ID: A Sophie Labelle 4 panel comic featuring Stephie in different poses, saying:
Landlords do not provide housing.
They buy and Hold more space than they need for themselves.
Then, they create a false scarcity and profit off of it.
What they're doing is literally the opposite of providing housing.
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If the landlords do not provide a service, you're welcome to go to the bank to approve your loan, buy or build a house, maintain it, pay back the loan and deal with delinquent renters and sell it when it's time for you to move out. None of which concerns you as a renter.
It is a massive PITA and it's a so-so store of value at best. That there are assholes who charge you through the nose for the rent doesn't mean it's a landlord problem. It's an asshole problem.
My landlady just put my rent up fifty quid. She owns (and rents out) 23 other properties. She's raking in everyone else's money. Fuck landlords.
Nobody tell this dude about co-ops, market rate housing, non profits, etc.
What is stopping renters to use these then, and give a middle finger to the landlords?
A lot of people apply, but since co-op, market rate and non profit housing initiatives make up such a small portion of available housing in proportion to a population, it's very hard to access.
The real estate cartel, the landlords themselves are stopping this. If housing is treated as a human right, their profit evaporates, so they'll never willingly let that happen. They intentionally make zoning harder, kill government initiatives to make housing cheaper, etc.
It's like asking a dictator to install democracy. Nothing short of a leftist takeover of the DNC, coupled with large scale local level cooperation, tenant unions, etc will solve this.
Sure, but you do realize the situation is typically different outside of the US?
Yes, I am aware. What's your point?
That your audience is global.
And?
For that to be true you need to be living in a place where price/rent has not doubled or even quadrupled in the past 10 years.
I live in such a place. This is obviously rent gouging.
It’s also the sad reality in basically all places world wide that aren’t in the middle of nowhere.
People sometimes even spend over 50% of their paycheck for rent and most consider this normal.
Hence the downvotes on your comment.
I live a college town. Most students don’t want to buy a house to live in for four years and many don’t want to live in dorms either.
Bull-fucking-shit.
20 years ago, houses in my neighborhood were selling for around $50k. Those same houses today hold a current market value of over $800k.
For comparison, the value of the USD has lost roughly 40% in value over the last 20 years, meaning if the houses in my neighborhood were only a "so-so store of value" (tracking inflation) they would be worth roughly $80k today, 10x less than the current market value.
For another comparison, if you put $50k into an index fund that tracked the S&P500 20 years ago, it would be worth roughly $350k today. That's not even half of the return houses in my neighborhood are getting over the same time period.
Sure it costs a lot of money to maintain a house and pay taxes and insurance over that 20 years and that's going to eat into those returns. But I can guarantee you I'm paying more than that to rent a similarly-sized property, which you would be doing anyway if you didn't have the capital to own a home.
You're sure living in a real estate bubble. Not going to last, thankfully.
A lot of people will probably doubt this when living in the middle of the bubble. But it has happened elsewhere already. China's RE bubble has melted down spectacularly and their economy is still deflating despite massive government stimulus. I imagine this will be the fate of the American Everything Bubble too, albeit we can't know when it will happen. The last deflationary episode around 2014 coincided with the meltdown in the American shale oil industry, which as we well know is going to happen again with the decline of the Permian - maybe this will start the bubble bursting.