Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I think such questions are hard to answer in general. I would say a person living in one (small to normal sized) flat and owning + renting another isn't worse than one person 'occupying' just one but bigger livingspace. If an old lady lives alone in a big house where there are sufficient rooms for 6 people+ she's taking away as much property from the market as the small-scale landlord. Sure that's not optimal for society but I also wouldn't necessarily consider that unethical.
If there is a housing crisis in an area, one can argue that short time rentals are evil but also short term rentals are important to some extent. If everything becomes an AirBnb that's obviously bad but I think there's also a healthy amount of that. If a city or region has a lot of tourists or business travellers, they need to live somewhere and traditional hotels don't work for everyone.
From my perspective, there must be a healthy balance of personal livingspaces to buy, for long term rent, for short term rent and commercial buildings. Regulating that healthy ratio should be a task for politicians. Unfortunately, I have to admit that government regulation is not exactly working fine in most parts of the world.
With our european housing market, that old lady or man might not even be able to move to a smaller size, even if they wanted to. Or, they might have a ton of kids and grand kids sleep overs, or kids that need to move back (happens a lot in our country) because they cannot find a place to live, so i generally try to be careful not to assume things when i don't know details. It's something that is basically the fault of our politicians, who could see this problem coming decades ago, but decided not to act. It's not always the fault of people that are stuck in a house that became too big and can't move because there just is no smaller appartment available, but the people who voted for politicians who let buildings be bought up by greedy investors. Edit to clarify my agreeing with your points