this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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I don't get it.. if someone works and invests in a property, they pay a significant amount of money to have and maintain that property. If someone can only afford to rent for a short term period of time, what then? Is the next step that the person spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a house supposed to just hand it over without selling it to a tenant? What is the alternative?
Put a limit on how many single family homes anyone can own. Especially corporations. They should honestly be banned from owning these homes at all. The housing market will adjust naturally without all these shitty big companies scooping up homes and making them inaccessible to buyers.
Individuals should also be limited on how many homes they can own if anything to prevent corporations from exploiting loopholes and having individual people "own" them instead. But also because it's just morally wrong to hoard property in the first place. I pay more in rent than I would on a mortgage but I can't afford the down payment for the very few homes that are even available within a reasonable distance from my job. Even if I could so many companies smatch them up over the asking price so people don't have a chance.
People like me that could financially afford the payments on their own homes are blocked by bullshit that was created solely to keep them perpetually renting. It's wrong. I shouldn't have to move to a whole new state or two hours away from my job because the same big company has bought up every house here. Not to mention a bunch of them recently got busted for illegally controlling the rent prices across multiple companies/properties using some kind of third party algorithm.
I don't think anyone should have to give up their property for free but if we're paying someone else's mortgage we should be getting more than a roof over our head.
As someone who was brokering mortgages during the housing boom this is exactly what happened. Landlords were usually just 1 or 2 extra properties, the odd person owned an apartment block, but it was all in personal names.
Once the corporations game started is when prices went nuts and havent stopped. Stop the corporations from owning rentals and this will all be solved. Personal liability is about 20 properties as far as the banks are willing to lend someone, corporations are unlimited if the numbers check out , which when you control and manipulate pricing, it always will.
If you limited house (single family residence) ownership to something like individuals, sole proprietorship, or partnerships, it would also remove liability protections which come with corporate structure, so it might make owning a large number of properties less attractive. That would be a good thing. But what would really drive housing prices down would be if houses were a public good.
HOUSES SHOULD NOT BE INVESTMENTS. They are an essential need and we have many people with no homes.
The alternative is stop treating them like investments. An owner should live in the house for some reasonable portion of the year. Crucially, this means corporations wouldn't be able to purchase homes. If you do that, housing prices would stabilize to much more reasonable, attainable levels.
If people weren't allowed to own property in absentia, then real estate prices would stabilise at a much lower level. As it is, this arrangement allows speculation which creates an unlimited market size. Some of the highest priced real estate in the world sits entirely empty for exactly this reason.
Without that the only people trying to buy housing would be residents, and at the point where everybody would be housed, housing prices would presumably be extremely low.
As for temporary, emergency or other unusual housing arrangements, non-profit organisations or cooperative systems could exist, and without property prices to protect everyone could be housed.
And because someone will always bring this up: going on holiday doesn't mean you're not using your house. Most of your shit is still in there. That's a facile argument that vanishes the moment you give it even the most cursory critical thought.
That said, this entire thing is unlikely to change in a world where the wealthy decide our policy. Landlording will probably be with us until we can find a way to abolish the market form entirely.
This is just childish mimicry of Marxism. The "landlord" as a source of income becomes a villain because the landlords as a class were villains in the eyes of Marx.
That said, people who full-on hate all landlords would say "fuck you and your money you filthy capitalist pigs" to your argument. That the house is hundreds of thousands of dollars doesn't mean much to a communist because "property is theft". Yada yada.
That said, the fact of that seems to bury the real criticisms about megacorporate landlords that represent a fairly large percent of all rental properties.
It is an investment, not a job. All investments generally exploit others (by "stealing" surplus value). Stuff like maintenance and even management of properties are jobs, but they don't require ownership of the property (in which case, some of the value of their labor is being stolen, assuming the landlord is making a profit/building equity in excess of rent).
Alternatives could be public housing, some type of housing cooperatives where tenants build equity which can be redeemed when they move, and probably many other systems I am unaware of.
most of my investments dont require me to fix a sink. or find someone to repair a leak that sprung in my cds.
"Stuff like maintenance and even management of properties are jobs, but they don’t require ownership of the property." You can hire a person or company to take care of everything; there's a whole industry around it.
yea sure i suppose if we move the goal posts it does fit.
From what I have seen, having a property is a lot like having a physical body. It must be groomed, fed, watered, tended to, mended, etc. It ages, parts wear down, it starts to make creaking noises. And what's more, you have a limited time with that body. Eventually it dies. As to your question, it's getting to the point where the only thing capable of taking care of a property is a corporation, and unlike people, corporations don't die.