Had an old landlord keep my deposit when I moved out just because they could. We left the apartment absolutely spotless and never damaged anything. In fact, we added value by fixing a couple small things. Didn’t matter.
Fuck landlords.
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Double property taxes on owners, but give back a property tax credit on owner-occupants, so that the effective tax rate on owner occupants falls, and the only people paying the doubled tax rate are investors.
Statutorily increase the tax rate and credit when owner occupancy is below 80%, and reduce the tax rate and credit when owner occupancy rises above 90%.
Wouldn't landlords simply pass those costs onto their renters?
Introduce rent control
Yes, and no. They are more likely to switch to a different strategy, such as a private mortgage or land contract. Large apartment complexes will likely convert to condominiums or co-ops.
Basically, if we raise the rate and credit high enough, the landlord will be able to get a better return with one of these other options than they could get from renting.
All of these other options are permanent agreements, with terms established from the start. The landlord can't arbitrarily raise rent every year. The tenant gains equity from day one.
Basically, I'm killing the concept of renting. It needs to die in a goddamn fire.
Yeah, you're not going to tax parasites off the host. We need regulations limiting corporate ownership of residential property.
Defense in depth. One's a more difficult target and it'd be foolish to abandon a near term improvement because we want a better option 10 years down the road. Do both.
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I think it should be a sliding scale.
Standard property tax on owner occupied home.
Landlord tax on additional home/unit. (Like vacation home).
Additional fee for vacant home/unit. Serious one like 20-50% market rate of unit per month vacant. This helps with company owned units and foreign bodies buying up real estate and hoarding it.
Additional fee/tax per extra unit owned. DISMANTLE REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT FIRMS. This would cause them to sell off homes.
Use proceeds of these taxes and fees explicitly for rental assistance/home buying programs.
For starters, massively increase taxation on every property over PPR, and ban corporate ownership of standalone housing.
Brilliant, love it. Anything to discourage housing hoarders will be a benefit to society.
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Being a landlord is supposed to be a job though. They're supposed to maintain the property and handle property related disputes between the tenant and the community. The problem is landlords aren't held to their obligations and are allowed to treat it as a passive investment. Liability for landlords and their property managers needs to be increased. Require a licence for landlording that can be revoked.
Treat it like a business. Licensing, revocation, banning, gaol time
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I have to agree with those others who suggest that banning landlords is not the way to go.
However, the power dynamics should be significantly shifted. And if those shifts mean some landlords decide to exit the market? So be it.
- Tenants should not be able to be evicted for any reason other than: damaging the property, being significantly (maybe 6 months?) behind on rent, the owner or an immediate family member wants to move in, significant renovations are needed (with strong enforcement to ensure these last two are actually done, and not used as a fake excuse). No ability to use evictions as a reprisal for complaining about the conditions.
- Tenants should be entitled to treat the place basically as their own. That means any minor reversible modification should be permitted, including painting and hanging up photos.
- No restrictions on pets other than those which would normally come with local ordinances and animal welfare laws.
- Rental inspections every 3 months is absurd. Maybe the first after 3 months, then 6 months, then annually after that at best.
- Strict rules about landlords being required to maintain the property to a comfortable condition. Harsh penalties if they fail to do so, as well as the ability for the tenant to get the work done themselves and make the landlord pay for it, if the landlord does not get it done in a reasonable time.
And tangentially, to prevent property owners just leaving their homes without a long-term tenant: significantly increased rates/taxes for homes that are unoccupied long-term, or which are used for short-term accommodation (e.g. Airbnb). Additionally, state-owned housing with highly affordable pricing should make up a substantial portion of the market, on the order of 30%. This provides a pretty hard floor below which privately-owned housing cannot fall, because people should be reasonably able to say "this place isn't good enough, I'll move".
If a property owner is willing to deal with the fact that a home's first and foremost purpose should be to provide a safe and secure place for a person to live, then I have no problem with them profiting.
the owner or an immediate family member wants to move in
Abso-fucking-lutely not. A lease is a contract. You don’t get to shove someone out into being homeless because Cousin Lou needs a place to stay. Either rent/sell the property, or keep it for personal use. Not both.
Where i live if the owner needs the space for immediate family use, they must give three months written notice to the tenant.
Additionally the property cannot be legally rented again for three months after the tenant has moved out.
Oh, and the tenant doesn't have to pay rent for the last of those three months. And if they move out before the end of the three months, the landlord must pay the tenant an amount equalling the rent. So if you move out after 1.5months from the notice, the landlord must pay you 1.5 months rent.
And our tenancy board, usually finds in favor of the tenants in disputes.
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While I hate the current state of affairs around housing, some people do lose the plot and forget that some people prefer/need to rent and that rent cant just be the mortgage payment because they're on the hook for repairs, not you.
Landlords aren't inherently the problem, they're a symptom of ALL property owners completely shutting down new development for over 50 years.
I agree with these ideas but we also need to fund development of new housing, and if anyone wants to complain instead of shutting it down extend an offer to buy their house so they can leave.
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So owning a fleet of rental cars is being a social parasite and not a job?
"Owning things" is not a job, correct. Making a living owning property is not a service to society.
Doing the labour to repair property is a service. Doing the filing to keep records of usage and repair is a service. Taking a cut because your name is on a deed? That's just stealing from the people who did the work.
If you hoarding a fleet of rental cars damages people's ability to get a regular car then I'd argue yes
yes
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Wait so is... uhhh how? Like you're literally not allowed to live somewhere unless you own it?? What about short term rentals and vacations? Or is the idea that we live in some kinda socialist utopia where homes are just idk assigned to people via lottery?
There are plenty of mechanisms that can be employed (as there already are in many countries) to ensure profit is not made from essential living. You either own or have strict rent control which tends to mean many properties are publicly owned. Recreational stay is different, it is part of a hospitality industry which provides an additional service on top of what fundamental housing provides.
Hotels exist for a reason, and they involve actual labour and upkeep
In theory the same is true for a landlord who is expected to maintain the homes they are renting out.
The thought that homes don’t require upkeep is insane. I’ve lived in my home for just five years and have spent tens of thousands in just maintenance alone.
Yes, but you don't pay a landlord and a cleaner and a plumber the same, why?
Because they derive value not from their labour but from supply and demand, thus those who own assets derive value primarily from the rarity of such assets. This pressure for increasing rarity is why capitalism is a failure where the overall trend is downward, where the few hoard assets they get off other assets, and the masses who trade in their labour have that labour become increasingly less and less valuable.
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So is someone supposed to rent a hotel room for 3 years when they move away from their home town to go to college?
No, all housing should be publicly owned to prevent landlordism and accumulation of capital, so where you will be moving from and moving to will all be owned socially regardless, the way you pick which housing you will use as your personal property for that period of time or any period of time does not have to change at all from how it is now: a website.
That's the ideal. For the time being, we should have more social housing and levy massive taxes on landlords, forcing them to either sell and turn that to social housing, taking it off the "market" permanently or pay enormous taxes that: 1) Fund socialized housing, 2) Make purchasing properties as investments unprofitable and 3) Fund building more (alongside nationalizing construction).
I used the words "socialize", "nationalized" and "publicly owned" interchangeably here. The answers differ on who you ask, but the above is what we should be doing, IMO.
So who builds the houses when an area expands? And how do you assign nicer houses in nicer areas to people?
- Fund building more (alongside nationalizing construction).
Fancy houses will still cost money as long as money exists, after communism it would likely be lottery or waitlists. The 8 bedroom with a coastal city view is probably turned into a short term vacation spot rather than a personal residence.
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Believe it or not, yes, this is what people used to do before the early 1900s
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The idea would be that you don't get to own somebody else's home. Why on earth do you equate that with not getting to exist somewhere on vacation?
Instead of looking for gotchas, why not imagine how that would work without someone at the top demanding a passive income?
Okay, I'll bite. I own a house. Now suppose I buy another house. It's empty. It's not someone else's home. Under the proposed rule ("you don’t get to own somebody else’s home"), I can't rent the house-shaped building to someone as a residence. So now instead, I'm turning the second house into a pig farm and hiring laborers to raise and slaughter pigs on it, because the state insists that I have to put the land to work. [That's what property tax is.]
I'm still profiting off of someone else's labor, the would-be tenant is homeless, and I'm destroying a neighborhood. Somehow this doesn't seem like a win to me--for anyone.
I am strongly in favor of protections for tenants: no one should be constructively evicted, rents should be controlled everywhere, and price-fixing by landlord cartels should result in prison sentences. BUT rental residences arise as a natural consequence of the freedom to contract. The solution to slumlords who fund entire generations of descendents by lucking into a valuable tower at the turn of the century is not "getting rid of landlords." It's just tax.
Full disclosure: I'm not a landlord, but I've both rented and am fortunate enough to own my own home now. I have also litigated both sides of evictions. I've seen bad landlords put the screws to impoverished tenants, and I've also seen spiteful tenants utterly destroy properties with essentially no recourse. This is not a problem you solve with magical thinking.
I'd imagine zoning would restrict this scenario in many cases.
Yeah, you'd think.
"Many" is the operative word there. It's not all--not by a manure-covered mile. If you ever want to do a deep dive down a fun legislative rabbit-hole, dig into right-to-farm law, agricultural zoning, and the history of nuisance litigation. I might not be able to put a hog farm next to a tenement building downtown in a major metropolitan (or I might be surprised to find that, in fact, I can, if I'm willing to pony up for the land), but there are plenty of places where I could.
In any event, the example is ultimately hypothetical. The point is that trying to exterminate landlords can have disastrous knock-on effects, foreseen or otherwise.
Rant warning (that's the end of the response; the rest is just venting about inequality).
It's no accident that the American Dream is about owning land. Land ownership is central to our national identity, born as we are out of generations of homesteaders, tenant-farmers, explorers, slaves, and frontiersmen who rightly made no distinction between the tyranny of the plantation and that of the feudal lord (and that of the modern slumlord). Everyone wants land, and who can blame them? For a hundred-thousand years, owning land has been the best, most reliable route to prosperity and, ultimately, generational wealth.
The problem isn't that landlords exist. It's that landlords are rich. And notably, it's absolutely not all of them. I don't really have any beef with a professional who does well, retires, and buys a little summer house he rents out to vacationers eight months out of the year. The fact that it's a profitable undertaking doesn't really unravel the social fabric, since the profit motive is the only reason vacation homes exist for people (like me) who want them and have yet to save up enough to buy one outright.
Ultimately the problem is, as always, wealth disparity. A vacation home isn't a big deal. A monopoly on an entire vacation community, however, is a different matter, because with it comes price fixing, capture of the local government, corruption, abuse, and all the worst consequences of gentrification--you know, capitalism. And again, it's a problem you solve by taxing hoards of wealth, whether they're in any individual's pocket or hidden in a corporate offshore vault or securities labyrinth. It's a problem we already solved a generation or two ago: Accumulate more wealth, pay more taxes, and continue to pay progressively more taxes until the profit motive is completely overshadowed by the societal benefit (via tax) of the new wealth generated. If you own a building in midtown Manhattan, you should get to pocket only the tiniest fraction of the rents it brings in. Not profitable enough? Then sell it. Plenty of the rest of us will stand in line to take it off your hands. Your corporation that hoovers up neighborhoods all over the country is suddenly in the red because a society-serving tax regime punishes you for said hoovering? Guess you better sell off some homes and watch the market correct itself.
All of that is to say that landlords serve an important function in an ordered society--providing the temporary use of otherwise unused land to persons who have not yet accumulated enough wealth to own their own land outright. We should not aspire to do away with that function, but rather simply to tax rent-seeking at a level that serves the society at large. It should be profitable to own a vacation home. It should never be profitable to own six.
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State-owned housing, or housing cooperatives.
Even in a Socialist system, it would not be "utopia" or other such idealistic nonsense. It would be similar to current housing markets, just without a profit motive and thus a desire to satisfy needs over gaining income. Much lower rent costs (maintenance and building new housing), but you still apply for housing based on availability.
Even without going full 'free housing for everyone' utopia, it would be nice if the rent students currently pay to landlords was recoverable when the space is no longer needed. The same way people paying mortgages can just sell their house even before it is fully paid off. We wouldn't need to drastically reshape society in order to allow people to invest in their own futures rather than shovelling most of what they have into a landlord's pocket.
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These things are tiring because renting a place is a job and has expenses. I have had some good landlords. Like these two sisters that owned a four flat and lived in the building themselves. Like any job though it can be done poorly. Like this other guy who owned several flats including the 6 flat I was in and did not live there but did live in the area. And then I had an accountant who owned an apartement complex and was great but in another corp owned complex it was aweful. The better ones had folks who were mostly trying not to lose money and were more concerned with having good tenants. The bad ones looked to maximize profits to the detriment of everything else.
I live in a housing org that has a relatively flat structure and there's no CEO at the top. Individual locations (often a whole block, not just one apartment) elect their own representatives and build their own rules. The central administration, the absolute top level, is a mere 2 hops away from the tenants and you can email them directly. It's not perfect, and is still subject to capitalist issues like land value being inflated, but I feel like it's alright given what we're working with.
landlords should get a real job.
Jesus fuck the amount of limp noodles here. You're so dominated by the owner class that even your dreams are subservient.
People need temporary housing sometimes, yes that is true. I am not sure what sort of cosmic fucking roller coaster you get on in order to go from that to privatisation of land is good actually.
I swear there's something about posting memes in leftymemes that triggers the libs, and they come here to vomit their bootlickin' takes.
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"I am the landlord, I speak for the land:
Just put your tips in the palm of my hand.
What's that? "No tipping," I hear you all bleat?
Then I'll jack up the rent and put you out on the street!"
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