Reason I’m asking is because I have an aunt that owns like maybe 3 - 5 (not sure the exact amount) small townhouses around the city (well, when I say “city” think of like the areas around a city where theres no tall buildings, but only small 2-3 stories single family homes in the neighborhood) and have these houses up for rent, and honestly, my aunt and her husband doesn’t seem like a terrible people. They still work a normal job, and have to pay taxes like everyone else have to. They still have their own debts to pay. I’m not sure exactly how, but my parents say they did a combination of saving up money and taking loans from banks to be able to buy these properties, fix them, then put them up for rent. They don’t overcharge, and usually charge slightly below the market to retain tenants, and fix things (or hire people to fix things) when their tenants request them.
I mean, they are just trying to survive in this capitalistic world. They wanna save up for retirement, and fund their kids to college, and leave something for their kids, so they have less of stress in life. I don’t see them as bad people. I mean, its not like they own multiple apartment buildings, or doing excessive wealth hoarding.
Do leftists mean people like my aunt too? Or are they an exception to the “landlords are bad” sentinment?
Both. A better statement would be “Landlords and real estate investors” are parasites. If you can afford a home you don’t live in them you are driving up prices on homes that others could live in, fuck you.
Why don’t you ask them?
I’d say even your aunt is included in that. Don’t worry though, my mom is on the same list. They’re extracting wealth from someone else’s labor.
My grandfather was a landlord back in the 80s-90s. He owned several small homes and duplexes in a big city, and he did all the maintenance and upkeep on them himself. I saw him work his ass off, how would his tenants paying him rent not be compensating him for his labor?
It’s not a coherent argument, people just don’t like paying rent so they lash out in frustration. If you can’t own you have to rent, if you have to rent you have to rent from someone. It’s just a fact of life. Just like food is also a requirement to live and you need to pay someone for that too if you’re not self sufficient. There’s good people selling food and bad people selling food. It would be dumb to consider all food merchants evil in principle just as it’s dumb to consider all landlords evil in principle.
I dunno about pricing back then but the issue is the amount of wealth that can be generated from a situation like that.
Like, hypothetically, let’s split your grandfather into two people. A landlord, and a maintenance guy hired to maintain those properties, getting paid a fair wage.
Would the landlord make money, after paying a mortgage and his maintenance man?
If the answer is no, then becoming a landlord isn’t financially beneficial, and your grandfather could’ve just been a handyman, and made a steadier income, his money not directly dependent on whether or not someone paid rent.
If the answer is yes, then your grandfather made more money than his labor was worth. While he earned money doing labor, the real issue is the money he earned by doing nothing. It’s likely your grandfather made quite a bit more money than his labor was worth, given the fact that property management companies live entirely off of the price difference from labor put into housing and the price they can charge.
Landlords are middlemen. They’re used car salesman for houses. Are there landlords that aren’t shitty? Yeah. My last landlord was awesome, he actually sold me the house I was renting, when I told him I was gonna buy a house and start my family. He was nice, reasonable, all those things. The total rent at the time (pre-covid, so a lot better than now, and split among 6 people) was 2250$, and my mortgage worked out to be 900$.
Did your grandfather put effort in? Yes. Did he make money doing nothing? Also yes, the difference between what his labor was worth and what he got paid.
That margin didn’t come from his labor or his smart investments, it came from other people trying to live, and potentially created hardships. If his tenants could’ve paid for the actual cost of housing instead of whatever your grandfather charged, that might mean another kid got to go to college, a father getting to retire earlier, a family that could’ve worked 1 job instead of 2.
Your grandfather is probably fine, he likely understood hardships and acted like a human being, but he still belonged to a class of people that are better off if they find ways to minimize the amount of money other people have. Some people judge others for taking what they don’t need.
I appreciate you breaking it down this way. It helps me understand the stance so many hold on landlords.
However, I think you’re missing a lot in your distillation that everything above mortgage + handyman salary is making money for nothing.
Owner also pays property taxes, insurance, all maintenance costs, all upgrades, and possibly utilities or yard care. The benefits for the renters include having a maintenance person on-call all the time, not needing to vet each tradesperson, not needing to get quotes, no expenses when an appliance breaks, no liability in case of a disaster, and more.
If I didn’t have a handy partner and the market was reasonable, I’d love to rent. I don’t want to deal with maintenance and I like having a consistent monthly fee rather than suddenly having to spend $2k on a new water heater like I did last month, or being afraid that our heat might die suddenly this winter because we weren’t ready to spend >$20k this summer to replace the air handler when it went out and needed a new part. Plus my partner took 3 half days off work to get 3 quotes for it. They each told us significantly different things that we needed to do, so we couldn’t decide if we were comfortable doing business with any of them. That shit is stressful! Having the assurance that I can call just one person and someone else will take care of it is worth a good price.
So the cost of owning some units is more than just the mortgage, and the benefits of renting are more than just a maintenance person’s salary. Distilling it to just those two things is an unjust comparison.
Should a person get stupidly rich off of being a landlord? No. That’s exploitative. The cost of renting should match the cost of the property and maintenance (as averaged out over time) plus the cost/savings of the additional benefits of renting. That’s all. But that’s a lot more than just mortgage + handyman salary divided out over however many units the landlord owns.
(Also this assumes the person is actually a good landlord, and we know there are many landlords out there who aren’t.)
Thank you for putting this so eloquently. Most reasonable line of thinking I’ve seen ITT
I honestly feel like when this issue comes up, everyone saying stuff like this is an alien. Do you seriously not know how much work maintaining property is? You say it’s exploiting someone else’s labor as though the several times a year every household needs work is, what, either worthless, unmentionable, or something people are owed by divine right? My parents owned some apartments and sound similar to OPs aunt. If anything, they were exploited by the people they bought them from (that aspect is a long story).
They charged people under market rate, went out of their way all the time to be kind to people by doing things like driving half an hour to personally come pick up rent payments, letting people stay for a year without paying rent since they felt bad for them, went out to fix maintenance issues in the middle of the night, and the list goes on and on. They treated people better than any other landlord and worked their absolute asses off to make a profit (some years they took losses). It was only after a 20 year struggle, full of manual labor and dealing with difficult tenants, that they were able to sell the apartments and be free from the stress and be free of all of that manual labor. They basically cleaned toilets and replaced filthy carpet for people who would spit in their face for evicting them after a year of non payment.
According to you and this thread, the people doing the spitting weren’t morally bad or the lazy ones. Nope, it was my parents.
According to the lefties, everything should be communal property, and you should be happy for a chunk of bread and two eggs a day.
Why bother what those clowns have to say.
Edit: Thanks for this post by the way, already extended my blocklist by 10+ users.
I lost my original comment I was typing as my device died so I’ll keep it short. Your aunt extracts money from people on the basis of owning private property (private property is property that is owned by an individual for non-personal use). She doesn’t earn the money through her own labour, she gets it by owning an asset that she herself has no use for and someone else needs and charges that person for using it. This is a parasitic relationship. Now to answer your question about if she is a bad person because of it, I would say not necessarily. The fact that landlords exist is a bad thing. We live in a system however where investment in private property (something inherently parasitic) is often the only way to retire. Every working Australian is required by law to invest a portion of their pay into an investment fund. This too is parasitic. That doesn’t however make every working Australian a bad person, they are just working within the system and doing what is required of them to live. Another thing to keep in mind is that for every house that is owned as an investment property, the price to buy a house goes up. By being a landlord, you make it harder for others to own a home.
Are they renting out for as cheap as they can afford? Modest profit aside is fair.
If they’re like “oh wow. I can raise from 1800$/mo to 2500$/mo bc everyone else is”. That’s where it’s concerning.
Personally, if I was in their shoes, I would interview and find a struggling family and subsidize their rent from the other tenants for two of the 5 houses for as long as I could afford to.
(I own nothing right now, it’s looking bleak)
Owning property isn’t a job
No, but it requires work and time and money for maintenance, insurance, and taxes.
It’s almost like… it’s… a… job. How strange.
Owning your place to live should be a right. Anyone who holds more housing stock than they personally need and who will only let it out if there’s profit on their investment (because if it’s an investment, then there is an expectation that the line must always go up, which is also very inflationary), tightens the market and makes it harder for other people to become a home owner.
The big difference between renting and paying of a mortgage, is that by paying off the mortgage, the home owner has build up equity and secured a financially more secure future. But if someone is too poor to get a mortgage to afford the inflated house prices (inflated because other people treat it like an investment), then in the current system they pay rent to pay off the mortgage/debt of their landlord and after the renter has paid off their landlord’s mortgage, they’ll still be poor and without any equity themselves.
It’s a very antisocial system. And with landlords building up more and more equity on the backs of people who are unable to build up equity themselves, there’s a good reason why landlords are often said to be parasitic.
You assume that everybody wants to own and that just isn’t the case.
I assume that everyone who wants to own a home wants to own a home and many of those aren’t able to. That’s the current reality.
Edit: I reread what I said and I distinctly said that it should be “a right”. Having a right to do something is not the same as having an obligation to do something. Imo home ownership should be a right for everyone, but that doesn’t make it an obligation.
and I distinctly said that it should be “a right”
Yes, you did, but you said it as part of an answer to the question “why are landlords considered parasites?”, and you explained that those who own more homes than they can live in are parasites. The logical conclusion (would be that it should be outlawed to be a landlord.
So, how am I to understand that? Should there be a quota, an acceptable amount of parasites so to speak?
People will always have a chance to rent since apartments exist, but people do not have a chance to buy houses
People own apartments too. If you can’t own more than one home, surely apartments would also be covered by that?
We can worry about that when there’s a lack of places to rent and homelessness is down.
I’m 40 and have friends my age who rent because they don’t want to own even though they can afford to. I’m not sure what percentage of renters are like them.
Go invest in nice cars, miniatures, god damn funko pops or stamps.
Not in roofs that belong over peoples heads. People need them, you don’t. It’s that fucking simple.
Your Aunt should be paying enough taxes that owning a second property should be more or less unfeasible.
A fair system would have her seeking other retirement vehicles.
Depends on the leftist, but generally I think hoarding land you’re not personally using, especially during a housing crisis, is wrong.
I also think that charging rent from people to simply exist in a place you aren’t using anyway is wrong. When she pays the mortgage she’s buying equity, when they pay the rent they’re buying jack shit. It’s an enormous parasitic drain on the economy.
But I don’t think she’s, like, evil. Not the same way that major landlord companies are. And I understand the motivations. I still disagree with the methods, but until the great commie revolution/rapture (/s) comes we all have to engage with problematic capitalist systems to a greater or lesser extent.
Depends on the person. There are people that mean every landlord. Their reasoning isn’t as bad as you might think either. The main issues are that they still exert control over property, a form of private governance; they’re denying the same financial stability through housing equity to another family; and they can artificially raise the price of housing.
That happens at every level of being a landlord. Of course the systemic problems only get worse as the number of owned or managed units goes up.
Most people are thinking about the giant corporations holding thousands of units.
If you make a profit for allowing another person shelter (particularly if you don’t need that space for yourself and/or your own family), then you are a parasite.
A bit of a hyperbole, but for the sake of this discussion, let’s say there is a house and no one can afford it but me. If I don’t buy it and rent it, no one can live in it. What would be the right thing to do?
I take umbrage with the hypothetical itself. Do you believe that buying the property and renting it out is the only possible solution here?
The “right thing” would be to not have a situation like that in the first place where only one person (or one small group of people) can afford to own the roof over their head.
But, obviously, an option you’re neglecting here, is letting people live in the property without paying rent. Nobody is forcing you to make a profit off people’s basic needs for survival.
Reduce the price of the house
The market determines the price. If no one can afford it the price is too high.
both are parasites.
No.
I of course can’t speak for anyone except myself, but for me, what your aunt is doing is what essentially capitalism is all about.
Its when those landlords get replaced by venture capital corporations and reits that it becomes a problem.
In your aunts case, the rent money stays local, contributes back to the local economy, etc…
In the case of venture capital and corporate ownership, the only goal is to increase a stock price for a corporation. None of that money gets returned to the local economy except for possibly hiring a local property management firm to handle things on the ground for them.
When capitalism remains about people, all of good. When corporations take the reins of ownership so their profit becomes the sole motive is when things go bad.
what your aunt is doing is what essentially capitalism is all about.
Both things can be true. Capitalism is inherently parasitic.
Capitalism is inherently parasitic
I fundamentally disagree with that.
Venture Capitalism is parasitic. But Capitalism itself is not at all. At it’s heart, if we continue with the landlord analogy, let’s say that you are renting a house from the OP’s Aunt. She’s paying the building insurance. She’s paying the maintenance, (or in some good old fashioned cases doing it themselves). She’s dealing with the paperwork involved in owning a home. Hell, in some cases you don’t even have to mow your own lawn. So of course she’s charging you rent. It’s not a charity.
But if she’s a private owner, than your rent stays with her. She uses what she needs to maintain the building and…yes…makes a profit that then gets spent in the local economy.
The only time there’s an issue is when your rent is being sent to a corporation that may not even be in the same country as you, and that money leaves your local economy for good.
To use an anecdotal example, I’ve worked in my time for two different furniture stores in my town. One was a chain, and one was/is a family run operation from the beginning. And yes…that family is wildly successful; I’m not guessing millionaires, but close to it. And I don’t begrudge them at all for that. Because it’s family owned, they aren’t forced to only care about a stock price or about profit. My boss would randomly come up to me, sometimes multiple times a year, clap me on the back and say “You’re doing a good job, I’m going to add a buck an hour to your wage.”
Because they can. Because for all intents and purposes, you’ve got a better chance to be treated like a human being when a corporation isn’t in the way.
The chain furniture store would only give out raises when forced to by government mandated cost of living increases, because anything more would cause the stock price to go down.
The heart of capitalism is my first example. The reality of capitalism is my second unfortunately. But that’s not the fault of capitalism itself, it’s the lack of government oversight protecting us from predatory corporations.
Yeah wholesome mom and pop businesses getting eaten by larger, more specialized and efficient corpos is not a bug, it’s an inherent feature of capitalism. A worker at a specialized firm can manage dozens of apartments for the same salary as your aunt managing just one or two- she stands no chance in the long run. Same for retail stores and most other kinds of businesses really.
The only solution is democracy- having the larger more efficient firm be democratically owned by its workers and accountable to them and through them the community, rather to a cigar chomping investor hundreds of miles away
At it’s heart, if we continue with the landlord analogy, let’s say that you are renting a house from the OP’s Aunt. She’s paying the building insurance. She’s paying the maintenance, (or in some good old fashioned cases doing it themselves). She’s dealing with the paperwork involved in owning a home. Hell, in some cases you don’t even have to mow your own lawn. So of course she’s charging you rent. It’s not a charity.
Oh wow, she has to do up to 40 whole hours of work a year, she totally deserves a full time salary for that!
But that’s not the fault of capitalism itself, it’s the lack of government oversight protecting us from predatory corporations.
I remember when I used to be naive enough to believe this.
The predatory corporations succeeding is capitalism succeeding.
Lol try to be a little more condescending, will you?
Yeah sorry, I guess I’m just tired of this shit.
And I really meant that genuinely, I do remember being that naive… I remember making the exact arguments that person is making. Since then, another decade or so of life experience has informed my positions.
This is the big lie that they tell you in order to put up with the constant exploitation of living in a capitalist society.
Based on the average age of Lemmy, I’ll go out on a limb and say I’m probably older than you.
What you call “informed positions” is simply giving up on seeing the reality over the propaganda. Your cynicism doesn’t allow you to separate the theory of capitalism from the reality of capitalism. You’re essentially no different than those people who say that anything except the current situation is essentially “socialism”, which by definition must be bad. But just because corporations have taken over capitalism, doesn’t mean there isn’t a fight to be had to try to change that.
I’m very close to 50 years old. I’ve got plenty of my own life experience that I don’t need any of yours thanks. If you want to give up, go right ahead. Some of us believe is a system where capitalism is contained by strong government regulations and social safety nets. Why do we believe this, because there’s plenty of European countries that already do this. Just because North America is completely bought out by corporations doesn’t mean that’s just what capitalism is.
Go be a sad sack defeatist on your own time.
Y’know, I think all I needed was getting yelled at by an old person. I’m a capitalist now! Exploit me, daddy!
Shush kiddo, the adults who can read are talking.
