this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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Reason I'm asking is because I have an aunt that owns like maybe 3 - 5 (not sure the exact amount) small townhouses around the city (well, when I say "city" think of like the areas around a city where theres no tall buildings, but only small 2-3 stories single family homes in the neighborhood) and have these houses up for rent, and honestly, my aunt and her husband doesn't seem like a terrible people. They still work a normal job, and have to pay taxes like everyone else have to. They still have their own debts to pay. I'm not sure exactly how, but my parents say they did a combination of saving up money and taking loans from banks to be able to buy these properties, fix them, then put them up for rent. They don't overcharge, and usually charge slightly below the market to retain tenants, and fix things (or hire people to fix things) when their tenants request them.

I mean, they are just trying to survive in this capitalistic world. They wanna save up for retirement, and fund their kids to college, and leave something for their kids, so they have less of stress in life. I don't see them as bad people. I mean, its not like they own multiple apartment buildings, or doing excessive wealth hoarding.

Do leftists mean people like my aunt too? Or are they an exception to the "landlords are bad" sentinment?

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Who is allowed to rent to the people who don’t want to buy?

Should the city own property just for that and run it as a non-profit?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The community should have ownership of whatever rentals are necessary and it should be not for profit.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How is "the community" defined and how is this ownership managed?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

No sheet.

Ok, so you want all housing to be publicly owned? That would be interesting...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If you're aware of public and social housing then why are you asking how community ownership and management works?

In any case, yes, of course all rental housing should be publicly owned. Vienna's Gemeindebauten and Singapore's HDB, among others, have proven that pretty definitively.

I'm not certain that all housing should be public, though. Privately owned primary residences are probably fine, in the grand scheme of things. But rental housing for profit should obviously be abolished.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

First up, so it's clear, I actually agree with you. But I also don't think this is an easy thing.

If you’re aware of public and social housing then why are you asking how community ownership and management works?

Because there is a hiccup in your logic as far as I can discern it.

On the one hand you say: "of course all rental housing should be publicly owned."

And on the other, "I’m not certain that all housing should be public"

So how does that work?

  1. How does the housing become public? That's trillions of dollars worth of property. I actually got the figure of US$7 quadrillion but I don't believe it. What's more, 70% of the 19.3 million rental properties in the US are owned by individual investors, meaning you'd have to either confiscate or buy from millions of individuals. I mean, it wouldn't make sense to just build all this housing if it's already there. Maybe a combination? But where on earth does that money come from? And how do you convince people invested in a $1.4 trillion market to give up that income?
  2. So let's say somehow #1 happens over some period of time. How then do you meet ongoing demand? I get what your saying - there are examples of this working (for some values of "work") on a small scale but over the entire rental market?
  3. If the public via governments has paid for all this housing at current prices, how do we then ensure rents are low? Over time yes, we can forgo all but the bare minimum rent increases to match inflation, but initially we have to foot the bill somehow. Because presumably that money has to be borrowed and we have to pay interest on it on top of ongoing maintenance, etc - there are real costs involved.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

This is just a long-winded way to ask “how do we pay for it?” The answer is taxes. That’s always the answer.

Let’s call it 10 trillion total: 20m rental properties x 500k average home price. If we allocated half the annual military budget—400bn—to buying private rentals and making them social housing, it would take 25 years to get through the whole market.

The financial scale of the solution is not so large as to be insurmountable. The US government’s priorities simply lie elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Well yeah, taxes. But...

The US government’s priorities simply lie elsewhere.

No, the American people's priorities. And until that changes, we're dead in the water

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Yes. The ability to have a place to live should be a basic human right and therefore be affordable.

If that means the government* subsidises it for the low income families (as in owns them and rents them at below market value), so be it.

We used to have “council houses” in the UK for exactly this purpose, but in the 70s, Thatcher came up with a “right to buy” (at a decent discount) and then made two mistakes - there were no restrictions after buying to stop you selling to anyone else, and there was no building of replacement stock after they were sold. So the result 50 years later is that there are nowhere near enough council houses any more, and a lot of the old ones are privately owned and being rented out at market rates, which are (depending on the area) very expensive.

*local or national, I don’t really care which

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Those definitely weren't mistakes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Hah. I meant socially, not that it happened by accident!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If that means the government* subsidises it for the low income families (as in owns them and rents them at below market value), so be it.

Not everybody who doesn't want to buy is low income. I'm too lazy / risk averse to maintain everything myself, so I happily pay my landlord a reasonable premium to bear the risk of shit burning down (or breaking in less dramatic ways) for me. I also like that I would be able to pack up and move without worrying about selling my old place. I might change my mind later on, but right now I'm good.

Why should governments subsidize the lifestyle choice I'm consciously making?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

To be clear, I wasn’t trying to say ALL rental housing should be subsidised, just that there should be a healthy supply available for local councils to make available to people who need it based on whatever criteria they set for that.

Even when I was renting, I’d earn too much to qualify. People with young children would take priory over single people. That sort of thing.

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s better than companies gaming the system to maximise profits at the expense of the most vulnerable.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yes, that's ideal. In Germany (where there is a culture much more oriented towards renting than owning) there are a lot of state run landlords and they are great to rent from, reasonable rents, reasonable to deal with (in the local context), etc. And of course they have good laws to protect tenants to back it up. Not necessarily a perfect system but definitely one the rest of the world can learn from. Unfortunately things are still heading in the wrong direction there too right now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's not true in any big city. While the laws keep the landlord madness limited, real estate and rent prices are out of control because of speculation, and there are tons of horror stories to go around - and by experience, I would say they are even more common with individual landlords than with large companies, at least large companies don't usually do anything obviously illegal and have less venues to make their tenants homeless.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yes, I'm talking about the state owned companies versus both private companies and individual landlords, rents with the state owned ones are like 20% or more lower than the others and they are usually more responsive to fixing problems, don't play too many games

But I totally agree rents are way out of control the last few years

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

For houses? Essentially no one, houses should not be for rent. Apartments in my mind are fine to rent because you can build a fuckton of apartments on a small amount of land. But there can still be a problem if there aren't enough apartments available to buy.