this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
283 points (86.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36153 readers
668 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [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