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landlords
(quokk.au)
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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2025
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People love to say that we have to have landlords because otherwise no one could rent. Great! So then, let's have not-for-profit landlords or public housing.
Also, here is a basic refresher on "what something is worth". If you're drowning and someone offers to sell you a life vest for your life savings, then you might pay it so that you don't die. Immediately after that you would pass laws to prevent them from ever doing that kind of horrible shit again. At least, you would do that if you had an ounce of empathy... Do you?
But there are many independent landlord options. The pricing is based on the market and not a instantaneous mark up. If being a landlord meant you couldn't make any money on your investment, why would anyone do it? Public housing is very different. That's getting the government to pay for it. Sounds great, except it's not 'free' - the tax money has to come from everyone else. If everyone got their house for free then everyone would have to pay in the cost of their house. But if you can't a afford to rent, you can't afford to pay that much in tax, so instead you want other people to pay more. But most people are stuggling now, even if they can afford to be in a house, so how can they afford to also pay your rent? Why is it fair to ask them to?
Market value is based off of demand. People purchasing extra homes to profit off of increases that demand and therefore increases the cost.
Tax billionaires.
Less than a fraction of a percent of the entire planet's population have more money than there are fish in the ocean. Tax the absolute fuck out of them including all of the money they have tied up in investments and stocks and we'd have enough money to take care of everyone's needs.
But that's not really how it works. Sure the money value of the .1% is obscene in the context of your grocery costs or rent, but it's not really about the money - that just a way to manage resources and productive work, and also somewhat independently to mange investments. If we distributed the billionaires' wealth out, that wouldn't increase the resources available, so we'd just get instant inflation to negate the benifits. You'd have more money but there'd be the same availability of stuff in the stores so either we'd run out of stuff in the stores when everyone buys more, or what would really happen is the store owners would raise the prices. And people would still have to do the work that needs to be done for our society to function.
The investments are money that fund companies which employ people. If you pulled all that funding, the companies wouldn't have the needed capital to operate and many people would lose jobs.
I'm not saying things don't need to change. Rent and grocery costs are out of whack with lower middle class salaries. Regulation to raise minimum wage and hiring practices to give workers more consistent employment is needed desperately. But unfortunately it's not so simple as just taking money from the rich to give to the poor.
The current discussion is on housing of which we have way more than enough of. You ask who would pay for it if we eliminated the need for landlords and my answer is the obscenely rich. We can easily house every single person in the world and still have housing left over. The reason we don't is cause of greedy assholes caring more about profits, however small they'd be, than other humans.
Social housing is a brilliant solution, as the citizens of those countries that provide it will attest.