I work in residential construction, but I make sure to tell colleagues that we are all parasites on the backs of other parasites.
I'm doing my part!
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2025
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I think it depends a lot on the specifics of the situation.
Did you buy a single family home / house that you're living in, and renting out part of to help pay your mortgage? Then it depends on the rent you charge.
If you charge market rates and you can afford to charge less than market rates, or if you hire contractors and maintenance people for the unit that are cheaper / worse than the ones you use for your own unit, then yes, you are being exploitative and hypocritical.
If, however, you treat the unit like your own and charge below market rates then no, you're not.
If you build an addition on your house, or build a laneway house or something, then it's more reasonable to charge market rates for rent because you've actually added new housing to the area, an act that in itself should help to slightly drop rents. Same thing if you buy vacant property and build rental units on it. However, if you continue charging the most you possibly can long after you've made your money back then you're back into the territory of being an exploitative hypocrite.
And if you're just in a hot market and buying up houses / condos, and renting them back to people as is, or just doing the cheapest and shittiest job you can turning them into apartments, then yes you are being a hypocrite. At that point you're just using your capital to buy up a limited quantity item and sell it back to people at exploitative rates. It would be like being stranded in the desert and buying up the remaining water and then selling it back to people for a profit. You're providing no value to society, just using past success to force people into a corner where they have to pay you for a necessity that's in limited supply.
No, it's just having basic empathy for other humans.
Not really, believing there should be affordable housing for everyone doesn't mean all housing should be affordable to anyone.
I believe there should be different levels of density of housing and pricing in different areas, and that the state should subsidise some percent of rent based on income, possibly up to 100% up to a certain cost, if you haven't had evictions on record; but I also own different properties I rent at market rate because it's commensurate to the cost of living in the area, and a lower rent would not make living there any more affordable, and would open me up to possible tenant disputes if someone who can't afford to live there were to move in.
If the cost of living went down in the area I would also adjust accordingly, as I don't believe in fleecing people and it's also generally beneficial to be in line with market value to maximise client volume.
Affordability isn't a "rent is too high" issue only. It's a "there is no place I can afford to live in that makes sense for the places I need to reach" issue too.
Cost of living is a huge factor, I have friends who work in the service industry who almost had to move completely out of the city due to the 22-23 price hike, despite local laws preventing rent from following inflation.
It's only hypocritical if you believe no housing should be market controlled, which is a non-serious opinion, to be frank.
I would make the argument that it could actually be a means to align with affordable housing (although that would likely be very difficult in this current housing market). Managing a property is a service, you have to manage vacancies, repairs, rent collection, etc.
If you don't offload this to a management company and do it all yourself it is technically feasible to make a profit from the labor of managing the property even when charging below market rate for the property (difficult to do right now, but after owning the property for a period of time definitely possible).
If you were to do this you would be directly combatting the affordable housing problem by introducing competition at a lower price (it would be a drop in the ocean, but it would be fighting for affordable housing).
Only if you're advising on how to close all the bullshit loopholes you've exploited preventing them from being used further.