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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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Does this still apply to the apartment building I once lived in which was built and run by an immigrant family as a long term family investment, and they charged a really reasonable price?
Just curious.
What are they expecting for a long term family investment?
OG family members die then children who see $800 a month and the expense of keeping things fixed change it to $2400?
Is it reasonable based on market or reasonable based on what people can earn in the local area?
Are they abiding by landlord tenant laws?
Are they under the tabling things?
Lastly how much impact are they having on the larger market?
This is a nuanced issue. We shape policy on the abusers in the market, then we curb financialization and big businesses out of the market, and lastly we strongly protect the people who could be homeless. Lastly if this family survives all the policy, lowering of future returns on investment, and being a law abiding reasonable landlord. Then they are cool.
Being a business leader/owner shouldn't automatically put you above others so you can abuse others it should be a job in which you provide a service that can be competed against and shouldn't lead to suffering. If the job you do leads to suffering of others at the profit of your self then it needs to be a subsidized or at service provided by the government or going back to pre 1970s a non for profit business. Although I don't trust those right now because of our oligarchs abuse of systems.
I'm trying to point out that "landlords are evil" is a stupid stance because how and why you do things matters. Everything counts in large amounts, and I have had good landlords before. Tenants who have never done their own property maintenance rarely understand what goes into property maintenance.
The personal demeanor or intention of a landlord doesn't change the nature of the arrangement. The nature of the arrangement is one where the landlord makes money that they're not working for, and the tenant must give up money that they did work for in exchange.
If a landlord makes a profit from owning a property after all is said and done, the amount of property maintenance is irrelevant. No landlords would exist at all if there wasn't profit to be made from charging rent, they aren't gonna do it for charity.
it doesn't do that. most business owners and home owners are not above others nor do they cause other people suffering.
some people are abusive and exploitative, yes. that is regardless of their financial status.
And who judges all of this? I work in medical trials. Is my job causing other people to suffer because we have them go on experimental treatments that might not improve their chances of beating a disease? is my job evil or something because it's not feeding the homeless? according to some of my ex girlfriends, my job was causing them suffering because I wasn't making enough money to buy them expensive things like Audis and go on trips to Bali ... are they right? They also got very angry when I suggest that they if we lived together we should split costs, even when they made more money than I did, and their reasoning was that because I'm male and I'm advantaged in life therefore I should be giving them my money and I should be doing everything I can to make more money, and give to them because they deserve it more than I do.
Yes, this is Lemmy.
immigrants are wonderful and perfect but only if they are struggling and oppressed.
until they own homes. then they are evil oppressors who are destroying society with their greed.
immigrants should just learn place and forever rent and be miserable and poor so they can joint the glorious proletariat revolution! not be evil greedy capitalists who want to provide for their kids!
Immigrants can buy a home and live in it. There's nothing exploitative about that.
If a person, regardless of their background, buys a property and makes profit off of charging rent for that property, the profit is extracted from the work that other people are actually doing. They're leeching off of others. This is simple, it doesn't depend on whether the landlord is a mom & pop landlord or if it's a giant private equity firm. Every dollar someone earns that they didn't work for is a dollar someone else worked for and didn't get to keep.
Liberal encounters the concept of class status for the first time
what class status are you?
do you intend to forever be that status, or do you aspire to become a higher status?
i've been multiple status and i know people from all different statuses over the year. they are far more alike than they are different and most people who swap status become the thing they claimed to hate when they were poor.
and a lot of people are straight up delusional wrong about their status. I've met people who have millions of dollars who think they are struggling working-class people. I have family members who have about 50 million dollars, who think they are poor working class proletariat, just like you do. Same family who also lecture me about what a rich snob I am when my net worth is about 1/100th of theirs. I also have had friends and romantic partners who grew up poorer than I did, who think I'm a poor loser piece of shit because the home I own is only worth about 500K, meanwhile they had no home and 100K+ of debt and they blame everyone but themselves for their self-imposed poverty, while claiming those who are more objectively successful than they are, are all poor losers because they aren't richer.
EXCELLENT POINT. "Class status" is not anything objectively measurable. Wealth is.
I aspire to be independent. To be free to do art and sell it without worrying about food or housing.
Class is objectively measurable. There are people who subsist off of sale of their labor, and there are people who subsist off of earning profits out of the capital that they own.
you are applying immunity of criticism of a persons actions, based on what a person is.
Land lords owning more properties then they need taking them off the market causes systemic harm. at no point in that equation did their status as an immigrant or not, have any bearing on the action nor the outcome.
Bro they are being facetious to make a point
they either were facetious to make… no point. or were earnest. either way
who determines the number of properties?
what if a landlord buys up 1000 properties and rents them out below market rates, is that systematic harm?
The number of properties is generally 1. You generally don't need to live in more than one house. If you're working in some kind of situation where that's absolutely necessary because you're staying in distant places for extended periods of time, you'd need some kind of special exception.
Once everyone (or pretty much everyone, barring people who desire to live as nomads) owns a house, we can talk about letting people own vacation homes.
If they're making a profit, yes. If they aren't making a profit, no, but they won't be doing it for long unless they're getting funding from somewhere.
yea… most of the time the cost of rent is lower then there houses market rate, and it still didn’t change anything about artificially raising that said rate. you didn’t change anything about the problem at all!
Personally, it only applies to huge corporations OR to smaller landlords who are abusive. Just because being a landlord isn't always shitty and evil doesn't mean we can't be upset about the scenarios where it is. How much of that $512B do you think is going to the good type of landlord you describe?
See, that's an excellent point! But "landlords suck" as a stance doesn't allow for nuance like "some landlords suck and some tenants are abusive dirtbags", it paints all tenants as pure victims of a system and all landlords as evil overlords. This lets people who are tenants feel righteous.
I don't think the responsibility is on the individual to provide housing for another but to advocate/agitate for a society where one doesn't have to. One thing to keep in mind is that what is reasonable is relative to what can be done, and a post-industrial society doesn't have to have necessities be scarce.
and who is in charge of this society, and what do they set the 'fair rent' rates at? you?
There already are countries with extremely high homeownership rates (95%+) that have figured out a housing system that's based on a mix of heavy regulation, charging rent to the state for the land, and expropriation of the landlord class' property. This is a problem that is solvable.
I would let you decide what is fair, then hand you over to the poorest of people for feedback. And that is why I don't advocate for me being in charge, but you asked.
so basically let the poorest of the poor guillotine everyone so they can take all our stuff, and then start killing each other?
Nah, just you
Don't expect rationality in this thread.