest bedroom on Airbnb is fine. Owning an apartment building and living in one of the units and actually providing labor to contribute to the running of the apartment building (whether through maintenance or office work), perfectly ok.
With that being said, when it comes time for the guillotine, we’ll start with the corporate landlords to give the “mom and pop” landlords time to come to their senses.
Edit: explaining my reasoning: Passive income is theft. Owning things is not a job. Humans have a right to live by nature of being alive, profiting off of a human right is evil.
I agree with your points but I’m curious what your solution is to single family homes that are being rented out? The obvious one is everyone who wants to buy a place is able to, but not everyone wants to buy yet (younger people, people who want flexibility, people who know they are moving [only in that city for school], etc). Having some corporation own everything is also obviously the worst option, but that only really leaves the government and the mom and pop operations (that is people who own 1 place and buy another to rent it out). Should all single family homes be run as co-ops? Torn down and rental apartments built instead?
Again, I agree that single entities owning multiple rental places is a bad thing, but there doesn’t seem an obvious replacement. So I am genuinely curious as what can be done?
Co-op housing are not all rental apartments. They come as single family dwellings, town houses, apartments, everything in between. It’s about how they’re used and regulated for the communities and individuals sake instead of an investor. You could find an appropriate housing style for all walks of life within co-ops, even those more private and secluded types.
but not everyone wants to buy yet (younger people, people who want flexibility, people who know they are moving [only in that city for school], etc).
People don’t want to buy a house because it’s either unaffordable, unavailable or the process takes too long. If you eliminate those aspects of home ownership, people wouldn’t mind and maybe even prefer owning a home for short periods of time.
Owning a home and having roommates that share the mortgage
does make you a landlord by definition
give the “mom and pop” landlords time to come to their senses.
Ok, I’ll kick the roomate out into the cold, I could use the room for a shop/office anyway I was just helping out a friend, but if I have to choose between him being homeless and me being headless, “sorry homie it’s an easy choice.” He’ll understand.
So curious here:
When I moved to the city I’m in now, I rented an apartment until I could figure out the best neighborhood in which to buy and to find the right house for me.
So it’s ok for me to buy a house and live in it, but it’s NOT ok to rent the apartment. It should have been provided to me, I guess. Is that right?
You didn’t read carefully enough.
Owning an apartment building and living in one of the units and actually providing labor to contribute to the running of the apartment building (whether through maintenance or office work), perfectly ok.
So I have to find a place to rent that has an owner/operator? And hope it’s in a safe location? And hope there’s availability? And that I can afford it? And that it’s close enough to work? And that they offer month-to-month so I can leave when I find the right place?
Seems simple enough.
Is your Airbnb a spare part of your primary home, or a money making scheme that exploits housing somebody else could live in?
Official communist stance: Corporate landlords who spend all their resources into buying more houses to price everyone out of the market. Renting out a single room out of your family house is immoral, but doesn’t hold a candle to the absolute evil of corporate landlords.
Remember: Communists don’t give a shit about individuals; that’s liberalism. They care about systems and dismantling them. It’s those who throw themselves in front of those systems to defend them who end up becoming causalities. There are plenty of examples in socialist history where the most evil of abusers would willingly give up their power (out of cowardice) and would ultimately go on to live a normal life. Perfect example of this was the literal king of China who the figurehead of the system oppressing them. When the communists won they gave up their power and their response was pretty much “You had no way of knowing what you were doing was wrong, we’re going to teach you why it was wrong” and even though it was a LOT of work, they did eventually get the picture and integrated into post-monarchy society.
TL;DR don’t die on the hill and you won’t die on the hill
Renting out a single room out of your family house is immoral
Why? It seems to me that if you’re accommodating having someone in your home, being compensated for that inconvenience wouldn’t be immoral. Certainly not any more immoral than having that room go unused would be.
You are entering a business relation where you have all of the power and their livelihood is completely at your whim. This is deeply coercive.
What’s the moral alternative?
Publicly owned housing.
Unionized housing is also a great option, where all rent is democratically controlled by the tenants and goes towards enriching your lives.
That’s certainly a more directly achievable plan within the framework of Capitalism, absolutely. Still, ideally all housing would be publicly or personally owned.
Idealism is the enemy of material change. We can fantasize about a perfect world all we want but that won’t make anyone’s lives better. What does drive change is fucking around and finding out. Seeing what works, what doesn’t, and then working off of that.
Decommodify housing so that everyone can buy a house if they want to. That way renting becomes a choice, rather than forced on them.
Right…
What’s the moral alternative for an individual without the power to make that change, who you said would be behaving immorally if they rented out a room from their family home?
Decouple immoral actions from your person. That’s liberalism. No self-respecting socialist would see someone stealing bread and call them immoral for the situation their material conditions forced them into. They would call the situation immoral and they would be right.
Self-sacrifice is false consciousness and akin to moral austerity.
Oh! So your statement was basically “a situation where someone has to rent a room from someone, even if that person is just renting a room out of their family house, is immoral?” That clears things up - thanks for explaining.
That’s not what people are saying. The situation itself is immoral, but you would not individually call people doing the best they can within that framework immoral.
Saying that “there’s no ethical consumption under Capitalism” isn’t damning for the consumers, but for Capitalism itself.
Thanks for clarifying. Phrased / thought of as “a situation wherein X happens is immoral,” it makes sense.
My confusion came from not doing that, even after reading the “Remember:” text in the comment, thanks to my conflating my personal belief that the individuals who are part of corporations that purchase houses in mass and rent them out are behaving immorally (vs being actors in an immoral situation) being adjacent with a statement about an individual renting out a room.
That concept of morality feels more similar to what I think of as “fairness” (though not an exact match) than to individual morality.
I feel like there must be a different word used to convey the moral judgment of someone who isn’t doing the best they can within the framework - i.e., someone who is choosing to exploit laborers for profit in excess of anything they could use for themselves.
Because this is rent-seeking, which leads to exploitation of labor via owning Capital.
Rent-seeking behavior is when you seek economic rent (more compensation than is required for a resource to be employed) without creating value. If you repurpose a room to make it available to someone to rent, you’re creating value. Likely part of how you’re creating that value is via your own labor.
The home you live in is generally considered to be personal property, not private property, so ownership of capital isn’t happening in this scenario. “Doing X is immoral because it leads to you doing Y, which is immoral” (that it would lead to the exploitation of labor) is a slippery slope argument without any basis (and with plenty of anecdotal counterpoints).
You are not creating Value by allowing someone to use a room for a fee. This is just using the already created Value to rent-seek.
Using a room to rent out becomes Private Property, not Personal Property.
You are not creating Value by allowing someone to use a room for a fee.
You created value when you made the room suitable for someone else’s use rather than your own. The room was not available and now it is. Value is an output, and the room didn’t intrinsically have value.
This is just using the already created Value to rent-seek.
Your understanding of rent-seeking is not one I’ve seen literally anywhere else. What’s the basis for that?
Using a room to rent out becomes Private Property, not Personal Property.
How so?
There’s no new value being created, the room was created once. Renting it out takes no labor, it isn’t a service, it is literally just seeking income from ownership. “Value” isn’t some mystical thing, it’s a measure of inputs and outputs, and in the case of renting a room out, there are no new inputs.
It becomes Private Property the second you become a landlord and rent-seek. Rather than using it for yourself, you seek value from ownership.
I’m using fairly standard understandings of rent-seeking, pretending that allowing someone else to use something you own via a fee is providing a service is landlord justification, it isn’t a service.
You created value when you made the room suitable for someone else’s use rather than your own.
The “Value” of the room was created when it was constructed and taxed. The “additional value” of a remodel will be reflected in the tax statements and property value (which is usually a return when sold). The room always had value, just not as a business asset which you want. These comments and the ones below are some of the craziest mental gymnastics I’ve seen this year. “but the landlord is my hero and stopped me from freezing by charging me 150% on the only place I can afford because all the real mean landlords took all the other houses”. It’s a scam, a con. A lord and serf arrangement carried on through centuries of oppression. It’s a grift, has been since it’s inception. Which came first, a house or a landlord? Which one was necessary and which one was created with excess capital that was distributed unequally?
Official Communist stance: there is zero distinction between personal property and private property. Hand over you toothbrush.
It’s the People’s Democratic Toothbrush, thank you very much. Now do 100 push-ups for Dialectical Materialism and become a Professional Letarian, a Pro-Letarian if you will, comrade! /s
AirBnB is horrible for local housing prices, because it removes long-term housing from the supply in exchange for more expensive short-term rentals. Guillotines are too nice for AirBnB owners; They should be thrown feet-first into a wood chipper.
I don’t think the Airbnb we stayed at in Charleston which was just this lovely lady’s extra bedroom in her house really affected the local housing market. She doesn’t want to rent long term and have to have roommates, she likes having guests and showing them around her city, and we’re still friends several years later, so no housing is being lost, and it’s actually a good experience. A single bedroom rental isn’t a big deal to me.
I’m middling about the other Airbnb we stayed at, it was a sort of apartment, but I don’t know who would have wanted to live there full time, the bedroom was only large enough to get a double bed in, let alone a dresser or anything, and we slept terribly, and while the kitchen and living room and bathroom were nice enough, there was no storage and a million stairs. The guy who owns it is a friend who owns the restaurant it’s above and said he never has much luck with long term renters wanting it, as it is also noisy because of the location and smells of food all the time. I think a place such as that fares better as an Airbnb too. Short term rentals should not displace housing for sure, but I’m not sure they’re all bad.
They’re all bad. Full stop. You’re rationalizing with “just”. That lovely lady would’ve downsized or eventually would’ve had a full-time resident (even a friend or family), there is absolutely zero incentive while she’s able to take advantage of the situation. Is she a registered business and paying taxes like all the other short term stay? That second guy, come on, you’re really not that blind right? No one is willing to PAY what he wants for that rental. He can get that price point he wants with short term rentals.
I hate the housing narrative because everyone plays real fucking coy when it comes to their scenario. Do we have a housing shortage crisis or not? Do we have housing for all immigrants or for refugees across the world? Is rent and housing prices sky rocketing because of demand? Like wtf, any defense is just a pity story “think about the rich people with their easy life, we might be them one day!” Every single fucker in here defending renting just wants an easy scam to get rich and hates to see their future “dream” squashed like that.
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I’ve always appreciated people who rent out rooms or expand their homes to let people rent a private space with airbnb.
I also don’t think VRBO, home away, house trip, and other companies that support this business model get enough visibility in the criticism against the model.
Which was the original stated intent of AirBnB. Going out of town for a day or two? Let someone stay for a day or two while they’re in town. Your place is watched while you’re out of town, it helps pay for your hotel while you’re gone, and everyone is happy.
But in practice, people buy houses for the sole purpose of listing them on AirBnB for 30% of the mortgage payment. They don’t care if it sits vacant for 80% of the month, because the four or five days it’s in use pays for the mortgage.
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.
You have a lot more faith in the government than I do
In a bourgois government? I probably have less faith than you do, but one controlled democratically by the Workers? Far more than any landlord.
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.
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.
When AirBNB first arrived, I think we thought it would be a tool to let people rent a spare room in their house short term to travelers, with a built in system for reviews and reputation building to ensure that it’s safe for both parties.
Turns out it’s a platform that enables wannabe real estate moguls to buy up housing and convert it into unlicensed hotels for a tidy profit.
Also a way to enable breaking regulations for hotels.
