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Rent is theft
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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Should hotels be illegal too? That’s basically renting out a room by the day. What if you cannot afford to buy a house, or only want to live somewhere temporarily? If you cannot rent any place to live, what would you do?
As with most things, it is a matter of degree.
If they're monopolizing the housing market, absolutely.
There are 16M vacant homes to distribute among around 770k homeless people. With such an enormous housing surplus, why is the clearing price for a housing unit so far above a new prospective buyer's budget?
You posit that people can't afford to buy homes without asking why homes are unaffordable.
Investors accounted for 25.7% of residential home sales in 2024.
I merely pointed out that not all ‘rent is bad’, ‘landlords are evil’.
Among probably many reasons that housing is unaffordable for many is that some persons or corporations are awful scumbags that want to maximize their profit beyond what is reasonable or fair.
Renting isn’t bad. Capitalism isn’t bad. Abuse of these things is bad.
Abuse of these things is a core feature of capitalism. How can you contradict yourself so quickly?
The world is not black and white. I don’t accept the validity of your claim.
Shelter is a fundamental human need, locking it behind an unnecessarily high and ever increasing pay wall is the epitome of abuse. Landlords are leeches.
Yes it is. But you and I both said it. It is abuse of capitalism.
I would support some idea that corporations cannot own property like single homes solely for the purpose of profit. And any single person should be heavily taxed on rental income, at least beyond a certain point.
And let’s use eminent domain to take back those empty houses and put people in them.
But there’s still lots of people who would prefer to rent than own.
The problem is not landlords. And the problem is not capitalism. The problem is unfettered greed. Greed is not good, despite what Michael Douglas said in that movie.
You gotta look at the nuance here. Yes, high and ever increasing rent is bad and it's because of the abuse and poor regulation of the system. And traditional lords of the land is pretty bad however you slice it. But small landlords now can be providing a needed service. It's a lot of work keeping a house rentable - even if you are 'just' organizing contractors, accountants, lawyers, etc.
The world is not black and white. But still you will 100% keep your claim. Again. Contradict yourself in two sentences.
Capitalism is most definitely bad tho, like come on.
Well, it's a way to incentivize people to use their resources to provide services for others. It would be nice if people just did that on their own, but humans are generally too lazy.
Citation needed.
This is not capitalism, this is a market based system, which can happen to exist outside of capitalism.
Capitalism is is the ownership of value by capital ( property of shares, housing etc.. gives you benefits because you own them, not because you provided value).
In terms of housing, if one uses their resources to build a house for others to use, they need to retain ownership of that house in order to realize any return on their investment and maintain their ongoing providing of the housing service.
In almost all cases, the owner does not build the house. Thats done by the masons, electricians, plumbers etc ... So the owner did not create value
The owner organizes and pays the contractors do do the work. The owner buys materials. The owner makes it all happen, puts their money down. Without the owner being able to have the incentive to do all that, it doesn't happen.
Almost there. So the "value" provided by the owner is money. It is capital. Which is needed purely because of the system in place, that was the whole point all along.
Yes, they provide money (or some form of resource). And somebody/something has to provide that if the person who's going to live there can't. The capitalist system encourages people to do that. Otherwise the government has to. And governments generally are too big to do a good job (the people making the decisions don't care about the details, it becomes very inefficient). When people use their own money to try to make money, they tend to work out the most efficient way to do so. Of course, we need regulations so that the efficiency that the capitalist system brings benifits the goal of affordable, quality housing.