A Boring Dystopia

What do families do, that only want or need to live in a place or area for like a year or so? Buy a house, pay thousands in closing costs and inspections, lose several thousand to realtors, and then have to go through the trouble of trying to sell the place a year later?

We very much need landlords. What's screwing everything up is corpos doing it as a business or individuals with like 20 homes instead of one or two. Renting a house is a viable need for some people and it would actually suck if it was an option that didn't exist at all.

Rental income is considered income, and taxed assuming reasonable tax brackets much higher than investment income (That is to say, caiptal-gains. Interest/Dividends are also taxed at the higher income rate)

The cost of maintaining a livable home, property taxes, insurance, property depreciation, and renter interactions eat into the supposed windfall that landlords make.

I'm not saying it doesn't suck sometimes and that certainly these formulas are out of whack in some situations, but there are no easy answers.

Set some limits. Each person can own one primary residence and x number of secondary dwellings. Each additional dwelling is taxed at a higher rate than the one before.

People can still buy themselves a house and maybe another couple houses or condos for their family or investment.

But big landlords can't profitably buy up neighborhoods then crank up the rent. Or perhaps they can own them, but they're required to be non-profits and expenses and rents are highly controlled relative to income in the area.

It's a tough problem to solve though... Huge apartment buildings do have economies of scale that permit high density living.

And property owners who don't sell or develop their land at all because there's not enough incentive are a big problem in other parts of the world.

I would argue that a live-in landlord that does maintenance work or acts as a building super is in fact doing a job.

Otherwise, agreed.

I am a landlord and also have a full time job. I also spend my time fixing my units.

With the maintenance cost and taxes, I'm actually losing money or breaking even depending on the year.

My tenants are living in a house that they wouldn't be able to afford on their own in today's market. Being able to live near their work.

So why am I the bad guy?

Folks, there's a difference between a slumlord and a decent landlord. I've owned a house for ten years now, and in addition to the mortgage and taxes and insurance I pay every month for the privelege, I've had to spend tens of thousands replacing the roof and doing other regular maintenance tasks. I'm actually about to dump thirty percent of the original purchase price into more deferred repairs and maintenance to get it back to a point where all the finished space is habitable again. Owning a house is expensive in ways that I did not fully understand until I bought mine, and decent property managers are taking care of all that for you, and if that's not a job I honestly don't know what is.

Slumlords and corporate landlords can fuck right the hell off, though.

My boyfriend and I have discussed moving out of his parents' house for many years now. We discussed renting, but then I realized it was just cheaper to buy a house in a small town. We wouldn't even be able to afford to rent in the larger town over that's closer to his job and a friend of ours told us about how a ghost company bought out her old place, raised the rent another two hundered dollars when they were already struggling to get by, and didn't even tell people about it until two weeks before the new year. My friends were able to move out when they did only because of rumors floating around.

My mother and I were forced to live in an apartment after we moved when I was a teenager, but the only reason we got in was because the older guy who owned them knew my mom's dad and used to go hunting with them when they were young. He was kind enough to cut us a deal. That's literally the ONLY reason we didn't end up on the streets. Her sibling said we could live at their place until my mother found a job, but about two weeks later kicked us out because "my husband and I have sex every Saturday and we just can't do that anymore because your son is in the house."

I knew what sex was, I was old enough to understand, and I told my mom that we could just leave the house for a while every Saturday. It really wasn't an issue. But no, the person who convinced my mother to move multiple states away from where we used to and convinced my mom that the job market was absolutely booming (it was absolutely NOT) basically told us to fuck off.

Now that we lived in an apartment in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, my mom jobless and sending applications to any place around us to no avail, we were fucking stuck.

The apartment had many issues and the man and woman who helped the older man run the apartment were hillbilly rigging everything that broke so it just broke again. Over and over.

Eventually, and sadly, the owner of the apartments passed away (the guy actually built the apartments himself with the help of his son) and his son wanted nothing with the place. It took a good year for the apartments to sell to someone else. I went to school with her son and she was kind enough to not raise rent, but eventually she sold them off, too.

It was too much work for her husband and herself and her youngest graduated with me, so she sold the apartments to some jackass in Tennessee.

The rent doubled. There was fucking NOTHING we could do about it. The guy who bought them was hours away from us and had his underlings hire cheap labor to start ripping everything apart.

The people who lived in these apartments weren't rich or had a lot of money. Many were elderly and had nowhere to go, yet they had to leave. My mother was one of them. I helped her move with my boyfriend and we found her a place, but holy fuck, apartments suck. Landlords especially.

Some rich fuck who has no idea what the local economy is like, buys some apartments for cheap, then thinks it is a good investment.

My boyfriend and I are doing our best to currently find a place, but not everyone can buy an entire house to live in. Not everyone has a good enough credit score or people to help them when they are in need.

I've seen a few people talk in the comments about how they own apartments and rent them and are "one of the good ones", and sure, some landlords will work with people. I've witnessed it myself, but only out of luck as stated above. The vast majority of landlords are jackasses who only want to line their pockets with money, and even if it isn't a specific landlord, some scam company can easily buy the apartments and fuck everyone over.

Being a landlord isn't a job. Taking money from vulnerable people isn't a job. If you go out of your way to work on the apartments you own, good for you I guess. Congrats. Woo. But you still chose to own apartments or rent out a house. You CHOSE to line your pockets with money from people who are desperate to have shelter, but not everyone has a choice in deciding to rent.

Threads like this really stress me out. I live in the US, and I've always wanted to rent long-term. I've obviously also always wanted a less broken system. If renting was the cheaper option and there were more legal protections for tenants, I think being an independent landlord of a very small number of properties can be well-done. We need to fix a lot before this ever becomes viable, and the stranglehold corps are gaining on the housing market is a fucking crime against humanity. Those fucks are parasites.

I think the real problem isn't landlording, exactly, but the capitalists we've propped up along the way :3

I collect rent from a roommate. The unemployment office doesn’t consider it income so it doesn’t impact my unemployment payout.

The government doesn’t even consider landlord income to be employment income.

Housing as an investment should not exist as a concept. Housing is to provide shelter and comfort, not generate wealth.

Being a good landlord can be a job, depending on the home and the needs of the tenants and whether or not they're able so whatever work is needed for the place.

The problem is most just want the returns of an investment without the risks of such, and without ever putting any further "investment" into the property after purchase.

You'd have to get rid of the concept of private property and that isn't going anywhere. Same with landlords.

You're not going to vote this out of the system.

Got a lot of angry landlords in these comments. Oops.

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?

Be a landlord

Pay a cleaning crew to handle the janitorial services.

Pay a contractor to handle repairs.

Pay a management company to handle the day-to-day activities.

Complain that I'm not making enough money on the property.

Raise the rent to the market-clearing price.

Demand the municipal government lower my taxes, because its the only way to incentivize me to buy more property.