this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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I never understood this brain dead obsession that Marxists have with landlords.
Landlords own property like anybody else does or could, and they use their property to offer a commodity in demand a for a fee like any other service. You never hear anybody complaining about a car rental service or hotels or any other rental service, just this one. This is a strong sign that it's not based in any merit, it's just ideological brain rot.
You could be nuanced and argue that certain types of landlords are bad or that certain practices are harmful, and that's fine, but to say the concept of people renting out housing units is inherently bad just because is just stupid. Renting has it's advantages even if you don't understand or won't acknowledge them, there's are plenty of reasons why renting exists.
Uhh, I hear people complaining about those services all the time, see Air BnB.
Regardless, a rental car or hotel is not a living requirement like a semi-permanent home is. Definitely comparing apples to oranges here.
You can acknowledge the benefits to renting while also acknowledging it's an unbelievably toxic and abused system that profits off the poor for the gain of the rich.
Until everyone is housed, no one should be profiteering off thoes that aren't.
In my area, the majority of homeless have cars. A car rental can be more important than a home to rent for survival for more people than you might think.
That's more of a testament of how fucked up housing is in your area. That would be like saying tents are more vital than housing because many homeless use them instead.
No, it's more of a testament to how car-dependent our area is. You can live without a house, but you can't live without a car, or access to someone who will drive you. Housing here is comparitively affordable.
Ok, agreed, but then the problem is with disgusting urban planning, people living in cars is just a dirty band-aid
You don't understand the problem Marxists have with pure capitalism? That's like their whole thing. An ownership class hoarding resources, and passively generating income from idle capital while not actively contributing is like the greatest sin in their ideology.
I personally think it's a bit melodramatic. There's a world of difference between renting your spare room, or the 2nd floor of your house, and a hedgefund buying 20,000 single family houses.
Just wanna point out that both BlackRock and your average landlord gramma have exactly the same class interests in fighting against rent control, rent freeze, or construction of affordable social housing.
This is nonsense, there's ZERO merit to rent control in 2025. It is a proven failure. There's mountains of studies, cases studies, and reports spanning over decades from cities all over the world, that show the same exact thing. Rent control does NOT control prices or fixing housing issues. In fact it does the opposite, it strangles supply by disincentivizing developers from building new units and it jacks up prices by incentivizing landlords to increase prices every time they get a new tenant, and by extension it also incentivizes landlords to continuously seek out new tenants for this purpose.
Rent control directly benefits your average landlord and hurts the average tenant. People have to incredibly misguided to still push for it. Massive corporations like Blackrock are unaffected by these policies. They'll profit either way because they control way more than just real estate. Their issue is not market incentives, it's accountability. So no your grandparents owning a triplex and renting out two units doesn't put them on the same team as Blackrock.
Rent control obviously reduces prices. By setting up a maximum price, prices can't raise further, it's not rocket science. This policy was literally implemented in my homeland, Spain, when a few years ago an inflation-cap was implemented so that rents can't rise above CPI. This has saved millions and millions of euros of tenants, again, because it's not rocket science: if you correctly implement a rent cap (not difficult), prices don't go above the cap.
The same happened with the Berlin rent freeze that passed through referendum and was applied to some areas of the city. The comparative economic studies that analyzed the evolution of prices in rent-capped areas proved empirically that prices had gone up slower in rent-capped areas than in free market regime. I don't know what kind of bullshit neoliberal YouTuber you're watching, but they're lying to you about empirical evidence.
As for housing supply, I agree, rent cap affects supply, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. When Milei removed rent caps from Buenos Aires, it became easier to find listed flats for rent in the city: because the people formerly living there were evicted since they couldn't afford to pay fucking rent! What a great solution neoliberals offer us: just fucking evict the poors!! I've already brought up evidence you can look up, can you do the same to prove your point? Spoiler alert: no you can't because neoliberalism is anti-scientific.
Regardless, rent cap is only meant to be a temporary measure and I agree that it won't solve fundamentally the underlying issue behind housing: treating as a commodity instead of as a human right. Build millions of public housing units, force businesses to move to smaller cities to fight overcentralization, do good urban planning, and establish socially owned housing. It's the only model that has abolished homelessness in history, and you can keep denying reality, but Soviets enjoyed rents of 3% of average income throughout their lives while people in the modern capitalist world can choose between spending 40% of their wage in housing or literally dying in the streets.
Here's an actual study's conclusion on the matter:
Soaring home rental prices are affecting all of Spain: almost 40% exceed 1,500 euros a month
Source: Dude, trust me
That's such a backwards take. Of course it's a bad thing. There's more people that want houses than there are available units. Developers won't build new ones because there's no incentivize to do so. It's in their best interest to hold to artificially restrict supply and jack up prices every time a new tenant moves in. So you end up with higher rents and less units.
This is just moronic at this point. It's crystal clear that you're just repeating because you think it's sounds virtuous, but you haven't given a single thought as to what that even means and you won't ever provide any explanation. If you apply the most elementary level of logic, anybody could understand that a house, including public houses, is something that costs money because it requires resources, time, and labor to make. Because of this, it is something that has to be traded for one way or another, and thus it is a commodity. Slapping the "human rights" label next to it is not going to change this reality.
Source: Dude, trust me
This has already been debunked. The fact that you keep repeating just shows that you're disingenuous.
Your original claim:
Your source:
You are very smart
You, on the other hand, are very dumb, because if you continue reading that very sentence and the one after it:
This directly supports my claim.
Almost as if I had already given answer to those points in my previous comment about supply of housing (Buenos Aires example) or reduced construction (publicly driven construction) and you just refused to address those points! I explicitly said rent control is a band-aid and I gave solutions to literally every "problem" you brought up in the study such as higher rent for uncontrolled units (control them all), lower mobility (that's a good thing meaning people get evicted less), and reduced residential construction (can be solved by public construction and has historically been solved like that).
Half of your original claim was that it does nothing to solve rent prices, and your own source claims that you're wrong on that, and you have the ballz to be here questioning my sourcing abilities lmao
You're just projecting because you're full of shit. I did respond to your points, all of them, and in great detail too. But you chose to ignore them entirely because you're simply incapable of responding to ANY of the points that I made. You still haven't responded to how I dismantled your blatant misinformation of about the Soviet housing model or why public housing on a societal scale hasn't worked. You ignore my responses, and then you have gall to pretend that I didn't respond to your original claims? Get outta here with that bullshit.
If you had even a shred of honesty, which I'm 100% sure you don't, you would go back to my previous comments, and reply to the points that I made properly. Instead of throwing out some brain dead insult like "bootlicker" or giving some lazy excuse like "do your own research", how about stop trying to deflect and distract and actually prove me wrong? It should be easy, right? Then go ahead and do it. But you won't, and I'm fully confident in that.
I think you might actually be ignorant enough to not know what this means. Social mobility doesn't eviction, it means people being able to change their socioeconomic status over time. If there was no social mobility then people in poverty will literally never be able to get out of it. How can you possibly talk about a concept you don't even understand?
You provided a single paper, that doesn't claim what you said it did (because you clearly didn't read it), gave me a source dumb that you got from chatGPT when you explicitly refused to provide sources when I debunked your narrative about the Soviet housing model, and you're still actively avoiding telling me what claims you want sourced after I told that you that I'm more than happy to provide sources. It sounds like you're afraid that you'll look small if I started sourcing my claims because you know you have nothing.
You claim I haven't read the papers, yet you're confusing social mobility (not mentioned in the paper) with residential mobility (the one referenced). From the study you linked:
Housing mobility or residential mobility is a distinct concept, and you're either not reading or misunderstunding. It's what I referred to when I talked about evictions. The article is even explicit about it:
This is explicitly about evicting people so that others can move in, that's literally what "residential mobility" means, and it's the mobility that the study is referring to, not social mobility as in ascending in income.
Educate yourself, lib
These concepts are all interlinked. The idea of social mobility is that people change their socioeconomic status over time. This includes their work and housing. It's baffling how you're actually dense enough to quote an example from the study that I linked that echoes exactly the point that I've been barking at all this time, as some sort of win for you. My god, you're slow.
This example is there to clearly demonstrate how rent control worsens the housing crises by creating conditions that fuck over people in need. In this very example, the elderly lady's socioeconomic status has changed. She's no longer raising a family and she's most likely retired. She's all alone in a big unit that she doesn't need, she's literally only there because she wants to cling on to the controlled rent. But by doing so, she's clogging up the unit from households that are still large and need that extra space. This is bad for her because downgrading to a smaller unit would better suit her needs but she feels the need to stay in the larger unit even though it's unnecessary, and it's also bad because there's a large household out there that either doesn't have a house at all or lives in a house that doesn't suit their needs.
This has nothing to do with evictions, and everything to do with how rent control creates conditions that stifle housing opportunities for everybody. Mobility is an integral part of any functional economy because people and society aren't static, they're dynamic. Situations and circumstances constantly change, and there needs to be a system that's able to provide people with options that allows them to adapt to their current needs.
If your level of education is quoting something that you clearly didn't understand with such confidence then you're a lost cause. As evidenced by you ignoring everything else that I stated in my previous comment, again, it's clear at this point that you're ignorant, an idiot, or a bad faith actor... if not all of the above. Since you have no interest in being honest or accurate, there's no point in me continuing wasting time on you any further. You will forever continue to lie, deny, and cry. Therefore, this will be my last reply to you.
Exactly. I know several people who sold their house and went back to renting because they were sick of the hassle and expense of home ownership.
Marxists don't have a problem with renting per se, we have a problem with private landlords renting to extract a profit from less wealthy individuals. Social/public renting is cool and I have 0 problems with it, and I thing we should favour it.
The underlying premise here is simply nonsense. The idea renting is exploitative or that only poor people rent are nothing more than baseless assumptions. It's ideological drivel. Renting is not exploitation, it's a service like any other. You pay a fee to get access to a commodity. Not to mention that you also assume that the rental market is uniform, but it's not. There are SO many different levels and styles that appeal to just about everybody. There's a massive luxury rental market, do you think that's made by rich people to exploit poor people? Of course not, luxury rental units like normal rental units have people who seek them out. Renting has its own advantages.
Imagine dropping 8 comments on a thread to bootlick landlords lmfao. "But haven't you thought of poor landlords having to call a plumber every 6 months and paying them with the money of their tenants?"
You made a bunch of comments under my thread, and I called out the points that you made for being weak, false, or misleading... and now you're just throwing low level ad homs like "bootlicker", as if that means anything, because you know I'm right and you have nothing of value to add. It's as simple as that.
Cry me a river, landlord bootlicker
This is the level of intelligence I was expecting from a Marxist.
They're definitely a landleech whose feefees have been hurt.
Marxist here. The reason why I argue and obsess about landlordism is that housing is a human right, whereas rental of a car isn't and neither of a hotel room. It's also important because of how much pressure it exerts on workers, very often 40% of a person's income goes to rent, which is absurd and destroys the quality of life of many people, and perpetuates poverty cycles.
You are right in that landlords offer a commodity in demand for a fee, but it's not like any other service since landlordism essentially doesn't require work: it's purely an unnecessary wealth transfer from wealth-less individuals who can't afford a home to wealthy individuals who could afford (or more likely inherited) one. We Marxists also famously have problems with commodity production, it's quite literally the core of Marxism: that the labour of workers is unfairly appropriated by capital owners.
As for renting having its advantages, Marxists don't deny that, and are very much in favour of social rent, that is, publicly owned housing rented at maintenance costs. This way, there is no relationship of exploitation between a landlord and a tenant: you can just rent one of the collective houses without your wealth being used for anything other than its average maintenance cost. For example in the Soviet Union workers rented housing at about 3% of their income. We are not against the idea of renting, we are against the idea of renting from a private owner that extracts wealth unfairly from the tenant
So is food and water, but we still pay for them. It doesn't take an economist to understand that it takes a lot of capital and labor to get these things to us, and these require money. Therefore, they have to be traded for to cover the costs. In this case, it's by paying a fee.
This is ignorant because it assumes that rental market is static, when in fact, it is very much dynamic. How expensive or affordable rent is depends on things like supply, demand, and policy.
Who told you this? This is just wrong. This is the issue with Marxism as an ideology, it's entirely a built on a house of cards. It's entirely on baseless assumptions built on other baseless assumptions. Simply insisting that landlords don't do anything without providing any substance is not a valid argument, that just the assertion fallacy.
Landlord do actually do stuff. They're responsible for their property. This means they have to put in the work in maintaining it, not only to preserve their property's value, but also because they're liable if their property causes harm to their tenants or anybody else. Landlords are responsible for things like
Repairs for any structural decay, damage, or malfunction (this ranges from changing light bulbs to changing the entire heating system)
General maintenance like snow removal, pest removal, the general appearance of the building
All the legal mumbo jumbo like drafting up the leases, following regulations, and meeting safety standards
All the finances of the building, this is especially true for multifamily buildings. They have to pay for the sewage and water, because they're shared by the whole building as well as the common electricity (usually has it's own panel). They also have to deal with the hassle of paying the taxes and house insurance on the building.
Tenant relations, again this is especially true for multifamily buildings. Landlords have to be able to settle disputes and complaints between their tenants, and they have to be willing to take legal action against tenants that are causing harm to the others
This is all stuff that tenants would have to personally deal with if they owned property, but because they're renting all of it get outsourced to the landlords. However, all of these involve the tenants actually being in the building. If there's a vacant unit, the landlord is also responsible for inspecting the unit, cleaning it, advertising the vacancy, screening applicants, and signing the new tenants.
You might scoff at this as nothing, but it's actually really annoying time consuming. So much so that there's an entire industry that revolves around property management. There's a reason why even rich people sometimes opt to rent instead of just buying a new place. To some people the hassle of owning and maintaining a property is just not worth it.
I'm aware, and Marxism is also famously well known for falsely believing that labor is the only source of value in an economy when that's just not true. Labor is just one component in the economy, not the only one. An economy needs capital, leadership, entrepreneurship, specialization (education/expertise), and innovation on top of labor to function.
It's funny you say this because this show that you actually have no idea what you're talking about. Three things:
Soviet workers didn't have a normal income like we do. Their incomes were centrally planned by the government, and they were distributed as a part of national budgeting scheme. Soviet incomes were not based on merit, demand, experience, or specialization but on administrative policy. This means that a doctor and a factory worker got paid a similar amounts, and Soviet salaries were notorious for being very low.
The Soviet Union actually set the rents via policy. A part of the reason why the predetermined government salaries were so low is because so many things were heavily subsidized, including housing. That was the government's grand argument as to why people got next to nothing, they argued that they're getting benefits elsewhere. Now, the government decided they would impose a symbolic 3-6% (depends on the regions) rental fee to remind people that housing was allocated, not owned, and could be revoked and reassigned at any time.
The Soviet Union solution to housing is one of the most historically famous examples of failure. They central government was very inefficient and ignorant in their planning. They allocated a lot of resources to build factories but barely any for houses for the workers that moved there, they set out of touch housing quotas that did not align with local needs, and they were rigid and uncoordinated in their execution which led to a lot of poor quality buildings and a lot of delays. The buildings that did get built were plagued with mismanaged, poor maintenance, and extremely long wait lists. You might not know this, but the Soviet housing model that you idolize actually had a lot, and I mean a lot, of housing shortages. That system collapsed for a reason.
Keep in mind, I am not against the idea of public housing. I do think that government has role to play in helping solve the housing crises. There are some people who lack the means to ever get housing on their own regardless of how affordable the market is, and those people should get government subsidized housing. However, this means that public housing should only apply to a specific subsection of the population, not the whole population. Trying to centrally control and plan the housing market will just lead to a fiasco similar what the Soviet Union experienced. That's a not a real solution, that's just introducing a host of unnecessary problems.
Our current system works, it's been proven to work. What it needs is some tweaks and updates to get it back on track. It's really not that complicated, we have a housing shortage, so we need to build way more houses. We want lower prices, so have to build so many units that the supply eclipses the demand. We want more dense, less car centric housing, then we have to update our zoning laws to allow it. We want to speed things up, so we have to remove obstacles standing in the way like unnecessarily long approval processes for new construction.
We can't cling on to failed ideologies like Marxism as some sort of new and innovative solution, because it's not. Marxism is a proven failure, and that won't change this time or the next. If we want to get anything done we have to remain practical, nuanced, realistic, knowledgeable, precise with our discourse and policy. That's our only way forward.
You never explained why you think this is the case, you just insist that it is by constantly repeating it. Tell me the specific mechanics that you believe make private renting inherently unfair or exploitative, because I don't see any legitimate case for this position.
But it is true, and it has been empirically proven time and time again. Just for reference, you can check Paul Cockshott's 2014 paper. There has been no serious reply to this paper, or any followup by neoliberal economists finding any other variable explaining the creation of value to the extent that labour does. It is empirically true that labour is the only source of value, and you would need empirical evidence to argue otherwise, which you don't have because it doesn't exist.
Everything you said about the Soviet Union is simply false. I'll come up with the references later, busy now, but you're just making stuff up.
Edit: I'm actually not gonna bother giving you references because you're just a blatant anticommunist making stuff up. Your talk of workers and doctors getting paid the same is absurd (highly trained specialists like doctors and university professors were the highest earning members of society), your explanation for the lack of housing in the USSR is absurd (they built more housing than any country in the world and allocated it efficiently, it's just that half the housing stock of the country was destroyed in WW2 and the rapid collectivization of agriculture and the industrialisation led to 2 million houses per year not being enough), and I'm not going to change the mind of someone who doesn't listen to facts.
Go on licking your landlord's boots (or leeching off your tenants if you're lucky).
Source: Dude, trust me
I know that you just linked the very first link on google that appeals to your confirmation bias, because based on the content of this paper, you 100% did not read it.
First of all, this is not a study. It's a response paper by 3 Marxist academics to another study that they disagreed with. Second of all, at no point in this response do they ever make the claim that labor is the only source of value in an economy. They just argue that it is a significant factor of value, which was supposedly not factored in the study they're critiquing. So you saying that they argued that "labour is the only source of value" is just you making things up. Third of all, nobody ever responds to response papers except for the authors of the original study being critiqued, and that only ever happens on occasion. So this is not the smoking gun you think it is.
You won't provide anything, ever, because you have nothing. You're just straight up factually wrong on this.
...and there it is! You tried googling for anything to confirm your biases, but you couldn't find anything because you're wrong. Instead of being honest and admitting that you're wrong, you did what all Marxists do and made up the lamest excuse imaginable as to why you can't provide sources for your own claims. You can't even defend what you say. This is just sad dude.
Your grand rebuttal is just you saying that I'm wrong without even providing any substance, you're not able to provide sources because there's nothing that supports what you say, and you can't even elaborate on your own opinions. Yeah, I'm totally the one who doesn't listen to facts, get real.
Look, Bart just did the thing! When a Marxist is called out on their bullshit and they're clearly proven to be wrong, they can't be honest and admit they're wrong, that's would be acting in good faith and that's just against the core of the ideology. Therefore, you have to come up with any lame ass pejorative or insult to shut down the conversation without addressing anything. That way you get to feel like a pseudo intellectual without actually accepting your ignorance. Classic Marxism.
I literally provided a source lmfao
I did not, I've read the whole exchange between Nitzan and Bichler and Cockshott, he has many videos on his YouTube channel talking about LVT and empirical demonstrations, and you can go through the references of the paper I sent such as the Zacchariah multi-country study.
That would be a good point if LVT wasn't an extremely politically important point. If neoliberal economists had any sort of empirical proof showing otherwise, they'd be more than happy to share it, but there are no studies in the academia providing this. Please search them for me if you will.
As for references for why you're wrong, you can go through Albert Szymanski's "human rights in the Soviet Union", Robert B Allen's "Farm to Factory", Pat Sloan's "Soviet Democracy" or Alec Nove's "economic history of the USSR" (paraphrasing the title of the last one because I read it long ago). You can go through my comment history and find references to all of those books if you want, but I have nothing to prove to you.
I gave you a summary paper collecting references several studies on labour theory of value, that's already more evidence than you have provided. When you actually bring up sources to the conversation you may change my mind and make me do the effort, but you won't do that I bet.
You specifically said that it was empirically proven that labor is the only source of value in the economy, and the paper you provided wasn't a study with empirically evidence, but a response paper that didn't make this claim to begin with.
I'm not going to do that. That's not how providing sources work. If you want to provide a source, then you cite specific sources that support specific claims, and have to quote or point out specific parts of those sources that are relevant to the conversation. What you're doing here is just lazy, it's the equivalent of some MAGA boomer going "do your own research".
No, they wouldn't. Academia doesn't work like Lemmy. There's no team "Marxists" vs team "neoliberals" like you seem to think. Academics are not going to endlessly go back and forth arguing about politics because that's a waste of their time. They have job duties to fulfill, and they will only ever respond to a paper if it either advances their career or is a defense of their work. No serious academic will ever respond to this paper outside of the original authors because they have to defend their reputation. The lack of responses is not an indication that team Marxism won the argument. That's a debate bro mindset, not a professional academic mindset.
Yeah... no, that's not how this works. What you're doing here is just source dumping. Spamming a bunch of random article titles means absolutely nothing. It doesn't make you right or look smart, it just shows that for a way out while saving face... which is fine, if you can't handle this discussion then you're free to end it, but at least have the honesty to do so directly.
In the off chance that I'm wrong, which I highly doubt, and you actually want to provide sources then you're going to have to do what I mentioned earlier AND you also have to explain how any of these sources are relevant to the discussion, as in you have to actually explain which claims you're using the source to support or disprove. Then, and only then, can we actually start talking about credibility of your sources, the merits of their content, and how the shifts the discussion.
However, if you're not planning to do that and you're just willing to insulting shit like asking me to go look through your comment history or go through your source dump without any having any connections to this discussion, then you have nothing of value to say and this conversation is not worth continuing any further.
That's literally the whole point of this discussion. Keep in mind, you replied to me, you started this discussion. You chose to state your views. If you can't defend your claims against such mild criticism that then that means you're simply incapable of defending your beliefs.
But it doesn't support what you claimed it did...
I'm not you, name me the claims you want sourced and I will gladly provide you relevant sources.
Shelter is a necessity. A hotel isn't.
Property is a limited resource. When people scalp concert tickets they get vilified. When they do the same thing for something necessary for survival people like you defend it with "well there are pros and cons..."
But this is a fundamentally flawed analogy. Renting is not scalping. If you want to criticize specific practices like predatory leases or speculative hoarding, that is a fair and nuanced position. But claiming that renting itself is inherently exploitative ignores how markets function.
Just because something is a necessity does not mean it can be free. Food, water, electricity, heating, and medicine are all essential, yet we still pay for them. Not because we should, but because we have to. These goods and services come from complex systems that require capital, labor, infrastructure, and logistics. Every step costs money. To keep these systems running, consumers have to pay enough to cover those costs and allow for future investment. That payment can come through taxes in public systems or through private transactions in the market. Either way, the cost is real and unavoidable.
Housing is no different. Building homes is expensive. It requires land, materials, skilled labor, permits, and time. Buying a home is a major investment, and renting exists as a practical alternative. Not everyone can or wants to buy, and renting provides access to housing without the upfront burden of ownership. There's a huge luxury rental market for wealthy people, even though they have the means to buy houses. This means that there are real advantages to renting that go beyond just not being able to buy a house.
Like any market, housing is shaped by supply and demand. When supply is low and demand is high, prices rise. That is not exploitation. It is basic economics. If you want to make housing more affordable, the solution is not to vilify landlords or pretend rent is evil. The solution is to increase supply. Build more homes. Reform zoning laws. Encourage development. More housing means more competition, and more competition drives prices down. We know this formula works. We've seen it work countless times. Actually we're seeing it work right now. Take a look at Austin and how they're rental and housing prices have been dropping considerable over the years. That is how you fix the imbalance. Not by attacking the existence of rent, but by addressing the root cause of scarcity.
And yet it not very long ago it was feasible for a single income earner on minimum wage to not only be able to afford a home, but do so while supporting a family. So what has ballooned in price to make that out of reach for the vast majority of people? The land, materials, skilled labor, permits, or the house itself due to it being used as an investment?
There are many viable houses sitting vacant because the landlords would rather wait for someone that can afford the absurdly high rent than risk lowering the market value of rent for their other properties.
If the first person in line to a concert purchases every ticket then resells them for 10x the cost the solution is not "make more tickets available". The scalper will just buy them as well.
You're correct, but at the same time, buying a house was still a very expensive back then as well. It was major purchase for most people, just not to the same extant relative to today.
All of the above, but also, by far the single biggest reason why house prices have gone up is because we haven't been building enough houses to meet demand. If you look up the US housing inventory over time, you'll basically see that it has basically collapsed since the great recession to near all time lows. In the meantime, this country's population has grown quite a bit since then, we've added well over 20 million people since 2010. So there you have it, that's the root cause. If we built houses as the same rates as we have in decades past, we would be an experiencing a housing boom right now reverse the current seller's market into a buyer's market.
It's actually more nuanced than that. The majority of the houses that are vacant are either seasonal houses in states like Maine, Florida, or West Virginia or they're undergoing renovations (source). There is still a decent portion that are being held as investments, but the number of actually vacant units are smaller than a lot of people think. As for the ones that being held for investment, it's not your mom and pop landlords who are doing that, it's massive corporations like Blackrock or JP Morgan Chase who actually have the means to sit on empty properties, pay the taxes, and play long manipulative game.
If you want to make the argument that corporations should be banned or greatly limited to buying residential housing, then I agree with you. However, that is a different discussion than saying that rent is inherently bad.
Okay, so we agree that there is a problem then. It was feasible in the past and basically impossible now. If housing prices were relatively the same as they were when I was a child I wouldn't be upset about landlords, but we are in a housing crises now and something has to change.
You mean vacation homes. People who own multiple properties so that can sit vacant the majority of the year. Boo-fucking-hoo if people have to sell their vacation home to someone who actually needs a place to live.
The only thing your source says is "Some are seasonal homes, some are undergoing renovations, and others are simply being held as investments." it does not provide a number or a link. 2 houses undergoing renovations counts as "some".
That's exactly the fucking problem. Yes.
So we agree that the majority of rental properties are owned by a landlord that is making life objectively worse for people? Then we should do something about that instead of clutching pearls about the 1% of houses owned by "mom and pop landlord".
And speaking of, can we stop with the "mom and pop landlord" bullshit? I have family members who are exactly the type of people you are talking about. They own a rental property and take care of it and their renters. If suddenly they couldn't do that anymore they would be fine. The property is not their livelihood, it's an investment. They would just invest in something else. These are people that can afford multiple properties in the current market (which we already agreed is much too expensive).
Property can be affordable or be an investment, not both. I'm arguing that it should be affordable (being a basic requirement for survival and all). People using it as an investment can go invest somewhere else.
There's a reason rent seeking behavior is a derogatory term.
The source of the disagreement isn't that there isn't a problem, but what the source of the problem is and how we should go about addressing it.
Only 4.6% of the housing stock in the US are second homes (source). Even if they were all available, that's not enough to make a dent in the housing market. Not to mention that most of these homes are in states like Vermont, Maine, and West Virginia where the housing crises is not the worse because houses there are cheaper than elsewhere and the demand is lower than elsewhere.
It does provide a link to a study actually, check again.
Different source, but the number of vacant houses held by investors is around 880,000 or 63% of vacant houses in the country (source). There's no data for renovations specifically, but a portion of this figure would fall under that category.
It's a factor, but there's still not enough vacant units held by investors to meet demand. We have an actual housing shortage.
No, we don't. I agree that some landlords are slum lords and they're bad, and I also agree that a lot of corporate landlords aren't great, but landlords are like any other other service providers, there's good and bad.
This is just false. Small rental properties are defined as buildings that have 1-4 units, they make up 46% of the rental market in the US, and over 70% are own by private individuals, and around 70% are managed by the same owners (source). That's a pretty significant portion.
Speak for yourself. You can't make sweeping generalizations or conclusions off of your anecdotes. I know a few people who own duplex and triplexes, and they would literally be homeless if they did not have their tenants helping them out. You're oversimplifying things to fuel a narrative you subscribe to rather than looking at things through an objective lens.
Property can be both because there are different types of property. When it comes to housing specifically, if we want average homes to become more affordable and remove the investment aspect of them then we have to build new houses. We have to build so many new houses that not only do we fill up the inventory shortage and meet demand, but go far beyond that to the point where we turn the housing market into a buyer's market forcing sellers and developers to compete. That's how we can get a plentiful supply, that's genuinely affordable for middle class and working class people.
This term is defining certain behaviors that are unethical, harmful, and immoral. The actual concept of renting itself is fine. You're paying a fee to a get a service, there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
So when I specificly quoted the word renovations, and said it does not provide links or sources in my paragraph about renovations, did you think maybe I was talking about data for renovations?
You literally just told me to check again for data you admit doesn't exist 2 sentences later. Either you're not paying attention to what is being said, or your looking for whatever excuse you can to disagree with me in order to ignore what I'm actually saying. Either way continuing would be a waste of time.
This was your exact statement. You said the article didn't provide a link to specific numbers or the original study, so I went backed and looked, and it was linked right at the beginning. I went and looked at the study and found out that they didn't have specific info for renovations, the article just listed it as just one example for vacancies. So out of courtesy, I went out of my way to provide you a source for the info you specifically asked for.
But you're not worth any courtesy or effort. Like what the fuck is your problem? This was meant to be a lighthearted discussion, why are you acting like you got log jammed up your ass? Like holy shit do you sound like an absolutely insufferable douche. But you know what, you're absolutely right, this conversation is not worth continuing. You're not worth my time, so piss off asshole.
Incorrect. My exact statement was:
(emphasis added)
A single sentence on both sides of what you quoted provide all the context you need. If you pay any attention to the context it's clear I was referencing renovations, especially when you consider that the paragraph before I responded to the point about vacation homes, and the paragraph after I responded to the point of them being held for investments. Anyone bothering to read what I was saying instead of skimming for things to argue against would have recognized I was splitting up the specific points using clear quotes and paragraphs to differentiate which specific point I was addressing at the time.
Every accusation is a confession. I said you're not paying attention to what I'm saying, you responded with swears, cursing and personal insults. Like what the fuck is your problem?