212
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
212 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
44128 readers
290 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
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
This is the main issue. There's not enough skilled workers to actually make enough houses and homebuilding supplies. It's so expensive and the average person can't do it up to code.
Before, if you had some small amount of money and a lot of time you could just buy a small plot and build a house yourself. Now you'd be an idiot to waste time doing that. No one will buy your handmade house even if it's up to code.
Apartments in cities used to be cheap because the city stank of horse manure and smoke, and there were no elevators. Basically we've made the world much nicer and realized people will pay an arm and a leg for a nice place to live.
Actually the housing crisis has gotten so bad that I've seen quite a number of "handmade houses" sell in my region (US Pacific Northwest). And they're selling for way more than just land value...
i blame investors, career landlords, rentals are more profitable than banks.
there absolutely should be a profit for rent. Being a good landlord is work, work should be compensated. Taking the risk of ownership (low though it might be) should be compensated.
The issue isn't profit. The issue is a) artificial lack of supply driving up prices b) greed and exploitation of basic needs.
In some countries, like some of the USA, you get clean drinking water pumped into your house for your toilets. However you do the math a) people need to work on the system to keep it working and they should get paid a living wage b) water is a need even more than housing. We pay for water, and people make profit on it. How you pay for it - taxes, city rates, privately - whatever, you pay for it.
that isn't the issue, just like paying rent isn't the issue. it's the amount which is.
the solution is simple and already exists: universal basic income, and make basic needs like water and rent limited by this amount.
Pay and profit are not the same thing, though. A landlord can be compensated for work without making a profit.
Agreed on UBI though.
you should be paid enough to make a profit. profit = money left over from being paid after expenses.
If you spend some time - any time - you should be compensated an amount that allows you to do things you actually want to do.
I'm not sure you knew what the word "profit" means, but hopefully you do now, or can find a better way to express what you mean.
Compensation for work - even if that work is performed by the owner - is an expense, not profit.
Tap water is not really a for-profit enterprise. Even Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, though there are some well paid lawyers and engineers on staff, has to justify their rates and re-invest it all into water supply reliability. No shareholders making a profit on tap water.
UBI would not prevent landlords from profit. If we can afford to spend trillions on concrete bridges, we could build public housing in every city.
"shareholders" have nothing to do with any part of this conversation.
UBI has nothing to do with preventing profit. Which is good, because we shouldn't be preventing profit. We should be preventing exploitation.
Even if you own your home mortgage free, you're going to be paying >100% of its value in maintenance and opportunity cost over the first ten years.
Sure, let's assume that's true. The difference though is, I own the property. I get something out of the deal other than a temporary roof over my head - something I would argue is a human right.
If I were renting, I would be paying all those same costs, plus a profit margin - and I wouldn't own anything at all. Someone else gets to cash out on the investment that I entirely paid for.
You misunderstand. The comparison I'm trying to make is this:
How high does rent need to be before it becomes a better financial choice to choose scenario 1 over scenario 2? The break-even point is around the price where you would end up paying off the entire value of the home over ten years.
Ahh, gotcha. That's fair, then.
There are some interesting scenarios I've seen contracted out that you might be interested in.
Scenario: Co-op housing, you lease a lot with housing (based on your desired price point) with a 100-year lease. You may "purchase" a portion of the capital that the co-op housing has on your leased property (lets say 100k value property). The invested money can be used for loans or other means (like how capital can be used for leverage) through the co-op (think State-employee-credit-unions which are co-ops themselves). Any interest or value accrued while maintaining that lease is passed onto the signer of that lease. Aka, 100k property sold 20 years later for 200k you receive a 100k "buyout" from the co-op if you're leaving.
Heavily regulated with plenty of stipulations of course so nefarious actors and "flippers" don't buy. The co-op retains the property for future housing even if you die at 118. Have seem family clauses so it can be passed down as well. There's just so many versatile and victimless situations that can be created which have the community and the individual in mind for fairness.
Also, I would just like to point out that I have very rarely had a landlord do maintenance on the property I live in. One building hadn't seen a lick of maintenance in over 30 years, until I finally convinced them to replace the oven.
it would surprise you to learn that many business owners are shit at their jobs. You've never heard of mechanics ripping off people for headlight fluid? Or shoddy construction work?
This isn't a landlord problem. it's a human one.
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.
People say that because outside of modern times in the first world, landlords = the mafia. Without expensive police, landlords have to enforce their own rent. So if you're socialist or any other political movement bad for landlords, they probably make up the biggest paramilitary force in your country and if you don't decapitate that chain of command fast you get dumped in a cave with 20,000 other skeletons.
And even in a first world country, the police manhours dedicated to evictions and the private security industry funded almost entirely by landlords is something anybody who wants to deal with housing prices is going to have to worry about.
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.
To me the question is whether the result of what you're doing makes the world around you better or worse. Would the people living in your place be better off if you were out of the equation? Then you're a bad landlord.
If you're making money from providing labor for the people who live in a place you own, and they're paying your costs to do so, I think there's a case for that being a reasonable occupation to hold. If there's an issue with it, it's not my highest priority, and there's definitely some value in flexible housing stock for people.
If your goal is passive income, or you're making money from owning housing and denying that ownership to people who need a place to live, then you're behaving as a parasite, and I think it's reasonable for people to give you an amount of respect proportional to that.